[/caption] Further to the always excellent topic of unusual airships, currently doing the rounds of every environmentally-oriented blog and many more besides (including the venerable William Gibson) is this wonderful creation of Christopher Ottersbach, Aeolus, for his diploma project at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Art) in Braunschweig, Germany. A [...]

Following the Camberwell Markets outing on the 11th, Mlle Millais and I spent some hours fossicking through The Camberwell Antique Centre, just across the road from the Station. It’s a veritable fair in a building, selling antiques and collectibles on behalf of dozens of other merchants. While there we collected an armful of flyers for other [...]

Via Cory Doctorow’s bouncy little journal, and apropos a conversation at the Carpark Cafe in Campberwell on Sunday,* Molly Wright Steenson’s “Postal services and pneumatic tubes” provides some fascinating factlets about the pneumatic tube postal system built under Paris in the 1850s. And the comments are almost as interesting. Apparently, there was a pneumatic postal [...]

First conceived in 1670, the notion of dirigibles made of metal has given rise to a number of curious failures over the last three centuries. This New Scientist article details a number of them, including the uniquely successful example: the US Navy’s “Tin Bubble”, an aluminium-plated airship capable of making 110km/h and lifting 5 tonnes, [...]

And indeed, a lady should  be rather flattered to have a bustle named after her good self. Alas, I fear it eclipses my poor effort at our Year’s End Ball in such extreme degree, I shall be forced to hide from society for simply an age, lest I endure ridicule and taunts. My bustle cannot [...]

Well, our annual new members’ welcome event, hosted this year by that inimitable knight of the realm Frederick Chook (and ably assisted by the lovely Lady Sha), has passed with some measure of success. We were particularly pleased to hear Flecker’s “Golden Journey” and Swinburne’s “Time and Life” read so masterfully by our esteemed guests [...]