Archimedian displacement activity.

[hirez]

There's something particularly gleeful, educated and terribly Scottish about this splendid item. I am reminded of the chap with the camcorder dealing with the polis at the Tower of London (somewhere on the Youtubes), and indeed of Drew-who-does-not-LJ.

I must also remember to use the word 'anent' when writing business emails.

What an uplifting panoply of language we have in this country.

Anyway. Earlier, I nearly poured milk into the microwave, instead of putting it in the bowl with the porridge oats like an uninspired person. Which then goes in the microwave because causality is actually quite boring like that. You people and your consensus reality with fixed labels for objects and an order for things. It's tedious and doesn't make the trains run on time. Assuming a common frame of reference for the notions pointed to by the names 'trains', 'run' and 'time'.

What in hell was wrong with art that people had to '(re)discover' perspective? Did no-one have the 'This one is small, but those are far away' conversation? Perhaps everyone thought they were stuck in a rubbish old computer game where people and things grew out of the ground a lot. Or we're in a simulation and that was the day that the local godlike object had come back from PC-Multiverse with a shiny new 5D accelerator card.

Geek arguments, right? I wonder if they get loud in a busy office for the same reason that I can't pay attention to someone speaking if the telly/wireless/random media-object emission device is also functioning. Perhaps it works the same way that FM reception does? (Which is 'most powerful signal wins and no-one else gets a look in.' As opposed to AM, which is 'Reception is a mixture of what's out there on that frequency')

Mind you, I've not studied wireless since R1 was on '275 and 285', so I no longer know my superheterodyne from a cat's whisker.

There has to be a word for the sheer joy of starting on some endeavour that requires skills you once had, and which come back in a lump through the medium of Just Doing. A lot like a long-tail version of muscle memory.

Comments

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

Realism isn't always the point of art. (See everything from Byzantine icons to El Greco to Picasso.) There's nothing wrong with that. I prefer non-realistic art; give me Jan Toorop's The Three Brides over any and all of Alma-Tadema's output...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

As you say. I'm not a great one for purely representational art meself.

It's just that I'm not entirely convinced by the 'sex was invented in the sixties' Larkin-argument as applied to that there art-thing. I am likely missing something akin to the Devil's Interval.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Talking of Larkin (rather than Michaelangelo), have you seen the rumpus in Hull these days?

In a fairly dull rip-off of Bath's fairly dull rip-off of Liverpool, there's a lit festie planned to place fibreglass toads all over Hull. This has raised the usual irate aldermen in a chorus of, "Amphibbery on the rates? Whatever next!"

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Surely at least one of their plastic toads will be done up to look like 'that hopeless cabin-boy you keep electing'...

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

Maybe they all decided realistic art was too Roman and were having none of that, or maybe the various groups that filled in the gaps left by the Romans could do perspective fairly well but didn't see the point. Given that a lot from that period was religious art, maybe too realistic a depiction would've been considered blasphemous. I dunno!

[quercus.livejournal.com]

What an uplifting panoply of language we have in this country.

We also have accents.

Which can be used for one clueless manager (from Sheffield) to explain to another manager (from Nottingham) how Bugzilla works (only wrong). All in a pair of monotones that sound like Death on Mogadon.

Never before have I wished to storm into a room wielding the Cluebat of Righteousness screaming, "Enunciate yer fecking vowels, y'bastards!"

[aidan-skinner.livejournal.com]

Dear Sir,

that's the last 20 minutes wasted on chuckling and not wrangling bits of C++.

Yours in procrastination,

- Aidan

[zotz]

Ah. Small world. Or small city, perhaps.

I know John Hein. I think he mentioned once in passing that he'd done that.

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

I almost had a correspondence like that with British Gas...when I had the gas supply shut off and the meter removed, having gone all-electric. British Gas neglected to make a note of this, so for the next six years (yes, really) I had regular visits from baffled meter readers, and regular gas bills that showed a consumption of nowt.

In spite of frequent, and rather sarcastic, letters to British Gas, nothing was ever done to put the records straight. I even took to sending them A4-size photographs of the capped-off gas pipe outside my house.

At one time I even had a stern letter from a firm of solicitors working for British Gas, telling me that they would break in to read my meter - the inference being that someone in the bowel of Gas House had assumed my continuing bills of nil meant I'd bypassed the meter and was stealing gas. My reply to that one was most entertaining.

It all stopped being funny quite a long time before it was finally sorted...but it was, finally, sorted. I am now no longer a gas consumer - officially. And it only took six years. British efficiency at its most impressive, I think we can agree.

Unfortunately I still haven't found a way of getting off the British Gas junk mail list...

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I've just had a direct debit notice for £1500, from "Good Energy", a company I'm not with, for an electricity supply I've already paid a different company for, on the wrong meter serial number.

It's a little high (about twelvefold), on account of their "estimated" consumption being based on 66kWh/day, i.e. a 3-bar fire running 24×7. Helpfully though, they've given me a reading for a night-rate meter too, even though I don't have one of those either. So I'm saving a bit of money there, which is nice.


The confusion may have been caused by them taking the wrong supply for the same address. Rather than my house, they might have taken the one for the old bakery. Which hasn't been either a bakery, or supplied with electricity, in ten years.

[janinemarriott.livejournal.com]

Dear John,

I am writing to tell you how I loved those. However I have just spent 20 minutes not archiving bits of very old paper or random crap for which I will be billing you. Although I believe I have increased my vocabulary a smidgen which may well make us even. I will be stealing this link in order to facebooking/livejournaling it in due course.
Yours
T.H.E. Curator
PS. Its Friday
PPS. Do some work

Bad the cat

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

I laughed so hard that folk came down the corridor to my office to see what the hell was going on.

Re: Bad the cat

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I would have laughed hard, expect that "fitlads.net" rattled our pr0nwall's cage so loud that even Big Gay Al could hear it.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Hands up those who knew what Rule 55 was...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I fear I had to employ the services of Messrs. Google & co.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I have a small cast iron sign for it somewhere (with bellpush, and Rule 55 spelled out in tiny iron letters), which I've long thought would make an excellent doorbell.

[bmlg.livejournal.com]

Unfair, you geek-baited me.
Perspective is old - you can see bigger and smaller and receding choices in art from way way back. It just wasn't always as useful as making the important things bigger. The Renaissance went all crazy over the vanishing point, which is a particular kind of perspective requiring the artist & viewer to see the painted image as piercing the page / wall /canvas / panel. Before that, the concept of the image (I'm speaking of Western Europe here, allow for ethnocentricity) was that it was in the same space as the viewer, not on the other side of the painted surface.
I could blather more, but instead I'll recommend Light in Early Italian Painting, by a fellow named Hill. It's brilliant, and he actually knows about painting materials and technique, rather than being the usual art historian wanker who prides himself on not knowing anything about the material side.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Aha! Ta very much.