The real signs of aging are not just things like wrinkles around your eyes, and there are a great many more than seven of them.

For me, one of the depressing ones is how my knowledge of spelling has gone into reverse.  So, for instance, looking over my posting of yesterday, I see the word “treck”.  Is that right?  Should it perhaps be “trek”?  I used to know things like this but not any more.  According to my spellchecker it’s “trek”.  I never was a Startreck fan.  But ah yes, Startreck looks wrong.  Startrek looks better.  So it must be trek.  Actually I just googled it to be sure, because Startrek didn’t look right either, and it turns out it’s Star Trek.  And there’s another sign of aging right there: inconsequential babbling.  Treck is now corrected.  I realise now that that posting was typed straight into my blogging software, which doesn’t do spellchecking.

A related thought also just struck me which is that I used to think I could spell, because I never saw any spelling mistakes in my own stuff, but that others couldn’t, because look at all the spelling mistakes in their stuff.  Do you see the logical flaw there?  (Floor?  Flore?  Phlaw?  There goes another word.) Maybe I never could spell, but merely thought I could.

It’s like that thing where people say they can always spot a toupée, when the truth is that they can only spot the toupées they can spot.

Seven signs of aging?  I think it may be six.

I need another category here, called “How the mind stops working”.

So there I was having lunch in Chelsea last whenever it was last week, and I decided to take a snap of the rather fine Casablanca poster opposite me, complete with three dimensional china Bogart.  However, the two people opposite me thought I was photo-ing them, so the upshot (ho ho) is that I was:

That’s him and her.  Most enjoyable.

This was the first time I have properly met David Tebbutt, but for me, he goes way back, to the early days of (not that) cheap personal computing, before even IBM compatibility, when Tebbo and his ilk would trek over to California to hunt down the latest in personal computer wizardry, and tell me (and all the other readers of Personal Computer World) all about it.  All of which was long, long before the days of 32gb SD cards.

This is my favourite recent photo, of all the ones I have taken in the last few days.  The crane is working on a building a little bit south of Victoria Station.  I particularly like the two tiny red lights.

I am in awe of the technology of cranes.  There they stand, often massively taller even than the skyscrapers they build, with torsos that are ridiculously thin and spindly, yet quite clearly they are more than sufficient to remain standing, provided (I assume) that they are correctly used.  Mishandle those loads, and goodness knows what catastrophes would be unleashed.

How much do crane operators get paid?  I’m guessing: a lot.  Think of the difference between having a good crane operator and having a bad crane operator, on your site.  And think what a difference cheap mobile phones must have made to such work.

Recently I recorded a short TV show called something like “The Secret Life of Cranes”, but I haven’t yet watched it.  I must.  Ah, here it is, the Solitary Life of Cranes.  I’m watching it now.

The Solitary Life of Cranes is a big disappointment.  Nothing about how cranes work, just a lot of waffle about blokes in high-up boxes seeing other people’s lives.  Ah, now some work is getting done, at last.

Now I’m going to do that thing with squiggles recommended in one of the comments on this, by Charles Pooter.  Wouldn’t want to disturb the kitten.

UPDATE Tuesday: The above posting was done late on Saturday night.  I have now removed one sentence which, on re-reading, just made no sense whatever.  I think it just got left there by mistake.  Also, in the very first sentence, I now see that I put “years” instead of “days”.  What am I? A climate scientist?!?

Incoming email, forwarded by Michael J, about how whoever it is can’t answer emails because “something has crashed on my computer”, and also “the mouse is missing”, ho ho:

I’m sure this photo is everywhere by now, but I don’t care.

The crossed legs are an especially nice touch.

I would not for a moment pretend that this ...

... is anything other than a piece of horizontalised butchery, done by me because I like horizontalising.  To enjoy the real thing go to the real thing.  And while you are there, I recommend a minimum of a few minutes of browsing through all the others.  Whenever I go to this site, I look at everything I’ve not seen since last I went there.

I don’t know where this photo was taken.  Or this one, for that matter, which I also like a lot.  Miami?

