Yea Science, bitch

Went to the science museum yesterday. I was told it was one of the best, and I was not disappointed - spent a straight eight hours there and didn't make it halfway around everything.

I am writing a blog post about it because this needs to be shared:

Plenty more than a video of a squirrel there mind you.

Huge section on the history of steam power. This one powered 1700 looms for like 100 years before being retired!

Great video on the British trans-antarctic crossing

That phone in the drawer at home? Yea, it was made in 1982. It's a museum exhibit.

Space! Apollo command module

Fatty McFat Fat mouse

Interactive section on climate change. They've got heaps of climate change stuff around. Some cool ideas in there, there's a floor panel some guy's designed, powered by foot steps, it depresses 5mm. London's going to roll them out around tube stations to power lights and bus stops and stuff, cool!

I was deturbined not to get sucked in

Surprise plane section!

Surprise medical history section! Which was too much after the Hunterian Museum the other day.

An engineers paradise, this museum. They've also got quite a lot of neat interactive exhibits that give me ideas for work too, using cameras to interact with people and stuff. All things to play with over winter.

Museums as

The last week or so I've just been doing practical, boring things. Getting a job, clothes shopping, groceries, socialising, watching the America's Cup. I've also managed to cram a bunch of museums in, but since many don't allow photography I didn't bother writing about them since that'd be BORING and I don't wish to BORE YOU, loyal reader.

But this isn't all about you; in fact, it's all about me! So the following is a quick round up of four museums and then a work update.

The Wallace Collection

This museum is quite neat really. It's all donated by William Wallace. For you history buffs, don't worry, it isn't true. There's some amazing stuff in this place. Swanky palatial furnishings, curiosities from across the world in all eras, paintings by masters. But the most unique bit I thought was the Armoury. Richard Seymour-Conway must've had a thing for weapons and armour, again it's from all eras and nations. He's mostly collected the arty armour, so it's all decorated and swish - the muskets and pistols were really interesting, and the ceremonial swords and things. 

Real quiet there too, not like the main museums, so you can get up close and explore everything without some F-ing tourists getting in the way.

Unfortunately they don't want you to take photos, and I'm like, respectful of rules like a total square, so I took none. But here's one from some maverick on the internet:

Read more on Wikipedia if that floats your boat.

The National Gallery

Most of you who've been to London have no doubt been to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. Inside are paintings from the masters from back in the day before SLRs and Photoshop. 

I'm not much of an art appreciator nor art history buff, but I really enjoyed my time there. I got the audio guide, every painting has a story to tell so that is well worth it (£3.50). Just listen to the ones that interest you, any one would be interesting enough but there're so many you can afford to be quite picky else you'd be there for days!

They've laid it out really well, so you can follow artists' progressions and general styles of various nations - there's some amazing stuff in there.

I quite enjoyed how pornographic it all was. For instance, the description for the one below was something like, 'the woman is too engrossed in her activity to notice the goat dude about to rape her'. 

I just love that old attitude, secretly being perves. There was one scene with Minerva, Venus and some other chick. The caption said it was quite a popular scene to commission, because there are three naked babes.

All jokes aside, it's a great place to visit - even if you don't think you'll give a shit, you may find yourself drawn in, it's such a concentration of history and artistic excellence from all of Europe.  

The Hunterian Museum

This museum was something else. It's a medical museum, and is based around the personal collection of John Hunter, a pioneering and curious surgeon from the 1700s. He collected and preserved all sorts of stuff, and heaps of it is still on display. There're shelves and shelves of pickled bits and pieces of all manner of formerly living things, some with quite some stories behind them. 

A tame one for the kids.

It's not for the faint of heart; there's a line of nine human foetuses, one for each month - and there're plenty of skeletons too. To lighten that bit, there's also a section with pickled penises. Pickled Penises. 

Other things of note in there for me, was some of the linkages within that era of English history. I've been reading on the tube this narrative of Captain Cooks travels, written way the hell back. Banks, who travelled with Cook as the biologist, worked closely with Hunter, and there're things Banks brought back from those pacific voyages in there in jars! And the Pacific Islander Omai, who went with Captain Cook and did translations for the English, has his portrait up in the museum. I thought that was cool, tying it all together.

