This is my favourite recent photo, despite its technical imperfections.  It would never make it to the short list in any photography competition, I realise that.  But here it is anyway:

Click to get it bigger, but frankly, not a lot better.

So yes, that was taken from Englefield Green, which is about twenty miles away from the centre of London, and up on a bit of a hill.  The family house, which is still in the process of being sold, is a few dozen yards further up the hill from there.  But despite having lived there all of my early life and having gone back to visit numerous times since, I only discovered this view last Sunday.  I was back to say hello to the younger of my two elder brothers, who is caretaking for us.  We were walking back down to Egham station, me to get to the station and him to keep me company.  The weather, having been very fitful earlier in the day, was perfect, not a cloud in the sky.  And there it was, between a couple of the little suburban bungalows set back from the road.  At first I wasn’t entirely sure, my eyesight being only what it is.  But there is no mistaking that shape, is there?  Taking the shot involved a spot of mild trespassing in someone’s forecourt, to get past nearer obstacles, but through the big front windows it looked like no one was in, so, what the eye didn’t see ...  And yes, the focussing is not all it might be.  Maybe I’ll go back and try again, although I doubt I’ll ever get better weather for it.

I have several times photoed this view, although never even this clearly, from the also quite nearby Air Forces Memorial which you can climb to the top of and look out from, over nearby Runnymede (of Magna Carta fame) and beyond that all along the Thames valley from Windsor Castle on the left to Heathrow centre right and beyond it to London on the right to far right, very far right just before the view stops being where the Gherkin is just about visible.  But I never knew until now that you can see any of London from even nearer to home, which is how I still think of it and will continue to think of it until the developers smash it up.

One here, and nine more here.

LATER: Make that eleven.

Here.  Thanks again to MJ.  Small Singapore Things.

David Thompson should be told about this ... what is the singular of ephemera?  Ephemeron?
 

Knowing my predilection for Friday felinity, Michael J today sent in the link to a story entitled Baby tiger found stuffed in bag at Thai airport.  Baby tiger: cute.  Smuggling baby tigers: bad. Rich Iranians like to keep baby tigers as pets: bad.  Baby tiger nearly died: bad.  Baby tiger rescued from nasty smuggling woman: good.  You know the kind of thing.

But why, instead of exporting tigers from Thailand being illegal, doesn’t Thailand let the exporting of tigers be a legal business?  There is obviously money to be made, provided they don’t over-produce the little things, thereby reducing their exoticism and pet snob appeal.  And legal capitalists would be far more likely to worry about preserving tigers in the long term than illegal smugglers, who might just swipe the lot for short term gain.

I seem to recall Leon Louw having written stuff about this, at some time in the past.  His point, as I recall it, was that lefties get all gooey-eyed about endangered species, but don’t care enough about them to make them unendangered to the point of actually ensuring that they survive and flourish.  Flourishing animals aren’t romantic and endearing.  Only endangered ones are good.  Link anyone?  I couldn’t find anything by Louw on this specific point.

More cattery (via David Thompson) here.  Stupid New York women dressing cats up in stupid costumes.

Bad.
 
 
 
 

Earlier this year Toby Baxendale talked into my recording machine, with only occasional interruptions from me, about the banking crisis and what to do about it.

This happened before the recent general election, so apologies for the delay in sticking this up, but nothing important has changed.  The delay was because the thing was rather long, and I hesitated about how to present it.  In the end, I just sliced out some stuff, mostly at the beginning, and shoved it up.  I’m guessing that the audience for this, some of it at least, will be willing to spend a bit of time on it.  So, I left it at just over an hour, rather than cutting it any further.  The crude timing of this two part conversation is that the “what do we do?” question is put just after the 38 minute mark.

Some of what I omitted was by way of biographical introduction about Toby.  If you would like to know more about him, read this, or listen to the the first conversation that I recorded with him in November of last year.

Here are links to the Cobden Centre, of which Toby is the chairman, and to its blog.  Toby’s own Cobden Centre bloggings can be read here.

I want to keep a note of this picture (it’s one of these) of what looks like a tap with water coming out of it, but which is actually a tap balanced on a solid piece of perspex.

I have been looking for this image for years, to illustrate a piece of blogging I want to do at Samizdata, Real Soon Now, about the Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy.  Ideally, the shape of the water coming out of the tap would be doing that that this-way-that-way thing that water coming out of a tap sometimes does, rather than it just forming a perfect column, perfectly circular if you, as it were, cut horizontally though it.  Can anyone find a version of this sculpture that looks like that, rather than like the one on the right?

Here.  Can’t ignore that just because I’m on holiday.

The bails:

The stumps.

Things seem to be pretty quiet around here, so I’ll be taking a bit of a break until the autumn.  Although, it feels like autumn now, what with it being so cold and rainy just now.  So anyway, postings here will be on an occasional, only-when-I-feel-like-it basis for the next week or two, or maybe more three or four.  This doesn’t mean there won’t be postings.  The rule is that I don’t have to post stuff here every couple of days, not that I have not to post stuff.  So, you’ll read me when you do, whenever that turns out to be.

