Tonight I did the talk at Christian Michel’s 6/20 evening, so called because the meetings are on the 6th and the 20th of each month.  Leave a comment if you want to attend these and I’ll send you the details.  I was talking about government Arts subsidies (bad).  Those who agreed agreed, while those who disagreed disagreed.  Afterwards I got a bit tipsy and engaged in Witty Banter (as they say on Dave TV), and then I made my way home, very happy.

When I got home I found that South Africa, chasing 376 to win 3-0 against Australia and go top in the world test rankings, had already lost McKenzie.  Which is good.  McKenzie is a slow scorer, and if you are chasing a big score and you want to win, you want to lose your slow scorers and let the quick scorers do all your batting.  So, good.  Trouble is, they’ve now lost Kallis and Amla as well, and will probably lose now.  But the good news is if they do lose, and quickly, or look like they are about to, I will get a proper night’s sleep.

Earlier in the day I bought these Handel Arias, for rather less than it says there, and which includes this disc by Mark Padmore, which, judging by the aria they played on CD Review last Saturday - “Waft Her, Angels, Through the Skies” (I think that’s it) from Jephtha – is a glimpse of heaven.  Another voice I think I am going to be addicted to.  I haven’t warmed much to Handel, who is having birthday celebrations this year on the BBC, until now.  Too smug sounding.  Too content.  Not tragic enough.  Maybe this will change that.

I had dinner at the Evans household not long ago, and Tim said many interesting things, about such things as how he was raising his daughter, and much else besides.

He said something particularly interesting about his taste in furniture, with which I found myself concurring.  It wasn’t one of those “I think” things; it was an “I feel and that’s just how it is”.  He wasn’t arguing for it; merely reporting his sentiments, sentiments which, as I say, I seem to share.

Tim said that he absolutely hated his parents’ taste in furniture, and liked two other sorts of furniture.  He loved the furniture that his parents hated, i.e. the style that came a generation before the stuff he hates.  And, he loved the stuff that after his parents, i.e. the furniture loved by his own generation, and presumably hated by the next generation.

I concur.  When wandering around Dingestow, the ancestral home of my mother’s family, I encountered lots of lumpy cupboards that were laminated, and I absolutely hated them.  Laminated furniture is the very definition of hateful, in my head, for some reason.  I really can’t say why exactly.  These things seemed so lumpy and inelegant.  The older stuff, on the other hand, so much less frumpish and uncouth, I thought splendid.  I also hate those big armchairs with great thick arms, that my parents held in such mysterious esteem, and of which there are still examples to be found in my mother’s home.  When I bought a sofa recently, it was essential that it have thinner arms curving a little outwards, rather than those great castle wall arms about half a yard thick.

Basically, you hate your parents’ furniture, and love your grandparents’ furniture, approximately speaking, although the timescales may be a bit longer than that. Maybe I’m actually talking about successive styles.

Is this some kind of instinctive aesthetic reaction programmed into our genes, to make sure that we can’t bear to live our lives out in our parents’ home, but instead strike out on our own, thus strengthening the survival chances of our bit of the gene pool?  Could be.

I’ve just been image googling “armchair”, and I could not find the kind of armchair I hate (which is why there is no picture in this posting), which strongly suggests to me that my aversion to this particular type of design is widely shared by furniture buyers now.  Oh, you get big frumpy-lumpy-armed chairs in abundance, but interestingly, all are straight-lined rather than curvy as per my parents’ big chairs, and clearly more modern than the chairs that furniture buyers all now seem to hate.

Perhaps equally revealingly, the nearest chair to the ones I hate that I could find by this method was this kids armchair, although the covers of this are quite different to the plain light green that my parents went with.  So, the latest batch of tots seem to like the chairs I hate!

Another thought occurs, which is that what we are talking about here is the “best” furniture, the sort of furniture that children are taught to stay away from in case they damage it.  Does this, perhaps, cause said children to dislike such furniture.  It becomes a forbidden and forbidding enemy rather than a friend, which is the furniture that you can sit on, jump on, do what you like with, i.e. the furniture your parents don’t care about.  Could that be it?

Does any of this make sense to anyone else?

I have accumulated lots of open windows, so let me spew them out here and then I can shut them.

I have finally got around to adding the UK Libertarian Party blog to my blogroll.  I wish them well, but am not optimistic, simply because any new political party is the very devil to get established without ridicule, internal dissension or general demoralisation, after the first thrill of it getting vaguely airborne has worn off.

Thank you David Farrer for the link to this review of the Lumix camera I keep going on about here.  But here’s a lady who explains why she hates EVFs

More on the madness of the contemporary art market.  Saatchi comes out quite clever, cleverer than the writer seems to understand.  He buys art cheap, puffs it, sells it expensive.  Sounds like he’s been making money.  It’s his customers who must now be suffering.

