Pictures

I've been browsing the Guardian's Galleries, in one of those displacement activities brought on by the need to format bibliographies. There are some great ones:
Here are pictures of some of Edmund de Waal's netsuke which inspired his recent book. (I covet all rat netsuke, and every now and then I look for them on ebay, but the nice ones are too expensive.)
Here is a nineteenth-century French photographer's views of London people. I love the penultimate picture. It should be the front cover of a novel.
These competition entries for a London Transport competition for a cycling poster are really very good.

I love this illustrated blog post about dog training. Wanting so much to be a good dog, and trying everything in the hope that something is right, is such a typical dog thing.

This xkcd thing is very true. I have learnt the hard way that if someone is doing computer things in a wierdly roundabout way you need to think twice about trying to sort them out with something more sensible. Only do it for people you really love and for whom you are prepared to be IT support until one of you dies.

I want an etching by Glyn Thomas. You could argue that they're too easy to like, but I really really like them, and I don't think they would wear out over time. I like the way he draws flat spaces a bit curvy, because that's what they feel like somehow when you're there.

I'm usually not that interested in "save this work of art" stuff, and I couldn't be less bothered about this new plan to build a theatre over the remains of the actual Globe, but this portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a West-African muslim who was freed from slavery by public subscription in London in the eighteenth century, and who sounds like a significant figure but isn't in the Oxford DNB, really should be in the National Portrait Gallery.