Day 379, Outward leaning

More rooms should be built with V shaped walkways, ones where walls lean outward.

Like living on a spacecraft.

Here's an example where you would least expect it.  A library, with shelves that lean slightly backwards?

Yes that's right, it's because the books are on geometry and aren't rectilinear.  If the shelves didn't lean back some would roll off and some other non-uniform shapes would slide off.

This is the library of the unknown and mysterious, where you should expect to find anything and everything.

And it's where I found this small robot creature patrolling.

A room with a droid.

And walls that lean outward.

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Day 378, Nutmeg grater

Do people still grate nutmeg?

If so then this handy car park will enable you to grate an enormous nutmeg on an industrial scale.

What is it with Sheffield and car parks that appear to have their designs based on food preparation tools?

The cheese grater, the nutmeg grater, the egg whisk.

Perhaps the architects had been taking hallucinogens.

There are a number of compounds in nutmeg which can cause hallucinogenic effects, and can create a selection of pleasant side-effects some of which may last several days.

Nutmeg is a bit of a haphazard way to get an hallucinogenic experience given the wide range of other available methods.

I would expect highly paid architects to be able to furnish themselves with designer drugs of more standardised quality.

If indeed they did such things.

Which I am not suggesting they do.

I expect the designer drugs of their trade are large cups of freshly ground coffee.

Which might explain the obsession with kitchen implements.

The egg whisk?

Perhaps that was an hallucination*.




* No nutmeg was harmed in the production of this blog.

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Day 377, Dead rat

Walking down the hill in the rain toward town.

Taking the back-tracks and short cuts.

There on the path was a rat.  Clean, shiny, like a pet, lying on its side as if asleep.

Consulting the handbook of instant morals and ethics I carry around for occasions like this I decided not to photograph the expired creature.

Here instead is a cityscape with rain.

Still life.

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Day 376, Library of the spirit levels

A return to the library after years away revealed many changes.  Changes not immediately apparent until after the closer inspection of one whose eye had become accustomed to things other than stacks, shelves, and card catalogues.

Gone were the stacks, now locked.  High were the shelves, like the residents of old.  And gone too were the card catalogues, in their place a mystical computerised system controlled by pale elf like creatures.  These creatures were secreted away in dark rooms and not encouraged to mingle with the public.

Much had been spent, and much had been polished and realigned.  Instruments of calibration and quantification had been used to make sure that the work had been completed to the satisfactory standard.

But now the work was finished.  The Russian Mafia had left taking their eastern promise with them, the failure in the smell-the-weight contest was now a dim memory.  All that was left was a brightly lit future.

Glancing up to see why there was so much light revealed a shocking discovery.

What was that?

The long thing visible in the suspended ceiling above the Catalogue Hall, could it be?

The talismanic return, no, no ...

It couldn't be ...

The spirit level.

Arggghhhhhhhh.




Apologies to Nick Revell

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Day 375, Arthur's seat, lies, smears, sociopathy, eyesore

These are doors that nobody has ever stepped through.  A main entrance that was never used.

The building is the former headquarters of the NUM, in the heart of Sheffield, right next to the City Hall.

During the miners strike when this building was seen on the TV news the cameras would always show people entering or leaving via the entrance to the car park.  The car park is just out of view to the right.

At the time of the strike we would see coach loads of police, with no numbers on their uniforms, travelling through the city centre being bussed in from University halls of residence.  These coaches would be heading out to Orgreave.

The news footage of the trouble at Orgreave shows the miners making unprovoked attacks on the police.  It has been shown since that this was counter to what actually happened with the reports edited in such a way as to make the miners appearing to charge the police when the truth was the opposite.  The BBC seems to have a self-preservation habit of abandoning factual reporting when there's a Tory government in power - and at the time both Thatcher and the right wing press had it in for the organisation, sound familiar?

Years later the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) found evidence (misleading legalese which masks the enormous amount of evidence) of assault by police, and perversion of the course of justice, and perjury in the failed prosecutions of miners.  Thirty nine miners at Orgreave sued for unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution.  The case was settled by South Yorkshire police with a payment of £425,000 and no admission of liability.  Despite the evidence of perjury the IPCC didn't pursue this any further deeming it "not in the public interest" ...

People still believe the lies and smears.  Maybe there is a case for full disclosure, although it is hardly likely to change the opinion of those that want to believe otherwise.

