no soup, no clouds
I started drawing again on this holiday. I’ve drawn since I was a kid – my father, a skilled draughtsman, taught me the basics. I was quite into cartooning; Searle, Scarfe, you know, the good ones. I let it drift once I became disheartened by realising I wouldn’t be as good as those guys.
But I do enjoy it. So I’m going to keep it up and I’m half-determined to post drawings on this blog.
Posted in Arts and Entertainment.
– August 22, 2010
Must do some research into this sometime. You might have expected the BBC, being our world-renowned national broadcaster, to employ website editors who can write English properly. Not so much.
Just recently there was the fare/fair cock-up (in a piece on A Levels, ironically) and now there’s this peice on Laura Dekker‘s bid to sail around the world. The title reads:
‘Teenager Dekker ‘sets sail’ on world record bid
and in the second paragraph says,
Her manager said she had left in a very good mood despite calm conditions, but did not want to speak to the media.
Firstly, the title. Why put ‘sets sail’ in quotes like that? ‘Sets sail’ is a perfectly well-known figure of speech; and yes it has a delibverate double meaning here because Dekker is physically setting sail; but unless the editor thought it a good idea to draw our attention to what he thought was a clever double meaning so that we could admire him, the quotes make the headline read as though it was written by someone not used to writing. A kid, who uses quotes and exclamation marks, and lols.
Then there’s the non sequitur in that second paragraph which seems to suggest that Dekker’s mood might have been expected to be excellent if sea conditions had been terrible and that under the boring circumstances of plain sailing (sorry, that should be ‘plain sailing‘, of course) she’s bearing up well by nevertheless being in a good mood.
I’d have thought the Beeb could do better.
Posted in Education, Politics and Opinion.
– August 22, 2010
Once you’ve seen what’s possibly the World’s most interesting museum of ethnography, the marvellous Pitt Rivers in Oxford, other ethnographic collections may seem rather dull by comparison; but the Budapest Néprajzi Múzeum (Museum of Ethnography) seems to have gone out of it’s way to disappoint.
The terribly polite DK Guide suggests that the Budapest collection is overshadowed by the building in which it’s housed, which is certainly true. Half of one floor is devoted to the permanent exhibition, a collection of artefacts from the last 200 or so years (excepting the period of communist rule).
Particularly concerning is the scant representation of the Roma in Hungary’s national ethnographic collection and as far as I could see absolutely no representation of Hungary’s Jewish population. About one-third of the Jews murdered at Auschwitz came from the enthusiastically collaborating wartime Hungary.
If you would like to take photos inside the museum you’ll be expected to pay a surcharge and then the officious and clearly bored staff inside will invent arbitrary rules such as; no flash; no use of mini tripod; and so on.
A dull museum, whose collection is scandalously incomplete given Hungary’s sometimes unfortunate history.
Posted in World and Travel.
– July 30, 2010
Helen’s been managing with her Nikon D80 for a few years now but a looming holiday has been the nudge to get her to agree to upgrade to the Nikon D300s. I doubted we’d be able to get it delivered in time but Amazon offered a guaranteed delivery date of 1pm on Friday 16th July, just in time for a last weekend of practising.
Friday 1pm came and went with no camera. I phoned Amazon. They will look into it.
Saturday morning I phoned Amazon. They will look into it. No alternative delivery date given, website still giving an estimate in the past.
Saturday afternoon, phoned Amazon. They will look into it. No alternative delivery date given, website still giving an estimate in the past.
This was just silly. It was a camera I wanted, not Amazon’s excuses so I phoned Jessops, in town. They had 2 D300S Nikon’s in stock. Popped in the car, zoomed into town, bought the camera from a very pleasant sales assistant – who expressed an understandable degree of envy – and zoomed back.
Phoned Amazon, told then I wished to cancel the order and that I wanted my money back.
Sunday morning, phoned Amazon. They had no record of my request to cancel the order, They said they couldn’t cancel the order. They couldn’t tell me when the item would be delivered. They were looking into it. They couldn’t confirm when or if I’d get my money back.
I pointed out that under UK distance-selling law I was perfectly entitled to cancel my order up to 7 days after delivery. The fact that they hadn’t delivered was immaterial.
Phoned Visa. Told them about Amazon. They asked me to fill in a form and return it and then they’ll refund the money and charge Amazon. One up for Visa..
Phoned Amazon. Told them about Visa. They put the phone down one me,
My advice? Just don’t use Amazon if you have a halfway decent alternative. They can’t be trusted and if you have problem you might well find, as I did, that their customer service is terrible.
Posted in Miscellaneous.
– July 18, 2010
Oliver Kamm had a widely-read blog, which he moved to The Times. Then The Times put up a wall.
It’s a piece of bad news: that when its paywall goes up, the Times will be putting behind that wall, not only its regular journalism, but also its blogs. This means that Oliver’s blog, which I’ve been reading daily since it began, will no longer be freely accessible … it is regrettable in any case if one of the most formidable bloggers in the ‘sphere is now lost to a proportion of his readership
This is also confirmation – here of an unwelcome kind – of a point I’ve made before about the distinction between the free blogosphere and the blog-space that is merely an extension of the mainstream media. It’s a distinction to the advantage of the former.
Norman Geras Paywall Blogging.
Posted in Politics and Opinion.
– June 22, 2010
We didn’t get quite as far as Billings, Montana last year, when we visited Yellowstone last year. I had no idea tornadoes got up that far north.
Posted in Science and Technology.
– June 22, 2010
Posted in Miscellaneous.
– June 20, 2010
Posted in Miscellaneous.
– June 20, 2010
The stupider of our two cats, Donna, went missing on Monday.
I came home Tuesday night expecting her to have returned: nothing. I supposed she’d jump onto the bed in the middle on the night…but she didn’t. We called from the garden, from the back bedroom window out across to the bowling green where she would go to watch pensioners play bowls matches on summer afternoons. We walked around the streets, shouting for her. Nothing.
We found her on Thursday night, miaowing from behind the locked doors of the garage of a house in a cul-de-sac just around the corner from us. Once we’d found the owner and had the garage opened up Donna appeared from a dark corner, very grubby and big-eyed. Back home she gulped down two portions of catfood, spent five minutes lapping water, waltzed out into the garden for a look around and then came back inside and fell asleep.
The only drawback was for her sister, Althea, who’d seemed to enjoy Donna’s absence and the extra attention she’d received. They’ve resumed hissing at each other and squabbling over the best places to lie in the sun.
Posted in Miscellaneous.
– June 20, 2010
The tape shows two police officers, on foot and in riot gear, slam McKenna into the wall.
Posted in Politics and Opinion.
– April 14, 2010
