| (Jolly?) Hollyhocks |
[01 Jul 2009|08:19pm] |
Which I pass on way to work every year at this time and have wanted to photograph for many many years. Now have camera, but have I done them justice? Not necessarily. I think ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jinty (IIRC) had a picture of them with a labourer lunching, which was much better.
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| Why does everything have to be symbolic? |
[30 Jun 2009|08:38pm] |
I was cutting the hedge last weekend and I thought, but I'm cutting back new growth, this is not good semiotically. The hedge had wooden bits in, not cut last year, which I couldn't get through. Oh yes, you are old - there will be bits like that in you. Need to get new tools. The hedge is me now? FFS. Cut the holly by the door. Good. Finally something positive: am removing the prickliness facing someone trying to get into my house. Yet the pretty new leaves were a lighter, more lively, lime green, and you cut them off.
The back garden was cleared earlier in the year, as if to show willingness (state of garden = state of self) - I'd sorted my space ready to plant things; dug the earth: look at it, ready. Did plant herbs. But the Green has grown back, and needs a massive clear-out attack again. And the parsley was eaten by slugs. Yet the bramble (my enemy) is feeding butterflies and bees, so where does that leave me?
Am not in despair at all.
The parsley has new leaves.
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| warm rain |
[29 Jun 2009|08:03pm] |
warm rain. Warm - about body temperature - rain
is WRONG.
Especially when you are already too hot and wanting to cool off, being simultaneously in the sun and yet rained on. Being bathed in something of a bodily-fluid temperature is not great. And the streets smell. Petrichor is a nice way of saying B.O. Yes, you, pavement; looking at you, road. You whiff.
(am enjoying it really. For the unusualness. It's like being in tropical climes.)
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| wanting world 2.1 |
[19 Jun 2009|11:47pm] |
1. There were I believe a series of programs on TV (that antiquated content-delivery system that I interface with a bit through the two hacked TiVos (courtesy e_pepys)) about anyalsing rock songs by PAUL MORLEY. Now you might not be a Morelyite, but I think I am. The one on the Smith's song This Charming Man, with Simon Armitage, I caught up with that one by youtube (not there now, I think). But where are the others .. and if not there then why can't I buy a DVD?
2. Waldemar Januszczak's TV progam about art. I saw the Land Art one, but missed the rest. Again, why can I not get this on YouTube, or DVD to buy?
Surely everything I want, my televisual needs, should be by now available to me whether I watched it when it was on or not. It's true for much of it already: iplayer, youtube, DVD, bittorrent, or whatever; so where's the rest? Surely we have moved beyond the tired old concept of content tied to time slots? Or having missed it.
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[18 Jun 2009|07:42pm] |
o bee, bee, oh, bee, bee, bee
you hit the window pane, repeatedly.
when you should be on the meadow.
o bee, let me help you, there you go -
gone.
flowers will thank me tomorrow.
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| Painted Ladies betoken a hot summer |
[01 Jun 2009|09:07pm] |
The first time I saw Painted Ladies in Bolton was in 1976. Hadn't seen the adults, but That summer, we found their caterpillars eating the thistles. Identified them and went, 'no way!'; we don't get those. But reared them through at home and indeed they were.
So, it takes me back, this news that they're back up far north..
So they reckon we're in for a 1976. I'd trust them more than the Met Office (who have been saying the same thing). Begin the hoarding of the water now. To follow: hose-pipe bans; cracked reservoirs; a Minister of Drought (usually appointed a day or two before the deluge).
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| June's off to a good start |
[01 Jun 2009|07:31pm] |
Locked myself in the garden this morning, watering the herbs. Back door blew closed, and the alley has a very secure unscalable security door at the street-end (after a spate of burglaries years ago). Thankfully fully clothed. With house key actually, but not back door or security gate. Could have gone to neighbours' back doors and knocked to have got through to the front street that way, but obviously that was last resort. 20 mins of banging on the back door later, e_pepys rescues me (thank you!). Sore knuckles.
Another sunny day - Back in spasm, but the heat is relaxing, like sauna and/or raljex.
I SPY: Saw a munkjack deer in Shotover on Sunday. Too quick for a photo, after the intital staring at each other for a long second, both frozen, then gone. but colour me a bit thrilled - not seen one there before.
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[30 May 2009|12:01am] |
pfft! pfft!
the air is full of stuff
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| Bad science archaeology? (actual archaeology) |
[28 May 2009|08:11pm] |
Göbekli Tepe
My friend Ruth WNLJ says,
If they were mobile, how could it be a burial area – as the people could have died when they were hunter-gathering a long way away..they’d have had to move the bodies all the way back..?