Someone at the time said to me "Scargill is a sociopath."  She was a secretary that worked in the NUM headquarters.  Nearly thirty years later, after belatedly looking up the definition of the word, I'm not convinced.  I get the impression her view was based on political bias implicit in the conversation.  Maybe neither of us was fit to judge, based on our combined lack of medical knowledge and loose interpretation of the meaning of the word.

And perhaps we ought to put these conflicts in the past, they only drain energy and feed bitterness.

No matter what your view, from the side, from the front, from a bias, this building needs to go. 

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Day 374, Practical YouTube tip

If you want to watch a bunch of videos on a YouTube channel in consecutive order of date of publication how do you do it?

Well it's easy.  Select the video you want to start watching from.  Append this &list=UL to the URL.  Press enter, then off it goes.

I started this sequence of videos here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu3Y_jyeTyY&list=UL

And off it ran until I decided to take a screenshot during this one here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTKv5LUfITc&list=UL-0SKDXwHKkA&index=21

I'm guessing the reason YouTube doesn't supply a simple, one-click option to do this is dues to some advertising or marketing mechanism hidden behind the guise of "we've chosen a list of what we best think will appeal to you."

Which may just be cynical old me.

However, given some of the tripe they seem to think will appeal to me (people falling over etc,) they are way off the mark in their profiling.

Someone, somewhere, someday might touch this data, actually read the data and make some judgement that is frankly bizarre.

Even if you delete the Marty Feldman truing a spare bicycle wheel or the World Naked Juggling Championships videos from your history, it will still be there in the data.

Think on.

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Day 373, St Crispin's Day, Agincourt, and the birthday of Wellington

Ah, Wellington old chap, what sayest thou on this the anniversary of thy day of birth?

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin's day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

And, so both of us in our flowing cups may rise from our beds and hold our manhoods.  This is typical after a long night of drinking and primarily for the act of micturation. 

Shakespeare huh, always lowering the tone, bloody perisher.

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Day 372, Structural crowd control, footballs

Never seen one of these before, perhaps they're only used if there are Millwall football crowds in the vicinity.

After the match every side road on to Bramall Lane had been blocked.  These mobile cordons open out and unfold into an impermeable barrier.

We walked round this one on the way out.

It had been put across the road on the far side of the entrance to St Mary's Church. We went into the the churchyard by another entrance and came back out on to Bramall Lane through the entrance the block was next to.  Not much of a barrier in this case.

There was no trouble evident.

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Day 371, (HD3) On this day in 2004

Construction of buildings near the canal basin.  Taken from a window in Netherthorpe a few metres above pantograph height.

To give some context, the construction is in the centre here.

Later that day Sheffield United went on to beat Plymouth Argyle by two goals to one at Bramall Lane, possibly due to the Plymouth keeper (Romain Larrieu) doing an impression of a duck taking flight.

Nothing else happened that day.

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Day 370, (H'day 2) Levels down, where will the ducks sit

Redmires reservoir appears quite low.

Reductions in the surface area of reservoir water mean there is less space for wildlife to bob about on it.

We interviewed two local residents about this pressing situation:

This must be very restricting for you?

Duck A - Quack
Duck B - Quack

It looks rather cold, is that in fact the case?

Duck A - Quack
Duck B - Quack

Are you concerned about the impact of climate change on your habitat?

Duck A - Quack
Duck B - Quack

Sources have suggested that these problems could be exacerbated by Jeremy Corbyn, what do those worsening conditions mean to you?

Duck A - Quack
Duck B - Quack

Thank you, that's a pretty conclusive vox-pop that suggests the opposition is out of touch, possibly responsible for the extinction of the Dodo, and almost certainly responsible for human rights abuse.

On page 48 of the Wilmslow Courier, in an 8 point typeface, "Cameron seen pulling plug at Redmires."

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Day 369, Holiday 1, the horror, the horror, bloody cars

Line your quotes up, novel, film, get them greased and ready for assembly.

I had to enter the disaster garage today.

Watcha got in the garage?

Oh, I didn't wanna look in there.

There were meaty, muscle bound, eight legged creatures, a single one of which would feed an owl for a fortnight.

The things I've seen with millions of eyes.

Why do they need so many eyes?

Why do they need so many legs?

Why do they need to be so substantial?

I extricated myself from webs thicker than a ship's rigging, made my excuses to the bruisers climbing from trombone sized funnel webs, and left.

If there's any need to go in there again it'll be done wearing a hazmat suit.

Perhaps I can send someone else up the river on that mission.

The horror, the horror ...

If I'd found the car battery charger earlier I wouldn't have had to have gone in there.

The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.  But then perhaps your battery stays charged.

