Well that was pretty spectacular. 🤩
Tag: photos
Taking A Dive
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
I had another submission accepted to Curious Cones last month; it remains one of my favourite silly niche blogs. This time around, it was this traffic cone seemingly about to take a dive from the low board at an outdoor pool (at which the younger kid and I were taking a respite from the heat!).
Not-accepted, but shared here for your enjoyment, was a photo I took while at West End Live in London the other week. I spotted a traffic cone on a shelf in the left luggage room at our hotel! I took the pic quickly and the room was dark and the photo came out blurry, so it’s fair that it didn’t make it onto the blog, but it’ll remind me to keep an eye out for cones in the most-curious of places!
Wikipedia @ 25: Yousuf Karsh
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YouTubeTo celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!
Today’s random article: Karsh (crater)
Today’s topic: Yousuf Karsh
The planet Mercury is covered with impact craters, which isn’t surprising because it has no atmosphere to slow down incoming meteors nor significant active tectonic or erosion processes to conceal them once they’re created. In 2015 the IAU ran a competition to name four such craters: the winning entries resulted in the naming of the craters Carolan, Enheduanna, Kulthum, Rivera, and Karsh.
This crater is named after Yousuf Karsh, who’s sufficiently famous that I’d actually heard of him, which was an unusual result from hitting “random article” on Wikipedia.
But in case you don’t know who Yousaf Karsh is – or if, like me, you just wanted to learn more about him – then you’re in luck!
Yousuf Karsh was an Canadian-Armenian photographer who took principally portrait photographs, some of which you’ve almost-certainly seen already. He photographed a huge number of famous and significant individuals of the 20th century. Like this one:
That photo, taken in 1941, is titled The Roaring Lion, and it’s got a story to it.
Winston Churchill posed for his photograph on his way out from delivering the “some chicken! some neck!” speech to the Canadian parliament (you can see his notes from the speech tucked into his jacket pocket). He had his trademark cigar in his mouth, but Karsh wanted it gone. He asked Churchill to remove it, but Churchill refused, and Karsh went ahead to take the photograph anyway. But then at the last second, Karsh said “Forgive me, sir” and snatched the cigar directly out of the Prime Minister’s mouth.
“By the time I got back to the camera, he looked so belligerent, he could have devoured me,” said Karsh later, of the expression on Churchill’s face. But it’s that expression that he captured with the camera, and that would go on to be described by the USC as a “defiant and scowling portrait [which] became an instant icon of Britain’s stand against fascism.” Absolutely iconic.
Churchill himself said, after the picture was taken, that “you can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed.” Hence the portrait’s name.
Or how about this picture of the Marx Brothers in 1948:
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Or how about this fantastic photo of the then Princess Elizabeth, aged 21 or 22, before her accession as Queen Elizabeth II:
Here’s some things I didn’t know about Yousuf Karsh, though:
Being born to ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire could have been a death sentence in itself for young Yousuf. Ottoman and later Turkish Nationalist authorities and paramilitaries deported, confined, or murdered hundreds of thousands and quite possibly over a million Armenians, who they saw as a threat to their national identity (among other candidate causes).
Karsh and his family travelled with a Kurdish caravan to Aleppo in Syria in 1922, and a year later his parents took advantage of a humanitarian scheme to transport displaced Armenians to live with relatives in Canada: the then 15-year-old who “spoke little French, and less English” and “had no money and little schooling” moved half way around the world to live with his uncle.
Yousuf’s uncle was a photographer and taught him the essentials of early-20th-century photography technology and techniques, before sending him to apprentice in Boston under John H. Garo, a fellow Armenian whose studio hosted the still-running Boston Camera Club. He worked in the USA for a time then returned to Canada, opening his own studio in 1932. When his brother Malak was able to join him in Canada in 1937, Yousuf helped Malak break into a career in photography too: a career that would probably have been better-known were it not for being in the shadow of his older brother!
I don’t know whether he’d care about having a crater named after him or not. But he’d probably have been more proud of the legacy that lives on in the Karsh Award, given every alternate year by the City of Ottawa for outstanding artistic work in a photo-based medium.
