Flickr blog does cats, so I don’t have to, and Jackie D did some cat stuff today as well.  But even though it’s superflouous to requirements, on the right is a cat clock I recently acquired.

Jackie also has a great photo up: Edward Hopper meets the Billion Monkeys.  And I like this snap also, which she merely chose to have at her blog.  At first I thought it was by her, but actually it’s isn’t.  Still very good though.

Remember that November 15th resolution of mine?  Probably not.  The idea was that instead of for ever delaying the composition of those Big Postings that we all have rattling about in our brains, I would simply sit down and write them, as best I could, adequately.  I said I would attempt one of these Big Postings once a week.

Well, it’s been over a fortnight, but I have finally written one of these things, and I have just put it up on Samizdata.  It is about a notion very dear to my heart, namely two-man teams.  As you can see from the number of categories I have listed at the end of this, I cover quite a lot of ground.  (At Samizdata we’re urged to keep it down to two.  And we are also now being urged not to put entire sentences in brackets.  Oh dear.)

Soon after that Nov 15 posting I just sat down and started writing it.  And then yesterday or the day before or whenever I gave it another bash, and now there it is.  If you can manage to read through it all, I hope you like it.  I like to think that it is the kind of thing that even those who are put off by the generally head-banging tone of Samizdata might enjoy.

Another such within the next week, I hope, but I promise nothing.

Indeed:

Original here.  Again Canada, I think.  He’s certainly on his way to the very photogenic town of Banff, which definitely is in Canada.

Thin quota photo:

The Flickr original contains lady in bikini, dog, and strange multicoloured lump.

Map of bridge and description here:

The Confederation Bridge spans the Northumberland Strait between the Canadian provinces of Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Prince Edward Island is located off the Eastern Coast of Canada, nestled between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  The crossing takes approximately 10 minutes.

Looks like a lot of bridge for not very much island, but I like it anyway.  So many arches.  Quantity becomes quality.

I do love a deftly mixed metaphor, and I certainly love that one, which is at the start of this.  It’s someone telling Lessig that he should support Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton is going to win.  Sounds like a political partisan talking nonsense.  The smart move is always to support whoever you truly support, and worry about those “bridges” later, if at all.  (I seldom find myself able to support anybody.) But, nonsense nicely expressed.  Although in the original, “don’t” is in capitals, and there is a “so to speak” tacked on the end.

I talked recently with someone who is just under half my age, about how wearisome the internet is, to her.  To her, it’s all just drudgery.

For me, even word processing still retains its magic.  That’s right.  What I am doing right now is magic!!  This is because I have liked writing since my teens, and first heard about word processing years before it was regularly available, and I thought: that would be fantastic!!  I taught myself to type with all my fingers, in the hope that word processing would eventually make sense of that decision, and when word processing finally happened, in the early eighties, I was not disappointed.  It was fantastic!! And it has remained fantastic ever since.  For me it has been like the best sort of lifelong love affair.  I fell in love with it, but had to wait.  During that wait, it acquired a magic in my mind that no mere reality could subsequently dim.

I feel similarly, although with less intensity, about colour television, because I had to wait for that for about a decade too.  My family was posh, and posh people are often slow to do things like colour telly.

But for my younger friend, the very internet itself was an accomplished fact by the time she paid much attention to it or felt the need for it.  It was just something people did, and already knew how to do.  She’s much better at it than me, but seems to enjoy it less.  She prefers real life.  How sad.

While pursuing pencils for this, I went to this blog (which was mentioned here) which contained this on pencils among many, many other things.  It looks really good, and crammed with links.  It’s like it’s his job, which is what I take “things magazine” to mean.

I was particularly struck by this picture:

Talk about an urban nightmare.  London often feels like that.  Not when you walk from A to somewhere near A.  Usually that works pretty well, unless you’re doing something like walking across a major bridge in the morning rush hour.  But whenever you try to use “transport”, to get from A to another letter of the alphabet, that picture is what it’s like?  So, is that how it will eventually look?  Will many open air parts of London mutate into places like the Underground is now?  The city is already 3-D underground, and inside big buildings.  Will the bits between the big buildings go the same way?

