Category: uk

Glass bugs

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Ah. Microbiology. Dontcha just love it?

Yeah – me too. And so does artist Luke Jerram – he’s made some amazing glass sculptures of protozoa, bacteria and viruses:

Made to contemplate the global impact of each disease, the artworks were created as alternative representations of viruses to the artificially coloured imagery we receive through the media. In fact, viruses have no colour as they are smaller than the wavelength of light. By extracting the colour from the imagery and creating jewel like beautiful sculptures in glass, a complex tension has arisen between the artworks’ beauty and what they represent.

Personally, I couldn’t see the “complex tension” – that sounds a bit unnecessarily arty-farty to me. But they are pretty special to look at:

T4Phage-Phage_artwork

Ecoli_sculptureThat’s a T4 Bacteriophage at the top, and my old friend E.coli on the bottom – check out those flagellae – hello big boy! But of course, they’re (thankfully) not actual size. The real things are far smaller then this, hence “micro”biology. I know you knew that.

There are a whole lot more images to look at on Luke’s website too: SARS, HIV, Smallpox, Malaria etc etc.

The beautifully detailed collection has now been bought for permanent exhibition at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

HMV

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And lo, as had been widely predicted, HMV was placed into administration yesterday. I spent many a happy afternoon (and many a hard earned pound) in HMV stores, most especially Pinstone Street in Sheffield, Northumberland Street Newcastle, Cornmarket Street in Oxford (who could forget their midnight release of Radiohead’s OK Computer in 1997?) and, of course, Oxford Street in London.

That’s where this photo came from – a-ha doing a signing for their first album, Hunting High and Low, back in January 1986:

hmv

Those clothes? That hair? Look, it was acceptable in the 80s.

As of course, was paying High Street prices for music and the like, because we never had the luxury of the internet. Thankfully, those dark days of bad clothes and worse hair are now in the past.
Sadly, after 91 years, so is HMV.

Bullfinch

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Check out this Christmassy ad for Disseldons – “Two sisters selling pretty things at affordable prices”. I’m not really into pretty things, but even I have to say that their pretty things do look quite pretty. I especially like the Pacman one.

Anyway, that aside, here’s the ad:

robin

 

Only issue (aside from the possible slight breakage of Facebook competition rules) is that the bird pictured therein isn’t a European Robin (Erithacus rubecula) but a Eurasian Bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula). In fact, if you look ever so carefully under “of our” on the bottom block of text, it even says so.

I can like to know my European garden birds.

Oops.

Stop Right Now

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Thank you very much. The Telegraph’s Tim Walker needs somebody with a human touch.

In a theatre review brought across in the telegraph which accompanied my parents from Blighty, there’s a review of the new Spice Girls musical. And it’s not ever so complimentary:

When one is up against the tsunami of hype that the publicists of Viva Forever! have managed to whip up, it is awfully tempting to try to be a really hip old daddy-o, go with the flow, and, after lighting a Hamlet cigar and taking out the earplugs, dispensing the five stars that the exclamation mark appear to require.

One cannot, however, ignore the old tosh-o-meter, when the needle goes off the scale to register a show that’s so bad, it ought, if there were any justice, to be accorded a minus-star rating.

This show is not just bad, it is definitively, monumentally and historically bad.

I shall not dwell on the plot, because, goodness knows, Jennifer Saunders, its writer, certainly hasn’t done. There is no acting to speak of, either, so I shall not identify any of the girls who appear in it, lest they be subjected to recriminations.

Viva Forever! marks the West End coming to an unequivocal dead end.

I don’t think he likes it. He gave it zero stars. Which is a whole one less than his colleague Charles Spencer gave it after enjoying enduring the opening night:

I’ll tell you what I wanted, what I really, really wanted – I wanted this terrible show to stop.

The producer Judy Craymer hit pay dirt with Mamma Mia!, which became a global smash hit. But that show was blessed with a witty and touching script by Catherine Johnson and a raft of perfect pop songs from Abba.
So cashing in on the Spice Girls’ back catalogue must have seemed a no-brainer. In fact, it was a ghastly mistake.

This musical is tawdry, lazy and unedifying, and one could sense a miasma of disappointment emanating from an audience of up-for-it Spice Girls fans slowly realising that they had paid top whack to see a clunker.

This is a fatuous show with nothing fresh to say about popular culture and our fixation with fame.
If you love the Spice Girls stay at home and listen to their greatest hits.

I’m unlikely to be hitting the West End to see this or any other musical any time soon, but some of you, my loyal subjects, might be considering a trip to the Piccadilly Theatre before June 1st 2013.

I’m here to tell you that Tim and Charles think that’s a really, really bad idea.