I’m still working through the photographs I took on holiday in German a few weeks ago. I’ve put the latest few online on Flickr. Some of the shots are pretty grainy (like this one) as they were taken in absolutely appalling light — in the case of this shot it was very grey and overcast and getting on towards dusk. Lots more to come which I intend to put up about 8-10 at a time over the next few weeks — and I’m keeping the best of the steam train shots ’til last (probably). I still have some 30% of the shots to look at in detail.
Category Archives: personal
Self-Portrait of a Foot with Thirteen Things
Self-Portrait of a Foot, originally uploaded by kcm76.
One of the groups I belong to on Flickr is called “Thirteen Things”. The idea is to post a self-portrait with a list of thirteen things about oneself. This photo and list are my first contribution, posted a couple of days ago.
Amazing the things one thinks to do when getting bored in an hotel room!
As this is my foot I thought I’d use this for my first “Thirteen Things” list. So here are 13 Personal Things About Me …
- I’m an only child
- I’ve changed a lot over the years; even my boss says I’ve mellowed! I used to be very angry and lose my temper a lot, I’ve learnt to let things wash over me and go with the flow; tho’ I do still get irritated and frustrated and swear a lot.
- I love the smell of grapefruit, coconut oil, bacon cooking, fresh bread, the sea, wood smoke, frying garlic & onions.
- I hardly ever drink coffee.
- I lost 20Kg between summer 2007 and New Year 2008, but i’m still obese.
- I was born with a deformed right index finger-nail; I’ve now had it permanently removed.
- I have a third nipple.
- My parents didn’t have me circumcised, for which I am very grateful.
- I wasn’t baptised as an infant. I took the plunge myself at 22 (eeek, that’s 35 years ago!) when I joined the Roman Catholic church. I’ve since converted to atheism.
- I’ve worn glasses since I was 14; it doesn’t bother me and I can’t imagine switching to contact lenses.
- I have never driven a car or a motorbike.
- I’m actually boring, shy and introverted, although many people find this hard to believe.
- I have type 2 diabetes.
On Marriage
While we are sort-of on the subject of marriage, here’s an insightful quote from chapter two of Anthony Powell’s novel Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant:
A future marriage, or a past one, may be investigated and explained in terms of writing by one of its parties, but it is doubtful whether an existing marriage can ever be described directly in the first person and convey a sense of reality. Even those writers who suggest some of the substance of married life best, stylise heavily, losing the subtlety of the relationship at the price of a few accurately recorded, but isolated aspects. To think at all objectively about one’s own marriage is impossible, while a balanced view of other people’s marriage is almost equally hard to achieve with so much information available, so little to be believed. Objectivity is not, of course, everything in writing; but if one has cast objectivity aside, the difficulties of presenting marriage are inordinate. Its forms are at once so varied, providing a kaleidoscope, the colours of which are always changing, always the same. The moods of a love affair, the contradictions of friendship, the jealousy of business partners, the fellow feeling of opposed commanders in total war, these are all in their way to be charted. Marriage, partaking of such – and a thousand more – dual antagonisms and participations, finally defies definition.
They're Clearly Meant for Each Other
From online news service Ananova:
Couple divorce after online ‘affair’
A Bosnian couple are getting divorced after finding out they had been secretly chatting each other up online under fake names.
Sana Klaric, 27, and husband Adnan, 32, from Zenica, poured out their hearts to each other over their marriage troubles, and both felt they had found their real soul mate. The couple met on an online chat forum while he was at work and she in an internet cafe, and started chatting under the names Sweetie and Prince of Joy.
They eventually decided to meet up – but there was no happy ending when they realised what had happened. Now they are both filing for divorce – with each accusing the other of being unfaithful.
Sana said: “I thought I had found the love of my life. The way this Prince of Joy spoke to me, the things he wrote, the tenderness in every expression was something I had never had in my marriage. It was amazing, we seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriages – and how right that turned out to be. We arranged to meet outside a shop and both of us would be carrying a single rose so we would know the other. When I saw my husband there with the rose and it dawned on me what had happened I was shattered. I felt so betrayed. I was so angry.”
Adnan said: “I was so happy to have found a woman who finally understood me. Then it turned out that I hadn’t found anyone new at all. To be honest I still find it hard to believe that the person, Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things to me on the internet, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years.”
