arts, beliefs, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

Another in our occasional series of quotations encountered during he week which have struck me: because of their zen-ness, their humour, or their verisimilitude.

Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting and … ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to “walk about” into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?
[Wassily Kandinsky, 1910]

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
[Chuck Palahniuk]

It doesn’t matter what you’ve got in your pants if there’s nothing in your brain to connect it to.

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

… the result of some wobbly high-heel work at a drink addled giggle-fest.
[Alison Cross]

amusements

Auction Oddities

As usual there are some strange, and slightly zen, lots in our local monthly auction.

A conductor’s baton, in ebonised wood and silver, London 1920, and a silver child’s fork
Is the fork for use conducting, or the baton used as a child’s eating implement? 

A stuffed red squirrel clasping a nut, perched on a branch. 

An old wooden bottle box containing old garden tools, trowels, chisels, hammers, an old fire extinguisher, a carton containing an enamelled measuring jug, old door plates, a first aid box incl. old spark plugs, an enamelled bread bin and lid containing a pair of green plastic picnic tables for suspension from car windows, a collection of shells, old buckets, an old water feeder by Eltex, 2 prints, etc.
Why does one keep spark plugs in a first aid kit?  Or green plastic picnic tables in a bread bin?

Old wooden cartons containing a large number of small terracotta garden pots, some in an old pram body, a small wall cupboard and an empty box
It was the “pram body” which finished me off!

A Belgian brass trumpet signed C. Mahillon, in case, a pair of shoe trees, and a club.

A python skin, four metres long.
Every home should have one!

I’ve never actually been to this sale as, apart from the odd sword, I’ve never seen anything of interest to me.  One day I must go to the viewing if only for amusement.

quotes

Back Numbers

As hinted a couple of days ago I’ve now retrieved and reformatted the posts from the first incarnations of this weblog.  Well almost all.  What I found the other day was everything pre-March 2005, so there was a gap which I had not realised.  I have today found another file containing a further 79 posts from 2006.

However I am still missing a minimum of 20 posts from 2006 which were on a Yahoo!-based system and which I cannot now locate.

Adding that lot (and the posts of the last couple of days) to my previous totals gives me a grand total of 1117 posts, with 983 of those being specifically to this Zen Mischief weblog.

If anyone really wants to read all this old tripe you can find it in two PDF files:

But be warned: there are almost 70 pages of it!

amusements, beliefs, nudism, thoughts

Nude Day at Work

I’ve posted quite a bit about nudity, naturism and “clothing optional” over the years; a search on “nudity” will pick up the majority of postings.  As you’ll all guess by now I’m a great believer in not wearing clothes if I don’t need to: “nude when possible; clothed when necessary” is the motto.  Having said that I’m not an active member of the naturist movement, partly because I’m not a clubby sort of person and partly down to sheer convenience; I do though support British Naturism (BN) by being a member.

All of which is a preamble to say that I’m not sure I have blogged this cartoon before; if I have it was before this incarnation of the weblog, so a long time ago.  You’ll need to click the image to get a larger, readable, version.

Now wouldn’t that be a great idea.  I wonder which company would have the courage to be the first to introduce Mondays (or any day!) as Nude Day at work?

personal, photography

Zen Mischief Website Updated

At long last, and after three days solid effort, I’ve completely updated my Zen Mischief website.  And not before time either!  I started the revision over 2 years ago and got as far as completing the design before I was rudely interrupted by work.  Only now have I made the time to complete the job.  Although at the moment the content – essentially a static backup to this weblog – is largely the same, all the text has been revised (some pages more than others), all the links checked, dead links removed and many new ones added, and all the images have been overhauled.  I have ideas for new pages and I hope they will be along over the coming weeks – there’s a lot that gets an airing on this weblog but isn’t covered on the website, an omission I hope to rectify.

science, sexuality, thoughts

We're Unique!

What makes humans special and unique?

Well according to a recent Scientific American article it is very simple …

We masturbate.  A lot.

(Oh, come on, it’s not that shocking!)

But the uniqueness is that no other animal, including our close primate relatives, does.  The theory seems to be, at least in part, that it’s all to do with the ability of our well developed brains to create entirely novel and imaginary picture shows and videos.

I’ll leave it to you to follow the link and read the article.  It’s long, but it’s interesting, especially if you’re a science geek.

books, photography, quotes

Milestones Passed in the Dark

Last night I had a realisation, the way one does, that I must have written quite a few blog posts.  But how many?  Having awoken at stupid o’clock this morning I figured I’d use the time to try to work it out.  Could I even do it?  This weblog has been through at least three different incarnations and the old blogs are no longer online.

Wait!  I have backups.  Do I still have the old files?  No, not on my current PC: well I did trash a lot of old data when I migrated to this machine recently.  So let’s search the archive disks … and …  Lo! we do have the old files, saved in an archive of my PC three before last.  (How sad is that?!)  So I was able to do a count …

“I don’t believe it!”  If I go back to when I started blogging in January 2004 I reckon I’ve written 879 Zen Mischief weblog posts (this will be number 880).  And we can add to this another 134 for the Anthony Powell Society.  That’s a total of 1013 in 6½ years, or three a week.  Not prolific by many blogger’s standards, but prolific enough for me, especially when you add in almost 2000 photos (and that’s just the edited ones!) posted on Flickr since February 2006.

While not everything I write is wholly original (whose writing is?) I’ve covered everything from beer, by way of diversions into naturism, science and Bagpuss, to zen.  Hmmm … not bad!

pleasures, topographical

The Tubes are Alive!

Thanks to Annie Mole’s London Underground blog, I’ve just spotted that Matthew Somerville and friends have used the recently opened up Transport for London API to create an (almost) real time map of all the trains on the London Underground.  The picture above is a horribly fuzzy screen capture from the real-time map. OK so the application it still needs some refinement – as Matthew says there are “some unresolved (a small number of stations are misplaced or missing; inter-station journey times need improvement; occasional trains behave oddly due to duplicate IDs)”.  This latter comment is indeed true as I was amused to see a District Line train hacking across country between Wimbledon and Richmond!

As a proof of concept – no, it’s better than that! – this brilliantly shows what can be done by skilled programmers in just a few hours.  In my book it is already a useful resource for Londoners, and has the potential to become much, much more especially if the DLR and London Overground data is accessible and they can be included.  Let’s hope Matthew and Co are able to continue developing the application.

Now what we need is a complete real-time map of all trains on the rail network – Matthew already has some prototype segments working.  Now that would be interesting.