Note #29064
How kind of the humans who constructed this sofa to leave a perfect dog-shaped nest in-between the cushions. Our pupper is appreciative.
Ghost of a dartboard
There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻
Caution: No Swimming
Hurrah! I just made my first successful submission to Curious Cones, a weblog collecting photographs of traffic cones spotted in unusual places.
I spotted this cone while the younger child and I took a walk to the next-nearest village to our temporary accommodation, in order to find a geocache, tag some benches for OpenBenches, and have a cafe brunch.
Anyway: if you’re not following Curious Cones, it’s exactly as delightful as you might expect.
Note #28356
I don’t know what this machine was (a crane, perhaps), but it’s now been almost-completely reclaimed by nature.
Curious Cones
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Welcome to my collection of cones that have found themselves in peculiar circumstances.
…
In the style of Wild Bread, Curious Cones is a catalogue of traffic cones in unusual places, and that is all.
How wonderful and weird our World Wide Web is, that such a thing can exist. And it’s got an 88×31, too (now sported on my blogroll)!
With thanks to Piece of the Pie’s “Site of the Week” for helping me discover it!
Tintern Abbey
Tintern Abbey’s looking especially beautiful in the fresh snow, this morning.
Minimalist Trees
Not sure I’m a fan of these new ultra-minimalist Christmas trees.
30 Years Of Notices
This telegraph pole in the centre of Eynsham carries the scars of hosting countless community announcements, notices, and flyers over the last 30 years.
Autumn Sunrise
Gorgeous autumn dawn this morning with a razor-sharp moon hanging above the shifting hues of the South-East.
It’s going to be a cold one. (At last; it’s been an unseasonably-warm November so far!)
Ten Pointless Facts About Me
This has been doing the rounds; I last saw it on Kev’s blog. I like that the social blogosphere’s doing this kind of fun activity again, these days1.
1. Do you floss your teeth?
Umm… sometimes? Not as often as I should. Don’t tell my dentist!
Usually at least once a month, never more than once a week. I really took to heart some advice that if you’re using a fluoridated mouthwash then you shouldn’t do it close to when you brush your teeth (or you counteract the benefits), so my routine is that… when I remember and can be bothered to floss… I’ll floss and mouthwash, but like in the middle of the day.
And since I moved my bedroom (and bathroom) one floor further up our house, it’s harder to find the motivation to do so! So I’m probably flossing less. The unanticipated knock-on effect of extending your house!
2. Tea, coffee, or water?
I love a coffee to start a workday, but I have to be careful how much I consume because caffeine hits me pretty hard, even after a concentrated effort over the last 10 years or so to gradually increase my tolerance. I can manage a couple of mugs in the morning and be fine, now, but three coffees… or any in the mid-afternoon onwards… and I’m at risk of throwing off my ability to sleep later2.
I keep a bottle of water wherever I work to try to encourage myself to hydrate, because I’ve got medical evidence to show that I don’t drink enough water! It sometimes works.
3. Footwear preference?
Basic trainers for everyday use; comfortable boots for hiking; slippers for when I’m working. Nothing special.
I wear holes in footwear (and everything else I wear) faster than anybody I know, so nowadays I go for good-value comfort over any other considerations when buying shoes.
4. Favourite dessert?
Varies, but if we’re eating out, I’m probably going to be ordering the most-chocolatey dessert on the menu.
5. The first thing you do when you wake up?
The very first thing I do when I wake up is check how long it is before I need to get up, and make a decision about when I’m going to do so. I almost never need my alarm to wake me: I routinely wake up half an hour or so before my alarm would go off, most mornings. But exactly how early I wake directly impacts what I do next. If I’m well-rested and it’s early enough, I’ll plan on getting up and doing something productive: an early start to work, or some voluntary work for Three Rings, or some correspondence. If it’s close to the time I need to get up I’ll more-often just stay in bed and spend longer doing the actual answer I should give…
…because the “real” answer is probably: pick up my phone, and open up FreshRSS – almost always the first and last thing I do online in a day! I’ll skim the news and blogosphere and “set aside” for later anything I’d like to re-read or look at later on.
