Arf arf.  Desperate Dan used to say arf arf when amused, or so my best friend who lived at no. 76 told me.  I am amused.  The dash in the title of this posting is because the printer is eating children, not a face.

I love that 6000 did not just link to the sunset gasometer photo I featured here, but actually copied it into his blog.  Which is why I do this to lots of other people’s photos.  Unless otherwise informed, which so far I absolutely never have been, I assume they love it too.

Being as I was on the subject of flypasts, and liking as I do flat pictures, how about this?:

It’s the business slice of one of these, this one to be exact.  It’s two Red Arrow jets not quite colliding.  For if those links stop working, I have also downloaded the original, which was taken by a “Mr Gooding”.

I did some more teaching today, at Hammersmith Saturday.  To no very obvious effect, but if you are not stupid (I am not stupid) or a bastard (I am not a bastard) and you keep showing up (I keep showing up), you will presumably accomplish something of educational value.

Meanwhile, it gets me out more, and to places I do not normally frequent.  I already spotted the wrapped church nearby, but missed that Hammersmith Saturday is also close to The Ark.  Picture taken this morning:

It is currently unoccupied, as the big advert on the side reveals.  I like curvey buildings, but it has to be admitted that there are reasons why they don’t build more such objects.  Being more for outward effect than for the mere convenience of those who live or work in them, such photogenic blobs can be rather hard to let in a way that balances the books.

More Ark pictures here.  That’s a piece at galinsky - they don’t capitalise so why should I? - which looks like a good resource.  Although, I have to say that this turns out to be disappointing, with many glaring omissions.

Expect more Ark pix here.

On Wednesday last, I got lucky with a flypast.  There I was, wandering along the South Bank from the Wheel to the RFH, and suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, these appeared in the sky with a great roar.  I got rid of all optical enlarging (because that reduces the area photoed and means you will probably miss completely), pointed, and clicked.  Bingo:

Click to get a bigger picture, but not any bigger of the actual airplanes.  Which I do to emphasise that Wednesday was yet another lovely London day, which was of course exactly prophesied by the weather persons.

The flypast, I subsequently learned, was to do with this event.  Typhoons, apparently.

But where can I learn about other flypasts, before they happen?  The Red Arrows have their own site, but these were not Red Arrows, just RAF.  What I want is not all the displays by the Red Arrows or whoever, wherever, that are coming up.  I want all aerial displays, by anybody, in London.  Can anyone help?  Who knows? - one day I might manage to take photos like these.

That Jeremy Clarkson is putting himself about, politically I mean.  When the historians write of how the New Labour tide receded, to be replaced by whatever other incoming tide replaces it, Clarkson will, I suspect, figure rather prominently.

I said in this posting about the excellence of our weather forecasts and the fact that Tuesday would turn out warm and sunny that I would put pictures up the next day of all this warm sunniness.  Apologies for the delay, but here they are, and they illustrate perfectly what a twat Stephen Fry is about weather forecasts.  I took them just after 5 pm on Wednesday afternoon.  If anyone wants to say that it was cloudy earlier in the day, I have cloudless pictures from earlier in the afternoon also.

Click to get them bigger.  The top two are looking in opposite directions along the canal, taken from the bridge that I walk over on my way to Kings Cross Supplementary.  The point about the big wobbly-fronted building is that if there are clouds that it might reflect, it duly reflects them.  That day, there were no clouds to reflect, no matter where you looked.  Just blue blueness.

It was also, again as prophesied, breezy.  That I find harder to photo.

Here’s one I took later, just before 8 pm, before disappearing back into Kings Cross Station:

Not the most spectacular sunset you’ll ever see.  No clouds.

Two amazing gizmos have been featured recently on Gizmodo.  First there is this eleven-a-side table football table (more here):

And then there are these hamster powered cars (product details here):

The hamster race-track could have been great, but it is far too small.  The cars should be racing each other on a track that is big enough for all three of them to have a meaningful contest.  All they have so far is one hamster going around a tiny single track, and not even in a car.  Just a sort of ball thingy.  Which is rubbish.  But, it is rubbish that is easily correctable, so hurrah for capitalism anyway.

If ubergadgetblogger engadget has recently mentioned either of these two superb gadget/gizmos, or any other gadget/gizmos that are half as splendid as these two, then I missed it.  Which could quite well be.

Not a great photo, but an okay photo of a great urban feature, just next to the Hammersmith Flyover, where I was on Saturday morning:

Temporary pleasures like this are surely among the ones most worth photo-ing.  The famous landmarks that we Billion Monkeys tend to concentrate on will be with us for decades.

