May 5th – In a world of fakery and things not as they appear to be, this really shouldn’t surprise me, but I was stunned.
On a building site near Rosliston, South Derbyshire fake chimneys, ready to go on the roofs of very expensive new build houses, complete with pre assembled pots and flashing.
I feel betrayed.
April 16th – Running an errand to Chasetown, near St. Anne’s Church I spotted this fake owl, someone had mounted high in a roadside tree.
I have no idea, really I don’t: that took serious effort to get up there (and I’m still not sure how it was done) and from the bird poo splashed on it, it’s not really scaring birds.
An oddity, for sure…
June 20th – One for the occasional series on the silliness of advertising billboards.
I find myself paying more attention to roadside ads when cycling, as they take me longer to pass than if driving and some, after a few weeks, really begin to irritate. This one is a particularly fine example of the Photoshop failure art form – this example is on the Walsall Road in Darlaston.
This is an advert for the BMW Mini Cooper. Nothing wrong with that (unless you can remember how much character the original had…) but this ad exists in several forms for different length billboards. Notice the bike in the background? In all but it’s longest format, the lamppost is slightly behind the car, and you can only see the rear of the bike, a steel 1980s racing bike.
In common with most 80s bikes, it has a self-added prop stand, mounted off the rear wheel nut, and an aluminium circular spoke guard between the gears and wheel on the back axle.
Quite what’s passing through the wheel at ground level I have no idea.
Now look at the front wheel. It has the ghost of the propstand mount, rotated around 105 degrees. The aluminium spoke guard is on the front too. The end of the front fork is straight, with no dropout.
The forks and position of the wheel suggest the top tube (between handlebar quill and saddle) is unfeasibly huge.
The front of the bike is not real. It’s been created in photoshop, by someone unfamiliar with bikes, purely to fill space when the ad was stretched.
What a load of old tut. This has been rubbing me up the wrong way for a week now.
May 15th – Today, I found myself in Droitwich, which is a place I used to go a lot, but rarely visit these days. A bright, sunny and warm day, it was a pleasure to be there.
There’s just one bit of Droitwich that really, really irritates me: just off the island at the top of Salwarpe Road, there’s a modern newbuild housing development. Some muppet in the design office decided they were going to make the new block of apartments look old, by building in false bricked up windows and bolting on very, very artificial architectural ironwork aping S brackets and circular tie plates. The effect fools nobody, and is visually and conceptually abhorrent.
Whoever designed and executed this dogs dinner really needs a crash course in good taste. It ruins an otherwise reasonable building.
September 10th – This just in from the ‘You’re having a bloody laugh’ department. A I noted last week, security at the bike parking facilities in the ‘new’ New Street Station is notoriously bad. Daily, the tally of thefts and vandalism increases. Notwork Fail, in their wisdom, stonewall any criticism or constructive comment.
Today, I noted they’ve been pro-active. They have pasted up a life-size photo of a copper on the hoarding behind the racks.
This has to be a joke. Fellow cyclists, Network Rail are taking the piss.
(Sorry about the poor quality close-up, taking photos at New Street is frowned upon)
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