Early Risers.

[polybear]

1 hour ago, DaveF said:

Many thanks for the thoughts on what I can do with the various pictures etc in my loft. I am going to have a good think and first make sure I don't want to swap any of the pictures round I have on my walls of which there are a lot - pictures not walls that is.

 

Talking of pictures....

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c07nm512l3do

[Grizz]

16 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

Awake at 03:08 🙁 but at least I got a snap of the permanent way people at work.

Not the greatest photograph coming being taken with an iPhone on zoom.

 

Thinking about it, I don’t think that the various Japanese railway companies do much in the way of closing entire sections of track to traffic for days at a time. They even shifted an entire platform and track at Shibuya station overnight.

 

 

 

14 hours ago, Winslow Boy said:

That can't be Grizz can it! He'd have mentioned it if he was going to be on an away day.

 

はい、それは私でした。私は架線マストに一番近い、白い帽子をかぶったオレンジ色の服を着た男です。

 

Hai, sore wa watashideshita. Watashi wa kasen masuto ni ichiban chikai, shiroi bōshi o kabutta orenji-iro no fuku o kita otokodesu.

I should add that, what with all this long distance commuting, I am exhausted. 🥱 

[iL Dottore]

12 hours ago, BoD said:

I have visited both and enjoyed both.

I’m not sure why people seem to have such a ‘downer’ on them.

 

 

3 hours ago, polybear said:

 

I suspect it's the knowledge of what they once were, as well as "what they could be"; the Science Museum in London in London is a prime example of that (the different between what it was in 1992 and what it is now almost reduced a hard-as-nails Poly to tears.....).

I am definitely with The Bear on this one! And I remember even further back to when the Science Museum in London, the Natural History Museum in London, the Maritime Museum in Greenwich were state of the art and highly respected museums (so mid 60s). The Science Museum is but a shadow of its former self and the great Hall on the ground floor, once home to an impressive collection of beam engines and other Victorian and Edwardian steam contraptions has now been turned over to flogging cheap and nasty souvenirs in the "museum shop". Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I think it's much more fun to watch 100 tons of beam engine work at the press of a button then to buy a Batman shaped pencil sharpener made from the cheapest materials possible in the PRC.

 

What's happened to the Maritime Museum is nothing but a national disgrace: once it had many galleries full of beautiful ship models; models made by apprentices, models made by prisoners of war and models made by skilled enthusiasts, these have all been swept away and replaced by offices for the "administration" (funnily enough I don't remember such a large "administration" needing so much office space back when there were many many more exhibits on display than there are nowadays)

 

Add to add a rather unpleasant icing to this particular cake, in addition to dumbing things down (to try to attract the sort of visitor that would have absolutely no interest in coming to a museum no matter what)., there is also the pushing of various agendas, such as DEI, into various periods of history that were anything else but diverse, equal or inclusive. Periods of history where the Empire was considered mostly a good thing and slavery was something bad that the British had taken the lead in abolishing.

 

And let's be very blunt here: back then White Western European Males were not considered the evil bogeyman as they are today (don't you know that for many in the museum, arts and media worlds no matter what it is, it's always the white man's fault!)

 

Fewer exhibits, trying to make everything fit or push an agenda of one kind or another and dumbing down.... So yes, they are a shadow of what they once were and nowhere near what they could be, especially when stacked up against the best American, Japanese and European museums.

 

 

[monkeysarefun]

The seasonal end of Friday night AFL left me at a loose end after 24 weeks of having something to watch.

 

However, wandering the backblocks of Amazon I discovered they have a secret stash of Australian movies of the late 70's and early 80's. 

 

Now I am going to put on my Australian cultural attache hat at this point, to give you a quick rundown on the Australian movie oeuvre.  

 

Basically we had a bloke called Gough Whitlam who became PM in 1973 or so who wanted to improve us culturally, so he offered generous tax concessions to those who invested in the arts.

 

Which was meant to cover ballet and writing thick books and so on but ended up mainly  going to anyone who wanted to make a movie because anyone with a camera could do that. So as a result there's a whole genre of movies called "ozploitation  movies" that were produced.  Most of these stumbled along  the fine line between   splatter movies and soft porn, but there were a few gems among them. The highpoints of this period were Mad Max and Road Games, the lowpoints were Turkey Shoot, Alvin Rides Again, Pacific Banana  and Howling 3 - The Marsupials.

 

Most of these movies were pretty dire  because they were made for the tax incentives rather than the story but one huge  fan was a young  Quentin Tarantino, who credits these Australian movies as the reason for him getting into film making -  so thank us for Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs etc.

