That Cloud Looks Like One of Those Brown China Things.

.. or maybe Cumulus Castellus.



Warning – Spoiler (or maybe a shortcut to save you having to read in).

Well I finished Foucault’s Pendulum and I was right – the whole mess of conspiracies was rubbish. The problem was that there were hundreds of people who believed it wasn’t rubbish and killed people to try and get parts of the message. There was some unpleasantness with ectoplasm which went against me being wholly taken in by the supposed secrets of The Templars. I wouldn’t say it was a wonderful book, just a lot of deep stuff, unconnected knowledge about the world. Maybe I lost some of the plot but it seemed that even in their belief that the whole thing was just a game, the narrator and his colleagues somehow relished the idea that they really had found something important. Vast swathes of the history just washed over me without sinking in though this in itself made me notice a difference between the pain of reading such things when I was younger and how I seem to be able to continue with them these days. Now this could be sign that I have managed to become more disciplined in how I read or that my brain is failing and can happily muse of other things while letting the garbage filter through the grey matter, sometimes sticking and sometimes just dribbling out onto the floor.

By the title I expect you will have guessed that I have started The Cloudspotter’s Guide. Now most of this goes in and seems to be sticking because I can look up at the sky and have a good guess at what I am seeing. I know the three species of Cumulus and how they differ from CumuloNimbus. I have also decided that my favourite cloud is actually NimboStratus, the deep grey blanket which pours out rain (or snow) for hours on end. Sad man I am. The engraving-style pictures which precede each chapter are rather fun and the one for NimboStratus shows a deep grey sky, a distance church just visible in the murk and some duck on a small stream in a gully. Very atmospheric though I think the rain that imagine in the picture is only implied.

I was actually thinking about how rain is show in animations. It must be one of the hardest things to animate realistically. I am sure that all those Hanna-Barbera cheapies just showed the standard oblique lines using some very simple repeating frames. But if you are doing something a little better, like maybe Spirited Away, how do you get the real atmosphere. From this I now realise that my knowledge of animation is quite limited. I am sure there must be many anime things with very good rain.

Obligatory World Cup Reference.
I am sorry to report that I guessed The Sun’s Sport headline for today. While the thought that they could actually use “A Late Rally at Nuremberg” got me angry, I had to take a step back to realise that I had actually thought of it as well. I like to think that this just shows knowledge of history and a sad capacity for bad puns. It might also have been that David Baddiel said something along the same lines during the World Cup Edition of Heresy.