Week 222: collage

People stick stickers in the urban environment here. It’s naughty of them, but I appreciate when they’re creative designs and stuck somewhere sensible. I took a picture of a sticker – it was a photo of David Seaman, the moustachioed, beponytailed former goalkeeper, wearing a bib, overlaid with some blackletter script, maybe advertising a brand of clothing? – and stumbled across a recent iOS feature.

Press and hold on the subject until it ripples and a white glow flows around its outline.

There’s a knack to the pressing and holding, but once you’ve got it, you’ve an isolated copy of the subject – be it a magpie, a woman or a can of ginger beer – with the background removed, to do with as you please, e.g. make a sub–Cold War Steve collage.

(It’s even easier on the Macintosh – there’s a “Copy Subject” item in the context menu.)

It’s a good feature, I’m quite taken with it. Sorry I don’t want to share the Seamo sticker, but here’s a bag of bread who was cooling off by wild swimming in the river, someone’s been reading the Guardian.

A few weeks ago, there was a much linked-to interview with the author Ted Chiang, an instalment in the Financial Times’s long-running “Lunch with the FT” series (“a weekly interview with leading cultural and business figures”). I’m sure it was great, but I really disliked like how they’d italicised words like baba ganoush, it gave me the ick even more than when someone mispronounced tzatziki recently.

Cleaned the bicycle drivetrain – carpeted the bathtub with pages from the Sunday Times and lifted the bike in, better than making a mess somewhere else. Later, outside, realised I’d forgotten to reattach the chain properly. There are dedicated tools to do this without soiling your fingers, but I usually use a twig, or in this case a discarded e-cigarette from the floor. Then a passing man came over to mansplain chains at me, and I didn’t manage to explain that it hadn’t slipped off by itself, but never mind, he was just trying to be friendly.

It’s old news but I’m still haunted by the clip of Nadine Dorries guest–co-presenting Piers Morgan Uncensored in October 2022. Has anyone considered that maybe it’s like Les Dawson playing the piano – they say you have to be really good at playing the piano to deliberately play the piano badly, and maybe it’s the same with reading autocues?

It hasn’t rained yet. The weather app is such a tease – “thunderstorm warning”, “light rain in 26 minutes”. Of course the problem with writing these before midnight is it might still rain this week – it’s not even really a problem but, you know.

(Update: it’s started to rain! But it’s more of a drizzle. I haven’t bellowed “now that’s what I call rain” yet.)