Once they get road pricing properly organised the economic incentives will be in place to turn lots of city air into solid lumps of Underground?  By which time robots will be driving all the (very small indeed) cars and we’ll be stuck inside playing with our iPods or our iTeddyBears or iGirlFriends.

Check this out, from the Daily Mail.

Few have been granted permission to see these marvels.

Indeed, the Italian government was not even aware of their existence until a few years ago.

But the ‘Temples of Damanhur’ are not the great legacy of some long-lost civilisation, they are the work of a 57-year-old former insurance broker from northern Italy who, inspired by a childhood vision, began digging into the rock.

Time and again these days, I wander around my favourite internet byways, and find my way to interesting mainstream media reportage.  This time, I went from Instapundit, to something else on this blog, which looked interesting so I stripped out the stuff about this particular posting to see what else I could find, and I found this link to the above weirdness.

This reminds me of that thing about how if you owe the bank very little it’s your problem but if you owe them a lot it’s theirs.  In this case, if you want retrospective planning permission for a patio extension, you lose.  But, if you want it for several miles of ornately decorated underground caves illuminated with fabulous stained glass windows, no problemo.

I have not been busy here.  But I have been busy here.

Surprise cat information on QI this evening, after which I googled the story and quickly found this:

In the early 1950’s, the Dayak people of Borneo suffered a malarial outbreak.  The World Health Organisation (WHO) had a solution: to spray large amounts of DDT to kill the mosquitoes that carried the malaria.  The mosquitoes died; the malaria declined; so far so good.  But there were unexpected side effects.  Amongst the first was that the roofs of the people’s houses began to fall down on their heads.  It seemed that the DDT had also killed a parasitic wasp which had previously controlled thatch-eating caterpillars.  Worse, the DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckos, which were eaten by cats.  The cats started to die, the rats flourished, and the people were threatened by outbreaks of typhus and plague.  To cope with these problems, which it had itself created, the WHO was obliged to parachute 14,000 live cats into Borneo. Operation Cat Drop, now almost forgotten at the WHO, is a graphic illustration of the interconnectedness of life, and of the fact that the root of problems often stems from their purported solutions.

Well, that was new to me.  It might explain some of the anti-DDT sentiment that still flourishes.  I changed “geckoes” to “geckos”, under the influence of my spellchecker.

Also, photoed by me today in a tourist crap shop:

I actually rather like tourist crap shops, often finding amusing photo opportunities in them, such as massed ranks of small statues, individually banal, but collectively striking.

On October 14th I encountered something a bit strange, in the form of a Billion Monkey lady on Westminster Bridge.  She was snapping away in the general direction of Big Ben, the way Billion Monkeys do, so there was nothing unusual about that.  (Billion Monkeys, for those new to the concept, are that enormous army of amateur snappers who now wield cheap digital cameras, and who, unlike those proverbial million monkeys who type at random but never write any Shakespeare, are producing the occasional terrific photo, in among all the dross.  I periodically wander around London’s tourist districts recording Billion Monkeys in action.  And yes, I am one of these creatures myself.)

So anyway, here was one of my first snaps of my Billion Monkey lady, which at first I just filed under Billion Monkeys Crouching:

But at the time of taking the picture I had obviously been sufficiently intrigued by that bit of paper she was holding up in front of her camera to sneak around the other side of her and take a snap which, with luck, would enable me to see what it was.  There she is again, this time with the bottom of Big Ben in view to the top left.

My camera having better eyesight than me, I then let the mystery lie, and only rather recently have I investigated any further.  This, I discovered, is what the paper said:

“HEINRICH PHOTOGRAPHY”.  I googled, but inconclusively.  None of the various Heinrichs suggested, although photographic, looked cheap and cheerful enough to be what was going on in my pictures.

