And also a good example of why you should always bring a camera with you. I ordered take-away at Nando's this afternoon and I had about ten minutes to wait. So I walked back up Baker Street and ran into the Singing Handyman.

 

 

Yes, those are bubbles coming out of the, um, vehicle. And yes, he is actually singing. He wasn't driving, at least not very fast. It must have been infuriating to be behind him. He was sitting in the middle lane of Baker Street just before Marylebone crooning to people on both sides of the street mostly at a stop but occassionally inching forward a few metres. When I first saw him, I didn't even get the camera out. I went and window shopped for a few minutes. By the time I got back to Marylebone Street he was still there, so I felt I had to snap him. Enjoy.

 

 

Goodbye Singing Handyman.

 

 

I was very disturbed to read the headline and lead for METRO, the free daily newspaper in the Tube in London and many other towns.

 

 

Look, I'm sorry if I disagree. I don't think it would dwarf 9/11. That doesn't mean it wouldn't have been really, really bad. It would have.

 

But now look at this lead for a moment. The deadliest terror atrocity in history. It's a reach. But the fact of the matter is that there have been worse terror plots, some in advanced stages, than this one. If you are attempting to compare an attack that didn't happen, and its potential mortality against ones that did happen and their actual mortality rate you'd get, at best, a tie. It's a horribly flawed way to look at it, but it makes a good headline. I presume that's why they did it.

I've been warned to keep on the lookout for a certain busker named Spring. I took a quick stroll through her myspace site and it does look like she's been spending some time down Embankment way. Hey, if you see her, tell her it's a small world - you know someone who knows Kim Davidson and you've heard of her. Then you should probably give her money. Kidding. Sort of.

With another foiled terrorist plot and the airport disruptions that follow (on both sides of the Atlantic, I might add), comes a mild flurry of activity - the phone calls from friends and relatives, the office gossip and so forth.

 

I had to pick up some prescriptions today and as I was walking down to Boots I noticed a pilot standing idly on a corner a short street away. I've not seen that before in Marylebone. I know, it sounds to goofy to be true, but it is. I actually started to pull out the camera when he walked away.

 

The most interesting thing I heard was that the reaction in the United States was more dramatic than in the UK. There are a few reasons for this. This is all my opinion, none of it is scientific or anything, but hear me out.

 

The reaction I saw here was threefold: a somber relief that the plot had been foiled, a pragmatic assessment of the impact on self and others and some surprise and concern about the scale of the plot.

 

I didn't witness a reaction in the US first-hand, but I did have some contact with folks in the US today. The reaction seem to be much more along the lines of trepidation or concern with even a touch of fear thrown in.

 

Both of these reactions make a lot of sense. When I talked to one of my British peers today about the difference he reduced it to a very simple thing. "The IRA." He said. Full stop. No further explanation needed. Londoners have experienced terror bombs going off in the middle of town and killing people. It happened here for a long time. So I think part of the reaction is tempered by the fact that they were caught and didn't carry out the plan.

 

But when I think about the US experience (and I lived most of it) it's quite a different story. The most obvious dynamic is that none of the operations the US has disrupted has been so large and far along. Some of them have been questionable. But this one in London was real and it was large scale. That's really frightening - it's the one unspoken thing that I think Americans do worry about. Another big one.

 

I will also tell you that this one hits me a bit personally too. For one, they targeted a route that I and my family have flown on and that people in my company fly on. It's hard not to think about that for a minute, now, isn't it? But also, I'll admit to a gut reaction that's not uncommon here. And that reaction is that British foreign policy is subservient to American foreign policy. And American foreign policy is creating more problems that it's solving right now. And terrorists are going to continue to do crap like this until that changes.

After hearing the news from Kara, I swung by the Baker Street Tube stop during lunch to see if it really was closed.

 

 

Uh, that's affirmative. Even though it was hours before I was going home, I still figured I needed alternative plans. The ultimate alternative is simply to walk home. I've done it many times. It's just not that far. But I can also take Marylebone Station home and that's what I did today, because as I walked past Baker Street, this was the scene.

 

 

There is one thing I'll say about London police - they seem to always be in very good spirits when I encounter them. There's nothing scientific about this and I may be totally wrong, but this is kindof typical of the interactions I see - happy police chatting with people.

 

Anyway, then there's this shot. This is one of those pictures you take just because you can. I stood in the middle of Baker Street right about in front of the Sherlock Holmes museum and took a picture of the street.

 

 

What can I tell you, it just slays me that there's a pigeon strolling around in the street.

Don't ask my why I do these things sometimes. My mother used to say, "take advantage of every opportunity," or, TAOEO. So I had an opportunity this evening and decided I'd see how the flower in our patio looked in a night photo of it lit by the glass door.

 

 

I wasn't going for composition here, so don't judge it too harshly on that. I will tell you one thing, the Canon 100mm macro lens is unbelievably sharp. If you set a shot up right, as this one, the straight up RAW image looks sharp, at least at all but wide open aperture. That's remarkable, because the straight image always needs to be sharpened - it's just a property of digital cameras.

 

In case you were wondering, this was shot on a tripod with available light coming from ceiling mounted halogen downlights through the glass patio door. At ƒ5.6 it was a 25 second exposure. The camera will do 30 seconds, by the way, before you have to throw it into 'bulb' mode and time it by hand. But frankly it's a miracle that there wasn't more movement evident in the shot. A 25 second exposure is usually enough for a little waft of breeze or something to show up as a blur in the final print. Most of this blur is just good 'ol bokeh.

Or, how many construction workers does it take to dig a hole in Paddington Station? The answer to that question shortly.

 

But first, I was greeted by the warm embrace of the Warwick Avenue Tube stop being closed, again. To be fair, I knew it would be from yesterday, so I made some plans. I decided that today would be the day that I would walk to Paddington and see just how long it does take. It turns out to be incredibly close thanks to the canals.

 

I live pretty close to the center of Little Venice, the part of Maida Vale that's between Edgware Road, Harrow Road and Elgin Avenue. Something like that. Anyway, the main water feature here is the intersection of the Regent's and Grand canal in a big triangular pool about three or four streets away from my house. If you walk to the point of the triangle it shoots you into Paddington Central.

 

At this point, I was helped by a freak irony of the tube. It actually doesn't run underground anything like the map. It turns out that the Hammersmith and City line runs at the very north end of Paddington - just the area I was walking to. Paddington is a large station, so the distance from this end to the south end is probably a quarter mile or something similarly large. But as soon as I got to the station I turned around and walked down to the track. Brilliant. And very, very fast.

 

And there is where we get to the question posed above. The answer is below the photo.

 

 

By my way of thinking there were at least 11 people involved in this particular dig. Oh sure, there are only eight visible in the photo. But there is a ninth running the caterpillar, and ten and eleven are actually out of frame to the left sitting on the stairway going upstairs watching the action.