Two Small Auctions and Imaging for one Big Auction

An account of Wednesday and yesterday – with plenty of pictures. Also a link to a splendi piece on WEIT.

INTRODUCTION

Most of this post deals with events of Wednesday and yesterday.

WEDNESDAY – NORWICH

We had a small stamp sale at the Maids Head Hotel in Norwich, which necessitated a seriously early start. I was at the bus station at 6:00 as intended (the bus I was going to catch is scheduled to leave at 6:10, and I always like to be there early), but the bus was very late. I considered briefly catching the alternative X1, but was not willing to pay twice as much money for the quicker journey (£11 for the X1, run by First, £5.50 for a day-rider plus on the X8/ X29 Stagecoach route). Finally, over 20 minutes after it was due to leave the bus arrived to pick up passengers. It made good time once it was under way, apart from the inevitable crawl past Hellesdon Hospital, and I was at the venue by 8:15. There were no computer issues, and the sale ran very smoothly. Those items that sold went for good money, and overall the sale was as good as we could have expected.

THURSDAY – FAKENHAM

Thursday featured an early start, but not so much as the previous day, since we were holding a postal history sale at our own premises in Fakenham. This sale was more of a success than the one the day before – due to the presence of internet bidders, and a number of items made good money. Once it had finished I had time to do some imaging for the big auction on June 29th, at which some lots will be sold to raise money for the Royal British Legion’s Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College, London, and for which the catalogue is currently at the printers. There were some very large flags, one of them so huge that the only way I could image it was in the open air with two of my colleagues holding it up, one at each end. Here are the images…

342 — One of the two images I took of the hypergiant flag

346 — A supergiant flag – by spreading it out on the shop floor and standing a chair I was able to obtain an image of each hal;f of the flag and use my editing skills to bolt the two images together.

346-b — The other half of the supergiant flag

Lot 655 – a piece with local historical significance – and a gallery of seven images

675 — This table needed careful handling and crafty psoitioning to get a usable image.

To end this section, a challenge to my readers: from where did I get the descriptors (giant, supergiant and hypergiant) that I used for the outsize flags?

A LINK AND THE CURRENT TEST MATCH

Having already shared Richard Murphy’s piece on licences for company directors, when I then came across a gem of a piece on WEIT I felt that I could not justify a second such post within such a short space of time. Here therefore is a link to a piece about the Freedom for Religion Foundation going after NASA for giving a grant to a theological study.

England have recovered somewhat from a very poor start. Just before the close of day 1 of this third test against Sri Lanka Jonathan Bairstow reached his century, becoming only the second England wicketkeeper after Matt Prior to reach three test centuries in a calendar year and also only the second after Les Ames to reach two in the same test series.

I finish this piece with a few more photographs:

DSCN6462 — Various model aeroplanes are currentrly on display at locations around King’s Lynn, and this picture and the next feature two of them

DSCN6685 — A bird enjoying the metal artwork that adorns the market square in Fakenham

DSCN6704 — The image of the hypergiant flag that I decided not to use as the official one.

Imaging

A brief and mainly, indeed almost entirely, pictorial account of my day at work.

INTRODCUTION

Today we were getting the catalogue for the auction on June 29th ready to go to the printers, which meant a lot of imaging for me.

A WIDE RANGE OF IMAGES

My days imaging started with some cigarette/ trade card lots…

These look like old coins but they are actually well disguised cigarette cards based on those coins.

Next up came some left over coin and stamp lots…

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Then there were a few small flags…

Then came 28 vinyl records, some of which are likely to fetch serious money…

Lot 751, first of the records in this sale

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Although I restricted myself to showing 10 of the 28 records this one had to be included.

Lot 778, the last of the records.

Once the records were done, there was a stereograph and some accompanying slides, which occupied 20 odd lots between them…

The Stereograph

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When viewed through the stereograph you get a single picture in 3D

The stereograph was followed by a handful of toys…

The last items of the day were two highly decorated, framed title pages of atlases, for which I provide complete image galleries, all as individual images…

Musical Keys and Imaging

An account of today at work and yesterday at Musical keys.

INTRODUCTION

This post has two very disparate strands – yesterday’s Musical Keys event for Autistic People and tody at work.

IMAGING

While I have imaged a wide variety of stuff today at work I am going to concentrate on some commemorative coin lots that were of particular quality…

353 — I did not have time to provide close-ups of all these coins…

353-a — …so I selected the one featuring a picture of Nelson (we are in Norfolk after all) for the treatmnent.

