Do I get a magic performing monkey or something?

The Potteries Post has updated. More ‘news you can use’ in the arts, wildlife and heritage.

Strangeness from Stoke: 86 year-old Joseph Jones builds Milan Cathedral in matchsticks, in his front room, having already done the same for Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s. The wire-photo caption, in Italian, appears to say that he then used them as garden features after completion. Presumably after giving them a good coat of varnish. (Christmas 1965, Italian press photo).

I’m pleased to see that some bits of Etruria and Cliffe Vale have been newly photographed for Google StreetView, at the end of May 2023.

The first re-photographing in a long time, as you can see above. And looking fabulous with it — or as fabulous as the greener bits of inner-city Stoke-on-Trent can look at the end of May. Coverage is a bit patchy at present, but hopefully it’s the start of a new tranche of photography. I’d do it myself, along with litter-picking, but I can’t afford the £500 for an Insta360 X3 camera with GPS (apparently the best and easiest, I hear).

Now, there’s an idea. Every city, each May-June, trusted photographers should be able to borrow an X3 camera for free and go out and build Street View for their city. Cheap, easy, ‘citizen PR’. Although, of course, ideally done after a Dad’s Army of paid-unemployed litter-pickers has swept through the area.

Stokies reading this should note that uploading 360-degree .MP4 or .MOV video (Google prefers 360-video) to help build Google Street View has changed. The long-time Android creation/uploading app has gone, and it seems you now do it through the Street View Studio website. Although it seems you can also do it direct from an X3 camera, which I’m told recently had a firmware update to enable more fine-grained GPS metadata. Older buyers should beware that the user needs to also own a smartphone (ugh!), to ‘activate’ the X3 camera for the first time via an ‘app’ — this may be a deal-breaker.

The only thing I see from the BBC these days is the 10-day weather, on a desktop PC. And even that’s becoming alarmist and naggy and click-baity, if it’s not filtered and blocked. Here’s how to clear all that guff off, in one go, and just leave yourself with what you came for… the likely weather plus sunset/sunrise times.

Just copy-paste my personal list of blocks into your Web browser’s uBlock Origin filter list (Icon | Dashboard (cog-wheel icon) | ‘My Filters’)…

! Hide all the alarmist, political, nagging and video stuff on the 10-day BBC Weather forecast
www.bbc.co.uk##:xpath(//span[contains(@class,"wr-c-environmental-data__item wr-c-environmental-data__item--pollution")])
www.bbc.co.uk##:xpath(//span[contains(@class,"wr-c-environmental-data__item wr-c-environmental-data__item--pollen")])
www.bbc.co.uk##:xpath(//span[contains(@class,"wr-c-environmental-data__item wr-c-environmental-data__item--uv")])

www.bbc.co.uk##[class*="wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation--grey gel-brevier"]
www.bbc.co.uk##[class*="wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation--blue gel-brevier"]

The result, clean and simple…

You’re welcome.

What I can’t do anything about is this subtly depressive slight-of-hand. The worst possible weather for the day is always chosen to represent it on the main single-icon. The single-icon is thus usually deeply unrepresentative of the day’s likely weather…

A lovely day, effectively and falsely proclaimed to be “wet all day” by the main icon and description, just because of a few drops of rain at 4pm.

And here’s another example of how the BBC lies with its 10-day forecast. A beautiful Sunday, but the slight chance of a drop of rain at 4pm means the whole day is falsely labelled “Light rain”.

This is not just misleading, it’s damaging the UK, with visitor attractions and some retail seeing up to a 30% drop in people if “rain” is apparently forecast.

My The Potteries Post has updated. ‘News you can use’, from Stoke-on-Trent and thereabouts.

Fascinating Folk of Newcastle-under-Lyme Film Show: Philip Astley and the performing arts, 15th June at the Brampton Museum in N-u-L. Followed by more in the same series, including public talks on Potters at Play and Oliver Lodge. Booking now.

The town also has a new circus centre planned on the back of the Philip Astley connection, and have commissioned a photographer to make portraits of local performing families.

Currently on Ebay from dillonthestaff, a set of Doulton glass “magic lantern slides”. Presumably some from Burslem, but also likely to be some from the Lambeth works/studio in London.

Would anyone even notice, if it dropped on Hanley in 2023?

New local books on Archive.org…

Most Splendid of Men : life in a mining community, 1917-25 (1981). This being Silverdale in Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Voices of Five Counties : a guide to writers of Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire (1994). An A-Z survey. Pre-Internet and search, so likely missing a lot.

Staffordshire and the Black Country (1988). A substantial gazetteer, ignoring 1974 boundary changes.

Butterflies of the West Midlands (2016). Being the proper West Midlands, including the counties.

Letters of Arnold Bennett, Vol. II 1889-1915 (1968).

Folk Tales of the British Isles (1988). Has “The Clicking Toad” from Darlaston in south Staffordshire, between Walsall and Tipton.

The Landscape Trilogy : the autobiography of L.T.C. Rolt, 1910-1974 (2005). Saviour of the British canal system, especially in the Midlands.

Staffordshire portrait figures : and allied subjects of the Victorian era : including the definitive catalogue (1987).

The Symphonies of Havergal Brian : Volume Two (1978).

The In Crowd : the story of the northern & rare soul scene, Volume One (1999).

Now on eBay, a book about the Garden Festival site I didn’t know existed. Regrettably From Inferno to Flowers (1986) is not on archive.org as a scan.

Sad to hear that the great local-radio presenter Den Siegertsz is being axed from BBC Radio Stoke, as the station continues to dwindle away into what seems — in the very near future — to be very little actual ‘local hours’ of speech radio.

Surely the BBC should be boosting its local non-sports services and grassroots coverage, not slashing them to almost nothing? But it seems our local shows are soon to become a ‘shared’ regional hodge-podge, with BBC Stoke’s local shows merged together with those of Radio Hereford and Worcester, Radio Shropshire, and Radio Coventry & Warwickshire. Not very enticing for listeners who just want some good local speech-radio with local presenters and local topics. And I’m willing to bet there’ll be no ‘weekly digest’ podcast, featuring just the best Radio Stoke speech-radio local-interest bits all back-to-back. For some reason, the BBC have always resisted doing such an obvious thing.

Anyway, here’s hoping that Den turns ‘getting the boot’ into ‘boots on the ground’. Perhaps by starting a wonderful and wholly-independent free weekly podcast and YouTube channel, that gets him out-and-about in the city with a microphone. I’ll be subscribing, if he does.