But then I tried Flickr.  Any references there to Heinrich Photography?  Success!  I quickly found my way to these snaps.  And, although there was no sign of Big Ben, among these I did find this photo.  That bigger version of the picture is an uncopiable .gif, but I was able to copy this smaller .jpg which you see to your right.

And, that is the exact same piece of paper.  There is no doubt about it.  And what is more, Billion Monkey snaps being datable and timable, I can tell you that those phone boxes were photoed just one hour after I took my snaps.  Also, the camera used to snap the phone boxes is the same one as my crouching lady was using.  The phone boxes picture was taken by one Alicia Ramirez, who simply has to be my Billion Monkey lady.  Googling for Alicia Ramirez yielded one actress, but she looked different.  I don’t know where in London the phone boxes are.

Another photo in the set linked to above, with Heinrich Photography signs in them, says instead “www.heinrichphotography.blogspot.com”.  Hah, a blog!  But alas, that url, as of now, leads nowhere.

What is going on here?  Why is it sometimes Heinrich and sometimes “Hein Rich”?  This would make the beginnings of a good short story.  I hope to learn more.  In particular, I wonder if that blog will ever come alive.

If I’ve been suckered by some kind of viral marketing campaign, guess what.  I don’t care.

Incoming from Adriana: check out this whole site, and this bit in particular.  It is, she says, “A brilliant way to ‘advertise’ one’s skills”.  So, although advertising is broken, ‘advertising’ is okay.

Deep thanks to Adriana also for the link to Him.

Come to think of it, God Almighty could do a nice sideline in railway announcements.  I once heard about an American who was travelling alone in a carriage, at night, on the long, long line to Inverness in deepest northernest Scotland, and after about two hours of complete silence, the intercom suddenly began an announcement by saying: “This is your guard speaking”, and the American misheard “guard” as “god”.  It made quite an impression on him, for a moment.

I love the idea of modern electronic communications systems being possessed.  One of my all-time favourite movies is LA Story.

In my next production of Hamlet - which, by the way, gets quite a big mention in LA Story - the ghost will be an emanation of the security system, the guards at the beginning being security men watching TV screens.  At first the ghost just appears on black and white screens, but in due course he turns 3D.  Hamlet spends spends much of his time from then on talking into video cameras and recording machines of various kinds, so that he can work the same trick on future generations.

Snapped last week in a shop:

Who are these people?

You get the feeling they were on the phone to each other beforehand, don’t you?  The magazines, I mean.

Actually I don’t despise this kind of thing nearly as much as you might suppose.  I think that the populus is right to be reflecting upon the romantic difficulties of celebs in an age of what is already, and definitely for celebs, total surveillance, which is what it will soon be for everybody.  Chanelle and Ziggy are, I can only guess, two of those particular sorts of celeb whose only claims to fame are that they are quite nice looking and that they must, while it lasts, submit to total surveillance.

What happens to romance, when everyone who cares about your romance can find out all about it with one google face search?  What happens to marriage when “don’t cheat on me in our home town” becomes instead “don’t cheat on me anywhere”?  Celebs give us all a foretaste of this new and scary world.

Another day at BrianMicklethwait.com, another bridge in another thin picture:

This time it’s the original Westminster Bridge, as painted by Canaletto in 1746.  Apparently it wasn’t finished until 1750, so that’s it while still being built.

Original fat version here.  Excellent close-up painting of one arch here.  It wasn’t very satisfactory, and was replaced with the current version of Westminster Bridge in 1862.

Here is another even thinner picture of the old bridge:

I found that here, which is the best www place about the history of the old Westminster Bridge that I could quickly find.  Lots more nice pictures of the bridge there.

In 1721 there was apparently a petition against the building of Westminster Bridge, from the then separate City of London, which is down river and was for many centuries blessed with the only bridge across the Thames in all of what is now London.  The new bridge, said the London petitioners, would:

… take their Meat out of their Mouth, by drawing off their supply of Provisions, and pick up their Money out of their Pockets, by enabling the Inhabitants of Westminster to Trade at less Expenses … In short, it will make Westminster a fine City, and London a Desert.

