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
It’s Lord Baden-Powell, Chief Scout, who at one stage in the 1930s seems to have had a regular spot in the Daily Mail’s “Boys & Girls” section, teaching the future imperial overlords all about their wonderful Empire. In the 18 March 1938 issue, he contributed a piece called “Policeman aeroplanes”, along with the following rather
Last week, in an effort to get over the jetlag I went to Leicester Square to see a movie. Since I had some time to kill before the movie started, and because Leicester Square itself is pretty ordinary, I went for a wander. I still have only a basic grasp of London geography, so I
Actually, that should be “The lodgings of the compiler of the damned”, but it’s more dramatic this way. 39 Marchmont St, Bloomsbury, WC1, just a few blocks from my own lodgings. The word “unprepossessing” could have been coined in honour of this building,1 and there are certainly many far more pleasing buildings too look at
Here are a few of the best pictures from my first trip to the British Museum, almost a week ago already. How time flies when you’re stuck in the archives! Marble statue of youth, possibly Caligula, early 1st century AD. If it is Caligula, then the horse is presumably Sir Thomas Inskip.
Via the WWII mailing list comes the welcome news that Flight International is putting its entire run of back issues online, as one searchable PDF per magazine page. So far, the following years have been scanned: 1909-1932, 1935-1940, 1948, 1955-1961, 1964, 1966-1968, 1997-2004. The archive can either be browsed (note that you have to click
