Winds and Breezes

I’m a bit zombified today and that is because I was up reading Nation until 3am. I wasn’t aware it was out until I fell over it in Here Be Dragons I mean Borders Bookstore.

Dear Jesus that shop is troublesome and dangerous. I nearly walked out of there bankrupt but fortunately managed to persuade myself that my assets in photography books were adequate and I should start reading the ones I have instead of adding to a pile of unread books in the corner.

Anyway I don’t know what to say about the book. In a way it’s brilliant but I can’t figure out who it’s pitched at. Children possibly but still…I recommend it but can’t quite figure out what to say about it either.

Weird.

Editorial in today’s Examiner.

It is all well and fine to call emergency budgets to confront a situation that had been brewing — and widely predicted — for several years but would it not have been much better to heed the warnings and take preventative action to try to avert the crisis?

The word “Duh” is lining up. But I do not recall the Examiner taking this stance in the last two years in the same way that I don’t recall Fine Gael voicing concerns about the future in the last election campaign.

Unfortunately, the editorial isn’t really about the economy but the environment. This is a bit of a pity because the piece is actually diluted by trying to say that “okay we screwed the economy, let’s not screw the environment.”

I was at a funeral today and it was quite a big one. A friend’s dad.

Because I was late, I had to wait a while before I could see my friend, and this meant I got to hear lots of conversations around me. Although I knew  about 10 of my friends were outside the church, having arrived before me, I was struck by how outside the community I felt. I don’t live in the village, but the conversations going on around me were of people who knew each other, well.

I know some people well. But they aren’t all in the same place. My closest friends live in Kerry, Germany and Cyprus. I know the people who live next to me, and the people three doors down. I know the guy who parks next to me and I dislike him  because he had my car clamped one day. And I don’t know any one else much in the estate where I’ve lived for more than three years. I am not all that close to the people I do know.

When I go to funerals, there are not so many people I can wave at, and most of the weddings I go to are a long way from where I live. The last one was in Spain.

In some respects, I don’t notice that so much. I have so many other things going on…but it struck me today that I was somewhat detached from any sort of a community, except, in Dublin, the kitesurfing community. And I know other people through stuff like boards.ie/photography, camera clubs but still…detached.

I wonder if this is normal or it’s just something about the aspect of my life that has led me to here.

This is the Princesss Bride, Lego style. If I were Damien this would be in a fluffy link round up but I just haven’t the time to seek out interesting stuff.

However, someone borrowed, permanently, my DVD of the Princess Bride and took it to Australia so I needed a fix. Youtube tossed this at me, plus various other scenes. Man, some of the related links for the Perfect Breasts scene are contextual, not.

I think I will order this again for me.  Damn. The special edition is on preorder for delivery sometime in November. That’ll be a birthday present then.

Friday evening I happened to be in the city centre meeting some friends for a post work drink and a meal. Several entertaining things happened.

The bus I got from Dublin Airport had a stag party on it. I personally think that the tourists concerned were several breadboards short of a kitchen shop, but that’s beside the point. They were dressed up like yellow and green leprachauns. The bus driver was hugely entertained. I would have been if the one dressed in yellow hadn’t taken a liking to my yellow fleece.

I wanted to go into Hickey’s Fabrics to raid their remnants box. I need little bits of black and white satin for the purpose of taking arty type photographs. They didn’t have anything in the remnants box but on the way back up to Bridal where they had rolls of the stuff (albeit more expensive), I had to pass the wool section. I never thought Hickey’s was great for wool and frankly it’s not, really. It’s just better than a lot of other places are (ie, most places have none). However, they had a rack of patterns and dammit all to hell, I now have three extra pattern books and wool with which to do one of the items out of one of the pattern books. Where in Christ’s name I think I’m going to get the time to do any crochet when I don’t have any time to take photographs, cook or kitesurf or organise the boards.ie photography exhibition or moderate any of the internet fora that I am supposed to moderate is a question I cannot answer.