Other notable things:

• Roosters with massive spurs(claws) growing out of their heads from transplants. Hunter was trying to do human tooth transplants. They'd pinch teeth out of poor people to put into rich people, lovely. There're also some roosters with human teeth in their heads - that didn't quite work.
• The skeleton of Charles Bryne is there. A giant, the Elizabethan Andre, he knew all these creepy surgeons wanted to dissect him when he died. Not keen, he paid a handsome sum to the undertaker to be buried at sea. So of course, the undertaker sold the corpse to Hunter, double-dipping dick, and there Bryne's skeleton stands, prominent in the museum. Some ethical discussion due on that one!

It's real mad scientist stuff, really interesting. The good folk at the Royal College of Surgeons have also made available the audio guide online, so I put it on my phone instead of getting one of those headsets. Cheap ass. 

British Museum Round 2

I popped back into the British Museum today 'cause I had a spare hour or two. Did the Asia bit, here're some pics. 

"What's brown and sticky?" "Heh heh. Comedy gold."

Darth Vader's regeneration chamber for Buddhists.

Stab stab stab

Work

I had the worst interview of my life last Thursday. It really hurt my self-esteem! Making e-learning for a utility company, so for salespeople and for call centre staff. Dude gave me a real drilling. He didn't think I knew what I was doing with rapid dev software or LMSs, and couldn't do instructional design in their 'fast paced environment'. We pretty much agreed it wasn't for me as he shuffled me out the door. Torched my ass! 

So with a heavy heart I went to my next interview on Friday. We all clicked about how we do things, managing clients and everything, and I did the 30 minute Instructional Design test. I must've done OK because they loved me and I start on Monday.

It's a six month fixed term making a suite of professional elearning products, with a team of flash developers so I don't have to develop anything either. It's cool to build products, the company is a global heavy hitter which'll be great experience, and it's on my tube line (London Bridge) so it's all pretty handy. Much better than the other job, I was lucky the dude hated me really! But still, some dude thought I couldn't do the work. I'll show him! Elsewhere!

Golders Green

I've been in London a month now, and I'm getting settled in to my 3rd London flat, in Golders Green. Here's my room:

So glad I brought my Times Square print

I considered tidying up before taking that. Anyway, tonnes of room as you can see - heaps more room on the right too. So yea, a flat of 4 and one bathroom, but we've got a lounge and the flatties are nice fun friendly sorts so that's great. Got a Tesco Express (New World Metro) across the road, and the night bus goes passed there - the tube another 5 min down the main road. We're quite close to the train line so I can hear and see the trains whizzing by, but that isn't annoying. Infact I quite like it. There's a heat exchanger on the roof of the kosher supermarket downstairs that rattles like a bastard which is annoying, but I'm getting used to it. I was spoilt with my perfect silence at home, it'll take a bit of getting used to here!

To counteract the lack of peace at home, I'm just playing music all the time. But there is also, 8 minutes away, two great wee London Parks that don't appear to be very busy! Which is awesome. Some nice green space, birds and squirrels, and no people. I've been running around the last couple of days, exploring and trying to find a nice wee running loop. It's really nice having these parks, a chance to get away from the never-ending bustle of this city!

Hampstead Pagoda at Hill House, West Heath

There's heaps of stuff over there, there's a wee zoo with lemurs and deer and weird giant guineapig-esque creatures, ponds, grass, playground, all the shit. And plenty of bush and tracks and stuff.

Just over the road there's the Hampstead Heath extension, big playing fields and grassy areas, and bush walks - totes dig it. Think I've landed on my feet around here! There isn't even a stabby vibe.

Ugly Ducklings. Bwak bwak.

British Graffiti. Because that is how they roll.

The Making of Harry Potter: Warner Brothers Studio Tour

I don't actually know what happens at the end of the Harry Potter movies.

