Another two newly painted units of ECW cavalry back from Lee's House of Magic. The guys with the nice purple flag are another bit of the Royalist Northern Horse - this lot being Sir Charles Lucas' regiment. The more sedate people below are Sir Thomas Myddelton's Parliamentarian "Myddleton's Brigade". Lucas, I think, was captured at Marston Moor. All I can remember about Myddelton is that he was the governor (owner? warden? janitor? gardener?) at Chirk Castle.
If you care, the Royalists are Tumbling Dice men on Kennington/SHQ horses, and the other lot are all Kennington/SHQ. I believe that the flags are pretty much correct, which is an unusually fine result for me.
Speaking of results, and without wishing to tread on any toes here, I note that the BBC's website is heralding the glad news that the Briton has won the Wimbledon men's singles final today. I don't have any kind of a problem with this, I'm as proud as can be, for all of us, but I wonder if he would still have been a Briton if he came from, for example, Oxfordshire. I don't recall Tim Henman ever being a Briton. Funny, that.
It would be paranoid to suggest that if Murray had lost he would definitely have been a Scot, so I'm not going anywhere near there.
Another random fact - a couple of days ago, I did a search on Google for Aaron Copland, the American composer, to get some biographical material. The day after, I visited the Amazon site, using the same machine, and - lo! - I was presented by Amazon with adverts for various Aaron Copland CDs.
Now how could that possibly happen? Cookie swaps?
Nice cavalry, enjoyed the battle report to looked like a very enjoyable game with on this occasion the right result!
ReplyDeleteRe. the tennis - you've been in Scotland too long.... and as for Amazon - they've put an awful lot of effort in recent years into collecting huge amounts of data on their customers online activities, and they don't have to swap data with anyone in order to do it. The view amongst the movers and shakers is that it gives them a huge commercial advantage, but whether it's all legal in the EU is perhaps open to question (or a long and very costly investigation). If you don't like being tracked then there are the obvious things you can do via browser settings, but if you have a fixed IP then there's a lot of data the likes of google and amazon can gather on you regardless.
ReplyDeleteTennis - I'm sure you're right. Scotland has a fine, long tradition of losing at most things anyway - we don't always cope well with winning! I've only just recovered from a BBC article on home winners of the F1 British Grand Prix, which somehow excluded Messrs Clark, Stewart, Watson and Coulthard. Interestingly, that feature was amended later, so some other paranoid must have noticed too.
DeleteNo matter.
I'm always very careful with my security and cookie settings - sometimes to the point where my "browsing experience" probably suffers as a consequence! If I look at stuff on Amazon, or any on-line shop, it's fair enough if they record what I've looked at and remind me some other time, but I've got used to it being within a single - what's the word? - enterprise? - no, that's not it, but you know what I mean. I was surprised that Amazon should know what I'd been looking at on Google - somehow that feels a bit off, especially since Google might just be getting paid for it.
We never had these problems when we used to get our change in a wooden ball via the compressed air machine in the Co-op, and they used to wrap the dried fruit in purple waxed paper. If you mentioned cough sweets in the bus queue, you didn't expect to be offered a pack of them when you arrived in a shop somewhere later on.
I don't really mind the snooping - I'm not particularly shy about my browsing - or shopping - habits. What pisses me off is that it is just another drain on the world economy - somebody milking money out of the system by introducing themselves as yet another no-value-added step in the already over-long food chain. There was a time when innovation was associated with something somehow more lofty than newer and more ingenious varieties of parasitism.
Ho hum. I feel strangely tired.
Cheers - Tony