Some snaps of the ever growing Shard, taken by me a couple of days ago.  Click to get them bigger:

The weather looked only so-so when I departed on my journey, but it turned out fabulous.  It’s amazing what a difference great weather makes to photography, when it comes to buildings.  Something to do with the clearness of the air.

I fluctuate in my guesses as to how good/splendid/magnificent the Shard will end up looking.  I think the answer is that different views will yield different results.  I worry that Guy’s Hospital (which will just become differently ugly after its facelift, I think) won’t be sufficiently dwarfed, at any rate from some angles.  As always with architecture, you never really know how it will look until it is finished.

Meanwhile, the cranes look magnificent.

I’m talking about this:

Is that as daft as it seemed to me when I photoed it in Victoria Street this afternoon?  If there is agreement here, I will promote it to Samizdata.  If not, then we can forget about it.

Indeed:

This is good different reason why I similar your website. I one your trend of authorship you assure your histories without out sending us to 5 previous sites to accomplished the story.

Deleted from a posting called It only takes One Rich Lunatic.  May the perpetrator of this, and all the other members of his spamster tribe, remain poor lunatics for all of their (I trust) miserable lives.

Counting Cats (NickM to be exact) has a great photo up, of a couple of US fighter jets doing space rocket impersonations, which NickM found here.  So I went wandering around at the same locale, and found this:

It’s the latest manifestation of the Galaxy, known as the Super Galaxy (warning: that’s a video and it will immediately start talking).  It’s not a new version of the old Galaxy so much as a beefing up programme for old Galaxies, fitting them with better engines and better ... stuff.

August being a quiet time for doing stuff indoors, Mein Host is doing some housekeeping and general shuffling around of stuff early this evening, and this blog will probably be down for a while.  It will be back up again soon.  Your continuing supply of trivia with a libertarian tinge is safe.

Meanwhile, before and after whatever interruption transpires, here is a self portrait of me, taken last month, reflected off of some Thing.  Judging by the photos next to it in the archives, this Thing was somewhere in that big shopping centre between Victoria train station and Victoria bus station.  I am suitably flattened:

So, see you all again soon.  Probably.

There’s been much talk about technology as applied to cricket, what with this new referral system.  Personally I think they’re right to use it.  If spectators and telly viewers are going to be shown umpiring mistakes within seconds of them being made, then surely the umpires should have access to the same toys, to avoid such blunders.  The problem is that these toys, especially to begin with, will always take time to yield their verdicts.  So now, for instance, “Hotspot” and “Hawk Eye” both say what they have to say in seconds, and the umpires are now using these procedures.  But “Snicko” - the one that gives you the sound and slow-mo of the ball as it passes the batsman, and thus says whether his bat hit the ball or if that noise was from something else, like the bat hitting the pitch or the ball hitting the batsmans torso – still takes ages.

I personally do not like this referral system, which is a distinct issue from the general principle of using technology.  This means umpires being made to look silly when their decisions on the pitch are overturned, and I don’t like that.  In rugby union, the match officials are in complete charge of the technology.  Only they can “refer” a decision, which they do before they announce any verdict.  But I suppose the problem with cricket is that it contains many more semi-important decisions than rugby does, and if the umpires, on and off the pitch, were constantly consulting each other, it could seriously slow things down.

Meanwhile, the referral system has already, potentially, changed the course of one man’s life.  The new Pakistan wicketkeeper, Zulqarnain Haider, playing in his first test, was out for a golden duck in the first innings, and was today given out again, for another golden duck, by umpire whoever it was.  But Pakistan still had an appeal left.  They appealed, and the guy was not out.  And as I write this, he is still not out.  Fifty not out.  Excellent.

You can always tell when a series is horribly one sided.  The key symptom is that if your team is winning a miss-match, you want the other guys to do better.

To return to my basic point here, as for the argument that techology is imperfect and that therefore it shouldn’t be bothered with, that’s a red herring, I think.  All I ask is that the umpires get all the help they conveniently can get to make their decisions.  As always, they should make the decisions.  It’s just that now, they have progressively more visual evidence to base their decision on.  It’s up to them to research the various extra toys they now have, and use what they say to help them make their decisions better.  The only alternative would be to ban the rest of us seeing such analysis, and I can’t see that being popular.

Meanwhile, further proof of the imperfection of cricket technology was supplied this afternoon by cricinfo.com, which this afternoon has been all over the place:

So three batsman at the crease there.

Whereas that was done without any batsman or bowlers doing anything.  The Sussex team hadn’t even been announced.  Was it even on the pitch?

“Bugs”, the test match text commentators called it.  When they got the chance to say anything at all, which was only infrequently.  But things seem to have settled down a bit now.