6. Age you’d like to stick at?
Honestly, I’m good where I am, thanks.
Sure, I was fitter and healthier in my 20s, and I had more free time in my early 30s… and there are certainly things I miss and get nostalgic about in any era of my life. But conversely: it took me a long, long time to “get my shit together” to the level I have now, and I wouldn’t want to have to go through all of the various bits of self-growth, therapy, etc. all over again!
So… sure, I’d be happy to transplant my intellect into 20-year-old me and take advantage of my higher energy level of the time for an extra decade or so3. But I wouldn’t go back even a decade if it meant that I had to go relearn and go through everything from that decade another time, no thanks!
7. How many hats do you own?
Four. Ish.
They are:
- A bandana. Actually, I own maybe half a dozen bandanas, mostly in Pride rainbow colours. Bandanas are amazingly versatile: they fold small which suits my love of travelling light these last few years, they can function as headgear, dust mask, neckerchief, flannel, etc.4, and they do a pretty good job of keeping my head cool and protecting my growing bald spot from the fierce rays of the summer sun.
- A “geek” hat. Okay, I’ve actually got three of these, too, in slightly different designs. When they first started appearing at Oxford Geek Nights, I just kept winning them! I’m not a huge fan of caps, so mostly the kids wear them… although I do put one on when I’m collecting takeaway food so I can get away with just putting e.g. “geek hat” in the “name” field, rather than my name5.
- A warm hat that comes out only when the weather is incredibly cold, or when I’m skiing. As I was reminded while skiing on my recent trip to Finland, I should probably switch to wearing a helmet when I ski, but I’ve been skiing for three to four decades without one and I find the habit hard to break.6
- A wooly hat that I was given by a previous employer at a meetup in Mexico last year. I wore it a couple of times last winter but it’s otherwise not seen much use.
8. Describe the last photo you took?
The last photo I took was of myself wearing a “geek” hat. You’ve seen it, it’s above!
But the one before that was this picture of an extremely large bottle of champagne, with a banana for scale, that was delivered to my house earlier today:
Ruth and JTA celebrate their anniversary every few years with the “next size up” of champagne bottle, and this is the one they’re up to. This year, merely asking me to help them drink it probably won’t be sufficient (that’d still be two litres each!) so we’re probably going to have to get some friends over.
I took the photo to send to Ruth to reassure her that the bottle had arrived safely, after the previous attempt went… less well. I added the banana “for scale” before sharing the photo with some other friends, too.
9. Worst TV show?
PAW Patrol. No doubt.
You know all those 1980s kids TV shows that basically existed for no other purpose than as a marketing vehicle for a range of toys? I’m talking He-Man (and She-Ra), Transformers, G.I. Joe, Care Bears, M.A.S.K., Rainbow Brite, and My Little Pony. Well, those shows look good compared to PAW Patrol.
I was delighted when our kids graduated from PAW Patrol to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic because it’s an enormously better show (the songs kick ass, too) and we could finally shake off the hollow, pointless, internally-inconsistent advertisement that is PAW Patrol.
10. As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?
This is the single most-boring thing about me, and I’ve doubtless talked about it before. At some point between the age of about six and eight years old, I decided that I wanted to grow up and become… a computer programmer.
And then I designed the entirety of the rest of my education around that goal. I learned a variety of languages and paradigms under my own steam while setting myself up for a GCSE in IT, and then A-Levels in Maths and Computing, and then a Degree in Computer Science, and by the time I’d done all of that I was already working in the industry: self-actualised by 21.
Like I said: boring!
Your turn!
You should give this pointless quiz a go too. Ping/Webmention me if you do (or comment below, I suppose); I’d love to read what you write.