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| Bad Science archaeology (i.e. from years ago) |
[28 May 2009|07:18pm] |
Does anyone else remember a stunningly stupid piece by, I think, Channel 4 News, although maybe it was Newsnight, from a few years ago? (which I am still amused by/ angry about), to wit
The point of the piece is the low and falling (at the time) Italian birth rate. So it is posited as a headline 'In the near future There Will Be No Italians'
Standing at the Trevi fountain the reporter tossed a coin in and said "Tradition has it that if you toss a coin into the Trevi fountain you will return to Rome, but if you were to return in 50 years time, you may find yourself alone."
I kid you not. (although I may have misremebered the '50 years' but it was something like that, not such a long time that the returner would not be returning.)
(despite you might think some of the Italians born that day would still be alive one hopes, let alone ... well, quite, let's just let that alone.)
The trend, if it continues as it is currently, will mean Something Entirely Bizarre!
Yesbutno. *is* that trend going to continue on its recent trajectory? Is the better question.
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| Incredible Journey, Human, The |
[26 May 2009|09:21pm] |
The third one was much more content-full than the previous two, I thought.
Putting aside Dr. Roberts' "I wouldn't shag a Neanderthal; would you? No; and we agree with the genetic data we have, that no-one did", as what a hopelessly naive, attractive woman would say rather than allegedy sapiens blokes in general would do rather than, say, a sheep.
I liked it, it told me about Gobekli Tepe, which I'd never heard about before.
And I thought was cogent on the us/Neanderthals cross-over. Although didn't say it in the terms I'd seen before (said the same things in a different key) - that we were traders, had enormous trading networks, and they didn't.
So you look at a modern human in Europe, they are striding the hill-tops; an individual in France has shell-beads on their neck which come from the Atlantic coast of Spain - they are trading across a wide area. Contrast Neanderthals (hugging the receding tree-lined valleys) who had no necklaces until the homo sapiens turned up, living in isolated small communities and not trading; then copied what they saw, so we see them then making (relatively crude) holes in nuts from the forest floor to string them to imitate what they saw. Can't remember where I got that from, and thinking about it, I wonder that the evidence for co-habitation of the same places would be lacking/ problematic. But liked it enough to have cemented it as FACT to be repeated. (dammit) . good story.
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[12 May 2009|07:19pm] |
.. also the Nyaho performance was in Harris-Manchester chapel, which has Burne-Jones stained glass on the walls.
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| Port Meadow is Yellow |
[11 May 2009|09:33pm] |
(that is all. It was the words driving the posting rather than the picture, obviously.)
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| D&D as RaceFail |
[10 May 2009|09:35pm] |
The new RaceFail
[ If you aren't familiar with it, I think the issue is best addressed by Rushthatspeaks]
reminds me of D&D.
The set-up of the original game was that you existed in a town/city in the midst of a 'wilderness'. And you, after dungeons, went out and fought monsters in that wilderness, and then built castles. The wilderness was not owned by any existing authority, it was only inhabited by bandits and monsters. You could carve out a fiefdom. This puzzled me more the more I thought about it*, and as a result the last D&D campaign I ran had gnolls as Native Americans and not 'evil' at all really just seen as that by the colonists, and opposed to the settlement of their lands, and violent about it, as a 'reveal' - you start out with the gnolls as the enemy, assumed, it's the culture you come from, but come to understand during the campaign that your starting point was incorrect, and where do you go from that.
* I think it's a troublesome concept for a British person, because we are aware that in our Empire, there were clearly people there already. It's also true of the American colonies, but as Churchill said to Roosevelt, there are 200 million Indians in India alive today (or whatever it was at the time) and you have how many? (As a way of establishing that we, looked down up on by Americans at the time for being colonialists, had been a hell of a lot better with the native populations than the Americans, colonialists too, had been.)
Only an American would posit an empty land which is free to be colonized without thinking twice, because the modern history of America for many, most?, Americans begins with the colonists, whereas we remember 1066. Damn that Norman French/Viking upper-class! (of which I'm a descendent), Anglo-Saxon wroth still felt. (let alone original Briton, i.e. Welsh wroth. They should be much angrier really.)
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| Stevie Smith appreciation post |
[10 May 2009|08:37pm] |
Autumn
He told his life story to Mrs. Courtly
Who was a widow. 'Let us get married shortly',
He said. 'I am no longer passionate,
But we can have some conversation before it is too late.'
- Stevie Smith
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