The church being restored or rebuilt or whatever it is, is St Paul’s Hammersmith.  This is it before they covered it up.  And here is another view of the covering.  Better lit than mine, but less weird.

Stephen Fry is widely believed to be a rather clever man, but on an episode of QI that they showed this evening because of the snooker finishing early, he said something deeply stupid, to widespread agreement from all the fawning panellists by whom he was flanked.  He said that British weather forecasts are hopeless, about as much use as looking at the insides of a bird, or some such oh-so-clever classical illusion.

I’ve said it before and I will now say it again.  Nonsense.  Our weather forecasts are superb.  If ever I have in mind to go out tomorrow, I make a point of attending to the weather forecast very carefully.  Often my decision to go out at all tomorrow is made the night before purely on the strength of the invariably almost unreally accurate weather forecast that I have just watched.

We have just been told that tomorrow, for instance, as in May 6th 2008, the south of England will be delightfully warm, breezy and sunny.  Ideal for a day out and about.  And that, I am here to tell you, is exactly how it will turn out.  Tomorrow, I will show you the photos to prove this fact, as fact it most certainly will prove to be.

We have just been told that tomorrow, for instance, as in May 6th 2008, the south of England will be delightfully warm, breezy and sunny.  Ideal for a day out and about.  And that, I am here to tell you, is exactly how it will turn out.  Tomorrow, I will show you the photos to prove this fact, as fact it most certainly will prove to be.

These universal ideas that are obvious bollocks are very odd.  Another one I recall from my youth was that people all used to say, to universal applause from every other idiot present, that there was “no difference between the major political parties”.  This is not true now, but it was total and obvious tripe in those far off days.  Yet everyone kept on repeating this mantra about there being “no difference” out of sheer habit.  It never seemed to occur to anyone at all to give the matter twenty seconds of solid thought and then to declare the notion to be the idiotic nonsense that it quite clearly was.  Now, if you want a cheap laugh at a party, say that weather forecasts are useless.  Or, maybe not.  Maybe someone with both a mind that works and a willingness to make use of it will be present, and you will be firmly contradicted for the thoughtless fool that you are.

I’ve been watching the world championship snooker on the telly, and Steve Davies did an interval report in which he said that in China they have more snooker players – about thirty million – than in the rest of the world put together.  I did not know that.  I take it for granted that all the cues and balls and tables and whatnot are now all made in China, but I didn’t know they were also turning out the majority of the players.  The picture is of Ding JunWei, who apparently beat Steve Davies in the UK Championship.  He is eighteen years old.

But as Steve Davies has also just pointed out, there were five players from Essex in this year’s championship, which is more than all of China had.  So for the time being, Essex rules.

Boris wins.  And actually not that narrowly.  1,043,761 to Boris.  893 thousand something or other for Ken Livingstone, with not that much difference between the second choice totals.

Here is the photo of Boris that I took in July 2006, at Lords Cricket Ground:

I’m watching the proceedings on BBC News 24, or whatever it’s called.

Boris is now making his victory speech, and he said it is already tomorrow.  Not so, this still gets in as May 2nd.  He’s going with magnanimity towards Ken rather than putting the knife in.

“Let’s get cracking tomorrow.  Let’s have a drink tonight.” Well said.  I feel a sense of connection to these London politicians.  It won’t last.  Tomorrow I will get back to realising that they are only politicians, and that politics is daylight robbery.  Now Ken is saying that it’s his fault he lost.  Also very impressive.  No doubt these two men will very soon also get back to stabbing one another, the way nature intended.  But for a brief moment, they conspired to create a little moment of magic.  Very cunningly but also very classily done by both men.

I’ll add a link or two to news coverage over the next few minutes.  It now really is tomorrow morning.

BBC.

The Man From YouGov is now crowing, ever so politely, just as Guido said would happen.

Rob Fisher is not amused.  Londonist is.  Diamond Geezer despairs.

Fraser Nelson on Boris’s secret weapon: driving the left mad.  Coffee House roundup of their Boris v Ken bloggage here.

Instapundit notices with more linkage, in particular to this.

John Redwood on Labour’s rubbish policy.  Not a metaphor.

Boris’s acceptance speech.