The Fixed Quantity of River Crossings Fallacy.

UPDATE (see comment 3 from Michael J):

Once every month or two, Moore’s Law, the one about everything doubling every eighteen months, clouts me in the brain.  Latest clout moment: this, a 16GB SD card.  Suddenly I can go on holiday and stop worrying about running out of card space for photos.  (Actually, I’ll probably be using two 8GB cards.  But thanks to this new wondercard, they’ll each cost what 2GBs now cost.)

The thing about technology is that it sneaks up on the world.  It’s only quite a long time after it became obvious to the nerdocracy that something or other is now going to happen that it actually starts happening, done by regular stiffs like me.  Home movies which are more than just idiotic tourist trap panning shots have been possible for several decades.  But now they have rather suddenly become quite easy.  The kit in the average home is now starting to be big enough and capacious enough to do such stuff semi-properly.  (Did I tell you I recently got a 750GB hard disc to add to my computer, for £130?  Yes I did.  That was my last Moore’s Law moment.)

Another example.  Copying movies off of the telly has been possible for years, but only now is it becoming a serious fact, on a scale that must now be troubling the old-school movie business.  Big elephant prick cartons full of 100 blank DVDs (which, crucially, occupy only a fraction of the shelf space that the old VHS vids did) are now on sale in Comet for £22.  DVD players and recorders have digital telly tuners and big (but cheap) hard discs attached to them, for only a bit extra.  Which means that Blockbuster have started selling pop music CDs, which turn out to have more life and more money in them than mainstream movie DVDs, because mainstream movies all get shown on telly, and then (now) copied.  I have now entirely stopped buying ready made DVDs.  Within a few months, my collection of movies copied off of the telly is now bigger than my entire collection of ready-made movies.  Ancient but excellent movies used to cost a fiver, or even more.  Now they cost 50p.  For all practical purposes they are free.  (I have even been known to make copies of some of them, for friends.)

Pop vids and pop songs, and believe me I know because I’ve tried, are just too much bother to copy off of the telly or the radio, because you don’t know when they’ll be on.  I have a few pop vids of favourite tunes, but movies are far easier to do, because you know when the mainstream movies are going to be on and can set your machine.  When you buy a pop CD, what you are really buying is the documentation and the navigation, and things like the www where you can learn more and the titles so you can chase up the lyrics on the www, and that’s still all worth something.  If, like me, you are not plugged into a pop song sharing social network (and what grown-up is?), then buying CDs, even pop CDs, still makes occasional sense.  But with movies, the faffing about to solid value ratio is decisively better when it comes to copying off of the telly, so that’s what’s happening.  Hence all those music CDs creeping along the shelves in Blockbuster.

The point of this being that raw power eventually achieves qualitative differences in how we live.  Okay, copying televised movies onto DVD isn’t much of a “qualitative difference”, but these things all add up.

More from me about this new world of copyable stuff here, linking to a very watchable video by Lawrence Lessig.

For some reason that I don’t fully understand, but which is something to do with getting Brian Micklethwait’s Education Blog ready, this blog has turned green again and the picture at the top has reverted back to the old one of my eyes that I used to have at the top.  However, the content all seems to be well, and no doubt normal service will be resumed soon.

Such are my rules here that this might be all there’ll be for today.  But hopefully I will also, later today, be celebrating this blog’s reversion to purpleness.

UPDATE: Well, I would have thought that was pretty damn obvious.  Anyway, see the first comment.

Just down the road from brand spanking newly restored Eurostar St Pancras is rusty, fusty old Kings Cross, which I walk through every Tuesday on my way to my volunteer teaching.  The best they can say for themselves, according to a plaque there, is that they were “Station of the Year 1998”.  I think it’s 1998.  So, what with all this Eurostar treatment being given to St Ps, have they perchance been asking themselves: What can we tell the media to trump all that Euro-crap? ?

