personal

Reasons to be Grateful: 23

Experiment, week 23. Continuing the experiment here are this week’s five things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful.

  1. Sunshine. It’s been another dull, grey rainy and not very warm week. So I’ve especially appreciated the small amounts of nice sunshine we’ve had. Sunshine really does make me feel so much better!
  2. Rain. I have also appreciated the rain. We need the rain; it has been very dry, despite the fact that my pond is overflowing. And some of the rain has been nice soft steady summer rain, which I always quite like.

    3. Rainbow

  3. Rainbow. And what do you get with sun and rain but a rainbow. We had a lovely example of a complete rainbow this week — and a second, but of course fainter, one outside it. (The photo is one I took last year.)
  4. Green Garden. All of which is making the garden wonderfully green. Lovely bright fresh Spring greens too.
  5. Pasta and Lemony Prawns. Finally some food. We got two bargains this week in Waitrose: some super king prawns and several ends of sirloin steak at not quite half price! The latter was divided up and frozen; Noreen used one portion to make a great beef curry on Friday evening. And some of the prawns I cooked last night in a very lemony tomato sauce with linguine. Yummy!
amusements

Not so much an auction …

… more a way of life!

More amusements from the catalogue of our local auctioneers.

An unusual Walt Disney Mickey Mouse ring, in 10ct gold, dated 24.9.56

A crude porcelain figure of a crouching man with naked bottom …
Just what I need for the mantelpiece!

A shelf of decorative ornaments and toys including … a figure of a lady seated with her dog in a crinoline …
How do you get the dog into the crinoline?

An interesting lot of old tennis rackets with presses, old golf clubs, lacrosse sticks, old radio valves and radios, a garden spray, old light bulbs, a tie press, an early photograph of a rugby team, and two fur coats, one faux

A set of 4 Royal Doulton Brambly Hedge seasons beakers, a set of 4 Royal Doulton Brambly Hedge seasons plates, 5 Royal Doulton Brambly Hedge figures: Primrose Woodmouse, Mr Apple, Poppy Eyebright, Wilfred Toadflax and Mr Saltapple; a Beswick figure of Mrs Rabbit and 3 Royal Doulton Bunnykins figures: Birthday Girl, Emperor and Mermaid Bunnykins
Oh dearie, dearie me!

A biscuit tin full of Robertsons Golliwogs paraded like the terracotta army …
Like one does!

A Victorian Aesthetic Movement brass wall sconce for three lights of leaf shape, applied with a lizard and butterfly
So hold on. You’re telling me that to use this I have to find leaf-shaped bulbs, and then a lizard and a butterfly to be able to fit them? Que?

An impressive radio-controlled liquid fuel model U-Boot Class XXI, with U.2511 transfer, in fibreglass painted grey, 64 ins. long …

A good old stuffed black-throated diver in a glass case
Hmmm …

A Burlington Wade Long John Silver musical Toby jug …

A Royal Copenhagen fawn on a column …
Takes a lot of skill does fawning on a column.

A Coalport neo-rococo milk jug enamelled with flowers and in grey and gold …
OMG!

A mounted fallow deer’s head with tail

A set of three mahogany salon chairs of gondola shape, each with an inlaid floral pattern above a pierced splat, each raised on cabriole legs

A modern cane chair of Sombrero design …

photography

Buggered Britain 6

Another in my occasional series documenting some of the underbelly of Britain. Britain which we wouldn’t like visitors to see and which we wish wasn’t there. The trash, abused, decaying, destitute and otherwise buggered parts of our environment. Those parts which symbolise the current economic malaise; parts which, were the country flourishing, wouldn’t be there, would be better cared for, or made less inconvenient.

Buggered Britain 6

This decrepit gateway is on the North Circular (A406) just south of the Hanger Lane Gyratory. Such a shame as it could look so imposing.

photography

Yet More Orchid Porn

This is the original orchid I had which has now been in bloom for four weeks. Currently there are 8 flowers open (each getting on for 10cm wide!) and at least another 6 to come. It is absolutely magnificent.

Orchid Again

See here for my first picture taken on 25 March.

ramblings, science

Aliens, but not as we know them

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This is the title of an interesting article by Ian Bogost in the 7 April 2012 issue of New Scientist. In it Bogost posits the question: Are everyday objects, such as apple pies or microchips, aliens?

Answer: It depends how you think about what it’s like to be a thing.

I can’t link the article as it’s behind a paywall, but here are a few salient snippets.

[E]verything is an alien to everything else. And second, the experience of “being” something else can never be verified or validated …

[W]hy should we be so self-centred as to think that aliens are beings whose intelligence we might recognise as intelligence? … a true alien might well have an intelligence that is, well, alien to ours …

[L]et’s assume they are all around us, and at all scales – everything from dogs, penguins and trees to cornbread, polyester and neutrons. If we do this, we can ask a different question: what do objects experience? What is it like to be a thing? …

[W]hy is it so strange to ponder the experience of objects, even while knowing objects don’t really have “experiences” as you or I do? …

This kind of engagement will necessitate a new alliance between science and philosophy … From a common Enlightenment origin, studies of human culture split. Science broke down the biological, physical and cosmological world into smaller and smaller bits in order to understand it. But philosophy concluded that reason could not explain the objects of experience but only describe experience itself …

Despite this split, science and philosophy agreed on one fundamental: humanity is the ruler of being. Science embraced Copernicus’s removal of humans from the centre of the universe, but still assumed the world exists for the benefit of humankind … Occasionally animals and plants may be allowed membership in our collective, but toasters or [electronic components] certainly aren’t …

[W]hat if we decide that all things are equal – not equal in nature or use or value, but equal in existence? … then we need a flat ontology, an account of existence that holds nothing to be intrinsically more or less extant than anything else …

Thomas Nagel … famously asked what it was like to be a bat, concluding the experience could not be reduced to a scientific description of its method of echolocation. Science attempts to answer questions through observation and verification. Even so, the “experience” of all objects, from bats to Atari computers, resists explanation through experimentation …

The world is not just ours, nor is it just for us: “being” concerns microchips or drilling rigs as much as it does kittens or bamboo.

So perhaps the people who apologise to things when they throw them away aren’t quite so mad after all!?

personal

Reasons to be Grateful: 22

Experiment, week 22. Continuing the experiment here are this week’s five things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful.

  1. English Asparagus. Following straight on from last week, this week Waitrose had the first English asparagus. What a lovely addition to a salad on Friday evening; lightly steamed it was succulent and with gorgeous flavour. Hope fully there will be lots more before the end of the (all too short) season.
  2. Cold Roast Turkey. Last weekend Noreen bought what Waitrose describe as a Turkey Crown Roast. Now “crown roast” to me implies that it’s boned and stuffed but this was just the front half of a turkey, sealed in a roasting bag. It wasn’t cheap, but it was delicious. It was good as hot Sunday roast (the bag method worked extremely well) but even better cold, with a surprising amount of flavour. And we got enough meals from it that it didn’t turn out that expensive after all. (And no sign of the dreaded Turkey Curry either!)
  3. Apple Blossom. The first of the apple blossom is out: our ornamental crab apple tree is in flower. I love apple blossom especially as the buds are just breaking and have that delightful pink blush.

    4. Another Orchid

  4. Orchids. The orchid my mother gave me is continuing to flower! And we spotted another nice one (above) this week in Waitrose, so now there are two!
  5. Sunshine. Finally for this week let’s have some more sunshine. It’s been a dull grey, intermittently wet, week. But yesterday and today we’re having some beautiful sunny periods. I feel so much better when the sun is out!