Ooh first post! Let’s start off randomly…
PYLON OF THE MONTH!
Ok, do you like pylons? To me they’re just big metal things that I see in fields and roads and stuff. They serve no purpose apart from doing electricity stuff.
But some people love a BIG. ERECT. PYLON.
And I have to say that some of these are magnificent. Take a look at this fucker from May 2016
Or this. Feb 2016.
I was lucky enough to be able to spot a nice big pylon at Glastonbury this year.
That might be my favourite pylon.
My least favourite pylon is this one, from the public safety ads, largely because it killed this kid so many times.
There’s a big fucker between the 13th and 14th holes at Chilworth that magically attracts my golf balls, but my favourite is this one that saw the final days of poor old Edgar Deems…
I think this thread deserves some poetry. I give you Death on a LIve WIre, by Michael Baldwin (1930-2014):
Treading a field I saw afar
A laughing fellow climbing the cage
That held the grinning tensions of wire,
Alone, and no girl gave him courage.
Up he climbed on the diamond struts,
Diamond cut diamond, till he stood
With the insulators brooding like owls
And all their live wisdom, if he would.
I called to him climbing and asked him to say
What thrust him into the singeing sky:
The one word he told me the wind took away,
So I shouted again, but the wind passed me by
And the gust of his answer tore at his coat
And stuck him stark on the lightning’s bough;
Humanity screeched in his manacled throat
And he cracked with flame like a figure of straw.
Turning, burning, he dangled black,
A hot sun swallowing at his fork
And shaking embers out of his back,
Planting his shadow of fear in the chalk.
O then he danced an incredible dance
With soot in his sockets, hanging at heels;
Uprooted mandrakes screamed in his loins,
His legs thrashed and lashed like electric eels;
For now he embraced the talent of iron,
The white-hot ore that comes from the hill,
The Word out of which the electrons run,
The snake in the rod and the miracle;
And as he embraced it the girders turned black,
Fused metal wept and great tears ran down
Till his fingers like snails at last came unstuck
And he fell through the cage of the sun.
Admin with “Fowllyd’s” high-brow intervention could we move this to “The Arts”
Thanks.
For me it’s got to be Michael Palin for July.
Now this is a pylon !!
The famous “It’s never happened to me before” pylon:
The Italian “We’ll make it big and beautiful” pylon…
I used to commute by train between Parkstone and Southampton. Quite a few pylons between the two. Took a few photos, most of which I now cannot find.
Blot on the landscape really, apart from the Acme MkII…which has the more delicate tracery of the similar McTavish Power-Wizard.
The best nylon by far
Well you all know my spelling is shit
Out of part curiousity part confusion, I just did a Google on Mc Tavish Power-Wizard and I’m completely dumbfounded to find out there’s an actual real life Hogwarts where the students wear invisible cloaks and stuff and possibly play Quiddich if you could see them.
The Mc Tavish International Academy of Magical Sciences
Not sure how this went under my radar for so long.
Beautiful photo btw … I’ve always thought the Mk11 was at it’s most majestic, in the resplendant glow of a setting sun.
Contentious assertion of the day:
Although the term pylon is used on occasions, particularly when communicating with the public. Within the industry, it is far more common to refer to a pylon as a steel tower. Use of the term pylon would quite likely out you as a mere amateur.