354 — This lot featured an extra requirement.

354-a — Namely providing a shot focussing on the coin and info sheet into which it is set.

357 — The last of the commemorative coins.

510 — A large collection of themed stamp books.

511-b — an even close up of two individual stamps.

MUSICAL KEYS

The 12 years and older session of the Musical Keys workshop run as an NAS West Norfolk activity started at 4:45PM yesterday and ran until 6:15PM. I was there both as participant and as one 0f the two designated committee members to be present at the event (the other was group leader Karan whose younger son was participating). As usual with Musical Keys the main piece of equipment we were using was a miniature computer:

For the first part of the session we were playing computer drums:

After a mid-session break during which a birthday cake which Karan had very kindly made (gluten-free as her son has an adverse reaction to gluten) and which was absolutely delicious, we moved on to the second part of the session, which featured a system whereby lines had to be drawn across the screen so that balls would bounce of them to create sounds. For those of my generation it looks a bit like a very early BBC Micro game!

The basic set up

An arrangement of lines which prevents any of the balls (released from the nozzle you can see top centre) from escaping. I do not know what kind of sound this generates, as at no time while the sound was on did I have this many lines in place.

As anyone who knows what the weather was like in King’s Lynn yesterday early evening will be aware it was not suitable for photography on the way to the Scout Hut, where as so often with NAS West Norfolk events this took place, but I did get this picture on the way home…

An Eulerian Birthday

A distinctive (I hope) way to mark the occasion of my 41st birthday.

INTRODUCTION

Today is my birthday, which is the last part of the title explained, so where does the word “Eulerian” come in?

THE MOST PROLIFIC OF ALL MATHEMATICIANS

For all his immense output Leonhard Euler (pronouned “Oiler”, not “Ewe-ler”) is best known to the world at large for his solution to the “Bridges of Konigsberg” conundrum. Citizens of this then German town (it is now Kaliningrad, Russia) used to amuse themselves by trying to walk around the town crossing each of its seven bridges once and once only in the course of their peregrinations. Nobody ever managed it, and Euler (pioneering the science of topology, a minor offshoot of which is the “Beck Map”, versions of which are now used worldwide as an easy way to display urban public transport routes, in the process) proved that there was no way to do this. This is because each the four landmasses involved contained an odd number of bridgeheads – had specifically two (and it could have been any two), or all four of these landmasses contained even numbers of bridgeheads it would have been possible to devise a walking route using each bridge precisely once.

Much less well known than the above, Euler also noticed that if you feed values into the equation Y = X² + X + 41 every value of X from 0 through to 39 produces a prime number for Y, and even after the inevitable break to the sequence where X = 40 produces Y = 1681 = 41 * 41, and X = 41 produces Y = 1763 = 41 * 43, the formula continues to produce a very large number of prime numbers – far more than any other formula of similar type. This then is why I described this an Eulerian birthday – it is my 41st. A clue to bear in mind for next year’s birthday is that the person who will play the role in my blog post on that day that Euler has played today was proud of the fact that he was born in Cambridge in 1953 and had initials DNA. More details, including a full listing of the primes produced before X = 40, can be found in Keith Devlin’s “Mathematics: A New Golden Age”.

PICTURES

I have some pictures, mainly from today at work. These are presented as a ’tiled mosaic’ – click an individual image to view at full size.

From here to the Watt medallion are tokens that I scanned at high resolution and worked on to produce the clearest possible images.

These last few pics are not work pics – they are the best images I have managed to get of the James Watt medallion I bought recently.

AFTERWORD

Many people on both facebook and twitter have wished my a happy birthday and I thank all of you for so doing – the main celebration, a Sunday lunch at the Crown in East Rudham two days before the actual day was superb.

Press Releases

Details of four significant press releases that I have put out recently.

INTRODUCTION

This post covers one particular qaspect of my work at James and Sons. Everything yousee has gone out between Thursday of last week and this morning.

