Google Art Project and grudges

No doubt I'm way down on the list of hearing about the Google Art Project, but at least I'm not like one commenter on the videos relating to the Project who said that now Google was taking over the art galleries!

As another wisely pointed out, many people don't have access to these galleries; they're on the other side of the world, and even if you wanted to visit the Uffizi, for instance, you have to wait in a queue for hours. By which time you're exhausted and don't have the energy to spend time with the art. (We waited in the queue for around a half an hour and then decided there were better ways to spend our limited time, went down the road, and found a superb gallery with hardly anyone in it!)

It's never going to be the same experience as standing in front of the original - no more than the Google street photographs are the same as the reality of standing outside a real house - but there are advantages. Access is great, for starters; you can go in really close on the paintings and see the detail not in a fuzzy way, but as clearly as you can see the whole thing. This is something I'm really appreciating. When you look at an art work in a book, for instance, you can't get any closer than the page and your eye's focus will allow. Consequently, details are out of your range.

The colours are superb as well, and the range of galleries is beyond belief. What is there not to appreciate about the Art Project. Good old Google, I say.

Check out the videos on the site, too, particularly the behind the scenes one which shows the photographers capturing the works digitally, cycling, in some cases, around the laminate floors in order to give you a sense of actually walking through these museums.

As I said above, there are always the grumblers. Here's one commenting on this particular video: Google lack any ingenuity or creativity of their own and either buy or steal intellectual property to compensate for their lack of creative vision. This project is a strong example of them stealing from me after presenting the idea to Google Ventures. It's not just myself who have an aversion to Google. Groupon told them to shoveit after being offered $6 billion and Path denied them after googled offered $100 million. There are stealth groups in SV who want to see google fall..

Hmm. Groupon and Path turned down $160 million between them. Some people must have grudges.

The Flying Scotsman

Some friends had enthused over The Flying Scotsman, so, when we couldn’t get in to see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, we popped round the corner to see the other movie.
It wasn’t helped by the fact that our seats were so hard that by the end we were in agony, but even that aside (and the sometimes impenetrable Scots accents) the movie is pretty much a B movie bio, and is marginal on humour, suspense, character and most other things.
Jonny Lee Miller plays Graeme O’Bree, an amateur cyclist with great ambitions, most of which he achieves. Miller isn’t a particularly good-looking actor at the best of times, and as O’Bree he achieves a sourness of face that must almost be unique amongst movie ‘heroes.’ (He might play a good Darcy in Pride and Prejudice!)
O’Bree himself appears to have been a fairly difficult character: obsessive about his cycling, depressed by past events, uncompromising, and with a determination that overrode the better judgement of some of his family and friends. Miller shows all this with a jutting out lower lip, and jaw, and haughty eyes. Admittedly O’Bree had some overcoming to do: the World Cycle crew appear to have been quite toffee-nosed in their opposition to him, and dragging himself up out of depression (and an unsuccessful suicide attempt) can’t have been easy.
But Miller lacks much warmth, and consequently you never really respond to him as a character. His wife, played by Laura Fraser, is the opposite, but she has little to do except be supportive, and has almost no time to come across as a character. Brian Cox has a quiet role as a minister who doesn’t reveal his colours until late in the piece (unfortunately my friends had spoiled this me) and is excellent in his portrayal of a man who’s had to face the same sort of distresses O’Bree is facing. Billy Boyd is Billy Boyd.
We should have waited till it came out on DVD.

One Man's Faith Journey

James Robertson, from our church, has been cycling through NZ from top to bottom (he’s in the middle of the South Island at present, I think), to raise awareness and funds for Tear Fund. Good on yer, James! James is a great guy, and even though he’s used to cycling long distances (a cycle ride from Dunedin city over the top road to the end of the Peninsula and back again is quite normal for him) this long trip is something out of the bag.
I have to have been wrong, but twice on the radio last night, when I was at work, I heard something in relation to Tear Fund which seemed rather odd. It sounded as though they had given a prize for a couple to go and see a work they were supporting in somewhere (I never managed to catch where) to check out the water project that was going on. And then…the couple were going onto Bali for a couple of days in a luxury hotel! Seemed a bit of irony going on here. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong – I can’t see anything about it on Tear Fund’s site. I hope so.