I assume He Who Shall Not Be Named gets thrown into the Great Pit of Carkoon, some minor characters die, and Ron and Hermione get together. I just couldn't stomach the money-grabbing double feature move, and it was all a bit heavy and long, so I didn't bother with the last movie.

What I did love about the franchise was the whimsy, the discovery, the childlike glee and FUN you had watching the first one/s. A fantastic blend of escape from reality, child detective mystery, and literal movie magic. When I learned of this Making of Harry Potter tour, I had to weigh it up, and I decided they couldn't really put too much brooding apocalyptic shit from the later movies in there, so it'd be pretty cool. I love film sets, I love the temporary nature of them, and the 'make do' kinda dodgy shit that goes on just behind that coating of plaster. And with films like Harry Potter where it's a whole new world they're creating, they bring the best creatives and craftspeople from so many industries together to work on a larger whole - really it's pretty cool.

So I jumped on the train and took a look!

Definitely fork out the extra £5 for the digital tour thing. Totally worth it, you can play the accompanying videos whenever you feel like it and there's so much more on offer through it, those suckers without them were just that.

It's just an ipod touch. Yet another cool diversification of my type of work I should get into!

Below are just a selection of some of the cool stuff in there. Really half the coolness was the interviews on the ipod, little stories about the details of the movie making business on such a scale. For instance, education - they had a cast of like 100 kids 10-12 years old, and by law they had to deliver so many hours of schooling each day. The logistics involved in getting that done around the regular logistics of running such a huge film crew - the realities are just pretty mind blowing. I would have killed a project manager to see those project plans and timetables - I bet they were works of art in their own right!

Flame retarded. 

You couldn't really tell the Great Hall apart from other old buildings around here, aside from the lack of roof. The arches are ornate, the pillars are of the community, the glass is stained. What set it apart was the lack of religious symbols - they had gargoyles of the houses of Hogwarts, rather than those of Christianity.

The great hall. 

Forced perspective - manual movie magic! The box is about 1.5metres long.

Gryffindor common room. The oil paintings were done brand new, the subjects are mostly cast members. The tapestries are custom and aged like the upholstery, it's all just an incredible level of detail when you have the time to study it. 

This was cool, armor for a orge or something. Haha I wrote orgy, that'd be a big night

Green screen samples. They were doing green screen broomstick riding, but I can never be bothered queuing for things.

Need more of these buses in London. Though they had to be very careful about getting it around the city due to its height!

So that stuff is stuff that's in the movies. It's pretty interesting to have a look, and there're some great videos and narratives about everything, but the stuff that was the most interesting to me was the stuff you don't see, or didn't really notice, when watching the films.

This is how they did some of the werewolf work with Lupin. I heard they did similar with JaJa Binx in star wars, but his head was just a mask so the actors could visually glare in the right direction. Here, they've actually got an anamatronic head on top of a guy. So cool! They did the same with the half giant Hagrid, got some massive rugby player to wear an animatronic head of Robbie Coltrane.

Fuck you! I'm an ... um.

They had a few of the blank models they scan for the CGI and making moulds and things, pretty neat to see the blanks up close. I also thought the concept art they displayed was pretty badass, and the techincal drawings were just aces.

Near the end of the tour you get to walk along Diagon Alley, which is interesting - again, such detail into the buildings and things, BIG MONEY.

This is a card model of diagon alley. I thought these were pretty choice.

Perpetual vomit, kids'd just lose their nut over this stuff

With the above, that's kinda what I mean about the other creative industries. All these graphic designers had to do every piece of packaging on everything, get it all printed up and aged, and you don't even really notice it during the film. Quite a few cute wee jokes and puns in the packaging when you've got the time to look at it.

And finally you see the giant model of Hogwarts used for flying shots and the like. Pretty crazy, guess there won't be the likes of this so much any more. That was one of the running themes in the narratives - what they did in 2001 in the first film was just garbage compared with the effects and techniques they'd developed by the 8th film - fire effects, better green screening, I guess crowd CGI, all that kind of good stuff came into being while these were being produced.