Friendship
I’ve just come back from a couple of days in Somerset attending the funeral of one of my closest friends. Although old enough to be my father, Victor was 82 when he died a couple of weeks ago, we had been friends for almost 35 years since we met when we were both post-grad students: he doing an MA in Art History, me just starting on my doctorate in Chemical Spectroscopy. In the year we spent together at university we became close friends; so close that when Victor’s wife died a couple of years back I was asked to be the celebrant at her funeral, and this week I gave the funeral oration for Victor – which was well received.
How nice then to return to find the following quote (attributed to Muhammad Ali) in my email:
Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.
I’ll perhaps write more about Victor later; as I said in my eulogy, he was a great man.
Twittering about New Technologies
The other day I came across a new (to me, anyway) expression: “declarative living”. You can find a quick explanation of it on Squidoo. The example of this to which I was introduced by Kelly is Twitter.
Let’s say it again: “declarative living”. I’m sad to say I’ve never heard so many round things in my life. And me who is so often a second-wave early adopter of new technology too. I really cannot see the point, with a passion. Please someone explain to me the purpose of living in the pockets of someone the other side of the globe who I’ve never met (and likely never will meet) 24/7?
It seems to me this is all about depersonalising and dumbing down everything — the modern opium for the masses — and selling us crap we don’t want or need to keep us occupied and not thinking or meddling with what the “great and the good” want to get up to next. (Iran, anyone?) It is false progress. [There’s a whole new topic on “false stuff”, but that’s for some other time.]
What worries me (possibly even more) is that in the last few months I seem to be turning into a Luddite like my father before me. Only father (who died last year at the age of 86) started being a Luddite before the age of colour TV. [How he never had apoplexy I don’t know as I discovered going through his papers after he died that he had belonged to an organisation against the introduction of digital computers — and this back in about 1970! Then I went on take my career in IT.]
Don’t get me wrong. I love things like flickr, weblogs, conferencing (ah the good old days of bulletin boards; been there since before PC was born!) and IM. I just don’t get this “let’s wear our whole lives on our sleeves all the time” stuff. I mean, why am I interested in real time that Kelly is cooking spaghetti or looking for her boots? Why would anyone be interested except Kelly and maybe the dog? Where does all this stop and privacy start?
But debating this with Kelly and others on her Kellypuffs weblog has made me think more about this. Indeed that is the good thing about the passion being expressed: it does make us think about what we are doing, what we really believe in and what is actually important. And each one of us will come up with different answers to those questions — none of which are intrinsically right or wrong; they’re just right or wrong for us at this time.
I guess where I’m really at is: just because we can do it, doesn’t mean it is worth doing or that we should do it. Developing the technologies may be an interesting (even useful) research exercise, but that doesn’t mean it has to/should be unleashed on the great unwashed as if it were the next best thing to sliced bread.
For me it would be more to the point if the effort the IT industry is putting into all this pseudo-progress-stuff was focused into something actually useful for humanity rather than just generating more CO2 to no purpose.
Second Life Ecology
According to a post at Treehugger an avatar in Second Life uses as much electricity as the average Brazilian. To arive at this conclusion Nicholas Carr recently has done a back-of-envelope calculation comparing the impact of actual humans and Second Life avatars. You can follow the math that leads to this conclusion here but be warned, as always with these things Carr has caused a tirade of critical comment. Now whether Carr is right or not I don’t know, but the even if he’s out by a factor 10 or 100 it does beg a number of questions: Is Second Life ecologically sustainable? Should Second Life have to trade carbon offsets in the real world? And even: Should Second Life be banned by the world powers as a way of reducing CO2 emissions?
Baffling
I have just received an email which begins:
nice creature that jo march is!”by a fellow younger than himself, for emil was past fourteen and a pluckycandy molly loo and merry brought me. mammy says i can’t eat it, and itand her “ow!” was more suggestive of pins being run into her than of feari’ve had it out with him, and he won’t want to see me again in a hurry,””i said you did not know me; now you seerose looked up with a face so full of tender sorrow he could not doubtwas, with a gilt crown on its head, a little bow in its hand, and one whiteponderously upon the bench, which creaked under his weight, stuffy …
It’s spam, of course, which is just as well because the subject line was the killer punch: “dont understand, hope u can help”. Well if they don’t know I sure as Hell don’t!