Indeed they have.  St Pancras has Eurostar.  Kings X has ... a cat!

Insp Roy Sloane, who enlisted the tabby, said: “PC Tizer is already an essential member of the team.

“Since we got him we haven’t seen any mice in the building at all ... Prior to his arrival we were spending a fortune on pest control and it wasn’t really working.”

Reminded me of this fictional creature.

According to this spec list at Digital Camera Review, the Canon SX100 IS digital camera has a flip-out-and-twist screen, which for me is a big deal (Billion Monkeys etc.), and would make it the perfect have-with-me-always camera.  Lots of zoom.  An automatic lens cap, which I really like.  Image Stabilisation, which is what IS stands for, which I cannot now live without.  And thin enough to be easily pocketable.  Perfect.  Here’s a nice big picture of what it looks like, which I found here.

But Digital Camera Review is wrong.  Next to the above picture is this one:

... and that’s a regular screen, not a flip-out-and-twist screen.

This is the first time I have caught these people making a factual error.  Since so much of the appeal of this site is great big lists of spec facts, that strikes me as a big deal.  What else might they be getting wrong?

So anyway, I continue to wait for the perfect have-with-me-always camera.  A combination of the above and the Canon A650 IS, which has only x6 optical zoom, and which does unnecessarily large pictures for my purposes, but which really does have a flip-out-and-twist screen, would be ideal.

Here’s a snap I snapped yesterday.  (Clicking gets it a bit bigger.)

It’s good to know that Cheshire is being defended against the arsonist Anglo-Norwegian Neurological conspiracy.

More general point: fun photos often contain a lot of text.

This posting is an example of what it is about, namely postings which say something important adequately.  Could have been better but at least it got said, is the point.

And that is also what I am here writing about.  I have written before (if this were a perfect posting there would now be a link back) about a characteristic blogging problem, namely the tendency to postpone profundity and to supply only triviality.  If one is a clever and witty person, the trivialities often turn out to be quite profound, so the blog is still worth reading, especially if by “profound” one means: long and hard to read, and by “trivial” one means “short and easy to read”.  Nevertheless, there is a tendency for a blogger to emit a steady trickle of more or less entertaining, more or less profound, but (to him) not that crucially important notions, while accumulating, unwritten, in his head, an ever growing pile of very crucially important notions, which he is awfully liable to take with him to his or her grave.  The problem with these profundities is that, because they are so profound, they must be composed perfectly.  Good enough is not good enough.  So, they tend never to get composed at all.

So here is my November 15th 2007 resolution.  (If this were a perfect posting, it would of course be a December 31st or January 1st posting.) I will try to blog those important things that I have accumulated that I want to say – let’s give it a schedule and make it once a week from now on, this being the first – but to say them in a just-chuck-it-onto-the-page manner, rather than in a properly thought-out manner, which is how I have now nearly finished writing this.

There.  That wasn’t so hard, was it.  And nor did it take you very long to read.  It may even have made you smile a little.

6000 left a comment on the 14 viaducts posting, about the Tinsley Viaduct, which is in Sheffield:

And the Tinsley Viaduct?  A little different? Yes.  A little more modern?  Certainly.  But still a stunning piece of engineering. Just unfortunate that because of the surrounding geography, it doesn’t really lend itself to the thin photo phenomenon.

But I looked on Flickr, and found a picture that proved very thinable:

The secret being that it was taken from a hill, delightFully called “Wincobank”.  (I remember reading a story set in Sheffield with a character called Wincobank, Lord Wincobank I think, and thought it a strange name.  That explains it.)

Click to get the bigger Flickr picture, which includes Twin Towers, which they keep trying to knock over, and keep deciding not to.  This is nothing like all the viaduct, but what there is of it is long and thin.

According to the Highways Agency:

The bridge carries traffic on two levels. The upper deck carries the M1 motorway and was originally intended to carry three lanes of traffic in each direction. It was reduced to just two lanes north and south three years ago following an EU directive on lorry weights, requiring all structures supporting main roads to be capable of carrying 40 tonne vehicles.

