(These pictures all need to be enlarged.)
The Clapham Junction sign reminded me of Peter Sellers’s Bal-ham – Gateway To The South.
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(These pictures all need to be enlarged.)
The Clapham Junction sign reminded me of Peter Sellers’s Bal-ham – Gateway To The South.
A Bad Guide
I’m surprised you’re old enough to remember Peter Sellers’s Bal-ham – Gateway To The South.
I think I first heard it on a record. Even if I were old enough to remember it from 1958 (when I was five) I don’t think I would have appreciated it – actually I was wondering if you needed to be a Londoner or at least pretty well-acquainted with London to get it.
I enjoy it and I scarcely know London at all.
There’s Dr.Who’s blue everywhere!
I shouldn’t be suprised but well … I am –
That Doctor Who blue is the police phone box, isn’t it? I think that’s darker, but I haven’t watched Dr who for nearly 50 years. Things may have changed.
I’m flying to Chicago in a few days. To O’Hare, “world’s busiest airport”. At least, they used to make that claim forty years ago. Why anybody would boast of that, I’m not entirely sure.
Yes, that police box blue.
I see it just like the one in your pictures, but I’m not sure: I need to fly to the UK.
Enviado desde mi BlackBerry de Movistar (http://www.movistar.com.ar)
Oh, I generally think Doctor Who is worth catching up with whenever I get a chance – and filling in the historical gaps, too.
To me, the blue is pretty close – also close to French Gendarme Vehicle blue…
No, keep it quiet, but at least there are probably people to be seen at O’Hare. And maybe they’re all very busy people.
I flew into O’Hare in 1987 in the midst of the worst rainstorm in Chicago history (or that’s how I remember it; I may be suffering from Clapham Junction-itis); the airport was surrounded by a sudden lake, there was no transportation in or out, and people were having to camp in ever-increasing numbers in the terminal, wherever they could find an open area to flop down. My pal Jon and I had come to see the Cubs play at Wrigley Field, and by God we wanted to see the game if it wound up being played, and besides we were getting stir-crazy, so we just walked out of the terminal (ignoring the uniformed busybodies who told us we weren’t allowed to) and waded to high ground, then walked to where we could catch the El into town. We wound up missing the game anyway, but we had a good time. That’s my O’Hare memory.
That’s pretty impressive, Language. I’ve never been to Chicago and you’re not making me want to go.
The food’s great, the architecture’s great, the lakeside park and museum are great, just don’t go in the middle of a huge rainstorm.
I changed bus in Chicago once.
I saw a man, he danced with his wife.
Ahoy, Crown, is this building known to you? Any views? (Yours, I mean, not views from the building.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/41_Cooper_Square
Haha, dearie. That made me laugh.
I haven’t seen it in person, and that’s usually important if you’re going to have strong views, especially outrage, about a building. For example (a digression here) everyone hates the so-called Shard, a new tall building in London, basically because it’s tall and you can see it from everywhere else. That seemed a reasonable argument to me. But when I was in London for instance by the river I realised there are tall hideous buildings all over the city, tons of them. I saw one awful skyscraper with some sort of Chinese pagoda plonked on the top of it. I can’t find a picture, but here’s another one I hate, it looks like a vacuum cleaner (why?). God knows how they get planning permission. Anyway, one Shard more or less doesn’t make a scrap of difference to the skyline nowadays but I didn’t think of that until I went there.
I can’t stop to read about that Thom Mayne building at Cooper Union right now because I’m meant to be mowing the grass. He’s a great architect (imo) with lots of unboring well-designed buildings to his credit. On the other hand he’s very California, and this is a very New York site. I think it looks interesting. About everything that could possibly be done with a glass curtainwall has been done, which is why you find so many good architects (Renzo Piano too) working with layers and veils on the outside of their buildings, usually on the pretext of shading them. I’ll definitely take another look later, though. Cooper Union has a good architecture school, and you have to be a brave architect to design for architecture students. They don’t like anything.
Thanks.
I wonder whether your “other one” is the one known as The Cheese-Grater?
(I found the CU building when I googled Cooper Union, having read that it seems to have got itself into the financial mire. The trustees even considered closing the institution for five years! They are considering scrapping their tradition of zero tuition fees. It won’t be the last university to find itself in a pickle, I fear. As I tend to say in my jolly way whenever the future of the universities comes up, “DIssolution of the Monasteries”.)
No, this one is much worse. It has a top like this.
Too bad about Cooper. I’m glad I talked Alma out of applying there, though.
I saw a man, he danced with his wife.
I never realised that song had such interesting lyrics. I hadn’t heard of Billy Sunday.
The quotations here are mildly interesting.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chicago
“I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea” seems a little harsh.
By the by, Mr Obama needs a better scriptwriter: the quotations attributed to him are just awful.
P.S. Why does “awful” mean bad and “awesome” mean good?
They’re awful, but no worse than Dave Cameron’s speeches or off-the-cuff remarks. I don’t think of diarrhoea as inevitable.
Some other people don’t like that vacuum-cleaner-cheese grater building, either.
Adam Jones, one of its nominators, bemoaned: “I used to live in south London and moved partly because – and I’m not joking – the Strata tower made me feel ill and I had to see it every day.”
I would have had to move too. As a rule of thumb any firm with a name like “RDFB Architects” (these names usually have an R in them and are mostly consonants for some reason) is no good at designing things. There are several of them around at the moment and they’re all hopeless.