Yesterday I had occasion to pass Cleopatra’s Needle on the Victoria Embankment. It’s not really Cleopatra’s at all but Thutmose III’s, as it was he who caused it to be erected at Heliopolis, in around 1450 BC. It was eventually transported from Egypt to London and re-erected there in 1878, after trials and tribulations in […]
My third Sunday here: I still hadn’t seen the Thames yet and so decided today was the day. I began with a visit to the Tate Modern, which was tres cool (especially the Dalí exhibition, for all your clock-melting and eyeball-slicing needs) but they don’t allow cameras. So you’ll have to be satisfied with this
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which
So this was the week I finally broke down and bought some books — I made it nearly a month in London without being forced to, thanks to Skoob Books and the Imperial War Museum. I am only human, it turns out. Norman Angell. The Great Illusion — Now. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938. A Penguin Special
You want planes? We got planes. After the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, though really it should be called the Technology Museum as there’s not a lot of what I would call basic science on show (perhaps due to the afore-mentioned Natural History Museum being right next door). Still, that’s just nit-picking, as this
A rather Vorlonish-looking whale skeleton. On my second Sunday here (so the day after the RAF Museum, I’m way behind here), I travelled out to South Kensington to visit the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, which are right next to each other (and the Victoria and Albert is conveniently located just across the
Last night I ventured out to a cinema1 to see Die Hard 4.0 (AKA Live Free or Die Hard). I’ve long been a fan of the Die Hard movies, and I thought this one was pretty good, though nowhere near the brilliance of the first one. But here I just want to briefly discuss the
On my way back from the RAF Museum, I paused to take some pictures of the beautiful neoclassical St Pancras Parish Church, completed in 1822. They don’t really do it justice, but I do like this one, of one of the caryatids guarding the entrance to the crypt. The caryatids were modelled on those on
On my first Saturday here, I spent the morning printing out pages from the Daily Mail at British Library Newspapers in Colindale, and then headed over to the nearby RAF Museum London for an afternoon wandering around the historic aircraft. The problem with this is that it meant I had to carry with me (a)
The degree to which science fiction accurately predicts the future is not really the point; its value is more as an exploration of what people might do and what society might look like if you change things in a few fundamental ways. (And for my purposes, it’s the assumptions underlying a given exploration which are