The lower deck carries the A631 trunk road. There are roundabouts at each end of the viaduct at the lower deck level with connecting roads to the local road network and the M1. Tinsley viaduct was built in 1968 at a cost of £6m. However, the price of replacing the bridge today would be £200m and the cost to the country for delay and disruption during the construction period would be £1.4 billion.

The viaduct has been strengthened twice, in 1983 and 2006, but that’s apparently still not enough for the top to be able to have six lanes, which is what it had originally.

I am posting this on the stroke of midnight, i.e. just in time for my self-imposed deadline around these parts, and at just the right moment to be talking about how Eurostar arrives in and departs from London.

Today was the last day that this edifice did what it was originally built to do:

Because tomorrow, this takes over:

Both new edifices have disappointed me, based on what I’ve seen of them.  The Waterloo Eurostar terminus was certainly an attempt to do something stylish, but for me, it didn’t quite do it.  The roof, from the inside, turns out to be oddly asymmetrical, and from the outside, to me, it just looks like a giant shed for growing tomatoes.  But, as I say, A for effort.

As for the St Pancras extension, that’s just a giant coffee table.  At best B minus for effort.  No wonder in all the pre-publicity they have been banging on not about the new extension, but about the old shed that they’ve restored.  Dull as the new bit is, and perhaps even because it is so dull, it may well be a magnificent experience actually to arrive in the new station.  First, you go under a modern Brand X railway station roof, so low you feel you could reach up and touch it, as if you were arriving under an airport.  But then, kerpow, you enter a Victorian Steam Age Cathedral.  That might be really something, and will be, I fondly hope.

They put as brave a face on the new extension as they can here, but my picture is, I’m afraid, more accurate, because it is the real thing rather than a mere architects fake-up.

So, what will the old tomato shed now be used for?  Not a lot, apparently.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Yet again a short-sighted failure to plan for the future costs taxpayers vast amounts of money.

“Paying for platforms to stand empty rubs salt into the wound for all those paying high taxes and wondering where their money goes. Those in charge of the Department for Transport clearly lack the experience to manage large projects properly.”

Or, they didn’t want to spend any more money, in case they got a different sort of bollocking from the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

… to make the most effective use of the platforms would require investment of more than £100 million to allow trains to cross, via a flyover near Clapham Junction, from the South West main line to the tracks leading into Waterloo International.

That’s public spending for you.  They either spend far too much, or not enough.  Or, as I expect was the case in this case, both at the same time.

I would have liked them to have spent more on the extension, so that it matched the original one in size and shape.  I bet they thought of doing that, and then decided against it.  Waste of public money.

While I’m on the subject of bulges, Patrick Smith of Der Spiegel, complains, a lot, about the aesthetics of the Airbus A380.  He quotes previous quotes by his good self proudly:

“Without question the most hideous airliner ever conceived”
“The worst-looking piece of major industrial design of the past 50 years”
“A huge steroidal porpoise”
“The ponderous, beluga-headed Airbus”
“An aesthetic abomination”
“Oversized, homely, decadent”

One of the regular things about criticism is that critics often understand something better than the puff-merchants.  They fix on the thing that distinguishes whatever it is and they hate it, while the puffers play that down, and say no, we don’t see that, hear that, or whatever.  But the truth is that the thing that the haters hate is definitely there.  And the A380 definitely does have just the look that Patrick Smith objects to:

Picture from here.

But I think that Smith zeros in on the very thing that could actually make the A380 a huge aesthetic success.

Aesthetically, everything depends on whether the A380 is a commercial and popular success.  If it is, and if people learn to like it and everything it will stand for and symbolise – even cheaper, even longer-haul travel, made pleasant with shrewd handling of the interior, then people will come to like the look of this monster, because they will associate how it looks with good stuff.

