[Bob Godfrey: Great]
Today is the birthday of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
[Image respectfully freeloaded from Wikipedia, but I gather from a recent technical biography (Beckett: Brunel's Britain, 2006; ISBN 9780715323601) that the negative of this famous photograph was recently bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum for no less than £7,500. Whether this changes anything I don't know]
Despite having a number of things to do, some of them disagreeable, I will endeavour to celebrate this happily Victorian event in a suitable way. Though it is probably infeasible to construct any railways, bridges or steamships it is clearly not impossible to keep alive the personal style of the great man, of whom it could be said (as it was of Sir James Martin, the last Victorian industrial genius) that it wasn’t that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, but that he didn’t suffer them at all.
Being of French ancestry myself it is perhaps natural that I should admire the insouciance of Brunel, who once responded to a tiresome bureaucrat thus:
I wish that you were my ‘obedient servant’; I should begin by a little flogging…
Anyway, it’s definitely stovepipe hat and cigar time, and no further remarks may be expected until I have either persuaded someone to give me a scarcely credible amount of money to build something enormous, or given them a definitive piece of my mind about their pusillanimity and Luddism in refusing so to do.
Naturally I shall avoid driving any railway-engines.
“I never dare drive an engine… because if I go upon a bit of the line without anything to attract my attention, I begin thinking about something else.”
[Brunel: evidence to Parliamentary Committee, 1843]
The image as “made” by the photographer has always, afaik, been his Copyright. Since he is dead, he can’t assign the same to the V&A. So I guess it’s now public property.
Well, that’s rather what I thought; it would hardly be on Wikipeida otherwise.
Having at last found a box of fifty cigars I am now off celebrating; more later.
Good for you. 73
An immense, profound and insanely high signal-to-noise ratio, but they DID do things.
Signal-to-noise ratio? One could argue at some length about the efficiency and despatch of the Victorian methods as compared with those of the present, committee-designed, politically-correct, risk-averse times.
On the molecular scale, Mr Smith meant. On the other hand, the state credentiallists, animated by a sort of bleak, inarticulable and dreadful, looming, realisation, now are working (sic) in an emotional reaction undergirded by stark horror at their own already-established supersession, to ‘fill’ cyberspace with their drip. They are like the post-modern Lutherans of Fargo, ND, in obedience to some antique biblical command to subdue the Earth, trying like Herringay Child Protection Services, to sandbag a town against a mighty river — but, to paraphrase Kirth Gerson to Umbria Division Mandator Ben Zaum, of the IPCC *, ‘There will always be a Beyond’. On this elecronic scale that same infinite Beyond is closer than ever, and more men than ever, and ‘their’ women, can — will — get away.
* ‘IPCC’ — Interworld Police Co-ordinating Company, a limited liability company of the 15th century of the galactic era (35th century, OS) and not the state-controlled police ’self-investigative’ body of a failed post-modern state in Old Earth. The future existence of the former was first drawn to the attention of thoughtful, perceptive and other superior late-modern personalities at the end of the Old Earth 20th century, by future-sociologist and -historian, Mr Jack Vance.
The other use of this acronym is of course for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of people with scientific qualifications who are paid by governments to justify on grounds which appear to be scientific those governments’ taxation plans.
Not even the master Vance ever thought of that.
Hmm, could be…wasn’t it a Brunel warehouse in Bristol as burnt up with all of the Wallace & Grommit stuff, in an insurance fire a few years since?
No joy with the sowing, she’d have wadded up good if I’d waded on in and digging our black clay loam from coulters is a real butt pain. But it was a nice drive under April skies, difficult to believe in just six months the nights will drawing in again. But Spring is just around the corner you know, only eleven months to go!
When I stopped at the pasture gate out onto the new hayground and switched off to walk out for a look, there was an endless shout of birdsong from the faint olive haze in the hedges and treetops, I seen a goldfinch, a bright handsome black and yellow citizen (the Iowa state bird), and the bluejays was singing love songs, all pouring water and warbling. (Normally they go /squeech, squeech/ or “thief, thief!” But that is their August note.)
No Baltimore Orioles yet, my absolute favorite bird, I think, next to the wrens. It’s early for them, they only come with the oak leaves at month’s end (the oaks are a tropical tree and doesn’t stick anything out until the frost is sure past.) When I have Orioles on the grove, in the oaktops, it will be a good year for regular rain and not many bad thunderstorms.
Just as well, Them Grandkids is looking forward to tractor rides on Grampa’s lap on this Easter weekend….
I naturally defer to your knowledge of North American ornithology, but from the railway engineer’s point of view they are, of course, all Lesser Spotted Window-Spatterers.
Savage insensate technologist!
I have mentioned before that my ornithology extends little further than discriminating between (a) seagulls and (b) birds, other than seagulls.