You can never let your guard down

Proof that you can never relax against extremism and zealots. Although i think also this one highlights crass incredulity and the naked fear of misogyny

Apparently Hillary shouldn't have been in that photo. The one with Obama. The one where she is in the side room of the Situation Room complex. I mean she is only the Secretary of State for god sake what did she think she was playing at. To remedy Hillary's oversight an ultra right wing Hasidic Jewish paper decided to put its photoshop talents to good use to correct Hillary's error and publish the photo as it should have been.

You think i jest. Think again

Removing Hillary

Removing Hillary 2

Removing Hillary 3

The reasons given for this act range from:
1 - we do permit photographs of women in our paper - so why choose this picture in the first place
2 - we dont approve of pictures of women because they are sexually suggestive - this one is really nasty and an offshoot of the burqa mindset of muslims that require their women covered from head to foot to stop them
3 - we didnt think we were being offensive to women - well i mean they just go and take ofence at the slightest thing dont they
4 - we didnt realise that we weren't allowed to alter copyright pictures - i mean who is the white house in comparison to gods word

As with many of these situations it is fairly redundant to add any form of commentary. These actions speak for themselves

That room

The world's most viewed photograph. Well in the last month anyway. What I can't get over is that room. I mean this is the mission that will make or break Obama's presidency and he watches in a small poky side room where he can't even get a seat at the table. (You would have thought the perks of power would have at least give him rights to kick someone out of their chair and pinch the seat with the best view.)

Apparently this room is one of the side rooms off the main Situation Room. Why weren't they using the big room?

If the White House website is to be believed it has nice comfy leather chairs and a really big screen

So why the poky side room?

On an aside I love the way Hollywood has dramatised the same room. In the West Wing they made everything so much more dramatic. In 2002 Jed Bartlett had too big screens

 and deep shadows for gravitas. By contrast George Dubbya had this anodyne corporate boardroom for a Situation Room as late as 2006

Nasty flouro lighting (bad for the complexion when chatting too bigwigs oversees) and only 1 screen. The new room apparently now has 6!

Intelligent life

Amidst all the chest beating zenophobic rhetoric spewing forth from the States over the last week since Bin Laden's execution I came across this relatively balanced article from an American media outlet.

Proof that sentient beings can exist in even the inhospitable environments

Rothkopf writing for America's National Public Radio

Even more impressive when you read CV. He is no bleeding heart Liberal. His company - Garten Rothkopf - is a fully fledged establish wonk tank

The artist formerly known as

If it was good enough for the "purple one" to change his name, its good enough for me.

Threading the needle

Another one of my Bob the Builder stories. This one concerns London Bridge station, a station I know well. We often travel up to London Bridge because there are lots of lovely restaurants and interesting places to explore. It is also just round the corner from where we got married.

Anyway the trainline I catch into work is one London's main North South rail routes and gets horrendously congested. Thankfully it is now being upgraded to the tune of £6 billion 

In order to relieve one of the major congestion points on this route they realised that they needed to create two new railway lines going in and out of London Bridge station. The only problem was the route of the railway lines ran via an elevated track over a bustling open air market on a series of cast iron bridges and brick viaducts. This elevated railway line passed close to a large number of listed occupied Victorian buildings. There was no room on this existing structure to take the new lines. These lines were an integral part of the upgrade and could not be put off as too difficult.

To help matters worse just 200m away Europe’s tallest building (London Shard – 87 storeys) is currently under construction. (A mere baby The Shard will only be occupied up to 72 stories – Eureka tower in Melbourne is occupied up to the 88^th storey!) 

The Shard website 

The main tower is due to be finished in 2012 after which the entire concourse for the London Bridge station will be rebuilt together with an additional mid rise office block. Because of the associated congestion with these works it was decided that the new railway lines had to be completed before work started on new concourse and associated office block. This has meant that the bridge is being constructed now which is 6 years ahead of when the rerouting of the new railway lines through London Bridge will be completed

The solution was to insert a new elevated viaduct on piles over and beside the existing buildings and build a new bridge across Southwark Road.