There's always some dumb payoff.


Quotes bastardised from:

Blade Runner - Batty

Repo Man - Cop, J. Frank Parnell

Apocalypse Now - Kurtz

Repo Man - Miller

I haven't seen many films ...

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Day 368, Quick, make a connection

Having only 5 minutes to do this rather than the 15 usually set aside let's crack on and make a tenuous connection.

It's day 368, oh look, my Fantasy Premier League team Bernard Hepton XI has scored 68 points this week.  If only they'd scored an additional 300 that would have been excellent.

That score keeps me in joint second in the league, which I'll take.

Over the Christmas period I'll be making a big push for the top spot.  The players will be told "enjoy yourself", "play with freedom", "express yourself", "give 110%", and "the lads" that have been "given the nod" will be "putting down a marker" even if the opposition is "well organised."  etc, etc, the usual empty stuff ...

And as it happens I'm out to watch the footy tonight.  Hopefully they'll try to play some, otherwise I'll wish I'd taken my knitting.



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Day 367, Alternate realities

Like a mediocre experiment in chroma key that has gone terribly wrong, here's a Kodak Palm Pix(TM) image.

A trans-dimensional rendering of some shelving seen through a double-slit experiment.  Are the shelves particles or waves - they certainly aren't straight.

It's possible that there is data concealed within the image.  Steganography done by someone that really hasn't a clue about how to conceal information.  That is almost certainly the case, download it and try decoding - or perhaps that's just a ruse to waste people's time by misdirection while the data is actually concealed in plain sight somewhere else on the page.

And while everyone is looking in another direction here is the secret message:

The august moon rises over the poppy fields.  Prepare to fly at dawn.


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Day 366, Return of the baffled

What problems might a typical person encounter during a selection of life activities?


There's the usual "I've put it back together and it's working fine, there are just a few bits left over."

There's the eternal "here it is in these 5 boxes, I just don't have the (time|money|inclination|skill) to reassemble it in the way that would do it justice." - Typical of motorcycle 'projects'.

"It's simple to sort out, let me just do this.  Oh, shit!  Well, I can get another one of those bits off of the internet ... HOW MUCH?!"

Then there are the more day to day elements of confusion.  "Where's the search box?"  "Why don't they use a breadcrumb trail for goodness sake."  "What is the point of this if the sort won't work on the relevant type?"

"What on earth made someone think that removing the sound from Pelican crossings and putting the green person of indeterminate sex at hip height so the visual signal would be blocked by standing pedestrians was a good idea?"  This really is dumb-assery of the first water, no visual or audible cue of the status of the crossing - and in most cases they're used where the pedestrian cannot see the traffic lights either.  Designed by a particularly stupid chimp or Jeremy Clarkson, whichever was the dumbest that Tuesday at the planning meeting.

"Is it charged yet?"  "How do I tell?"  "That light changes from red to green."  What use is that for the 8% of the male or 0.5% of the female population?  Just leave it on for many, many hours and guess.

Sometimes it's useful to have someone else assist you if you are baffled and becoming fractious and frustrated.  Someone of calm demeanour and capable of reading instructions.  In which case bafflement may soon be eased, even if they don't know why there are extra bits left over after the keyhole surgery.


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Day 365, That's Numberwang

Happy birthday blog post, possibly, given a sequence of numbers and an arbitrarily applied anthropomorphic meaning.

Let's start the game.

Three hundred and sixty five.

That's Numberwang.

Three hundred and sixty five.

That's Numberwang.

etc.

Here's a history of Numberwang for those that have been living in a cave, or have just never heard of it.

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Day 364, Discipline

Look, rotating vinyl.

And bits of dismantled Betamax video recorder.

But lets focus mainly on the vinyl.

It appears to say DG on the label, which is a dead give away that it is a King Crimson album and so must be one of the early 80s albums.  It is almost certainly Discipline, if that is Side One playing then it's a couple of minutes into Frame by Frame, if Side Two then in the early part of The Sheltering Sky.

Music used to have sides, although with the return to popularity of vinyl this won't be news t

In fact it is definitely the Discipline album as the sleeve is visible in another image.

On many tracks of the album instruments are played at time signatures that move in and out of phase with each other.  Quite disconcerting at times.  Some of songs are influenced by Gamelan percussion instruments.