9 and 3 quarters out of 10.

Canterbury, Margate, and the end of my flatting woes?

Meetup.com is a great website for those with no friends. It's a hub for interest groups, but in London there are a tonne more than back home! There's pretty much a meetup group for anything you can think of. I joined the 'Day trips from London' group a while ago. Yesterday we took a coach to the city of Canterbury, and the sea side town of Margate.

The coach driver was a right knob. First thing he said was 'Listen to me or you might die' then told someone to shut up, straight up. Way to ruin your tip! I couldn't tell if he was being super dead-pan, maybe he was a comedy genius.

Anyway, ended up sitting with a lovely lady and we gassed away the 90 minutes to Canterbury talking crap. Turns out she's well-hard into the theatre and that, and is going to go to the theatre with me and see a show so I don't have to go on my lonesome. Theatre friend! What the meetup day trip group has over tourism operators is that most of the people are legitimate Londoners, not a bunch of tourists who don't speak English, so from my limited experience it's been much more social at the meetup things.

Canterbury has two industries, students and tourists. It's quite weird really - cute little cobbled streets and stuff and some unfortunately boring main streets due to WWII bombings. Unlike Bath the other week, Canterbury has developed naturally with no 'style' - it's got historic buildings from all eras, it's a real natural hodge-podge. I liked that, it had more character than Bath because of it's more cobbled together development, nothing staying in similar styles.

Cool sky and some little buildings in Canterbury

Wacky sideways house

Library donated by Melbourne Gold Tycoon Beanie, 500 styles of building in one.

It's most famous for its Cathedral, and the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. Messy!

Canterbury Cathedral

We didn't go in, because it's a bit shit. Took a little history boat cruise along a little roman canal, dude was just loaded with puns. Was OK, probably could have spent the time more productively, like going into the cathedral, but yes. Decisions were made.

Oarsome time in the canal

Then it was back on the coach and off to the seaside town of Margate. Margate seemed pretty quiet and maybe has seen more busy days, but that quiet was quite nice and peaceful.

A beaching time at a British beach

After a quick stroll along the beach, had some fish and chips by the beach and went to a couple of art galleries. The Turner Contemporary Gallery had an exhibition on curiosity, and much to my surprise, I actually really enjoyed it. Curious. A fucking art gallery exhibition. You've changed man.

The Outside the Square gallery. Little Esch dog has some work with them so I popped in to see, but unfortunately I couldn't find any currently being displayed. Poos :(

Appreciating art and shit. 

Beanbag fight.

All in all a lovely day out. Arriving back in London around 8pm, I had the good fortune of being dropped off 10 minutes away from Binny's 30th birthday mexican meal during his and Holly's honeymoon, so I popped over there for dinner and a cocktail, was great to see them! So nice seeing friends, old and new.

In other more domestic news, today I have taken new keys to a place in Golders Green here in London's north. It's a huge room in a four bedroom 3rd storey apartment with wee balcony, with cool sounding long-serving tenants, and a really lovely creative landlord who lives upstairs in another shared apartment. She finds like-minded professionals for the places and it really did just feel great there. The area is really Jewish so I'm going to have to watch more Curb Your Enthusiasm to fit in. It's pretty close to a big park, Hampstead Heath, so that's awesome too. I'm really happy with it, I feel really light now with the weight of where I am going to live being taken off, and I think I've done pretty well for myself there. Chuffed as! So, here's to leaving my slumlord douchebag in this crappy area, and on to enjoying London without impending homeless doom!

Oh, did I mention I tried out a 'speedflatmating' evening the other day? It turned out to be a poorly conceived idea in terms of finding flats, but I did talk to some interesting guys who were also in my dire accommodation situation. I'm catching up with one of them, German dude, for a beer later this week, and I should catch up with the Polish dude too. Out of necessity I've been quite the extrovert this month, and I've got to say I'm really enjoying talking to these new people, making friends and hearing about their experiences. I AM HAVING SUCH A GOOD TIME!