 

One controversial feature of these movies was that low-level nudity was allowed for 5 seconds - any   more than that and the office of film classification poked their nose in and the producers had to put up an argument that it was necessary on artistic grounds, but the film makers made the most of the time by expecting every leading lady to have a topless shot  whether it helped the plot or not. 

 

Happily for the film makers we had a thriving drive-in culture so distribution wasn't an issue because the drive-ins sucked in everything that could be distributed.  The screens were meant to be angled away from casual viewing but in the suburbs this was pretty hard to do so it was not uncommon to be driving past Bass Hill Drive-in or the one at Narellan and see a huge b00by appear in your peripheral vision which was somewhat distracting, but probably harder for those with young kiddies in the car who were curious about what they were seeing while sitting there  waiting for the lights to go green.

 

Anyway this is a long introduction to saying that  I watched  "The Money Movers",  which was a Bruce Beresford heist movie from 1978 which did use the 5 second allowance to advantage.

 

 

But I did not totally waste my time, because while watching it I simultaneously finished off  the CAD of another 3D model destined for the printer, a small shop with interesting details from Richmond in Melbourne.

 

 

 

 

Now I just need to print it and paint it!

 

Edited 3 hours ago by monkeysarefun

[Cowley 47521]

4 hours ago, Coombe Barton said:

At a guess you're near Ballowal and the hill on the right horizon is Chapel Carn Brea, the most westerly hill in England.

Absolutely spot on. Very good!

[PupCam]

Afternoon

 

A good result from a follow-up hospital consultation yesterday so that's a very big tick.

 

Monty was out of salts the other evening when we went out.    He didn't sound very lively on the starter and wouldn't start.     He seemed to recover yesterday after having his battery charged.     Although it's been a bit nippy lately we're not in the "really giving the battery a pasting when starting" territory yet and so it appears that the battery is very close to end-of-life.   So this morning I treated him to a nice shiny new one.     He'd better start when I next go out otherwise Puppers could get grumpy! 🤣

 

Could I find the code to reset the radio after replacing the battery?    Yes you've guessed correctly.   Never mind, thank goodness for the internet and YouTube, problem solved.  Who'd want to nick a bog-standard Mondog radio anyway? 😀

 

This afternoon I have for the for the first time been using a product from Railtec to put small, mostly white markings onto a bauxite coloured mobile box.   Seemed to work well.      Now I just need to be patient whilst any remaining Dihydrogen Monoxide used in the process evaporates before proceeding to trying to make the mobile van look like its been dragged around Britain's railway network for years.

 

TTFN

 

 

Edited 1 hour ago by PupCam

[PhilJ W]

Afternoon all from Estuary-Land. I recently picked up a few volumes about items that run on parallel steel rails. I'm not sure now if the newly obtained volumes don't duplicate some I already have. So now I'm going to check if they do, I might be some time.

[Coombe Barton]

... The Guardian review of Unleashed by Boris Johnson – memoirs of a clown really does sound like me marking undergraduate work ...

 

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2024/10/04/postcards-from-home-2024-37-spread-of-covid-xec/

 

[Ozexpatriate]

2 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Basically we had a bloke called Gough Whitlam who became PM in 1973 or so who wanted to improve us culturally, so he offered generous tax concessions to those who invested in the arts.

 

Which was meant to cover ballet and writing thick books and so on but ended up mainly  going to anyone who wanted to make a movie ...

And a Jackson Pollock painting.

 

I don't believe I ever watched "Alvin Rides Again" or ever will.

[Tony_S]

3 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

don't believe I ever watched "Alvin Rides Again" or ever will.

I am glad I have been informed about it. I might have expected it to be a wholesome cartoon about singing chipmunks. 

[Tony_S]

I have installed a security camera on the back of the house today. It had a little solar panel so it didn’t need a power supply and it connects wirelessly for images and sound. 
First job was to release the ladders secure fixings. This required squirting with oily stuff. A couple of years ago I found I couldn’t lift the ladders but was fine today so the tablets must be working! Screwing the camera and solar panel to the wall was easy, modern drills make light work of our bricks. Then it became IT problems. I had tested the camera and it had connected to the WiFi mesh disc in the dining room. When on the wall outside it still tried to connect to that one but it was a weak signal. The internet help system wasn’t helpful about forcing a device to use another nearer WiFi disc but I remembered when all else fails “turn something on and off” so I turned off the WiFi disc in the dining room, the camera found a better signal and I could turn the disc back on again. 
We had been using an internal camera in the dining room to observe the back garden but I moved that in to the utility room to  observe the back door. 
The loft was entered briefly to put a leak sensor in place under the tank that leaked earlier this year. 
 

Edited 8 minutes ago by Tony_S