Among other things the builders had to lop one storey off an existing pub to allow the new viaduct to pass over. A new roof is being built for the pub and a single storey extension provided to replace the lost space. At another point the new viaduct passes within 157 mm of an existing building.

The new viaduct is supported on 8 irregularly placed piles 2.4m in diameter. These piles required a 90 tonne piling rig to drive them into the ground. The trouble was the access road used to drive the piling rig into place wasn’t strong enough to take the weight of the rig. So they had to remove the top of the road and expose the Victorian brick arches underneath so that these could be strengthened and allow the piling rig to be manoeuvred into place

Before each pile could be dug a 5m deep archaeological excavation had to be completed – one such dig uncovered a 17C delft pottery plate

One of the 2.4m piles had to be drilled into a 3m zone beside one of the tunnels for the London underground – that’s only one foot either side of the pile. The piles in another area had to be double sleeved to avoid transferring loads to the adjacent tunnel carrying one of the escalators down to the platform station. Throughout this work the tube lines running beside the new piles remained open. All the tunnels and escalator shafts were continually monitored by automatic theodolites mounted in the ceiling to measure any deflection

The 1200 tonne 71m single span truss crossing Southwark Road couldn’t be fabricated off site and trundled up the road and craned into position because a service tunnel and old cast iron water main underneath the road could not take the imposed load of the truss and multiwheeled transporters. Southwark Road was deemed to busy to allow it to be closed for the time that would be needed to strengthen the road. Another solution had to be found – this involved building the truss piece by piece on top of the new narrow viaduct 4 storeys up in the air beside an operational railway line and within a metre of an occupied building.

On April 30 it will then be winched out over the Southwark Road, rotated slightly to clear an neighbouring building and then lowered onto the waiting piles on the other side of the road. Southwark Road will only planned to be closed for one week

The market underneath has remained open 3 days a week throughout all of this work.

How long can one man take

A big congratulations needs to go my good comrade and perpetual student - Dr J. He has finally completed his PhD having taken something like 15+ years to finish it. On many levels this is a feat worth celebrating. Dogged determination and stubborness. A frantic race to complete before his supervisors either died or retired. Starting in typewriter days and finishing it in the iPad era. Completing it before your son finishes his secondary education (just - literally by only a month or so). Not getting so totally bored with one topic for that long.

For all of these reasons and more I raise my glass to Jeff and say well done. Big effort mate.

According to Guinness World Records however this effort is paltry compared with the record holder. The longest time to complete a degree (not even a PhD just a degree) was Robert Cronin who began his degree on 9 Feb 1948 and graduated 30 May 2000. 52 years!

Therapy

As part of regaining some measure of balance in my life I have started going to a life drawing class once a week. I never did any of this sort of thing during my degree (although I probably should have done) so it has all been a bit daunting.

To test myself further and go even more out of my comfort zone I asked for a set of crayons rather pencils for my birthday. Pencils have a precision that is comforting. You draw hard edges in the main which is what i am used to when visualising buildings. Crayons however bring two different aspects - colour and tone. Both are difficult. Showing shape with tone is a whole different ball game for me. I find it very difficult and am constantly reverting to drawing edges. Slowly though my lines are getting freer and more expressive. I am also slowly exploring how different colours go together. Mainly when looking at shadows but also when capturing the negative space around the models.

The classes are for two hours on a Monday evening and involve a range of poses from 2 minutes to 30 minutes. The time flies as I am concentrating frantically for the whole two hours trying to make my blobs look more human like. It is amazing at how sensitive the eye is when the proportions of the body are out slightly. You can see it looks wrong but it is often quite hard to be specific about what needs to be changed to make it look right.

Michael has been deeply worried when he found out i also have to sometimes draw naked men. "Yes I can see all their bits Michael". That said most of my attempts have been quite sexless as there is usually a white patch where their genitals should be. It is hard enough to get the arms and legs looking right let alone the dangly bits.

I am not the worst one there and i am finding it very relaxing. Focusing completely on something quite different from work is very therapeutic