I thought it would be fun to make a whole set, with different record labels. I’ve added Trojan, Upsetter, Chess, Apple and Sun:
You can get a zip of them as .icns files here.
Category: Other
From Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That:
24 June, 1915, Versailles. This afternoon we had a cricket match, officers v. sergeants, in an enclosure between some houses out of observation from the enemy. Our front line is three-quarters of a mile away. I made top score, 24; the bat was a bit of a rafter, the ball a piece of rag tied with string; and the wicket a parrot-cage with the clean, dry corpse of a parrot inside. Machine gun fire broke up the match.
I read the Graves at school, but I’d forgotten that little gem. I found it in A Social History of English Cricket by Derek Birley, a book which I’m finding more entertaining than the slightly dry title would suggest. It would also make an excellent choice for the list of books to explain England, since all the social changes of the past 250 years have been reflected in the development of cricket. The class system is especially well represented. Although it does contain an awful lot of cricket anecdotes which might be a bit impenetrable to our notional foreigner.
Thinking about Englishness lead me to re-read My Five Cambridge Friends by Yuri Modin, who was the KGB handler of the Cambridge Five. It really is the most extraordinary story. Having started with an Englishman playing cricket behind the lines in WWI, let’s end with another posh chap maintaining his Englishness in difficult circumstances:
I know that Philby didn’t much care for the character in The Human Factor who is supposed to be modelled on him, a whining fool who ekes out his days in a Moscow hovel. His own circumstances were totally different, what with his huge apartment, his magnificent view, the copies of The Times, Le Monde and the Herald Tribune to which he had subscribed, the videotapes of cricket test matches and the pots of Cooper’s Oxford marmalade sent from London.
We really are caricatures of ourselves sometimes.
Flickr set of the week this week is Good Decorating by MikeLove. This are “examples of good decorating from the Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement (1970)”.
Categories
Houses of Parliament
I went on a tour of the Houses of Parliament today, which was well worth doing. Most obvious point: the chambers of the Lords and the Commons are both really surprisingly small. Too small, in fact; you can see why the Commons is standing-room only for PMQs.
I was amused by the fact that, while the Lords’ part of the building is dolled up in elaborate carvings, gold leaf, painted ceilings, mosaics and other gothic bling, the Commons is much plainer and more austere. This is no doubt meant to be symbolic – but of what? The decor in the Lords is so OTT that I almost felt it was gently poking fun at their lordships. I assume that wasn’t what Pugin intended.
I decided that while the coloured vinyl was ok on its own, the addition of a coloured note was just too garish.
The anti-aliasing round the note needs tweaking, but I think it looks pretty good. Better than the original:
EDIT: OK, I’ve tweaked it. Here’s the final version:
For Mac users, there’s a zip of those designs I got as far as making into .icns files here. To change the iTunes icon: rename whichever icon you prefer as ‘iTunes.icns’. Then you need to quit iTunes, right-click it in the Finder and choose ‘show package contents’. In the ‘Resources’ folder, replace the original iTunes.icns file with your new one (but save a copy of the original somewhere just in case).
I’ve updated my new iTunes icons for the release of iTunes 7.
I’ve switched to using LaVern Baker.