Iain Dale has a picture up of a funny-ha-ha gravestone of GORDON BROWNS ECONOMIC REPUTATION.  So where’s the apostrophe?

Computerised sewing machine.

Computerised skiing machine.  Meanwhile, Alan Little has been checking out where you can do the real thing, in a number of postings starting here.

Now design students aren’t just designing stuff, they’re getting it built as well.

Lebrecht lambasts the New York Philharmonic.  And here.

A cute portable keyboard, and I seem to have scrubbed the window before noting the link.  Anyway, it was very small and folded down the middle and fits in a pocket.  These things seem to have disappeared from the shops.  Maybe it’s because what you want is not a portable keyboard, but a cheap extra keyboard, to keep wherever you camp with your too small laptop.  And cheap means regular, not clever.  Ah, found it.

New double decker bus designs, which I got to via David Thompson’s latest clutch of ephemera.  But the thing about the double decker bus is that it is such a strong design to begin with that all subsequent double decker buses just look like ... double decker buses.

What’s black and white and over?  Yes, newspapers.  But it’s important to get the causal links in the right order.  What is ruining newspapers is not necessarily that they’re shit, although some are.  It’s that their advertising is deserting them and they stop being viable businesses.  While newspapers last they are supporting a generation of rather good, paid bloggers.  But what happens to all that pro-blogging when the newspaper money isn’t there any more?

And that clears my screen.  Thankyouverymuch.

This posting has been like dreaming.  Random accumulated notioins that my subconscious needs to get shot of, and which it therefore shows to the conscious mind for one final time.  Does this mean anything?  Thought not.  Just checking.  Now, about this play that you don’t know your lines for ...

On Sunday nights (i.e. early Monday mornings over here) and Monday nights (i.e. early Tuesday mornings over here) Chanel 5 TV has been showing NFL football, which is the American variety, which isn’t football (apart from for a couple of specialist kickers on each team) and where touchdowns aren’t.  I usually record these on my TV hard disc, but the problem is finding the time to watch them.  Often I still have two unwatched when the next two come along.

Soccer, which is all done and dusted inside two hours, unless there’s extra time and a penalty shoot-out, has a bit of an advantage here.  You sometimes get extra time in soccer, butt then again, you sometimes get extra time with American football too.  There’s extra time going on right now, in the recording I’m watching the game between Carolina and the NYGs.  28-28.  I do a lot of fast-forwarding, and then slower-backing when someone scores a touchdown.  But not now.  What a finish by the Giants.

I think what I like about American football is the definite family resemblance to rugby union, which I have always liked more than soccer.  I reckon rugby fly halves could learn a thing or two from quarterbacks, even though they can’t through their passes forwards, only sideways.  The funny thing is, there is no particular NFL team I support, but I still like to watch them knock hell out of each other.

At half time in the show I’ve just watched, they asked a British guy who plays American football why he liked it.  He said he liked the violence.  “If you did that in the street, you’d be in trouble.” Indeed.  Maybe the secret is all that protective clothing.  When you wear all that stuff, there’s less and less of a limit on what you can be allowed to do.  So if you want violence, maybe rugby union will get better in the decades to come, because they, like the American footballers before them, are getting more and more encased in protective clothing.

Injuries still play a big part in American football though.  Somebody called Plaxico Burress was a key NYG player this season, until he shot himself in the foot by, and I kid you not, shooting himself in the foot.

Soccer has got a lot less violent in recent decades.  They used to have people called things like “Chopper Harris”.  Now, if you chop, you get banned for about ten matches.  But they still have an after-echo of all that seventies mayhem in the form of shameless public denunciation of the officials, by managers, during the game and after it.  And Liverpool’s Stevie Gerrard upheld the ancient tradition of soccer player mayhem (when not actually playing) by recently getting himself arrested for brawling.

One of the best things to happen recently in the moral history of homo sapiens is the way that people have switched, at least somewhat, from killing exotic and rare animals for fun to photo-ing exotic and rare animals for fun.  Fictional romantic heroes who used to kill wild animals now shoot them in a more benign way.

Some right wingers of the more belligerent sort probably regard this switch as evidence of the feminisation (equals decadence) of modern society, of the unwillingness of me to be Real Men.  But Real Men only fight when they really have to.  They don’t practice on defenceless and rare animals.  They practice with human-shaped dummies and with guns filled with paint or blanks.

We should still be allowed to own real guns, though, because that would scare criminals and reduce crime.  Defending guns as just being for sport is stupid and doomed.  We should hang on to our guns to defend ourselves, not against amoral and endangered tigers but against immoral humans who ought to be more endangered than they now are.