The RAF Museum London

Today I popped on the tube nice and early so I could spend all day at the RAF Museum London. An incredible number of planes and great information, it was really interesting and I thoroughly recommend it! A 10 minute stroll from the Colindale tube station and you're there too, nice and easy.

The day started off not that great, sitting opposite these African dudes who saw fit to pretty much shout at each other in their mother tongue for the 45 minute tube ride, though they're sitting right next to each other. But this cheered me up:



Oh wait, that was yesterday. Still cute though. That's out the window!

I took a lot of photos of planes. A LOT of photos of planes. Below are a small selection. (For my plane-nut bros, I'll try suss an easy way of sharing the lot with you).



Entrance to the RAF Museum

Centenary of flight wall - was a great read!

After the main entrance hangar, which is a real hodge-podge mix match of planes, you can go to the 'Graham White Aviation Company' around the back and that's where they've got heaps of WW1 planes and replicas. It is actually housed in a part of the old aircraft factory, pretty cool! They have a big section about the area and history of aviation there, construction and stuff. The strangest bit was noone else went over there, so I had the entire place to myself! What I thought was fantastic about the Blenheim Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre was the personal stories they had, of you know, sorties of interest, particular dodgy landings, that kind of thing. The RAF Museum had pretty much none of that, I found it a little lacking in that regard. They did however, on occasion, have the full histories of the planes you were looking at which really brought it home!

 

 

 

Crapper. Glad no-one walked into the bathroom and heard the camera click, ahem. 

Barely scratched the surface of the planes in that hangar just here. But moving right along, you go into the Bomber hanger, which is pretty much the coolest thing ever. We've got some pretty badass fighters around New Zealand and our WW1 stuff is pretty neat, but we don't have bombers.

They had a great video about Operation Chastise (Dambusters raid) - below is a replica of the mine used, and also a ghostly image of me.

 

Below is an inside shot up the rear gun turret of a Halifax bomber which was raised from the fjord where it crash landed attempting to sink the Tirpitz. It was quite eerie, you can still see the RAF insignia on the fuselage (not shown, haha).

I'll give you a shot up the rear gun turret!

Liberator! Oh boy!

Lancaster! Holy mackerel!

B-17! JESUS!

A Vulcan. Notice the pointed ears. It is really far too big to take a photo of so I took an arty one instead.

The bombers in there are just massive, it was so amazing seeing them. Can't believe they were chucking 20 year old pilots in the cockpits of these things! I'm guessing 20yr olds didn't fly the Vulcans, it was quite interesting reading about the history of British nuclear deterrents too, another area we just flat out don't have.

Obligatory.

I thought this was cool, the front half of the control basket from R34, one of the earliest dirigibles. They couldn't fit the actual airship in the hangar. 

Beside the bombers there's another huge hangar with spitfires, that kittyhawk, jets, heaps of cool stuff. And a cafe where I spent £4.20 on a sandwich.

Across the plaza there's the Battle of Britain hall. I was interested in how all this history would be portrayed in Britain, compared with how it's covered back home. Was pretty much the same, with a bit more patriotic vigour, which is expected!

Walking in there's a bit about Hitler's rise to power - here's a Hitler Youth having an awesome time:

 

There was some quite interesting reading about building bomb shelters, and how people handled the London Blitz. They've done this quite clever thing with projectors on mannequin faces, so there's like, human lips talking, projected on a head - it's pretty creepy really but got me thinking doing museum exhibitions would pretty much be the coolest training to develop ever.

 On the hour they have a 15 minute show, projected on a screen across the Battle of Britain planes in the hangar. They turn the lights off and light areas as required, simulate fly-bys (godamn I wrote fly-buys) with great speakers and I just generally found it pretty well done.

I've always wanted to see more of the German planes, and they've got em! There were 2 Me109s (saves me trying to spell it) and here's a Heinkel, something:

 

I was stuuked to see a Stuka!

In the final area, there is a massive Sunderland floatplane. You can actually walk through it, it's pretty awesome!

Bloody cool place to go, and you know what else? IT WAS FREE. That's just jolly decent of the RAF what what.