Kipling quote of the day

[from the poem after How the Camel got his Hump in the Jungle Book]

...

Kiddies and grown-ups toooo,
If we haven't enough to doooo
We get the hump — camelious hump —
The hump that is black and blue

...

The cure for this ill is not to sit still,
Or frowst with a book by the fire,
But to take a large hoe and a shovel also,
And dig till you gently perspire.

And then you will find that the sun and the wind,
And the Djinn of the Garden too,
Have lifted the hump — the horrible hump —
The hump that is black and blue.


But there's precious little gardening to be done in Cambridge in mid-January – it's much more a time to sit back and watch the bulbs come up – so I went swimming instead.

Speaking of which, I'm back in Cambridge. All but 30 of the 4270 photos made it back with me, though organising them is going to be a troublesome task. Still not king employed.

Do not bother with the Canadian Centre for Architecture

On my last day in Montreal, I went out with papersky to visit this museum.

There is clearly a part of architecture which is basically engineering; to ensure that your designs can be realised in available materials, to see what novelties newly-available materials allow you to realise in terms of design. There's clearly a part which is practical politics; how to run a zoning board, how to convince a zoning board that your building deserves exemption from their rules.

The museum avoided these parts.

There were three exhibits. One of them juxtaposed some wonderful Hermann Vogel 1868 photos of ancient Egypt, pin-sharp despite being taken inside monuments by available light augmented by cunningly-waved mirrors and "a very substantial quantity of magnesium", with some 1999 photos of Washington DC taken by John Gossage; a photographer who, having made the bizarre decision that the instrument to use to photograph Washington DC should be grainy black-and-white film in a camera with a lens extended by stacked teleconverters to 1200mm focal length, seemed to have trouble with the concept of posing his pictures, of holding the camera straight, or of achieving accurate focus.

Another showed drawings of the building of part of St Peter's in Rome, our enjoyment of which was spoiled by the fact that the scene depicted was the destruction of the large and previously beautiful Roman obelisk in the middle of Nero's Circus. We notice that you have not yet discovered PERSPECTIVE, would you like to exchange it for CATHEDRAL BUILDING?

And the third was 'Sense of the City'; somehow this managed to consist of six rooms. The magazine cover depicting the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building surprised in flagrante by one of the more ziggurat-like apartment blocks, the view from the window being of the New York skyscraperscape with human heads atop many of the buildings, was adequately bizarre. The large block of plasticised bitumen was fun to press one's hands into, albeit that one's hands ended up covered in sticky bitumen plasticiser.

The blocks of explanatory text, in fonts shrinking by the line, with the French in high-contrast black on white and the English in high-contrast white on black, were impossible to read. The headphones presenting audio captured in random locations in half a dozen world cities seemed to lack purpose. The jars containing exceedingly concentrated noisome stenches were sufficiently unpleasant (particularly 'garbage', which had a nauseating tone I'd be tempted to attribute to some kind of thiol) that we were obliged to hurry to the local bubble-tea purveyor to recover.

By September 2006, all the exhibitions will have changed, and the curious and undeterrable might want to visit this museum.