Week 222: collage

Sunday 18 June 2023

• 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.)