Last night they had bloggers on BBC1, and the BBC woman talked about them as if they were there to lower the tone.  In fact they raised it, and the BBC’s own Jeremy Vine lowered it.  Iain Dale did very well, I thought, coming across as thoughtful and analytical.  He too thought Vine made a twat of himself, as did Guido.

By the way, and I keep meaning to mention this, I don’t like the design of the top of Guido.  It makes it look like there’s dirt on my screen, which is annoying because there often is, so the illusion is credible.

Guido’s commenters are expressing the fear that a great pile of pile-em-high-sell-em-cheap postal votes will crash in and steal it for Ken.  I hope this doesn’t happen, and have now worked out why.  Aside from disliking tax-and-spend lefties, I am simply curious to see how Mayor Boris will turn out.  He reminds me of a recent radio comedy joke: “His men would follow him anywhere, if only out of morbid curiosity.” That’s Boris, I think.  The other Guido comment that stuck in my mind was from someone saying that Gordon Brown will now punish London, with complicated but deadly tax tinkerings, etc.  I hope that it’s Mayor Boris, that he proves as clever as his enthusiasts say he is, and that he bellows at Gordon whenever he does this.  Samizdata’s Johnathan Pearce has been drip-drip-dripping away lately with stories of big businesses leaving London, or, in the case of Shire Paharmaceuticals, Basingstoke, which is nearly London.

Another complaint about Guido, peculiar to just now I trust, is that whenever Guido is up on my screen, the rest of my computer misbehaves.  Coincidence?  Maybe, but no links to him for the time being.  I think he has just crashed Internet explorer for me, again.  Guido Fawkes, that is.  See my blogroll if you are confused.  Good luck.

Despite myself, I always get sucked into elections and election watching on the night.  I think the big news for London is that it is, finally, a political battleground, with two great\ political machines vying for the Mayor and all the Mayor’s budgets and buildings and corruption opportunities, instead of merely one Ken Livingstone machine just hoovering up all this stuff unopposed, or opposed only by the Evening Standard.  I suspect the big story of the next few days in London will be the high turnout, nearly as high as for a general election.

I hope Boris doesn’t put a stop to London having more skyscrapers.  Maybe the change will merely be that the skyscrapers will be Jewish rather than Arab.  I hope that if they decide to build a Thames Estuary Bridge, Boris decides to hustle up enough more money to make it a great looking bridge instead of a boring one, such as is I believe is threatened now.  And I hope Boris cancels the London Olympics, which will bankrupt us all for generations, but that is presumably too much to hope for.

There’s an election happening in London today, and the early guesses say that Boris Johnson will be the new Mayor, and Ken Livingstone the new ex-Mayor.  I have no idea.

Shane Greer is angry about this article by Steve Richards.  Greer says that Richards’ piece is elitist, because it calls the voters stupid and ungrateful.  But Richards has half a point.  Ken Livingstone has done quite a lot of popular things for Londoners, if you are the sort of Londoner who relies on public transport rather than your car., and who doesn’t pay that much in the way of council tax.

Voters aren’t stupid, but they are indeed ungrateful.  They don’t vote about what you’ve done, they vote about what they want done.  They don’t vote about the past, they vote about the future.  The most famous British example is probably the way that the victorious Winston Churchill was unceremoniously dumped in 1945.  War won, thank you Winnie, but no, you are not the post-war Prime Minister that we now want.  You can do heroism, but not a land fit for the heroes to come home to.  Goodnight.

Voters can also be punitive.  When someone they basically don’t like has done the job they were voted in to do a few years back, the backlash can be something terrible.  This is partly what happened to the Conservatives during the last decade.  This may now be happening to Ken.  Ken may have been regarded as necessary, to make the trains run on time, etc.  But he has never been really liked, and now all those corruption stories and all that disgusting cosying up to terrorists starts to count for more than the tube and the buses.  So, thanks for the buses mate, and piss off.

What I think also may be happening in London is that Ken Livingstone has made being the Mayor of London matter, and this has had the effect, it would now appear, of causing potential Conservative voters in London local elections to become actual Conservative voters.  Boris Johnson has served to highlight this same effect, by being a celeb with high recognition, and by not making any big mistakes.  My favourite comment about the London Mayor election is from a commenter at Guido’s - which I can’t now find because my I-now-wish-I-was-a-swear-blogger computer is playing up, as it is now doing from time to time - saying that the amazing thing was that Boris had said and done nothing seriously stupid for three whole months.

He has gone from the authentic Boris as seen on HIGNFY to a boring twat, in the manner of Robert Redford in The Candidate.  Which means he will probably win.