Celebrity selfies

Call me a fame hog, but I can't resist a selfie with a famous person. Here are some of my favourites.

Big Bird 

Paddington Bear (twice)

Scooby Doo

Wally the Green Monster (mascot of the Boston Red Sox baseball club)

A member of the Ghostbusters

And his nemesis, Mr Stay Puft

Lester, the store mascot for the Leicester Square Lego Store

Harry Potter (in brickish mode)

Groot

Dougal from The Magic Roundabout

And a blurry photo with Ermintrude, also from The Magic Roundabout

Samantha Stephens (from the TV show Bewitched)

And finally, long-time Cardiff resident and local legend, Billy the Seal

Park Life (Victoria Park, Canton)

On Easter Sunday we went out in the sunshine to Victoria Park in Canton. It's one of Cardiff's bigger parks, with a big play area, a splash park, lots of trees and flowerbeds and a caff selling ice creams.

It also has a statue of a onetime resident of the park, Billy the Seal. We took a selfie with him.

Billy was discovered in with a catch of fish when a trawler docked in Cardiff in 1912. He was subsequently kept in a small pool in Victoria Park where he lived until 1939. After he died, it was discovered that actually Billy was a female seal. Her skeleton is now on display in the National Museum of Wales. Billy was later the subject of a song by folk group The Hennessys, who also wrote a song about The Grangetown Whale. 

Incidentally, Grangetown now has a whale mural.

But back to Victoria Park, I really liked this yellow tulip that had snuck into a bed full of pink tulips. How to make sure you stand out!

And we also saw this, which I have on authority from my friend Sarah, is a squirrel nest. But to us it looked like Groot when he extends himself into a ball to protect his friends at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy.

On that cultural note, we bade farewell to Victoria Park. Until next time.

Psychological insights into "collecting" - taxonomic and aesthetic collections

As I have mentioned a few times recently, I am doing a MSc in Business Psychology. A recent module, about marketing and advertising has been really interesting, particularly a tangent in a recent assignment about collecting. I find this particularly interesting as both Cathy and I have the collecting 'bug', and as a result we have a lot of stuff in our house.

The main psychological research into collecting I've read has been by Russell Belk. He distinguishes 'collecting' from 'hoarding' and 'accumulating', although I reckon they can look quite similar. But for the record, 'collecting' is "the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences". Hoarding, meanwhile, is defined as collecting several things that are exactly the same, while accumulating is the gathering of things without the idea of completing a 'set', e.g. when a person doesn't throw out newspapers and they just start to pile up.

Collecting experiences: My collection of commemorative scarfs 

That note about experiences is true, I 'collect' football grounds that I have been to and I know several other football fans who do the same thing. It's the motivation behind buying mementoes like half and half scarfs or keeping ticket stubs.

There are different ways of ‘collecting’. Belk distinguishes between taxonomic and aesthetic collecting. Taxanomic collecting is working on the basis that you can complete a set - whether that set is stamps from Zanzibar, or one of each type of Roman coin, or the complete range of original Kenner Star Wars figures from the 80s. I'd say football stickers are a very good example of this - you even get an album showing which ones you need to complete the collection. Taxonomic collectors don't tend to give up when they complete the set. They usually move on to a new set or keep trying to improve their collection with better examples of the objects in it.

Football stickers are an example of taxonomic collecting

Aesthetic collecting is open-ended. It's when you collect a particular type of art, for example, where there is no finite limit. Of the two, taxonomic collecting is more active, with collectors deliberately seeking out the objects they need to complete their collection, while aesthetic collecting is more passive - people add to their collections as they see objects they want with less 'urgency'.

I'd say the Tsum-Tsums are taxonomic and the Groots are aesthetic

I think there is also a middle ground. I'm a member of the British Thematic Association, which is the aesthetic side of stamp collecting. While I have gone out and made my own 'list' of stamps that fit my theme, I also buy things that it simply wouldn't be possible to list. That is very much a case of 'If I see it, I'll decide whether I want it in my exhibition.' There's no way of knowing if my collection is complete because it's not as simple as 'have I got every stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty?' - there are all the envelopes with those stamps on, many of which are interesting in their own right.

My stamp collection on display for a stamp society

Having said that, there are attempts all the time to turn aesthetic collecting into taxonomic collecting - the Boba Fett Fan Club has tried to list absolutely every toy and other piece of merchandise featuring the galaxy's most feared bounty hunter. It's a nigh on impossible job. My collection is pretty much aesthetic in that I buy stuff when I see it but don't go actively looking. (Although I do always check out the Star Wars toys in toy shops and other shops that sell toys.)

My Boba Fett collection

Belk notes one of the more unusual aspects of collecting, in that once a thing is in a collection, it becomes special, precious, and 'sacred'. A collector can't just get rid of it, unless replacing it with a better item. The collector needs to look after the collection. It's kind of like the old saying that what you own can end up owning you because I admit sometimes all this stuff is inconvenient.

But I can't just get rid of it, it's my collection...

Wisdom for life from Groot Comic, issue 6

Back in 2014 (was it that long ago?) I watched Guardians of the Galaxy and fell in love with it. As a film it's just a roller coaster of action, witty dialogue, special effects and has a great soundtrack to match.

The past eighteen months have seen the number of GotG toys in our house rocket (pun intended), as evidenced by this photo:

GotG Disney Infinity figures

It's hard to pick a favourite Guardian. But if I had to, I'd say my favourite character in the film was Rocket Raccoon. Cathy's favourite character was Groot, who is a talking tree of few words. Specifically "I am Groot." (Incredibly Vin Diesel who voiced Groot recorded all the lines of "I am Groot" in the film separately, in English and in all the other languages it was released in as well.)

GotG has also got me into buying comics. Not just the Guardians of the Galaxy title, which is back after a months-long hiatus, but the spin-offs as well. A six-issue run of Groot comic has just finished. I started buying it for Cathy, but I really enjoyed it as well.

In issue six, we get Groot's back story (although that has been in several of the other comics and there are many different versions of the tale), in which Groot is exiled from his home planet of fellow groots, for showing compassion towards a human child kidnapped by the groots for research purposes. Groot travels to Earth to meet the child he freed because he wants her to know that he still thinks about her. Along the way, he muses on some of the things he wants to tell her - that his exile wasn't dreadful, that through it he became a Guardian, that he wants to thank her for being the catalyst of his rebellion.

Comic books are generally dismissed as fairly meaningless. But this particular issue was quite emotional. It got me, I must admit. I had a lump in my throat at the end and was a bit blinky.

I'd freely admit I'm not a fast learner. It has taken me many years to learn some simple things in life. But one thing I have learned (the hard way) is to be open to wisdom wherever you find it. These panels seemed to me to be true and life-affirming and worthwhile lessons to dwell on. You will need to click on them to read them.

Groot Issue #6

Final panel of Groot #6

I love that last line. "Life is not about the shadow you cast on your enemies, but the shade you provide for your friends."