Reflections in the Victoria and Albert museum

And now for something horribly British

A red, double-decker bus trundling off into a cloudy landscape (city-scape I suppose). In the nature of things buses are the locus for endless humor of one kind or another.

We were living in Cambridge and regularly took a bus to and from the city center; always crowded, always a long wait. We come bowling merrily down Station Road, over the bridge and turn left. Oh, no, we missed the turning. and the vast crowd waiting to get on the bus immediately after it. Nothing daunted, the bus boldly takes the next turning and weaves its way down a narrow street, turns left and comes out about 20 yards from the vast crowd at the corner, now watching in outraged astonishment as the bus turns right and drives blithely on without them. Of course all of us on the bus were vastly amused. As I said, horribly British.

Finally, something vaguely British - the Green Man

This is Britain of the Morris Dancers, standing stones, white horses, Silbury Hill, and the Gog Magog Downs (regrettably now occupied by a golf course). Nice to know the Brits are relatively indiscriminate in their depredations of ancient artifacts. To be fair, the only thing worse than being a golf course developer in the UK (where you can't dig a flower bed without turning up something that looks suspiciously old) would be trying to follow the same occupation in the Holy Land. I suppose they must have golf courses there. I imagine permitting processes of epic proportions. The expression on the Green Man's face seems very appropriate.

British Museum again. Stuff pinched from the Egyptians this time.

By the looks of things, that's basalt, basically glass, only a lot harder. Try that with your Black & Decker. How in the world did they manage it? No doubt there were tools and techniques; still, it is quite beyond my experience. Someone once remarked that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, a remark that, in this case, seems to miss the point. There is magic here, only it is in the human spirit that produced the artifact.

The sad thing is that many of these were blatantly stolen by the Brits - equally sadly, many of them would not have survived otherwise. Much of the damage to the Parthenon, as we know it, is because someone had the bright idea of using it as an ammunition dump.

Surely, if the word "timeless" can be applied to anything, this is it. I know I cannot look at the world without, in some measure, seeing it in these terms.

A figure from the British Museum.

Vicarious trip to Europe. Beginning with the best restaurant in the south of England (at least from my point of view)

I spent a year in the UK teaching database programing and design and, among other things, taught a course on transactional programing to people in the IT department for a savings and loans outfit that had offices in Brighton. I ended up teaching the course to their entire staff and so taught it several times. I was originally scheduled to teach it just once to a group of trainee programmers. There were a couple of older guys sitting in the back looking increasingly glum as the week went by. They confessed to me at the end of the week that the course had been very useful to them as they were building an application to synchronize ATMs and mainframes and were largely ignorant of the theory behind two-phase commits, distributed locking and transactions and stuff like that. Hence the impulse to teach it to the rest of the company. Anyway, I enjoyed numerous meals at FFF.

I always stayed at a B&B owned by a strange little old woman. She was Swedish and married a British soldier after the second World War, he had evidently died many years past, leaving her a stranger in a strange land. A very sad figure, I could never bring myself to stay anywhere else.

There is something very compelling about the gesture of turning away from or towards something.

This simple, rustic figure, nothing more than a concrete garden decoration, resonates in my mind to an extraordinary extent. There is something about the tension between the upper and lower parts of the image, that makes it vibrantly alive. Odd, as I cannot recall every coming across something on the aesthetics of turning. Maybe it's just me.

Another twist.

There really should be a Society for the Preservation of Beautiful Trees. I imagine an organization that pays a stipend to the owner of the land, repayable if the tree is damaged or destroyed. In time there are places where the trees are so valuable... A nice story, perhaps it'll be true one of these days.

This tree is in Port Townsend on the Olympic peninsula.

A twist, I suppose is a sort of three-dimensional tessellation.

I think of two lives entwined with one another, mutually constrained but rising above their solitary neighbors. Actually 'tessellation' here is a misnomer; a tessellation fills the entire plane, with no gaps. Two lives entwined don't qualify; though maybe there are periods in their biography when they believe that they do.

Another tessellation.

I prefer this one, the other was, well, plastic. Its imperfections a matter of indifference. This is a picture of a roof, there is a surprising amount of movement and flow in it; a visible testament to the fluidity of the world around us, regularity in a formal system is all very well, but in the real world,

In time

in rhyme 

in rhythm

is no truth

but regularity

like a cemetery

swallows all.

A nice tessellation

Don was telling me yesterday about Roger Penrose's idea that quantum level phenomena can be described in terms of tessellations. So, a picture of reality perhaps.

a ...what.. of pelicans. Apparently a pod, or perhaps a scoop. Scoop seems very appropriate.

Gets me back to the subject of collective nouns. I came across a whimsical list that included such things as

A flight of yesterdays

A promise of tomorrows

Plus some obvious vocational ones such as

A number of mathematicians

A flush of plumbers

I would be tempted to add

A compilation of programmers

An arrangement of operators

A debacle of databases

A cache of computers

A crash of windows...

Camcorder intimidation

I've encountered this response a couple of times. I'm always intrigued by people taking pictures of other people. If I see it happening, I'll get out my camera and start snapping away. Often the response is for the individual (or even individuals) to start taking pictures of me. I suspect it is, consciously or unconsciously, an attempt at intimidation (I've got a bigger...). Having seen it before, I'm not impressed and carrying on snapping anyway. He's not well placed. There's a limit to how long you can stand in the middle of the cross-walk, even with a camera as big as that one.

Florida parking lot

It looked as though he (she?) was trying to pick the lock. I believe this is a Sandhill Crane. I hope not lost, or looking for its mate. They are apparently given to elaborate courtship displays and dancing between mated pairs. Delightfully, collectively, they can be referred to as a "construction", "dance", "sedge", "siege", or "swoop" of cranes. Apparently they sound like this, a surprisingly delicate and intricate sound for such a large bird.