Which means that they will notice the most distinctive external feature of the A380 and like that.  And that is the bulge on the top, the baluga-headed steroidal porpoise look.  Smith’s brief explanation of why he hates this thing will be the reason everybody else loves it:

Most of that ugliness is the fault of the plane’s bulging forehead, a trait that resulted from an engineering decision to place the cockpit below the upper deck. It is useful to think of a jetliner as a sort of horizontal skyscraper. To recall the words of architecture critic Paul Goldberger, writing in a 2005 issue of the New Yorker: “Most architects who design skyscrapers focus on two aesthetic problems. How to meet the ground and how to meet the sky - the top and the bottom, in other words.” With airplanes, as with office towers, the observer’s gaze is drawn instinctively to their extremities, and their attractiveness, or lack thereof, is personified through the sculpting of the nose and tail sections. Not that the A380’s tail is anything special either, but it’s hard to get past that forehead.

If - if - the A380 takes off commercially, as opposed to just literally taking off the way it has already, that forehead will be what everybody will come to love.  Without that weird forehead, there would be nothing special and recognisable about this airplane.  With it, it has personality.  Goofy but lovable, if you already love it for other reasons, like a younger brother who isn’t very clever or pretty, but who is a great trier and who has a good heart.

Me being me, what the A380 reminds me of is one of the two giants in Das Rheingold.  The thing is, Wagner giants have to be sung by mere mortals with their mouths unimpeded, but they have to look big and weird.  So, what better bigness and weirdness than a big bulging dome on top?

I am now finishing a piece for the CNE Competition blog, about Ofcom.  I am referring towards the end of my piece to the photogenic nature of the building these guys work in.  I didn’t find many snaps of this building on the internet, so here is one I took several years ago, at that time of the evening which turns even the greyest building bright blue and the dimmest artificial light bright orange.

I’m sure that not everyone likes this building, but what I like about it is that it is basically a Brand X office block, but by the simple expedient of bulging out the front of it like that, it has been turned into something interesting.  This is a kind of visual effectiveness that is not imposed exactly, but rather achieved from within the rules of these sorts of buildings.  The floors stick out a bit.  The uprights on the outside curve instead of going straight up.  Provided you know what you are doing (and thanks to computers you now can), then making a building like this can’t be massively more expensive than make it flat, and boring.

This thing, I think, is a great addition to the London river front, and great fun to walk past, right under the bulge.  It’s on the south side, just a bit downstream from Tate Modern.  Walking beside the river in London just gets better and better as the years go by.

For a more fanciful take on this building, more in keeping with what I’ll be saying at CNE, see this.

Remembrance outside Westminster Abbey goes on for a while.  These snaps were taken just over a week ago:

The massed ranks of crosses thing is relatively familiar.  It’s now the small stories that stop me in my tracks.

A good friend also remembers.

I’m definitely a Newb ego blogger.  Cats.  Ugly picture of me.  I’ve even switched to the right colour.

Via India Uncut, who is of course The Real Deal.

See also this.  I am stuck at the top right, as are most of us, but it’s a start.

Every few months I get an email from someone wanting to use one of my photos.  I say, yes go ahead, give me a credit and please tell me about it when you use it, preferably sending me a copy.  Sometimes I dig up the big original version of the picture and send them that.  And then I forget about it.  If someone “steals” my photo, how am I going to know, and what could I do if I did?

So anyway, it turns that somebody at UNESCO found, here, this doom-laden picture:

... and they used it in this, on page 15 (where I duly get my credit) and on the front cover, no less.  Topical.

I don’t think the interesting story here is the flood barrier itself, or that I am aiding and abetting UNESCO, although this is an organisation that I do regard as rather sinister.  I think the real story here is how easy it is for an amateur photographer like me to take a quite nice picture, how easy it is for photograph users to find out about our efforts, and how savagely amateurs like me are now undercutting the Real Photographers.

I didn’t know it was going to be such a prominent report.  Maybe I should have charged them.  But, how much?  And if I had, would they have used it?

Just heard on CD Review, a quote from a retired orchestral clarinetist:

“It used to be that orchestral musicians could take the concert experience into t