Day: 23 July 2023

Weeknotes #26: exhibitions and ABBA

Week commencing Monday, 17 July 2023

A sign depicting a lot for sale in the fictitious Asteroid City. Taken at the exhibition of props from the Wes Anderson film.
Asteroid City exhibition

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 6/7 and Move 5/7. (81%, better). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 58,028

Life

  • Related to last week’s comments about the sand trucks, on Monday morning’s walk we encountered a different tractor doing something else to the sand. Jobs you never knew existed.
  • “Johnson was not undemocratically or otherwise improperly ‘forced out’ of Parliament” is a really interesting article in Public Law For Everyone about a very false narrative being peddled.
  • Speaking of de Pfeffel, there are moves in the UK to compel providers of secure messaging services (WhatsApp, FaceTime etc.) to create backdoors for the security services. Nobody, except politicians, believes it’s possible to have a ‘good guys’ back door that can’t be exploited by the ‘bad guy’. Daring Fireball had a good piece on this which ended with the line, “The legislators themselves surely all depend upon [WhatsApp]” and I simply can’t stop laughing given our former Prime Minister’s stance on his own WhatsApp messages.
  • Saturday morning, to the wonderful exhibition of original sets, props, costumes and artwork from Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. Wholly recommended. I am not sure which was my favourite but I do like the vending machines, the miniature train and the alien.
  • Leaving The Strand, walking through London, we discovered an outdoor exhibition of around 70 super-sized Morph sculptures. It got me asking if Plasticine man, Morph, made it to other countries where viewers may not have seen Take Hart or Hartbeat?
  • And then to The Tower of London. The whole place is fascinating and is a bit TARDIS-like: bigger on the inside that it seems form the outside. The White Tower, which gives the place its name, was built by William the Conqueror. Seeing Traitor’s Gate from the other side was a bit underwhelming.
  • Related, reportedly some of the last people to be imprisoned in the Tower were the Kray twins. It was not for their gangster behaviour in the 50s and 60s though; something to do with not showing up for their National service.
  • Almost 14 months on from seeing the ABBAtars at Abba Voyage, I was back with a different group of friends, to dance to Summer Night City, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight), Voulez-Vous and Dancing Queen. Last time I thought the ABBAtars were remarkably convincing to the human eye and, from the standing (dancing) area, nothing’s changed: in fact they may be even more realistic. The ABBA arena is holding up well one year later. The Visitors, remains one of my favourite songs.
  • I know it’s work but this is really good. Agile or agility? What’s important, then, is agility, not Agile™ via Dave Briggs

Media

  • Does your employer have holiday homes for you to use? A lovely interview about treating your staff well and reaping the rewards (and then giving them the rewards): Gap Finders – Richer Sounds founder Julian Richer
  • I am determined not to drag out watching Bosch: Season 3 quite as long as I did the second season. Watched a couple of episodes on the train home on Monday evening and then throughout the week. Not quite finished.
  • I did not get into Schitt’s Creek when it started back in 2015. So we’re at Season 1 now. Thanks to Dave. And all because Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara star.
  • After extolling the virtues of Asteroid City, we watched another Wes Anderson film: The French Dispatch (of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun). Layered, beautifully shot and, perhaps, a wonderful tribute to a type of literary journalism that doesn’t seem to exist (although staff of The New Yorker may disagree).

Archive

To save the links getting lost in the future I checked the Internet Archive to see what they had saved for the posts linked here. If the original source above no longer works, these should.

Anything You Can Do

The latest advertisement from Mercedes is one best-timed and well-pitched pieces of advertising I have seen for a long time.

I haven’t written much here for a while. I don’t really know why, but I haven’t gone away – perhaps I am just spending all my time moving my Windows Media library across to iTunes. Yes, after all these entries about music players, I gave up and switched to an iPod Nano. And, after all those trials and tribulations with other music players, I am very happy. I even bought the Nike+ kit so that I can track how far I have run at the gym. Seriously, I’ve tried many of the music players, and they just don’t have the ease of use and integration that iTunes has. It’s the seamless interaction that makes it all work so well.

Still, that’s not why I picked up the keyboard today. Earlier, I watched the European Formula One Grand Prix, and boy, what a race that was. But I don’t really want to talk about the race itself (I am sure you can read all about it here), but I did want to talk about one of the best pieces of advertising that I have seen in a long while.

Even if you are not a petrolhead follower of Formula One – and especially if you are British – you can’t have failed to have read some piece about the Championship scrap between Lewis Hamilton and his McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso.

The latest advertisement from Mercedes (which is, of course, the team they both drive for) plays on this rivalry beautifully. Anything you can do, I can do better:

I just think the whole thing is really well pitched, and they seem to have had some fun making it.