All these photos are copyright.  I hope the above counts as fair use.

Incoming from Peter Briffa:

That’s your March sorted out then, Brian.  And quite a lot of April.

Indeed.

Not long ago, there was talk of Indian Premier League Twenty20 cricket being on YouTube.  But when Michael J lent me his Sky TV connection a few months back, all it did was destroy my internet connection, and then stop working.  (I did get to watch the decisive session of the 2009 Ashes though.  Fabulous.) I was afraid this YouTube thing would do the same, and be very shoddy to look at, and keep going off, and screw up everything else I was trying to do.  So, for me, it’s great that it will be on the proper TV.

TV should be on TV, and TVs should be separate from computers, I think.  Computers still have a bit of developing to do before they can handle permanent video in the background.  Mine has, anyway.  Like with having photos on computers in the 1980s.  You could do it, but it didn’t work at all well.

Having it on the proper telly also means I will be able to record it all, and have a vast stack of DVDs.  Sport DVD recording is like wine collecting.  To start with they aren’t much, but, as the years go by ...

Another thin picture (see also this posting) of unmanned aircraft, the MQ-9 Reaper:

Here.  Bigger (recommended).  Recent article, which includes another great photo here.  Our guys said gimme in summer 2008, so they have them now?  Thank you Instapundit.

Who would have thought it?  The future of warfare is blokes flying radio-controlled toy airplanes.  At present it’s still men against toys, with the toys winning, but soon all nations will have them, and millions of others besides.

This was how chess got started, wasn’t it?  First men killed each other.  Then, they said, why don’t we just use sculptures of men, and move them remotely?  That way, nobody gets hurt.  I think I smell a whole new sport here.  Imagine it, fat blokes at an airfield having aerial dogfights, where the losers lose their airplanes, but nobody dies.  Great TV!  Watch those dogfights!  Superstar controllers will be feted in the media.  And, they won’t die.  They’ll have dual scores: kills, and killeds.  Nerd heaven.

I just attached this rather eloquent comment to a Johnathan Pearce Samizdata posting about how he might emigrate out of here if Brown won the next election, Heaven help us:

I think JP is doing us a favour by talking about leaving, and would be doing us another favour if he did leave, if things got that bad.

No number tells politicians more clearly that they have to shape up and stop wrecking the place better than the number of people just buggering off. People leaving is the one number that tends to signify that things are about to get better, because it just can’t be ignored or spun. The number can be lied about, of course, but big queues to get out are hard to pass off as anything else.

It happened like this at the end of the 70s when all those movie stars upped sticks. They did us a favour too. They don’t call this “voting with your feet” for nothing.

Voice and exit.

Unless of course the Brown government builds a Berlin Wall around the country. But that would be pretty hard to miss also, if it worked. The more you have to sacrifice and risk to get out, the more dramatic it all looks, and the more obvious is the damage done by the lying bastards who did it.

And that’s the central problem now, making it clear how much damage is being done. That’s what the Brown gang are now all busy trying to conceal.

JP’s posting helps with this.

I wanted to have a diary entry, so to speak, about how I felt just now about it all.  Comments at Samizdata are hard to get back to.  Postings here are easier to get back to.

Other eloquent comments are rapidly accumulating.

Until I came across a snap of such a lorry here.  And once I knew, I could Flickr into action, and I found a slightly better Marmite lorry picture here:

This one is good too, where a commenter says:

Yup, they pipe it ashore from the Marmite rigs and load it up into the tankers ... of course if you have the right contacts you can buy it in 50 gallon drums ...

Here’s hoping the world never runs out.

Incoming link from Michael J:

What lies beyond iPad?

iPhone.  iPad.  iBoard.  ... iMat?

iWall would surely make much more sense.  I’d have one, if I had any wall space.  And if it didn’t cost anything, like my soul, for instance.

I wish my bloody spellchecker (OpenOffice.org Writer) would stop changing iPhone to Iphone, iPad to Ipad, etc.  Normally I can ignore this interfering thing, but this is annoying.  You’d think it would know things like that.