PRESS RELEASES

I am sharing four of these with you:

MILITARY BADGE AUCTION ALERT

This one is about our upcoming auctions on Wednesday and Thursday, the first of which contains a few military badges, including both of those used in the image, and the second of which, taking place at our own premises, is a pure badge auction. I will provide the images, a jpg of the full document and a link to the original word document:

MILITARY BADGE AUCTION ALERT

THE GREAT CENTENARY CHARITY AUCTION

For various reasons instead of a dedicated auction devoted entirely to fund-raising we are incorporating the Great Centenary Charity Auction within our own programme, with lots in June and November being sold for fund-raising purposes. I have put out two press releases thus far about this:

WHERE MILITARIA AND SCOUTING COMBINE

The first press release focuses on a collection of medals and paperwork relating to Jack Cornwell, who at the battle of Jutland became the youngest person ever to win the VC. He was also a boy scout, giving an extra connection. I have a jpg of the press release, the press release itself and all the images I took of the various items:

GREAT CENTENARY CHARITY AUCTION

POPPIES AT THE TOWER

The second Great Centenary Charity Auction press release is about an oil painting of the Poppies at the Tower by one of the two artists who created the real thing…

POPPIES AT THE TOWER

COIN AUCTION ALERT

This was chronologically the first of the press releases to go out, focussing on this Wednesday’s auction:

COIN AUCTION ALERT

Chris Packham and the Foxhunters

An account with links to the three source pieces of the vile abuse of Chris Packham by the pro-hunting lobby and his dignified response to it.

INTRODUCTION

I live with Asperger’s Syndrome, have previously had mental health issues including depression and am a nature lover. Chris Packham presents nature programs on TV, has Asperger’s Syndrome and has had mental health problems. Mr Packham has recently gone public about his Asperger’s and depression, and this is where the story starts…

A TWEET AND RETWEET

Yesterday morning Hunting Solutions put out the following tweet, quoted in his own piece immediately after it had happened by Miles King on anewnatureblog:

This tweet was retweeted by Nicholas Soames, a politician whose own party leader has spoken of the need to end the stigma attached to mental health. As Miles King points out, given the hysterical reaction to Naz Shah having liked an offensive facebook post before she became an MP, you might think that this could cause more trouble for the party concerned. When Miles King challenged Soames about the retweet, rather than attempting to defend himself Soames blocked King. Please follow the link I provided near the top of this section and read that post in full before proceeding.

PACKHAM’S OWN RESPONSE

Chris Packham provided what was in the circumstances a remarkably restrained response in the form of an interview that was published on Huffington Post, which I urge you to read in full.

THE FOLLOW UP THIS MORNING

Miles King on anewnatureblog returned to the fray this morning because Hunting Solutions had provided a response of sorts. As this image, taken from the Miles King piece, which I urge to read in full shows it was exactly what we might expect from these people:

This is classic victim blaming of the sort that Tories specialize in. I will conclude this section with my own comments on Miles King’s posts which I once more urge you to read in full:

As someone with Asperger’s Syndrome and who has experience of depression I am in no doubt that the both the original tweet and Soames’ retweet were bang out of order, and in the continuing absence of an apology there is no doubt to give these people the benefit of. The use of the word “nutjob” in the context Mr Packham having recently gone public about his Asperger’s and depression is reminiscent of the the prolonged series of smears that functioned (thankfully and deservedly very badly) as Zac Goldsmith’s London Mayoral campaign.

And Miles’ response to that comment:

thanks Thomas – a good analogy. The hunting community, feeling threatened, are resorting to a smear campaign against high profile people like Chris Packham.

My comment on the second post:

Excellent follow up piece. I would take your reasoning re the comments about foxhunting being psychopathic a small step further and say that for true equivalence between the remarks Packham would have to labelled not just foxhunters as a group (which as you point out he did not) but an individual named foxhunter as a psychopath. As for the ‘if he hadn’t criticised us we would not have said it’ “defense”, that is simply another example of a favourite tactic of these kind of people – victim blaming.

I conclude this post with some photos…

Gibraltar £1 — I noticed something about this £1 coin that caused me to examine it closely – just as well I did, as it is Gibraltarian and would probably not have been accepted by the bus driver!

Tory Mps Taken to Court by Electoral Commission Over Campaign Expenses

A contribution to the developing story of the Tory election expenses scandal. I provide three links to detailed accounts of the story so far and make a brief mention of an old case that relates to this subject.

INTRODUCTION

This is a story that has been running for months. As well as the Electoral Commission’s involvement, nine different police forces are investigating various MPs. In this post I will provide links to three versions of the story (all tally closely, and all are from national newspapers) and then quote a case from the past which indicates how seriously this kind of thing has been viewed.

THE STORY SO FAR

Here are the three links:

For the Guardian version click here. Note, that as often when dealing with a controversial story the Graun has switched off its comments section.
For the Independent version click here.
For the Mirror version click here.

