About Brum

Well, you’re in luck.

In a somewhat meta presentation at Town Hall, due to take place on Sunday the 20th of January at 2pm, a chap called Anthony Peers is going to deliver “an account of the architectural history of Town Hall from its construction through to it recent renaissance.” Apparently, “Anthony has been researching the history of the building for close to a decade and was involved in the planning of the recently completed scheme of repairs and improvements.”

Unfortunately I’m not in Birmingham that weekend - drat! However, it sounds really quite interesting, and it’s only £6 (£5 if you’re over 60, although I bet they have student concessions going if you ask nicely)… So, there’s no real excuse for you to avoid this talk if you’re truly interested in the redevelopment and reopening of one of Birmingham’s largest and best-known landmarks.

And, as a bonus, click the image above to get a full-sized version, taken (and stitched together) by yours truly. Enjoy

Hear ye, hear ye, I am thereby claiming ownership of this fair blog!

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This will be deleted soon as it’s done, so don’t bother blogging about it.

I’ve been lazy recently - must update more! I’ve been sitting on this stuff for a while now, and I thought it’d be time to blog about this (especially considering I told them I would!)

If you were watching the local events calendar recently, you might have noticed that the  2007 Birmingham Festival of Xtreme Building (now finished, sadly) had an events space where guest shows could come and exhibit. I was just walking past, walking down to take some photos of the area around the TIC in Millennium Point for a future blog, when I noticed this exhibition going on, so I dropped by. Admission was free.

I was amazed to find what I did - a cornucopia of little mysteries (and one copy of Great Mysteries), all with their own stories to tell. The exhibition was entitled “Belongings”, an exhibition (and indirect celebration) of all things Lost and Found.

Katharine Kavanagh, a Curator
(she promised me the specs were
hers, but I don’t believe her!)

Put on by two UCE graduates, Natalie Wilson and Katharine Kavanagh (under the moniker of Kipipeo arts), the exhibition’s sole purpose was to bring to the surface all those things people discard or lose, and give you a little food for thought, to take a minute to just wonder the situations and circumstances that resulted in the items being where they were. All of the items were tagged with the date of, and where, they were found (or discovered), plus any backstory if there was any. The majority of items were completely anonymous, which lent them a definite air of curiosity (and I like curious mysteries!) When I asked Katharine about where they’d collected their items, she explained to me how she’s a bit of a hoarder (like me!) and that she and Nat had either found items at random or gone to public places (libraries, railway stations, the main Birmingham bus terminuses, etc) and just used their eyes. They had a trunk with some ‘Restricted Items’ in, things which might be dangerous for little kiddies to get their mitts on (good idea), but they also had some rather curious finds like a woman’s handbag (left in Birmingham Central Library about 3 years ago) which had not just her purse in, but her cards, her passport (!), her various forms of identification, a Visa (which had expired a while back) and some letters from what I guessed were her sponsors. You can see the handbag, and the trunk, in the photo of Kat to the right.

I totally clicked with Kat’s mindset - I’m a serial hoarder too, I love collecting things and never throwing anything away because you never quite know when that oddly-shaped screw or collection of elastic bands might just come in handy, and this festival was as much a celebration of not throwing anything away as it was discovering items which would otherwise remain locked away in windowless back rooms in public buildings, only to see the light of day when they were either discarded into a bin or tossed away into a dump. To recycle all these curios in the way in which they did meant a lot of legwork and effort on their behalf (they apparently spent many months collecting before the exhibition began), but it was most definitely worth it. For the items which were identifiable (like the handbag with the passport in), Kat said that they were going to do their best to return those items to their original owner, which was a nice touch.

There were some items I would’ve loved to take away for myself (and she said that if I wanted to take something I was more than welcome), but I wanted all the 78s but Kat professed to have claimed them herself because the 78 player was hers I can’t take a record from someone, so I let them be, even though she offered to let me have one to take away, but that would have ruined the collection. So, as a fellow hoarder, and an avid (nay, obsessed) vinyl collector, I let her keep them all, because I know how much it means to someone to have a record which is subsequently taken away from them for one reason or another. I did snap loads of photos though, so I did get to take something!

Here’s the best (imho) photos I took (there’s more available, including shots of the most important pages from their explanatory Portfolio) on my Flickr page):

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All in all? A very worthwhile afternoon, even if it was a bit overcast! Can’t blame them for the weather, it didn’t rain though. The event was on all weekend, but I never even knew about it until I walked past on the Sunday (I left just after the exhibition closed). I had a great time, and it was an enjoyable morsel of brain food. So,  the moral of all this? Always be prepared to deviate from your original plan when out in a city, and keep your eyes peeled because you never know what you might stumble upon.

You may have traveled to this corner of the Web expecting to see my scribblings about the new UCE logo and how I was concurring with what many other people had already roundly described as a big waste of money and a poorly-implemented rebranding. You’ve just got the short version, but if you’re looking for the long version - sorry, you’ll be disappointed - I was strongly advised to remove this from my site (more on this later). So, this post has automagically gone into hiding for the time being, as some people in high places feel it may be sufficient cause for me to receive an official telling off or maybe even removal from my course. I’m opinionated, but I’m not an idiot, so this post will most likely stay in hiding until UCE have stamped my degree.

(And you can count on the fact that I’m quite surprised about this happening now of all times, and I won’t be letting this lie when I have a proper chance to sit back and consider all of this and argue properly in my defence, but now is not the time.)

(more…)

…As apparently they’ve just decided to take delivery of a new VRA (Voice Risk Analysis) system for their Benefits helpline, in an effort to reduce fraud (often indicative of lying, just how polygraphs work) by detecting stress in a caller’s voice. Rats.

In the first three months of a pilot scheme in Harrow, north London, that began in May, 173 housing benefit and council fraudsters were exposed, saving the council £110,000.

…

VRA is used only in conjunction with questioning by call operators who have been trained to detect deception, says a spokesman for the Capita Group, which owns the technology. It works by measuring “micro-changes” to the frequency of the human voice and relaying to the operator, in real time, the level of risk that the speaker is being deceptive.

I’ll reserve judgement on the efficacity of this scheme - however, I’ll be amazed if the helpline staff can even hear callers, given the shocking condition of some of Birmingham’s antique telephone lines!

Remember: lying: baaad. Birmingham City Council knows all… They’ll be installing those fancy mirror-style TVs in your homes next so they can broadcast inspiring promotional content to you!