That little trip cost me 67E and while I was at it, all of the 10 minutes I had to get the fabric from Bridal so I still don’t have any black and white satin to take pictures of paperweights and jewellery on.

Very disappointing.

Saturday I drove to Clare. It is a long way from Swords to Clare, even though the roads have improved massively since the last time I drove. After I had met a friend for a few hours, I stopped off in Spanish Point on the way home. The weather really wasn’t my friend.

Neither was Spanish Point. I fell on one of those rocks and stubbed my toe in such a way as it bled profusely and there was a long debate on whether I had broken it, closed off by “and anyway, even if you had, there’s nothing anyone would do about it anyway”.

Right. At least I could drive even if changing gears wasn’t without pain.

I saw the second half of Cork-Kerry and frankly Kerry should be ashamed of themselves for losing that match. Then I drove back to Dublin and I like the Emo service station in Mountrath. They have my business on the N7 sewn up.

I read bits of the Sunday Independent too. It’s still a waste of paper. And someone please make Barry Egan retire. His interview with Paul Fitzpatrick and wife was embarrassingly bed. Even Hello is better and the Sindo still thinks it’s a quality newspaper. I have news for you Aengus…

I’m not convinced it is.

The Olympics are over. I saw some swimming and that was it. I was just too busy and not organised. I saw Nationwide last night and am bemused by batontwirling and whip-wrestling. Not in a good way either.

I would like to say I did all sorts of exciting stuff otherwise but frankly I spent about 9 hours driving between Sat and Sunday, lots of hours in restaurants and too much time on the internet.

In short, if I could cut the internet side of things, the crafts side might happen.

Who is Desmond Fennell? Is he really suggesting that women in the west be compelled to bear more children?

Women have fewer children because it is neither economically nor socially attractive to them to have more children. They are not valued by society when they produce children. If you want women to have more children, then you have to recognise that it is valuable to society that they do have said children. Most societies do not provide that value, or a fair share of economic benefits to women who have children. It massively discriminates against women who have children by 1) often paying them less for work done compared to equivalent male effort 2) giving them fewer opportunities to grow in jobs which are economically valued 3)  providing for them in old age.

Women are supporting themselves now. They are less able to support themselves when they have career breaks to care for children and receive little or no economic support for that sacrifice.

I also don’t like the idea of humans being described as a breed.

I wish that when the Irish Times got rid of their garden wall and went no-pay per view that they had also done what Indo Papers had done and made it possible for their readers to leave comments on their opinion pieces. A bit like commentisfree at the Guardian’s site.

It would have been very inclusive.

Today, John Gibbons has a piece about climate change in it. I’d like to be able to comment on it there but can’t so here is going to have to do instead. The original piece is here.

THEY SAY the only two things in life that are certain are death and taxes. We can now add a third item to that list: climate change.

This is an interesting comment if only because there is one ickle word in there which grates on my nerves when it comes to climate change. Climate change is not new. It has always existed. There is no “now” about it. It’s always been there.

Preventing climate change is now a physical impossibility, as the process is already under way.

We never could prevent it. This is the problem. There is a monumental amount of climate change going on all the time leading to fluctuations in climate and weather which even now are still imperfectly understood. It is arrogant in the extreme to assume we can control it to any major extent.

As we continue to live on this planet, and make changes to it, we have to recognise that even without climate change, there is an impact. So a whole pile of scaremongering about how we can’t do anything about it any more - the subtext being “It’s too late, now we need to adapt” - is disengenuous.

Our floods were not devastating. Not in the real meaning of the word. For devastating floods please go to Bangladesh. And a certain amount of our flood related difficulties could have been alleviated by adequate planning and maintenance of shores which blocked up. Building on floodplains is a far from wise move and we have done much of it in this country.

