I Love Paris in the Springtime

T and I have just got back from a brief holiday in Paris. I've only ever stopped in Paris on my way somewhere else so this was a good opportunity to get to know the place a bit. It's a fabulous city and we enjoyed the art and architecture very much.

The only major let-down, and this may come as a shock, was the food. T is a vegetarian which does complicate matters where French cuisine is concerned but in this day and age if your kitchen can't cook something interesting without meat then it's not a very good kitchen; all it proves is that you're lazy and not creative. We ate in a variety of places, with friends of ours who live in Paris, at places highly recommended by guide books and had two dinners out at restaurants recommended by the hotel so I think there was plenty of opportunity to impress. Nothing I ate, and I didn't eat any vegetarian options, was beyond average and considering that last night's meal cost a small fortune whilst featuring limp overcooked asparagus and over cooked fish was not really acceptable. I get the impression that city has rested on its laurels for far too long.

After five meals at several price brackets from multiple recommendations I can only conclude that Paris falls well behind New York and London in culinary big cities. A real shame. The rest of the trip was great though and here are the inevitable photos:

Magazine Title FAIL

Magazine title FAIL, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Nothing to add. Amused me no end.

What I Did Today

In The Beginning...














The End.

Bletchley Park

Last Monday I did a day trip I've been meaning to do for ages. After breakfast I took a train from Euston up to the nondescript small town of Bletchley, just south of Milton Keynes. Bletchley itself has little to recommend it but about five minutes walk from the station is a site of massive historical importance in modern history and in cryptanalysis as a whole.

Bletchley Park is an estate with a manor house built in around 1880 by the Leon family who lived in it. When the family sold up the site was bought by the UK government. It was convenient to them as it was close to the main rail and road routes to London. The reason for the purchase was that the government wanted to move their cryptanalysts out of London and expand the cipher-breaking operations at the outbreak of World War 2. The operation took over not only the manor house but a myriad huts, and brick office blocks built on the site to provide work space for the up to 10 000 people who worked there at the height of the efforts to break the Enigma cipher that the Germans were using to encrypt their communications.

The site is now a museum, many of the huts have displays about the Enigma machine, the bombes used to break its cipher and the minds who enabled this to happen, especially Alan Turing. The site also has a rebuilt Colossus, arguably the world's first electronic computer, which was constructed to break the even tougher Lorenz cipher that Hitler used to communicate with his chiefs of staff.

It's a fascinating place and I will probably go back at some point. Here are a few photos I took of the place:

We Come From the Land of the Ice and Snow

So winter returned with a vengeance today. It doesn't really snow here much at all and I've certainly never seen anything like it in the ten years I've lived in the city. So it took a little longer to do my morning walk in but I did take a few photos as I wandered:

The Cold

Icy Fountains, The Regent's Park, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Well it's new year and we finally have a proper winter in London. For the last three or four years it's been overcast, not very cold and mostly rainy for months, and spring and autumn seemed so similar to winter. This year however we have an actual discernible winter. Now I know by the standards of those of you living in colder and more varied climes our winter here is nothing to write home about but to me it's been a delight. I

like a proper British Winter, where the weather hovers around the zero degrees Celsius mark for days on end. We have even had a few of my favourite sort of winter days, those where the sky is cloudless and the air crisp. The views over London Bridge as I do my long walk to work have often quite taken my breath. The photo above was taken in The Regent's Park. It had been below freezing for a few days by that point and it was possible to see the dominant wind direction as one side of the fountain urn was covered in ice whilst the far side was clear. The energy of the flowing fountain water was enough to keep it liquid but as it got blown about drops stuck to the sides of the fountain and froze. It was quite beautiful. The icicles dropping down from the lip were merely the icing on the cake.

Thank you all for the kind comments on the previous two posts, it was very sweet of you all. I'm going to try more regular blogging again as my real-world web site is up to date, though there is still work to be done, and I have negotiated my frantic last few weeks of 2008. Hope you all managed some kind of holiday and I'll try to write at least one a week for now. I'm working long hours and six days a week on The Wolf Man for now so I may be a little short on bloggable material. I'll transcribe it as it comes to me.

Christmas Crackers

Lonely Christmas Crackers, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

I saw these slightly lonely looking crackers whilst going for a walk and thought they were a little incongruous but interesting so I took a photo.

I am about half way through the work I want to do on my other "real world" web site and I'm hoping to have the rest done by early January. Then I should be able to spend some time here again.

If you're celebrating anything over the coming days I hope you're able to do it in style and I'll see you all in 2009 with luck.

Mr A.

More Pinhole

In lieu of words, which seem to be failing me at the moment, here are another couple of pinhole experiments:

Crystal Palace

Today, after making myself blueberry pancakes and bacon for breakfast, I hopped on a 'bus to Crystal Palace Park. Back when I used to live at Shenley Mansions, Crystal Palace was much closer and so I visited more often. I don't think I've been in about a year so it was fun to revisit old haunts. There are two main features of the park I like. One is the site and foundations of The Crystal Palace itself and the other is the Dinosaur Lake. Having had my fill of Victoriana I walked up to Herne Hill for a late lunch at one of my favourite cafés, Café Prov. Refreshed and refilled I took another 'bus back to Schossadlerflug.

Here's a few photos from today:

Casting Call

For one of the projects I'm doing at work an in depth analysis of human facial skin qualities is needed. One of the things I thought would really help would be a good plaster cast of a human face and since I'd feel bad about bullying someone else into doing it, and I wouldn't want to ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do myself, I spent most of Sunday morning in a variety of very sexy outfits. First off is this skin tight, see-through polythene top. Note the handles at the bottom and its distinct resemblance to a bin bag with arm and neck holes cut in it.

Next up, once I had my skin-tight (spotting the theme?) rubber hat on, my glamourous assistant poured dental alginate all over my my face and made sure it was massaged into all the cracks and crannies. My world went dark and strange smelling for a while.

The next item was several layers of plaster bandage, applied to support the mould. The next photo is taken at the moment when the plaster is drying and becoming quite hot, as it does, whilst I listen to Rammstein. My world is now very dark and smells of algae and hot plaster.

After waiting for ten minutes for the plaster to harden I was finally able to start wriggling my face and after a few minutes of this the mould came loose and I emerged back into the light following a very strange a calustrophobic half hour. The mould, when angled to the light in a certain way looked like a positive image which was odder yet:

Here's the mould filled with good ol' plaster of paris:

After another couple of hours to allow the plaster to really set hard I carefuly lifted the plaster bandage support off the mould and then began peeling the mould itself away from the cast. This is quite nerve-wracking. iI you screw it up you have to start again because you destroy the mould pulling it away from the cast. Fortunately this worked out OK:

A bit of a clean up to remove any loose lumps of plaster or alginate that stuck to the mould:

And here's the finished article.

I find it very odd to look at. Because I'm more used to seeing my face in a mirror I find it weird to see it the "right way round" and although I recognise the face I don't think it looks much like me. Tinseltroos on the other hand is equally freaked out because, she feels, it looks exactly like me. She wasn't too freaked out though as she now wants me to cast her face. That'll have to wait for another Sunday though.