Time signatures the pair of guitars cycle through (and play against each other) in the title track alone are:

5/8       5/8
5/8       5/4
5/8       9/8
15/16  15/16
15/16  14/16
10/8    20/16
15/16  15/16

15/16  14/16

12/16  12/16
12/16  11/16
15/16  15/16
15/16  14/16

All of this against drums are played in 17/16, apart from the bass drum which is 4/4

The venerable cat, Bottom, lies unmoved by the pretentious complexity of it all.

I still think it is pretty neat though.

(And it is also very danceable.)


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Day 363, I'm In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Check-out Desk

Rummaging around in the dusty corners reveals a record by The Freshies.  The band fronted by Chris Sievey.  Sievey later went on to create the character with the papier-mâché head, Frank Sidebottom.

At the time the single was released there was an 'A' board in the Manchester Arndale Virgin store next to the checkout which said something like "This is the certain girl!"  There was usually a bloke on the checkout when I went in so she was probably having a break from all the autograph hunter attention.

Here's my copy, the BBC radio friendly version, which doesn't have her autograph.

And that is the actual Virgin store.

This version is going for 99p on eBay.  The RAZZ version with the original title goes for around £18.  I'll keep hold of this copy then, it doesn't occupy that much space.


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Day 362, Nobody knows

Struggling to shake off some anger, which isn't like me at all.

Looking forward to having a break, time to revitalise, refresh, and get back to normal.

Normal?

Yes, I know there is no such thing but it's a word that I'll use as shorthand for a broad range of behaviour some of which may appear odd to others.

We are all like that, so don't point and laugh otherwise you will be revealed to be an arse.

Where are the kittens?

Nooo, there are none, the internet has broken.

So while we fix that here are some more pictures of the neighbour cat.

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Day 361, I really used to love agricultural machinery

And on days like today it becomes natural to think back to the quieter simpler pursuits, before being an ...

Yeah, I know.  Cheap innit.  But sometimes you've gotta go with the obvious low-brow material and get it out of the system.



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Day 360, No cats but the proxies

All our own cats having aged-out means that tickling any cat that passes through the garden is the closest to the old experience.  Most of them are quite amenable to a tickle behind the ear.

It's not quite the same as having a cat that will sit on your head in the morning while attacking any visible bit of flesh to encourage you to feed them.  But until then here's to the neighbour cats, may they forever be tarts.

This is Nellie at the end of her first of 19 ish years of purring, tap dancing, and being an all round top cat.

She's looking wistfully at something, probably some tuna that has long gone beyond the point of being endangered.

And just look at the size of those ears.  She could probably hear the death throes of the poor giant mackerel echoing from the tin.

Magnificent.


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Day 359, I dunno, it might work

It would be great to have a telescope and get a decent view of objects in the night sky.  But it's often cloudy, there are trees, there are very bright LED street lights, and so the useful and usable field of view is often restricted to one that is very narrow.

So as a cheapskate work around let's use binoculars.  They don't occupy as much space when not in use, they are relatively portable, and they are cost-effective and can gather a lot of light if they are a decent size - these are Celestron Skymaster 20 x 80.  These bins allowed me to see Jupiter and four of the moons while balancing them on a wall, which was brilliant, if only I could have taken a photograph.

So let's try some half-baked antics with the bins and a camera to see what we can pull off.  Thus far it has been a pretty unimpressive test against some trees at the back of a garden a couple of roads away.  The real test will come when there's a clear night with a decent objective to be seen in the narrow field of view available.

Not sure tonight will provide anything, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mars all are due to be below the horizon or behind houses.

Taps watch, waits for darkness, some day, maybe tomorrow.

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Day 358, Like a big wooden pie

No idea.

Pie?  Wooden?

Big wooden Pi, that's it.

Sometimes things move very slowly.

Sometimes the things that move very slowly are me.

On other occasions the slowly moving things may be other people.

But if it is me moving slowly, ultimately I'll arrive with a greater impact due to my superior mass.

Although my circumference is not so great that complex calculation is needed.

Even though my mass divided by Pi is 29.921129301276325

There is no hidden meaning, it is what it is.



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Day 357, Elaborate spoof sees car owners doing a bizarre dance

Changing battery on a car key-fob ought to be a straightforward process.  However there are dire warnings that the device will lose pairing with the car and it will no longer be possible to automatically lock/unlock the doors, or worse still it won't be possible to disable the alarm.

So with trepidation and a massive amount of Googling this is the narrowed down list of instructions on how to deal with the battery change process.

It isn't clear which one of this selection of processes will be the actual one, so let's try them all just in case.