That picture is partly a small bit of evidence that the rise of the fun camera and the fall of the fun gun are indeed related, in that both cater to the same human instincts.  It is also evidence of how, when something relatively new comes along, the designers and users of the new technology reach for something familiar that the new gadget seems to resemble.  The first cars looked more like horse-drawn carriages than really made sense.  The first skyscrapers looked like regular houses, only with more layers.  And I seem to recall early guns that looked rather like crossbows.

Within camera design, it is noticeable how digital cameras tend, perhaps more than is necessary, to look like old-fashioned cameras, because that is what people are used to.

My possible next camera, the Lumix DMC-G1, is now selling in Tottenham Court Road for £450 and falling.  It has been heavily advertised, so presumably heavily manufactured, which means that the price surely has quite a bit further to go, down.  This is certainly a chance I am willing to take.

One thing though.  I definitely want one that’s red or blue (preferably blue) rather than black, because I want it to be clearly understood that I am a jumped up Billion Monkey and I don’t care who knows it.  I will not pretending to be a Real Photographer, which I would be if I insisted on getting a black one.  Sadly however, most of the cameras piled up in the shops that I saw were black ones, and they may only have black ones going cheap in a couple of months time, having overestimated the demand among Real Photographer Impersonators for this particular camera.  Real Photographers themselves wouldn’t be seen dead with this camera, because it has no optical viewfinder, and I suspect that the Real Photographer Impersonators know that they’d be fooling nobody if they had one, of any colour, so they aren’t bothering with it either.  So, I may end up getting a black one after all, if the coloured ones end up costing more, as well they might.

Yes, Happy New Year, everyone.  Or, as Perry de H put it in his New Year Samizdata address:

Although I will wish you one, do not expect a Happy New Year.

Because, goodness knows, it doesn’t look like being a very good year, does it?

Sorry it took me the entire day to get around to saying this.  But you’ve got the entire rest of the year to actually have, haven’t you?

On the right, and clickable to get bigger, is a picture of Quimper Cathedral in Brittany, where I stayed last June.  This was one of my happier moments during 2008.  Apparently you can now climb to the top of the Cathedral, which they have been restoring in recent years, so next time I go there, I will do that.  My target will be the footbridges of Quimper, which are extraordinarily numerous, but impossible to capture en masse from ground level.

There’s no question about it that the best Christmas present by a long way that my family gave to each other over Christmas was a calendar my sister did featuring lots of ancient family photos, further copies available on request (and much requested):

That photo may not mean a huge amount to anyone else reading this blog, but it means a lot to me because those are my parents, at around the time they got married, in 1935 I think it was.  It’s the youngest I can recall seeing them together in a photo.  You can see where I got if from, can’t you?  That’s Dad, wandering around Dingestow Court, presumably taking photos of the place.  Who photoed them I have no idea, but the picture was supplied by cousin Anthony, who now lives at Dingestow.  Perhaps our grandfather, who also features in many of this set of snaps.

And here is a picture of Uncle John, Anthony’s father, with his three sisters, including, on the left as we look at them, my Mum.  If she was about ten or twelve when that was taken, then that puts the photo somewhere in the mid 1920s.  Uncle John is dressed like that because he was at Eton at the time and that’s where the picture was taken and that’s how they dressed.  And did for a long time after that.  Maybe they still do.

As mentioned in passing in this, Uncle John was killed towards the beginning of World War 2, but not before he had had two sons.

Just posted a cricket piece for Samizdata, focussing on that great win by South Africa against Australia, the final result of which (South Africa by 9 wickets) coincided (yesterday) with Michael J’s birthday.  Happy Birthday yesterday Michael J.  (It was.  I’ve checked.  He says he’s not that put out.)

My hope is to do more of my blogging at Samizdata during the year 2009, which could well mean that the only thing here on quite a few days could be links to things by me there, as per this.  But (Perry de Havilland), I promise nothing.

Incoming:

Dear Mr Micklethwait,

While researching images of the Cut in London, I happened upon your striking shot (attached). My client - representing Southwark College - is very keen to use it in an advert in the Times Educational Supplement on Jan 9th.

I write therefore to ask whether you grant permission to do so, details of the usage fee you’d like to charge, and how we can settle up with you if you approve the request. Our deadline for supplying artwork is Tuesday 6 at 10 am, so if it’s possible to reply by then I’d be most grateful.

Kind regards, and best wishes for a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

David Gooda

He’s talking about the second of these two shots.

Excellent, but what should I charge?  Usually people either ask to use it free for something non-commercial, which I always accept, or they suggest a fee for something commercial, which I always accept.  I’ve said to him: make me an offer.  What would make sense?

