Link Banana

Photographed from above. On The Big Picture.

If those lines aren’t enough to make you view this one, nothing else I say will.

A very cool short video from “the Beeb.” My favorite is probably the view of London taxis during a day, but they’re all pretty good visualizations.

(via Gems Sty)

Calling to mind this story, a British website paid people to stand on the street with “If you ask me for a £5 note you can have it” sandwich boards. They report surprisingly low acceptance of the offer.

(via Boing Boing)

The records of the central criminal court of London from 1674 to 1913 are now online. It’s not exactly the most user-friendly interface, but you can find some interesting tidbits. The Economist’s story has some interesting bits, like this:

Henry Williams, who in 1886 was sentenced to four months’ hard labour for “attempting an abominable crime with a mare”.

Another interesting — and sometimes ghastly — thing to do is see what crimes merited what punishment. Some truly gruesome punishments are on display, like John Morgan who was drawn and quatered in 1679 for “having received Orders from the See of Rome.”

There’s been a fair bit of coverage of London’s maybe-important mayoral election, which is tomorrow. Anne Applebaum offers the best, and most entertaining primer I’ve seen.

The candidates haven’t exactly gone out of their way to discourage this kind of commentary. Though he’s been more staid than usual during the mayoral campaign, Boris is a man who can’t stop telling jokes, whether at the expense of the aforementioned mistress or the people of Portsmouth (a city of “drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs”).

Adjectives like mop-haired, blustering, and old Etonian appear in just about every profile of him ever written. So does his most famous quotation—”Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3”—though that line is misleading since his sense of humor is usually far more self-deprecating. “Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering buffoon,” he once remarked, “there lurks a blithering buffoon.”

Ken, by contrast, isn’t funny or self-deprecating at all. His need to attract attention manifests itself in other ways: the expensive celebration he had planned to commemorate 50 years of Fidel Castro’s dictatorial rule, for example, or his public embrace of a Muslim cleric who defends suicide bombing and advocates the death penalty for homosexuals. Like Boris, Ken often offends people, though his insults are less likely to have started out as jokes. He called the U.S. ambassador to Britain a “chiseling little crook” and told a Jewish journalist he was behaving “like a concentration camp guard.”

The Economist compares the cost of living in cities around the world. I was rather surprised that neither London nor New York came out on top. As proof of my ignorance they say Norway’s Oslo has topped the list since 2005.

Also, this map of American cities and their singles sex ratio has been floating around. It appears to have originated on The Daily Dish. It appears to be related to Richard Florida’s recent Who’s Your City?

Some would say, and with good reason, that there’s no good reason to compare London and Paris. They’re different cities with different goals and different heritigates. Nonetheless, the comparison allows for a pretty interesting rundown of what problems and successes the two cities have had. For quick reference, the crux of the difference is roughly thus:

All the same, as Mr Sarkozy has lamented, Paris seems to lack London’s dynamism. Marc Levy, a French novelist who has chosen to make London his home, argues that the conservative attitude towards planning and architecture has a direct effect on creative life. “Paris doesn’t take risks, it lacks audacity,” he says. “How can you create a desire to innovate when the ambient culture is oriented towards preservation?”