Fully prepared to do some sort of Strictly Come Dancing style co-ordinated door opening and closing, window upping and downing, pedal depressing and releasing, I make my way toward the car.  Having taken the precaution of disarming the alarm in advance of this procedure I feel confident that if I fuck it up and have to do it one hundred and thirty seven times I won't be disturbing the neighbours as well as being a dancing fool.

Well, that was easy.  The battery replacement went without hitch.  The buttons all do as they are supposed, and none of the above instructions need to be carried out.

So.  Are the instructions just some sort of elaborate practical joke, or have people really had to carry out this ridiculous performance.  If so there really should be a better way, this is the 21st Century for goodness sake.



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Day 356, A riposte too late, comedy of witless comments

Staying on a farm in a northern state in early 1980s US of A it wasn't uncommon to be asked questions such as:

Do you have valleys in England?

Do you have color TV in England?

Isn't your money funny?


Perhaps these were jokes, perhaps they were serious, they were definitely tedious.

If only I'd had the presence of mind to say:

Yes we have of that, and we also have these things called cars, they're like a sort of horseless carriage.

A photograph of your authentic Amish using traditional transport, somewhere in Pennsylvania or Ohio

The French call this type of missed opportunity l'esprit d'escalier, and normally it happens much sooner within a 35 year period than this late offering of staircase wit.


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Day 355, You know the score

Everything they say is true.  Why would anyone want to pull the wool over your eyes.  Let's trust them.  They wouldn't want to manipulate you for monetary gain, after all, when has anyone ever done that?

Picture containing the word 'score'

Don't believe a word of it.  They are lying bastards.

Takes off tinfoil hat and drinks the koolaid.

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Day 354, World of desks, monitors, multitasking nonsense, oops

There are three keyboards here.

And in this case that also means three computers.  The eagle eyed will spot a fourth keyboard and computer but they aren't commissioned yet.

There is no such thing as multi-tasking, no matter what anybody tells you.  Not for men, not for women, not for computers.  In the case of computers they do things quickly enough that it appears that the interleaved processes are happening simultaneously - on a good day at least.  Unless of course the computer has multiple CPUs and where tasks can be scheduled separately on each, even then these tasks are interleaved with many others.

With humans though it turns out that when we attempt to multi-task what happens is it takes us longer to complete the set of tasks than if they had been worked on in separate blocks of time.  We would be better served by maintaining focus.  And we would be much less likely to cock up.

I currently have the "cow of shame" (not quite visible here) due to being the person that most recently cocked up.  The cow is a token that we pass around, it's a lighthearted mechanism for reducing tension and I don't feel at all bullied by it.  No really I don't.

Multi-tasking doesn't work.  That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

It's also true.

But wait, that's no answer.

Ok, you might say that humans can do all sorts of stuff simultaneously.  Our autonomous nervous system is controlling, monitoring, changing, managing all sorts of processes all the time.  The key there is that is autonomic, self governing.  So what about an activity where we are more involved, such as when we cross a road.  A situation where we are making a massive number of calculations about the speed and distance of approaching vehicles.  There is a tremendous amount of subconscious activity taking place, and this activity is using processing power of a sort, so is that multi-tasking?

No it isn't.

Like a computer with multiple CPUs the human can 'run' multiple tasks simultaneously, but not those of conscious focussed tasks where our attention is devoted to something.  For example when reading and listening to music, where one of the tasks is completely passive, you are missing huge chunks of what is happening when you are focussed on the reading.  And so this is the case with any selection of tasks.

So there it is, a rough and ready, comprehensive and conclusive argument.  Not even hindered by my usual 5 minutes of Google based research due to me not wanting to context switch from typing.

Don't judge me, this only had a 10 minute time block allocated to it, and I was distracted by Antiques Road Trip.





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Day 351, +3 inadvertantly

Things occasionally just come together accidentally.

Staring out of the kitchen window at work.  I was looking at the back of the Georgian terrace opposite, considering the oddities in design changes that had happened to the buildings since they were built.  Altered windows, added skylights, changed chimney post, and lost gardens.

So I took a picture of them, to see if I could spot anything interesting about the alterations.  Inadvertently my finger pressed on the volume button on the phone rather than the usual button to take a photo.  What I ended up with was a brief stream of images.

Tut, I thought.  I'll delete them later.

But no, Google Photo got hold of them and decided to 'auto-awesome' them into an animation.  Not a great deal happens, at least not a great deal happens in a much shorter space of time than that of Andy Warhol's Empire, which would be a relief if it went on general release.

"Absolute quality" - Rotten Tomatoes (78%) average rating 7.2/10

However, it is now making me feel nauseous.

Goodbye.

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