And here we go again, I need to fill in with other verbiage, to stop that elongated picture blasting its way through the bottom.  Be prepared for multiple postings of this, and multiple alterations to this paragraph.

Actually, because it’s long and thin, I quite like how it impinges upon the posting below.  I think I’ll leave it, for now anyway.  What does anyone else think?

Here:

Far as I can see the BBC don’t do podcasts. They just make their radio programming available to time shift. This is fine but it’s not podcasting. Podcasting has an emotional tug that most radio doesn’t. I have this discussion/argument all the time with radio friends like Trevor Dann of the Radio Academy. They think radio does most of this stuff and I don’t think it does. Radio is organised to minimise the likelihood of people changing the channels. Radio is push. Podcasts are pull. At the exact moment you worry your podcast is getting too obscure or self-indulgent or detailed, it’s probably just finding its groove. Face it. If you wanted a balanced diet there are no end of places to get it. Podcasts shouldn’t be trying to be professional and polished. I can’t abide podcasts that begin with a menu that tells us what’s coming up. What’s the point of that? It’s more likely to make you change your mind about listening to it than persevere. I also hate the feeling that people are reading from scripts. I wince when I hear journalists trying to crack the same kind of jokes that look OK in print. We don’t need any of that print or radio or TV baggage. Podcasts are punk rock. They’re the first thing that comes into your head. They’re an evening down the pub. They blitz the divisions between the speaker, the thought and the personality. They have little use for conventional professionalism. They’re so direct they’re hardly media at all.

I copied and pasted this because I like it, but thinking about it some more, I realise that Hepworth is just right enough to be seriously, because rather persuasively and attractively, wrong.

This is like those articles circa 2002 about blogging, which defined blogging in far too much detail - it’s about this long, it’s about this, it sounds like this, in this kind of style, and so on.  All of which blinded those who took such articles seriously to the true potential of blogging, which was that, potentially, along with a few more tweaks and widgets like Twitter, it could swallow “Fleet Street” whole, and several other ancient and venerable institutions besides, such as party politics, old school advertising, and several more yet to be identified.  To put it another way, those early observers of blogging, many of them bloggers themselves, made the mistake of imagining that all that blogging was ever going to be was BrianMicklethwaitDotCom.  Me in pyjamas, opining about this, and that, and kittens, and stealing all the real content from elsewhere apart from the occasional pretty photo of nothing very much.

Remember when the journos said blogging would only ever be, basically, verbal masturbation plus kitten pictures.  Now: Climategate.  Now: the Tea Party movement.  What next?  Not just more kittens, that’s for damn sure.

In other words, while trying to be completely open-minded, Hepworth is actually an old media pro telling himself and the rest of us that podcasting is amateur hour, and won’t ever be any more than that.  It most definitely is amateur hour, if what you are is an amateur, and you want to have your hour.  I am, and I do.  And like Hepworth, I despise the banalities of lowest-common-denominator broadcasting, and idiot podcasters who imitate this bullshit.  My particular aversion is shoving muzak on the front of people talking.  But podcasting is so much more than than a mere trip to the pub.  “Podcasting”, by which I mean everything that anyone can do with a sound file, is the next version of radio itself.  Amateur, that is to say, only in the economics of most of it.  The biggest and best “podcasters”, like the very best of the bloggers now, will turn out to be so blazingly professional (as in very good) that they will put the average BBC wonk to shame.

Incoming from Antoine Clarke, who is one of those annoying Englishmen who supports a different team to England in the Six Nations.  I remember how, at my Surrey prep school (the kind David Cameron went to - we played sports matches against Heatherdown), there were plum-voiced little twats who used to support Scotland.  Antoine at least has French ancestors and can speak French, but I still don’t approve.

Anyway, he just sent this in:

The below was going to be a comment on your blog, but I thought grief is better in private.

I note the category “Sport” and the date, but I see no reference to events in Cardiff yesterday or Rome and Twickenham today.

I added those links.

England’s defeat should not be considered a shock. The only match in the Six Nations 2010 not to go to world ranking form so far was in Rome today. A year ago, I thought the French coach, Lièvremont, was all over the shop with constant squad changing. Since then, he appears to have some coherent goals and the players seem to understand them most of the time.

