Photographed by me this afternoon, outside the Savoy Hotel, Strand, London, where there are two of these, on either side of the entrance road:

I couldn’t tell, no matter how carefully I looked, whether this is made of real vegetation or just plastic fakery.  I asked how long the cats had been there, but got no satisfactory answer.  All I learned was that these cats are there for “good luck”.

When home, I googled, and learned of Kaspar.

Inevitably, this blog, if it persists much longer, will become more and more concerned with the experience of getting old, this being one such posting.

As you get older, you “sort of” know more and more things.  You don’t know them properly.  But nor do you entirely not know them.  You sort of know them.  You once did know them, or think that maybe you once did know them.  Yeah, I remember reading about that, way back when I read about it.  I think.  I’d forgotten it.  But now that you mention it, I sort of remember it.

Here is a fact that I sort of know, which is that in the Isle of Man, proper Isle of Man cats (as opposed, I presume, to the imports) have no tails, as this picture illustrates:

That’s one of a collection of facts about the Isle of Mann.

The title of the piece is Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Isle Of Man (But Were Too Afraid To Ask).  I don’t know about you for sure, but guess that, like me, you are becoming rather tired of this lazy old joke, having read it before far too many times.  Why would anyone be afraid to ask about cats not having tails on the Isle of Man?  About diseased vaginas, dangerous government agencies with scary reputations, illegal drugs of various sorts and how to buy them, yes, you might be afraid to ask about those, even as you might want to know about such things.  But about whether cats on the Isle of Man have tails?  What’s scary about that?

Besides which, there might be a great many other things you might also want to know about the Isle of Man, besides the things on this list, such as how much it costs to fly there from London, whether it has nice but cheap hotels, how good the buses and taxis are, and so on and so forth.  So, not necessarily “everything” by any means.

And further besides which, these are not really things you’d ask about, unless you already sort of knew about them.  If you did not know the sort of things on this list, you wouldn’t think to ask.

Despite which, thanks to 6000 for mentioning this list.  If it had just called itself an Isle of Man Interesting Fact List, it would have been entirely excellent.

Another symptom of getting old is when you start out a blog posting saying it’s going to be about thing A, but by the end it’s about some other and completely different thing.

The photos below of NHS headlines were taken in one of my favourite newspaper and magazine shops, the one in Victoria Street on the left as you go towards Victoria Station, having turned left out of Strutton Ground.  Moments after leaving that shop, I started off back in the other direction along Victoria Street, towards Parliament Square, and took these the two snaps below.

There is not much point any more in taking pictures of just The Wheel.  We all know what that looks like.  But I still like to snap away at it, when I am able to combine it with other things, such as particularly sastisfying foreground clutter, or a statue:

I especially like the one on the left, partly because the scene will never be repeated.  I do like temporary clutter.  And I particularly like how it says “ALARMED”, bottom right.  I only saw that when I got home.

The statue on the right is the one featured in this posting here, from 2008, which I had of course totally forgotten about but have just been reminded about by google.

That’s right.  I went a-googling for “statue outside westminster abbey”, and clicked on entry number four, “images for statue outside westmister abbey”.  And guess what the Gold Medal Image was, the very first image, top left, number one on the list.  That’s right, only me.

Not long ago, Alex Singleton dropped by.  And one of the many intriguing things he told me was that Google really, really likes blogs like BrianMicklethwaitDotCom.  This is because blogs like BrianMicklethwaitDotCom have been going for quite a long time, are quite frequently updated with new stuff, and are real blogs rather than fakes.  Also, crucially, BrianMicklethwaitDotCom has now no truck with - and never ever has had any truck with - bullshit tricks for boosting traffic as peddled by bullshit tricksters on the www.  Google can tell this.  Google has its own box of clever tricks to spot anyone trying to do this, and guess who is cleverer, the bullshit tricksters or Google?  And Google has worked out that I never do any of that crap.  So, Google likes me, and when people look for a picture and I have such a picture, my picture gets to be at or very near the top of the list.

Alex also told me that some quite Big Cheese car maker and car seller had made the mistake of availing itself of the services of one of these traffic booster nitwits.  Jaguar, I think it was.  And Google proceeded to expunge Jaguar from its listings.  So, when you went looking for a luxury car, you got no Jaguars at all.  And if you went looking for jaguars, all you got was big black kitties.

At the time, I thought Alex himself might have been bullshitting, but it seems he may have been exactly right.

No, not Jaguar, so not exactly right, and I have only left that in for the kitty connection.  Sorry Jaguar.  If you want all that removed, just say the word and it will be done.  I have just dined with Antoine Clarke, and he told me it was: BMW.

Yesterday was an excellent day for me, photographically.  Usually, after an enjoyable and productive photo-walk, I show you people only a tiny sliver of what I took, and quite often not even that.  But today, Friday, I want to do a bit more than that, with a series of postings of various sorts of things I snapped.

Meanwhile, Friday being Friday, some sensational cat news, which I spotted in one of London’s free newspapers towards the end of the day:

Monopoly fans have voted to give the iron the boot and welcome in the cat as the new token for the much-loved board game.

I guess time was when the Iron was a huge deal in life, far more than mere pets.  Not any more.

I recommend googling “monopoly cat”.

That’s the headline, but really, all that the cats are doing is killing off a few endangered bird species.

I guess people get so used to saying that something is both destroying the planet and meanwhile killing a few endangered species, that if all that it’s really doing is killing a few endangered species, it must also be destroying the planet.

As promised, more Croydon Shop Stuff, feline because it’s Friday:

Top left, superior Egyptian cats, and: a meerkat.  They’re cats too, right?  Well, kats, anyway.

Top right, you can see a hippo, next to all the exotic, big, wild cats.  Hippos are extraordinarily rare in such situations, given how appealing you would think they might be.  Stuff Shops are full of animals, such as monkeys, bears, cows, dogs, cats (of course), horses, and dinosaurs.  But, hardly ever hippos, in fact pretty much never.  I know this because Perry de Havilland collects hippos, and I am constantly on the lookout for them, to repay him a bit for all the free dinners I cadge off of him (and her).

The one in that picture is by something called Naturecraft, and it’s the only hippo they do.  It costs £25 quid, and I’d be willing to go that far, but I reckon Perry already has one of these exact hippos.  They aren’t hard to find on the www, so if he wants one, he already has one.

According to this site, Naturecraft was bought up and rejigged, and doesn’t do these animals any more.  Maybe the problem was that people photoed them in shops, but didn’t buy them.

A cat gets into a box.  Eventually.  Video.  Here.

And no, I don’t know what language that is.

Last Wednesday, for reasons that had nothing to do with any attempt to take the photos that follow, I found myself at Piccadilly Circus.  This is always a fun spot to photo photographers, but on this particular night they were out in force, because also present were Halloween revellers, typically themselves armed with cameras.  Here are some of the better snaps I snapped, of all the Halloween fun and games:

I hope (although I promise nothing) to be doing a Samizdata posting, Real Soon Now, along the lines of: Is Halloween Replacing Bonfire Night in Britain?  I shall be keeping an ear open next Monday (November 5th) to hear if there is any abatement on the explosion front.

Nice for me that one of them was a cat, what with it now being Friday and all.