Unposted Photographs of March in Chronological Order.

 Someone keeps removing things from the canal, and putting them to one side. Here's a free bike.

 Listening to Cliff Richards on "Desert Island Discs", but thinking of The Beatles.

 

 A word.

 

Looking up while waiting to shoot.

 

 A detour home.

 

Back on Hampstead Heath.

 

 A second back on Hampstead Heath.

 

 Unpoliced oral prohibition.

 

 I don't know what heated tobacco is, and I doubt this.

 

 Something old.

 

 Something new.

 

 Which seems showier than anyone would actually want their own private, freestanding toilet to be.

 

 Heat coming off from the left.

  A peek inside the dressing room.

 

 Uruk.

 

 Peeping or peeking, I can never remember which.

 

 Possibly something to do with the Olympics.

 

 

 That moon.

 

"Shouldn't they have called it Conspira-sea?"

 My friend Phil asked that, in the flesh. I bumped into him this evening, sharing beers with three more friends by the boating lake; one advantage of the parks filling up is a heightened chance of chance encounters. I'd watched Seaspiracy the night before, and when I got back in tonight and everyone had gone home, I followed it up with 2014's Cowspiracy. The one follows the other almost beat for beat, and who can blame it? Some of those beats are glaringly dumb – for example, the title – but some are brilliant, and the former documentary's disputed revelations are now common talking points. Maybe the same will happen to Seaspiracy, whose claim that over forty per cent of the plastic in our oceans comes from fishing seems far less disputed. As with Cowspiracy, the documentary's most powerful moments might come from seeing the shadow of some higher authority fall over the faces of mainstream environmentalists when asked if anything should be done about this: the good guys fall silent for what seems like minutes, standing at a crossroads invisible to the viewer. 

 

"He had a point..." is literally the voice over for this shot.

 

  However, also as with Cowspiracy, the documentary's dumbest moments come from awkwardly staging a moral awakening on the part of our innocent protoganist: "I left there feeling confused" becomes a catchphrase. I commend Ali Tabrizi's bravery, but literally every scene he appears in feels like a bad spoof, and one feels almost duty-bound not to take them seriously. But I'll probably stop eating fish anyway. And if this film's revelations end up having as strong an impact as Cowspiracy's, I won't even have to recommend it.

Turpintude

 The fact my laptop now crashes every time I so much as look at iMovie has made editing this video an act of pointilism, and for all the the time it took, it clearly needed more, but once I'd imagined the haves of Metropolis confronted with Ben Turpin in A Clever Dummy, I knew I had to see it. So at least now that's done. And let's face it, for all his singing, George Seurat wasn't so hot at painting hats either. Speaking of a Sunday on La Grande Jatte, here's some people meeting today in groups of no more than six...

 

Top Search Results for an Image of God

 Considering monotheism on the back of that post about Akenhaten, I was looking for something to illustrate the concept, when it occured to me – for the very first time – to see what would happen if I just typed the word "god" into an image search.

 

 

 This painting of Krishna was the first to come up, from a blog called Get Much Information (Hindu Gods - 7). Capitalising the G made no difference; monotheistic or pantheistic, "God" and "god" both turned up exactly the same results. I think you can click on these to get a closer look. That's Krishna, top left...

 I thought this find surprising enough to share, and was about to write "Look what I happens when I google God", when I realised I hadn't actually googled God, because I don't use Google, I use Ecosia. 

 So I typed "God" into Google...

 ... and got markedly different results. Again, it didn't matter whether the "g" was upper case or lower, in contrast to Ecosia's mainly Hindu pantheon, Google gave me wall-to-wall Abrahamic Lord and Father (click to enlarge)...

 

 Which is when I realised I should probably try every other search engine too. 

 Next up then was Yahoo...

 

 

 

 Krishna again! From Hindu Gods 7, together with almost identical results to Ecosia's. I'd expected Yahoo to be more Googly, but no...

 

 What other search engines were there? 

 Ask.com didn't have an image search facility, as far as I could find, but if you're interested, its top result for "God" was the site Reading Christadelphians - a Bible-based community. 

 Microsoft Bing, however...

 

 

 

 Krishna yet again. A whole line-up incredibly similar to Ecosia's and Yahoo's. But with one notable addition. See if you can spot it...

 

That's right. "God's Face", dead centre...

 

 According to The Daily Mail's website, this "youthful and feminine" face was an e-fit conjured up by the Univeristy of Northern Carolina "with the help of 511 American Christians", which raises a number of questions I probably don't want answered, and anyway that's not real investigative journalism, this is. Finding out what religion various search engines are (bearing in mind, of course, that Islam's non-figurative tradition means we'll never know how Muslim a search engine is).

 What about AOL? America On Line...

 

 

 Oh, hi Krisha! And hi, guys...

 

 Why were Google's results were so different?

 By now I was having to run a search for search engines, because I couldn't think of any more, and found this list of fifteen.  

 Baidu was one I hadn't heard of so I typed "God" into that, and finally...

 

A different perspective...

 

 Baidu is a Chinese engine. 

 This meant I found it quite difficult to find the image button, and when I did press it, the following text popped up at the top of my screen...

 

... which I think says "God lie". 

 Yandex was another engine I hadn't heard of...

 

 

 Ah! A heavily accessorised, but definitely identifiable, Abrahamic if not exclusively Christian deity again: glowing wafer, pyramid hat, staff with two fingers raised, bird holding another origami bird, it's all there. I think Yandex is Russian...

And the last search engine on the list was called DuckDuckGo...

 

 Shiva!

 

 Finally I decided, as a change of tack, to try an online "Artificial Intelligence" text-to-image machine – or API. But all this gave me was a series of hairy, missshapen pigs... 

 

Do let me know if you have any better luck.

Film's First Robot Flicks the Bird

 Mack Sennett's more famous for being an early filmmaker than a good one, but the comedies he produced rollercoaster in quality, that does at least mean there'll be highs. Here's Ben Turpin in A Clever Dummy, playing possibly cinema's first Robot three years before Karel Čapeck invented the word. Clockwork dolls were clearly already a thing though, as attested to by Turpin's brilliant impersonation of one two minutes in. That's one high. 

 

Another is the repeated and unambiguous raising of his middle digit, as seen at the top of this post, when – eight and a half minutes in – the "lovesick janitor" played by Turpin, upon whom the automaton was modelled, takes its place to perform a series of sinuous physical jerks for a couple of talent scouts. It's pleasingly reminiscent of Brigitte Helm's robot dance in Metropolis made a decade later, and these talent scouts are won over, although not as won over as Metropolis' panting swells. Director Herman C. Raymaker is not as silly as Fritz Lang. 

 A third highlight is this intertitle:

 And a fourth is the last seventy seconds, into which Sennett seems to have suddenly decided to see if he can cram the entirety of Con Air. He doesn't do badly either. I like Mack Sennett. Enjoy!

The Telly Sets Round

 Aw, look at this lovely lego sitcom set, too small for real actors of course, and there's nowhere to sit down. So let's move our attention instead to more functional models, and to this fortnight's round in the old Dungeon Quiz. We never really talk about old sitcoms in our group, so I'd no idea how easy people would find this. What about you? Can you name these shows from the following photographs, as lifted in bulk from some archive I found on the BBC website? I was hoping to include a bit more small-"v" variety, but it's harder to find a nice range of depopulated sets than – well, than I'd left myself time for. Sorry. Not all of these are sitcoms. Answers as ever will be posted in the comments...

 

 1.

 

2.

 

3.

 

4.

 

5.

 

6.

 

7.

 

8.

 

9.

 

10.