... of the seven deadly sins, the eighth and most horrid is emotional blackmail ... whilst for this blogger, the only sacred thing is life itself
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Monday, November 5, 2012
sweet voices of reason ( part 99 ) ... oliver sacks talks about what hallucinations can tell us about human conciousness
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/oct/30/oliver-sacks-shares-hallucinations
http://www.ted.com/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds.html
and a subsequent book review from will self ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/08/hallucinations-oliver-sacks-review?INTCMP=SRCH
and one from new york
http://nymag.com/news/features/oliver-sacks-2012-11/
Saturday, November 3, 2012
in conversation with dev ...
i took dev by surprise for this picture, holding the camera in my lap whilst we talked on a sunny park bench
we'd been talking about kindness and tolerance and he suggested that england was a far kinder place than india
we have pensions and welfare, and he has no fear of being neglected here on account of age and infirmity
then he went on to talk about dogmatism and conformity, saying that in india a family would often expect an unmarried daughter to commit suicide if she was having a child
and then he said that although he no longer believes in heaven and hell, he'd rather go to hell in the company of a "pandit", than go to heaven with ten thousand conformists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandit
the vulcan can no longer fly
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-19952395
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Vulcan
when i was a teenager, during the difficult times we called the cold war, one might sometimes hear a single vulcan on its way north during a still night
they were armed with atom bombs and were supposedly prepared to cross the baltic if required, on their way to bomb strategic targets in russia, if war had broken out between east and west
the idea was that they would fly in beneath the radar whilst everyone was watching the exchange of inter continental ballistic missiles far above them
the engines crackled and roared like no other plane i knew and sometimes i fancied you might glimpse the flames as the plane climbed
i often used to wonder if tonight was the night ?
but the thought only came to me some decades later that we had been living "in a moral vacuum"
Friday, November 2, 2012
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Sunday, October 28, 2012
remembering music ... blimey ... how did a choir of country boys sing this whilst unable to read music properly ?
the answer is ... we probably sang it quite badly whilst thoroughly enjoying our few short moments of pure joy and spiritual ecstasy
norman townsend, the wretch, was a great choirmaster and trotted his unruly tribe of trebles through two choir practises a week in the echoing shadows of malmesbury abbey before driving off to his night shift at the railway works in swindon
i am still grateful to him, despite my subsequent agnosticism and anti-imperialism, for bequeathing this "stately" music and this "triumphalist" language which still reside comfortably as welcome guests in sunlit attics of my memory
his good taste in church music was unerring, so this is the one in B flat and not the one in C
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbaz9T-RW-M
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Zhoen ...
finished her blog today with this sentence ...
"Church bells pealing, a wonderful sound, like train whistles and ship horns. "
so it only seems natural to plunder this picture from Shorpy ...
... and then add a link to another aspect of my most favourite railroad photographer's work ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbzAJoW34DM
... headphones if you have them !
"Church bells pealing, a wonderful sound, like train whistles and ship horns. "
so it only seems natural to plunder this picture from Shorpy ...
... and then add a link to another aspect of my most favourite railroad photographer's work ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbzAJoW34DM
... headphones if you have them !
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Monday, October 15, 2012
word verification troubles ...
I made eight unsuccessful attempts to leave the following simple comment on the FÜNFFINGERPLÄTZE's blog after she'd written about a pang of food nostalgia ...
"Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit"
Grrr ! I just can't read those wobbly letters ...
Sunday, October 14, 2012
mother nature's riposte ... a second flower twenty-four hours after the first
... i had to stand on tiptoe with one foot on the dog's lead and arms stretched uncomfortably high to get this picture
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Friday, October 12, 2012
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Old age never comes alone…
I might be turning out like my grand-dad after all … much of his
life seemed to be spent criticising and complaining, grumbling about the youth
and its culture, and fidgeting with a bible.
As the bus lurched past Clapham Common this afternoon with me slumped
against the window on the top deck, I glanced out and noticed a young woman striding away from
the stop and wearing some very tight shorts with that common and conspicuous attention-seeker's combination of very long smooth naked legs and longish silky blonde hair that swung with her rhythm.
And then I caught myself thinking, “Dear oh dear ! If Clapham Common were
the Garden of Eden, that hair would never even hardly cover her nipples.”
Sunday, October 7, 2012
this little bronze statue from ancient crete greets you at the "superhuman" exhibition in the wellcome collection's gallery
photography was forbidden at the british library so i took this picture by the door ... kerouac's scroll manuscript of "on the road" was unfurled ... well not quite all of it as it was too long !
what was particularly enjoyable for a man with new glasses was that you could get right down close to the glass and see the texture of the carbon ribbon in the text, a bit like looking over the writer's shoulder
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19811219
some info about the owner of the scroll ...
http://goodvibesmedia.com/2012/01/20/irsay-insights/
and this borrowed picture gives you an idea of the thing ...
http://www.ashmontmedia.com/releases/release_images/scroll_pics/scroll-layout_lg.jpg
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