Patrick Smith

@drpaddysmith.bsky.social

364 Followers 473 Following

Astronomical optics, get 'em while they're cold

the characters from Rex the Runt (1998-2005)
The Dreadnought pub's dress code for men. No jobby catchers. No turned-up jeans worn with bare ankles and shoes.
Augustus John's dramatic portrait of the Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia. She's in a long red dress and giving it socks on the cello
A remote inn on the side of a loch on a sunny day, there is a marquee attached
Cusack's pub in Dublin. The first S on the sign is upside down
Calamity Jane and her close, live-in friend. They're looking for husbands we are told
The cover of Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book
A sign on a building in France reading MORON Constructions
Gozer the Gozerian asking you to choose the form of your destructor
Doctor Who art prints from Scott Gray. There's two, the Yetis in the Underground from The Web of Fear and the Voc robots from The Robots of Death
Carlos Braithwaite towering over Isa Guha and Alex Hartley on the Hundred coverage
A frankly breathtaking classic racing schooner in the sunshine off a scenic bit of Scotland. Honestly it's the most elegant classic sailing yacht you could hope for, but perhaps a bit big at 55 metres
A door with a name plate on it reading Kiloran
A handwritten comment pinned to a board reading "was a bit shit lol soz"
Frame from The Red Sea Sharks in which Haddock surfaces next to the raft with a jellyfish on his head
back cover of a record with four stretched-out faces mashed together
lots of smartly-dressed gentlemen marching with red flags
A Ford Cougar
A calm scene of sea and sky. Some wooden yachts are at anchor in the distance. Behind them on the land is a white complex of buildings
a colour bar fading imperceptibly from green to red - where does it stop being green and start being red? it must be somewhere!
Record label reading A Personal Message About Your New Hornby Train Set From Bernard Cribbins
Flippin police car
Gabriel Byrne on the phone in Defence of the Realm (1986)
Raised to great precocity in a multi-lingual and hyper-literate home, he was sent to board at the Catholic Ampleforth College at the age of eight. Then just a remote and drafty lodge housing twelve boys and twenty-four Benedictine monks, Ampleforth provided instruction in history, languages, and the minutiae of Catholic devotion. Given this intense and closeted environment, it is no wonder that John should dream of entering the priesthood, but his father had chosen a different path for his son, pulling him from school at the age of fifteen to attend the university of Edinburgh to study medicine
George holding up a sketch he's done of Zippy
Francoise Dorleac making a forceful point to a gentleman trying to board a train in Billion Dollar Brain (1967)
W. G. Grace, with no visible food in his beard
The way from Carsaig on Mull to "Kiloran". The Corryvreckan is not on the way
While quantum tunnelling can’t be predicted because it’s a random process, we can calculate the probability of it happening. Thankfully, it turns out to be extremely unlikely, occurring perhaps once in 10100 years (1 followed by 100 zeroes). The age of the Universe pales into insignificance in the face of those odds
Shot from Do The Right Thing in which a yuppie who has moved into a brownstone confronts some of the more earthy residents of Bed-Stuy
Peter Serafinowicz as a vampire selling jewellery on daytime TV
A minke whale surfacing in the distance, against a coastline. The whale is doing its characteristic rolling over motion as it takes a breath
Weather today for south Scotland - high of eighteen degrees, overcast and light rain
The Comb of the Cybermen
Brian Butterfield reading a URL to camera
Sarah Lam as Dorgan in The Adventure Game
Lynch the conductor! Jugulate the drums! Butcher the brass! Ensanguinate the strings! Throttle the flutes! … Stravinsky’s April comes With pitiless pomp & pain of sacred springs … Incendiarise the Hall with resinous fires Of sacrificial fiddles scorched & snapping… Meanwhile the music blazes & expires; And the delighted audience is clapping.
A man showing a graph with the x-axis labelled "age of thing I like" and the y-axis labelled "my sophistication". The two are linearly related.
An ornate curving corridor with numbered green doors on both sides. A boy and a girl are walking along it
fragments of a teacup from the abandoned Franklin expedition camp of 1847
A quote from Pope Leo XIV about the digital revolution bringing "new forms of slavery" comparable to the Atlantic slave trade
The Killers, from the video for "Crystal" by New Order
The Drake meme but it's Ogden Nash happy to see Wes Streeting advancing and decidedly less impressed with him retreating
Drake doesn't like the new Banksy statue of a man striding off a plinth with a flag over his face, he likes Tata Peradze poised with her foot over an edge with her flag covering the face of the man next to her
A blue tit seen from above in a nestbox. She's snuggled into a hollow in moss and feathers
Chyron reporting Edinburgh South as a Labour gain
Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Single White Female (1992)
Volcanic sea stacks off Aci Trezza in Sicily, traditionally held to be the stones thrown at a departing Odysseus by the angry cyclops
Nigel Tufnel pointing out that the bread that doesn't fit the filling
a very large elephant at a zoo with handlers and visitors looking on, wondering what other word could be used to mean "very large"
A sepia-coloured photo of a notably compact biplane
Derek Zoolander pointing at a model
The bulk carrier Clipper Iris travelling up the Firth of Clyde silhouetted against the light, the mountains of Arran in the blue distance and sun sparkling on the water as usual
Laurence Olivier as Richard the Third
It was common to drink alcohol while competing in endurance cycling events until the 1960s. Riders drank various drinks, from beer to wine to champagne, for both hydration and, reportedly, to have more fun during those long, gruelling stages.
Viktor Orban in 1990
map showing a line from Port Ellen on Islay to Shrove in County Donegal
map showing the line from Eastbourne to Cap Gris Nez
map showing a straight line from Bournemouth to Cap de la Hague