All unknowingly, at the end of last month and at the beginning of this month, I photoed a small moment of London history, namely the time when the Evening Standard headline signs stopped being hand done and then printed, and started being boringly printed and then just printed some more.

I remember thinking a few years ago that this was bound to happen.  But then, when I started photoing these things, I kind of slipped back into thinking that the hand-done-ness of them would never stop, ever.  But now it has.

Some googling reveals that I’m not the only one doing this.  Here is his version of this same switch.

So I put nothing here today, during the day, and then went out to supper in the evening.  Very nice it was too, but it left me no time to perform my blogging duties here.  So, when I finally did get home I just took a lucky dip in my Billion Monkeys collection and quickly found this snap, which will have to do.  I took it just before Christmas, not this year, but last year.

I know this because Billion Monkey snaps now have the date, even the time, automatically attached to them, assuming your camera is not set to Jan 1st 2000, or some such stupidity.  This is a very fine feature.  It means that copious photography works as a kind of diary for lazy people.  Not so long ago, hard discs were not big enough for such behaviour.  But then, suddenly, they were.  Rather like with writing in about 1984.

Here.

Obviously Sport is going to be one of the categories at the bottom of this post, but I’m afraid that another will be The Micklethwait Clock, a virtual entity that I seem to spend my life trying to getting into sync with daylight, only for some idiotic all-nighter brought on by something or other to blow it to hell for another fortnight.  Well, at least I’m getting today’s posting here done good and early, which will give me the chance to finish that long ramble I’m trying to do for Samizdata, about the fact that my mother ... isn’t going to live for ever.

Just now, the particular cricinfo concerns an absorbing series between Australia and South Africa.  It’s 1 am my time, but only approaching lunch their time.  How close will South Africa get to the Australia first inning of 394?  They have now reached 268-8, which doesn’t sound good but which is an improvement on 198-7, which is how they started the day, at 11.30pm my time.

The good news, Micklethwait Clockwise, is that the entire point of me being here is to see to Mum each day, which I have to be ready for her to begin at 8.30am, with water, milk, toast, satsumas, whatever.  If and when she has a bath, I have to be around in case any of that requires assistance.  All of which will keep the Micklethwait Clock in order, not matter how interesting the cricket may get.

South Africa now 304-8 at lunch.  Definitely South Africa’s morning.  And definitely my bedtime.

Is it my imagination, or are these ...

... getting lighter?  I’m talking about the big white plug there, which in this case happens to be the one that plugs Jesus the Micro Laptop into the mains.  If so, kudos to the geeks for contriving this.  As Michael J has long been explaining to me, the issue with mobile gizmos is not really connectivity any more.  It’s power.  In a coffee bar what you want is not WiFi, because you bring your own, for you to use everywhere, not just in WiFi spots.  What you want is power.  But if the plug that gives you the power weighs getting on for as much as the gizmo itself, that rather spoils things, doesn’t it?

And, can these plugs now be even lighter, if you pay more?  Or will they be lighter soon, for the same money as we pay now?

Readers of my recent classical music postings here (I like to think that that doesn’t only mean Alan Little) will know that I am intrigued by the phenomenon of orchestras and orchestral conducting that you can see on DVD (or the telly) rather than just hear.  So when, this evening, I found myself listening to a performance I had already watched on the television, and when I found myself making a lot more sense of it than I did when watching it also, I thought: interesting.  Now why would that be?

Partly it was the piece, Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra.  This is typical tunelessly theoretical Schoenberg, as opposed to early, nice, musical type Schoenberg, i.e. Verklarte Nacht.  (Please scatter continental dots at will.) These Variations are devilishly complicated to play accurately, and watching anyone conduct them is not a pretty sight, which does little to make any sense of the music from the listener’s point of view.  There is much beating of time with no sound attached, and then sounds, with little in the way of conventional conducting added, in a way that explains what it is supposed to mean.  (I remember watching Boulez conduct a Mahler symphony a long time ago, and that was a similarly unlovely sight.) This is music that resembles law, in that you don’t want to see it being made; you just want to result.

But there was something else.  Seeing the orchestra, with all its inevitable antique associations and reminders of thousands of beauties past and to come, really rubbed your nose in how beautiful this music isn’t, what artistic opportunities are being deliberately spurned, what glorious melodic and harmonic resources are being willfully applied to a quite different sort of task to its usual task.  All those ranks of violins, doing such drearily cerebral things compared to what we know they can do.  All of this is unignorable when you watch Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra.

But when I listened to the piece on the radio, I was able to forget all this other stuff, these reminders of other felicities, and to listen to the thing for what it was.  I was, in short, able to concentrate on it.

I still didn’t like it, mind, any more than I like disco music or jazz or hip hop.  But at least I didn’t hate it so much.  And I began to hear how others might, in all sincerity, not hate it at all.