caught in the wild

One thing I've always been rubbish at is discerning minutiae of expression, stance and speech. There was an interview in New Scientist the other week with a bloke so good at micro-expressions and so on that he trains security operatives to spot people about to do bad things; from studies of photographs and film handily taken short moments before assassinations and suchlike the precise expression (apparently quite invariable) of those about to pull the trigger has been identified and can hopefully be used to spot people about to kick off in airports or in tense situations of conflict. The techniques are just as applicable to spotting someone who's really bored in a meeting, lecture or party or for having fun when watching people in public places and working out what's going on. If I remember to I sometimes try to notice large-scale stuff which everyone knows about such as the crossed arms, crossed legs and so on but always forget even basic stuff such as which direction people look in when they're thinking about lying or trying to remember a truth.

A couple of minutes before sneaking up behind this pair I saw an obvious example where the nasty man was obviously angry at the nice lady (though I was helped by the fact that he was revving up to start shouting). I couldn't work out what the deal with the two above was; was he taking pictures to dispel an awkward moment or so that he could then lower his arms and coory in to show the pictures as they looked at the view? Were they even a couple or just brother and sister or just friends? This is the sort of stuff it would be interesting to be able to work out by posture and expression alone . One could also then amuse onesself by wandering around the place telling particular show-off boyteenagers not to bother as the girlteenager at which their activities were aimed obviously wasn't interested in their caperings.

Despite the hill's fullness of tourists (including some photographers attempting to mitigate that one-eye-closed sneer thing we do when looking through the viewfinder by standing in silly positions it was quite a pleasant place to spend the late afternoon until a busful of wedding guests arrived (presumably for some pictures) and started cluttering the place up with fancy dresses, silly kilts and snotty accents. They scared off the couple of potential blipcard-recipients I was edging slowly towards so I too pottered away. Nicky was away today on a canal-boaty-trip with some workpeople so I had booked up to see a Shoot-'em-up although she'd probably have liked it; kind of like 300 but with less naked men, scripted by Aardman, directed by John Woo and cinématographed by someone who had quite liked Sin City but thought it would have been better in colour. It's one of these things which probably works better on the big screen just for the showiness. It's nice to hear Clive Owen's proper accent too after whatever it was he was trying to do in Sin City and in a different direction in Children of Men. Paul Giamatti was doing a funny accent instead but was still very watchable.

We're going to the zoo tomorrow.