I’ll be generous and suggest that there is time for Martin Johnson to get it all right. But I don’t think it will be. The robots weren’t malevolent this time, more like fluffy Daleks. Like Johnson, Lièvremont is not a respected coach who came through the ranks of club rugby, but he did coach the French youth team for a while so he knows the core of his squad (Parra and Trihn-Duc for example). Johnson looks like he wants to run onto the pitch and knock heads together, reminding me of a big tough version of Kevin Keegan (screaming “BELIEVE” to his team at Wembley while Germany calmly won 1-0).

I suspect that overcoaching is going on in the England camp. Either that or the players are too thick or scared of taking responsibility to use their initiative. I don’t think either of these is going to go away without some change of strategy or personnel.

If England let one in five tackles go like today (about 7 missed and 28 made) when they visit Paris, I shall be very, very happy.

Well we wouldn’t want to waste all those bon mots, would we?

Actually, England were so bad against Italy and before that so lucky against Wales that I had no great hopes of them doing that well today.  And I agree that Johnson is probably not a proper England coach, although I don’t really know, the way Antoine always thinks he does.

The comparison with Keegan is interesting, and I vividly remember that particular England Germany game, because that day I had lunch with vividly memorable Kristine Lowe, who said: so, presumably Brian, you are about to be a maniac, desperate for England to win, right?  Interestingly, no, I said.  I want England to lose, so that the England manager, who I consider to be wrong for the job, gets the sack.  Which they did and which he did.  Well, he sacked himself, for which I have always respected him.  Keegan’s strength was and remains motivating average teams to do well in rather dispiriting circumstances, where the other fellows are often rather unmotivated and dispirited also.  International teams aren’t average and don’t need any more motivating.  They are already well up for it, as are their opponents.  What they need is wise selection and clever preparation and good tactical guidance.  And let’s just say that there’s no reason to think that Johnson is in any way special at this.

The great coaching genius of England rugby in recent years has been Sir Clive Woodward, who did sports boffinry at Loughborough (actually delaying his international career to do this), then played for England with distinction, but then coached several clubs of varying size and grandeur before he got the England coaching job.  Not only did England win the 2003 World Cup under him.  They came amazingly close to winning the next one, because of the team ethic he left behind him.

But now, I agree with Antoine about Johnson, which means that I may support Scotland, if them beating England is what it takes to make Johnson jack it in.  Or be jacked in.

Time for a foreigner, perhaps?

I love this:

Here via here.

The point being that however fast the biker is moving, his shadow doesn’t move at all, relative to him.

I remember snapping a skateboarder and his shadow on the South Bank, by following him with my camera.  I went looking for that, but instead found these, of which the one in the middle of the bottom three is also a skateboarder, approximately in focus while all around is blurry.  I had no idea I was capable of such brilliance.

Earlier in the week I heard a similar expression of arrogant humility, from E. J. Moeran, on the subject of his cello sonata, which was played on the radio. 

Here we are:

“I have just spent all day yesterday on cello sonata proofs. You know I don’t usually boast, but coming back to it, going through it note by note, and looking at it impartially, I honestly think it is a masterpiece. I can’t think how I ever managed to write it.”

Ain’t the internet grand?

Although, any dumbo can still take the odd great photo, provided only that he knows its greatness when he sees it.  The real artists when it comes to photography are the geniuses who make the cameras.  Once I have one of these cameras, I don’t have to put my photos together “note by note”.  Cello sonatas, that is to say, are not something you can just get lucky with.

Miaow:

Few things alarm the experienced reader more than the prospect of a science fiction, fantasy, or mystery book that involves - or worse, fetishizes – cats.

But the good news is:

This reprint anthology is the exception, ...

In the mail, but not to me.  To him.

Although, I do remember enjoying this, which I suspect falls seriously foul of the above rule.  Along with this, which probably fetishises geese, although I can’t recall the details.  It was a long time ago.

Indeed:

Here.