Mary is just round the corner from John the Baptist,

both physically and spiritually, I suppose. What a wonderful piece of ecclesiastical sculpture; beautifully done, in both concept and execution, but so odd, so foreign to the contemporary mind; you almost have to misinterpret it, no matter what angle you approach it from.

An appropriately rugged picture of John the Baptist (as he seems to have been a singularly rugged individual).

Is there a word for a picture that is like its subject, same as 'autological' is a word that describes itself (as I believe I've mentioned before). The word 'noun' for example is a noun and so is autological. A word that does not describe itself is heterological. There is, of course, the heterological-autological paradox which poses the question, "Is 'heterological' heterological?" (if it is, then it's autological,  but if heterological is autological, then it's heterological, and so on, you get the idea).

Presumably there's an equivalent paradox for a picture like John the Baptist, for the moment my mind rebels against the idea of coming to grips with what it is.

I was listening to Violeta Parra, Gracias a la vida on the way to work this morning. It's a short trip, I didn't get to hear the end, so I've had it running round in my head all day.

It got mixed up with somewhere over the rainbow/what a wonderful world - Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwo'ole  - What a strange mixture; a huge man playing a ukulele, of all things; Violeta Parra says "thanks to life" and kills herself a few months later.

It's felt like a long day for some reason. I don't multi-thread very well. I'll blame it on Bridget in Italy.

A Beatles favorite:

I'm so tired, I'm feeling so upset

Although I'm so tired I'll have another cigarette

And curse Sir Walter Raleigh

He was such a stupid git.

What a wonderful line. The continuation is not inappropriate (though three weeks is a bit long)

You know I can't sleep, I can't stop my brain

You know it's three weeks, I'm going insane

You know I'd give you everything I've got

for a little peace of mind 

Hiding

Greenlake picnic with the family, this being a fairly typical shot.  I won't mention names, but we all know who's there.

More fun at Folk Life - hacky-sack this time.

Heraclitus perhaps -

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

I couldn't take the same picture again, he couldn't go for the ball the same way again; that's what corresponds to the first part of stepping into the river, "it's not the same river." That first part is what we're familiar with, the piece that's not so familiar is what corresponds to the second part. I'm not the same man, I'll never take that photograph again. Probably just as well.

A summer scene - a busker dancing at Seattle's Folk Life festival.

I loved the combination of the dog in the background and the do-it-yourself dance-floor. A comment from Robbie Burns, who I'm sure would heartily approve of both the dog and the dance floor (never mind the dancer)

 The princely revel may survey

      Our rustic dance wi' scorn;

    But are their hearts as light as ours,

      Beneath the milk-white thorn?

I am a bit of a philistine when it comes to modern art. I have this abiding suspicion that some (maybe all) of its value comes from the socio-economic context in which we find it; out of this context, like 50 years from now, or the freezer section in the local supermarket, it's basically worthless.

OK, I feel better now. Here's a picture of a Henry Moor statue (thing, erection, I don't know, whatever it is, here it is), if you look carefully enough.

Shadow flowers. An odd image for a sunny Florida evening.

A song? What laughter or what song

Can this house remember?

Do flowers and butterflies belong

To a blind December?

Robert Graves

Yes and no; usually our thinking about these terms is influenced by the law of the excluded middle (a statement can be either true or false, but not both). Of course the world is a good deal messier than that. A suggestive picture.

I was prompted to think about this by coming across a list of words for 'yes' in 550 different languages. I felt compelled to find the equivalent list for 'no', then felt further compelled to get a sense of how they distribute across the alphabet, here's a graph - I find it fascinating that none of the languages have a word for either 'no' or 'yes' that begins with 'F':

Back in Celebration

I have always been fascinated by psuedomorphic rocks. These are typically sedimentary rocks that take the form of some other rock, most often (in my experience) the 'other rocks' would be quartz crystals. You have this hunk of rock that looks like a quartz crystal, but actually isn't, it's a hunk of sandstone. I wonder, are these blinds psuedomorphic? Plastic made to look like wood, or even better, wood made to look like wood.

I celebrate the 4th, sitting at home listening to Ennio Morricone, thinking of Bridget in Italy. Trying to figure out why enabling RedirectStandardOutput would disable RedirectStandardInput and nothing in any Microsoft documentation (a lost hope at best) or on any post anywhere mentions that this is the case. I'm confused, at a loss as to what would be a suitable image for the occasion.

Trees, falling slowly into a beautiful but cold and colorless oblivion, seem good enough.

Sea monster - Chesterton perhaps, who always seems to me an inadvertently bright poet.

I Cut a staff in a churchyard copse,

  I clad myself in ragged things,

I set a feather in my cap

  That fell out of an angel's wings.

I filled my wallet with white stones,

  I took three foxgloves in my hand,

I slung my shoes across my back,

  And so I went to fairyland.

Borges has this characteristic comment on Chesterton - "There is something more terrible and marvelous than being devoured by a dragon; it is being a dragon. There is something stranger than being a dragon; being a man. Such elemental intuition...shapes all of Chesterton's poems"

Summer begins on July 4th (here in Seattle anyway)

A farewell to spring. Seattle from Eliot Bay. Might not be the most beautiful of cities, but it certainly has a ambiance all its own.

I am told, this is a roof decoration. A beautiful, flowing design. I'm sorry I can't see it in it's original setting, though I wonder, would I notice it if I did? Would I see it the same way?

There is an echo in this sentiment of living somewhere out of one's sphere, the colonial syndrome, being somewhere other (and someone other). The roof decorations withdraw into the background, or a collector's shelf, taken out of context, they cease to be a part of ordinary life and become almost magical, perhaps what they were all along.