Debate about the floods is now “it must have something to do with global warming”. Increased rainfall almost certainly does. Flooding, on the other hand, is linked to other issues as well. The world is nowhere near as simple as the environmental lobby would have us believe.

Pure Magic Kitesurfing, Clontarf.

I have been insanely busy of late. Too busy to do anything really. But first up. The above picture; if you look carefully at the blue wall, you’ll see it’s a photograph. It’s a photograph which I took on 15 July last and which now graces the back wall of Pure Magic Kitesurfing in Clontarf. I love it - it’s the coolest thing anyone has ever done with one of my photographs. It’s class.

I wish the rain would stop, the grey would go away and the sun would come back for a while. I’m starting to get mightily cheesed off with the lack of cooperation on the weather front for me. I suppose it doesn’t matter when you are camped out over a laptop fixing photographs, fixing more photographs and updating your FaceBook with all sorts of nonsense. I’m bored and I’m thinking of doing crazy things again. Hang-gliding is starting look attractive but it would appear I’ll have to go to France to get lessons.

MWEH.

I was at a wedding in Spain during the week and on my way to it, I stopped off in Bilbao.

I particularly wanted to see this building. I’m not necessarily the greatest one for modern architecture, although against the run of play I do happen to like the Central Bank and the Corporation offices on Wood Quay. I don’t like most of the new office blocks around the place though. IFSC is okay (for now).

My Spanish is almost nil. I can say - very accurately - that I don’t speak Spanish very well and most people just won’t believe me. So I communicate haphazardly at best. I’m not used to this - I spend most of my time in French and English speaking countries with the occasional foray to a German speaking country where I can make myself understood reasonably competently, and I have a sufficient amount of Spanish for it to be not completely alien to me, but not enough to carry out much of a conversation. It’s  very confusing really.

What was really the oddest thing is not long after I landed into the centre of Bilbao, the first thing that happened is I got chatted up by three youngsters from France. I’m guessing 21 or 22, 24 at the absolute most. They decided to chat me up in English. I don’t know if this is because they didn’t know any Spanish, or whether because I don’t look Spanish (I don’t) or whether because I look German and they didn’t know any German either. Either way, English.

It was a collective effort. After profound discussions on the modalities of the English language, particularly with respect to the question of irregular plural verbs, they eventually managed to emit a very mangled version of the following sentence:

“He” (pointing at the blond one in the middle) “is looking for the future mother of his future children”.

The brighter one of them, on the left, worked out, I do not know how, that there was a chance that I spoke French and we then had a conversation whereby I explained that if he was looking, he hadn’t found yet, and I certainly hadn’t noticed her around the place either.  He did, himself, about 25 seconds later. She ignored him completely. I fear his heart is as of yet unattached.

Bilbao is nice. I didn’t see very much of it, but I did get to the Guggenheim museum, saw bits of the old city, and of course I spent money in El Corte Ingles which is the way of things in that store. I liked it. I like how friendly people were, even in the face of my more immaculate looks of incomprehension following a stream of high speed Spanish from which I managed to extract one word in fifteen.

A while ago - look I’m busy and not in blogosphere mode lately - John Breslin blogged about something interesting which boards.ie was going to do. I read the entry, thought, that’s interesting, and then filed it away for future reference under the heading of “not that I’ll be able to get involved as it’s not really my sphere and I don’t appear to have a whole lot of time”. I just couldn’t visualise what you might do with that data.

Anyway, although there are aspects of boards.ie that I don’t like (AfterHours qualifies), I’m fascinated by some of the boards - and their contributors - and what sort of information you’ll find lying around in there. My most recent discovery is the Weather forum which provides near live commentary on developing unusual weather. I found it fascinating during a thunderstorm burst last week.

I probably shouldn’t admit that. I spend most of my time in Photography, Commuting and Transport, Accommodation and Property, and marginally less time in Arts and Crafts, Digital Art and Design and the occasional sporadic visit to Recipes and Cooking and Motors.

It’s a fascinating place to explore.