THE FRANK GRAY CASE

This case is almost a century old (I read the details in Iain Wilton’s “C B Fry: An English Hero”, where it featured because Fry was involved in the subsequent by-election). The culprit was Frank Gray’s election agent, who played fast and loose with campaign finances. Gray was as shocked as anyone when he found out what had been going on, and held his hands up. The judge in this case while praising Gray for his honesty and co-operation still considered it necessary to debar Gray from seeking public office for a period of seven years.

I never like to put up posts without a picture, so here (with apologies to any such creatures who take offence at being associated however loosely with Tory MPs) is a snail from this morning…

Snail - edited — ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Lustrum

A celebration of the fifth anniversary of aspiblog – read, enjoy and please share!

INTRODUCTION

What does the title of this post refer to? Here, courtesy of Robert Harris, backed by Edgar Allan Poe is a clue:

DSCN5629 — The definition of lustrum from the front of Robert Harris’novel of that name.

DSCN5658 — From Edgar Allan Poe’s “Eleonora” an example of the literary use of the word lustrum.

The special significance of lustrum in the sense of a five-year period to aspiblog is that today is the fifth anniversary of aspiblog. To view the post that started it all on May 10th 2011 click here.

BLOGGING

There are many approaches to blogging. Some blogs deal almost entirely in original content, some blogs are devoted principally to sharing stuff created by others, and some like this one are a mixture of the two. I create new posts such as this when I feel I have stuff to write about and/or enough good pictures to warrant creating a post to share them.

SHARING ON A BLOG

Sharing can be done in various ways. There is the “Links” section was has been a frequent feature of this blog, which enables one to share lots of stuff in a single post. Other wordpress posts can be reblogged, and some other posts not on wordpress allow one the option of ‘pressing’ a link on to a wordpress blog (I have a ‘press this’ tool for my wordpress hosted London transport themed website www.londontu.be to enable me to post links to interesting and appropriate articles). This morning I used the press this button on Richard Murphy’s Tax Research UK blog to post a link to a piece of his speculating on the prospect of Mr Osborne being reshuffled into obscurity on June 24th and took some screen shots along the way to illustrate the process:

Share 1 — This is first stage, at which you merely need to press the button marked Publish

Share 2 — You will then see two buttons saying Customise and Edit, and it is the Edit button you want to click

Share 3 — At this point, having done some simple editing and put in some tags I have opened up the ‘more options tab’ and you will notice two checked boxes indicating that at the moment I am allowing comments and trackbacks/ pingbacks…

Share 4 — I conclude by unchecking the ‘allow comments’ box so that people who wish to comment have to visit the original and post their comments there (this is not to avoid fielding commments, but to ensure that the creator of the post gets full credit for it)

MAIN THEMES OF THE BLOG

This blog features many things, but there are several recurring themes:

Autism – I am #actuallyautistic, and although the Asperger’s Support Group that I ran for some time ultimately became a casualty of Tory funding cuts I am now on the branch committee of NAS West Norfolk.
Photography – I am a very keen photographer and invariably share pictures in my posts.
Politics – I am politically very active and I follow many political blogs/ websites.
Cricket – I am a huge fan of cricket and particularly during the summer months I will frequently have things to say about the game.

CRICKET

I spent yesterday listening to commentary of the fascinating match between Somerset and Warwickshire. While elsewhere in the country vast numbers of runs were being racked up this match was low scoring, and the better for it. The big scoring that has been such a feature of this early season is partly due to a daft playing condition introduced into the county championship whereby the visiting side can dispense with the toss if they wish to bowl first. This has resulted in a succession of pitches on which batsmen can fill their boots. There is no logic to such a playing condition – if you want to absolutely ensure that home teams cannot prepare pitches to suit themselves simply get rid of the toss altogether and award choice of innings to the visitors, although I would personally stick to having a toss for innings. If, as currently seems likely, Somerset win, they will owe it in large part to Peter Trego who in a low scoring game has amassed 94 and 51.

I heard while listening to that commentary yesterday that there are going be matches played between the North and South to give the best county players a chance to play in matches of higher standard than normal county games, taking place in the UAE in March, before the MCC v Champion County match, which I think is an excellent idea.

LINKS

I have three links to share:

First, a petition on change.org calling for a statue of a suffragette to be erected in Parliament Square, which I urge all of you to sign and share.