Footnotes
1 They’re internet memes, in the traditional sense, but sadly people usually use “meme” nowadays exclusively to describe image memes, and not other kinds of memetic Internet content. Just another example of our changing Internet language, which I’ve written about before. Sometimes they were silly quizzes (wanna know what Meat Loaf song I am?); sometimes they were about you and your friends. But images, they weren’t: that came later.
2 Or else I’ll get a proper jittery heart-flutter going!
3 I wouldn’t necessarily even miss the always-on, in-your-pocket, high-speed Internet of today: the Internet was pretty great back then, too!
4 Obviously an intergalactic hitch-hiker should include a bandana, perhaps as well as an equally-versatile towel, in their toolkit.
5 It’s not about privacy, although that’s a fringe benefit I suppose: mostly it’s about getting my food quicker! If I walk into Dominos wearing a geek hat and they’ve got pizza on the counter with a label on it that says it’s for “geek hat”, they’ll just hand it over, no questions, and I’m in-and-out in seconds.
6 JTA observed that similar excuses were used by people who resisted the rollout of mandatory seatbelt usage in cars, so possibly I’m the “bad guy” here.
7 From left to right, the single personality traits for each of the pups are (a) doesn’t like water, (b) is female, (c) likes naps, (d) is allergic to cats, (e) is clumsy, and (f) is completely fucking pointless.
Scarecrows
As time has gone by, a great many rural English villages have been consumed by their nearest towns, or else become little more than dormitory villages: a place where people do little more than eat and sleep in-between their commutes to-and-from their distant workplaces1.
And so it pleases me at least a little that the tiny village I’ve lived in for five years this week still shows great success in how well it clings on to its individual identity.
Every summer since time immemorial, for example, it’s hosted a Village Festival, and this year it feels like the community’s gone all-out. The theme this year is A Century in Television, and most of the festivities seem to tie-in to the theme.
I’ve been particularly impressed this year by entrants into the (themed) scarecrow competition: some cracking scarecrows (and related decorations) have started popping up around the village in advance of festival week!
There’s a clear bias towards characters from childrens’ television programmes, but that only adds to the charm. Not only does it amuse the kids when we walk by them, but it feeds into the feeling of nostalgia that the festival theme seems to evoke (as well, perhaps, as a connection to the importance of this strange village tradition).
If you took a wrong turning and found your way through our village when you meant to be somewhere else, you’d certainly be amused, bemused, or both by the plethora of figures standing on street corners, atop hedgerows, and just generally around the place2.
The festival, like other events in the local calendar, represents a collective effort by the “institutions” of the village – the parish council, the church, the primary school, etc.
But the level of time and emotional investment from individual households (whether they’re making scarecrows for the Summer festival… decorating windows as a Christmas advent calendar… turning out for a dog show last week, I hear3…) shows the heart of a collective that really engage with this kind of community. Which is really sweet.
Anyway, the short of it is that I feel privileged to live in a village that punches above its weight class when it comes to retaining its distinctive personality. And seeing so many of my neighbours, near and far, putting these strange scarecrows out, reminded me of that fact.
Footnotes
1 The “village” in which our old house resided certainly had the characteristic feel of “this used to be a place of its own, but now it’s only-barely not just a residential estate on the outskirts of Oxford, for example. Kidlington had other features, of course, like Oxford’s short-lived zoological gardens… but it didn’t really feel like it had an identity in its own right.
2 Depending on exactly which wrong turn you took, the first scarecrow you saw might well be the one dressed as a police officer – from some nonspecific police procedural drama, one guesses? – that’s stood guard shortly after the first of the signs to advertise our new 20mph speed limit. Holding what I guess is supposed to be a radar gun (but is clearly actually a mini handheld vacuum cleaner), this scarecrow might well be having a meaningful effect on reducing speeding through our village, and for that alone it might be my favourite.
3 I didn’t enter our silly little furball into the village dog show, for a variety of reasons: mostly because I had other things to do at the time, but also because she’s a truculent little troublemaker who – especially in the heat of a Summer’s day – would probably just try to boss-around the other dogs.
Note #26502
My contribution to the long-standing British tradition of photographing dogs at polling stations. Don’t forget to vote, folks!