My next two links are both related and concern a subject close to my heart: libraries. Libraries in many parts of the country are facing cuts, and one of the areas affected is Lancashire. A campaign is running to save their libraries, and they have recently created a bit of a stir by telling their MP to stay out of it, such is their (entirely justified) lack of trust in the individual concerned. Two links for you:

The Vox Political piece that put me on to this story and
A direct link to the petition at the heart of this campaign.

PHOTOS AND CONCLUSION

No aspiblog post would be complete without a few pictures, and I choose to finish with this section…

DSCN5656 — The Erie Railroad pass now in its display place

DSCN5661 — The top portion of the Clifton House tower.r

DSCN5662 — The top of the flagpole above Clifton House Tower, doubling up as a bird perch

DSCN5676 — I also found a way to display the Old London Bridge print.

DSCN5664 — The Stories of Lynn flag – the trouble with this newly opened attraction is that at £5 the admission price is too high.

Finally to end this post a message to all my readers, and fellow bloggers who have helped to inspire me to keep this blog going…

Summer is Here and Other Stuff

A mention of politics, cricket and summer being here. Some good photographs as well.

INTRODUCTION

I have various things to cover, and of course pictures to share. I will work up to the pictures, covering everything else first…

LOCAL AND REGIONAL ELECTIONS

The only vote I was able to take part in was for Norfolk Police & Crime Commissioner, and although disappointed that it went the way of the Tory (by a small margin from Labour) I was pleased to see the incumbent, Mr Bett, finish a humiliating fourth.

THE LONDON MAYORAL ELECTIONS

The news from these was nearly all good. Sadiq Khan won with a record vote for any candidate in any London Mayoral election. This has probably had the added beneficial effect of ensuring that no further campaigns will be conducted under the malign influence of Sir Lizard of Oz (yes, even as the latest effort to be besmirched by his dirty pawprints was unravelling in spectacular fashion Mr Cameron was orchestrating a knighthood for him) aka Linton Crosby. Sian Berry was rewarded for the excellence of her own campaign with third place, a record vote for a Green candidate and election to the Greater London Assembly along with Caroline Russell, while Shahrar Ali just missed out on becoming a third Green GLA member.

THE OVERALL PICTURE

In the first set of elections since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader his party won 47% of the council seats contested while also succeeding in in two mayoral elections (Bristol as well as London) and two by-elections. For comparison during the first set of elections contested after the election as leader of Anthony B Liar Labout won 46% of the council seats contested, while in those days there were no mayoral elections.

CRICKET

The English cricket season is well under way, with some heavy scoring going on all over the country. May 9th 1895 was the day on which W G Grace played his first first class innings of that season, and just 21 days later he reached 1,000 runs for the season, the first time that feat had been achieved in May (the strict 1,000 in May has since been emulated only by Wally Hammond and Charlie Hallows, although Tom Hayward, Don Bradman (twice), Bill Edrich, Glenn Turner and Graeme Hick all reached 1,000 for the English season before June, having played some innings in April).

SUMMER IS HERE

After a somewhat patchy spring, summer appears to have started early. For the second straight day I am in shorts and t-shirt. Here are some summery photographs to end the post (in tiled mosic form – click on an individual to view at full size)…

These planes flying in chevron formation were tough to capture, and shooting upwards from ground level I probably have not done the spectacle full justice, but I was glad to have managed this much.

This was on a wall near my flat.

A Poster and More Imaging

An account of today at work, featuring the creation of a poster, a laminated copy of which is on display in our shop window at 5 Norwich Street, Fakenham, NR21 9AF

INTRODUCTION

Today as well as producing the poster which forms the first part of the title I did some more postal history imaging and imaged a couple of lots for a small militaria sale in which i have otherwise had no involvement. Also, I assembled a metal detector for display in the shop.

ASSEMBLING THE POSTER

The purpose of this poster was to advertise the hats and helmets I blogged about yesterday. This required selecting the images which would work best, getting brief descriptions of the items chosen to feature and fitting the whole together in a visually appealing way. The three images I selected were:

I went for the white helmet to provide a contrast withe dark colour of the other two. Putting these together with the descriptions and appropriate top and tail pieces gave this final product:

POLICE HEADGEAR AT JAMES – this is a link to the original word document – a screenshot is below…

SOME HIGHLIGHTS FROM TODAY

Just a few images from today…

	Aoteroa Axed by Ahme… on South Africa Finnished as Alle…
	Thomas on World T20 Cup Underway
	Anna on World T20 Cup Underway
	London Underground t… on Project Piccadilly
	Thomas on All Time XIs – Detective…