Mutterings - 12 April

This weeks free associations from Unconscious mutterings

1. Animal :: Vegetable
2. Temporary :: /tmp
3. Moan :: grumble
4. Rapid :: flow
5. That’s for me to say :: intolerance
6. City :: subway
7. Bumper :: to bumper
8. Eclipse :: solar
9. Problematic :: challenge
10. If? :: then (I was tempted to respond ':')

A mature debate?

From Blake Morrison on the Edlington and Bulger cases:

In the UK you have to reach 16 legally to have sex or marry, 17 to drive a car, and 18 to drink in a pub, serve on a jury, or vote in a general election. Yet at 10 you can be found guilty of murder or rape.

When are we going to have a mature debate on age, responsibility and crime, it is far easier to demonise young criminals and lock them away...

Well it may be more exciting than preparing tomorrow's talk

over the top
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

The local URC minister Marion Tugwood abseiled from the Church tower this morning to raise money. More pictures of the descent on my flickr pages - and on the church's website (in time)

Update - the official pictures are here

Rain coming

Rain coming
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

A Good Friday walk around Bakewell/Chatsworth - around 9 miles in rather wet weather. Here the rain approaches, rest of the photos are here. Ended with a long pull up the hill from Edensor back to Bakewell. Then a restful meal at the Cock and Pullet in Sheldon.

Doty on poetry and silence

Mark Doty on really listening to poetry

At the Zendo, I felt that I was placing the poem into the space in front of me, where it sort of hung for a moment as it was being taken into a deeply receptive listening.

Go and read the whole post!
I need to look up Fanny Howe too!

This week

Rowan Williams thoughts on Easter

Teaser Tuesday - 7 April

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

- Vous êtes un vieux salaud, oui.
- Absolument pas, déclara le type avec une véhémence qui étonna Zazie.

I think I'd better attempt a translation:

'You're a real dirty old man'
'Certainly not, said the guy with a force which astonished Zazie.

As I've blogged here, I'm reading Queneau's 'Zazie dans le métro' - 50 years old this year. I'm currantly finding spotting the buns a little difficult. Knowing the film well has been a great help though!

Connecting arcs

Bond Street
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Spotted these patterns on the way to church on Sunday. The vertical line is the sun but some form of diffraction pattern caused by that building having two grilles has caused that arc of light - I didn't take a very, very long exposure!
And then there's the vapour trails criss-crossing it.

Berlusconi has a sense of humour!

I am tempted to direct and strong actions against the media because of their disinformation about me

Go to boing boing to read the rest of Silvio's latest tantrum.

Blink!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

With gratitude to Niles for hilighting these Dr Who tribute felines.

Mutterings - 5 Apr

This week's free associations from Unconscious Mutterings

1. Log :: cabin
2. Plaything :: toy
3. Broom :: sweep
4. Heels :: dig in your
5. Smoke in :: your eyes
6. Guests :: celebration
7. Attraction :: magnet
8. Shiny:: kde
9. Risked :: gambled
10. Velvet :: underground (-teen rabbit)

Oops

From today's GuardianInsert some meaningless verbiage here to finish off the weblog posting nicely.

Wonderful anarchaic fun

Spent an evening (re-) watching Malle/Queneau's Zazie dans le métro, the book was published 50 years ago this year and the film followed it a year later. Zazie is well into bus-pass territory.
Dangerous, edgy, non-PC, fun, with, in the film, Philippe Noiret (a breakthrough role for him) and Catherine Demongeot (her first and practically only role) giving it verve and off-the wall lunacy. Vittorio Caprioli does a wonderful prophecy of Berlusconi in the final scene...
I don't think the Pythons and the Goodies would have happened without the powerful influence of the film.
I've not read the Queneau book but it is downstairs and I think the challenge will be worth it!
Don't watch the clip if you're scared of heights.

It's a bit late

but I did enjoy it when I got around to reading the email advertising the Swiss keeping their mountains clean

Towards a reopening

News from the Scargill movement site that there will be a day of commemoration to celebrate the completion of the sale this(!) Saturday at the House. I'm considering at least when I recover from the present state of exhaustion, I'm also preaching the next day.
It should be a good day though!

It's that day

Guardian switches to Twitter#

Expenses

When our ever so high-minded and principled press have finished with the sordid elements of MP's expenses, no doubt they'll move on to other things we can curl our toes about.

Why would a minister of culture buy that colour curtains with that carpet. Taste, culture, he has none and should resign!

Iain Dale is right (can't find where I think he said it though - maybe I just have a fertile memory!) - a lump sum and no breakdown - it just gives opportunity to the nosy and the prurient.

Going, going

Macclesfield Borough Council is having a end of all things sale

Only 24 hours to go! (try to ignore the handsome photographer, he is not for sale!)

Simple pleasures

For some obscure reason (well obscure to some) I got far too much pleasure from this item from the Mad Priest. Combination of the first photo and the reason for its choice.

Unconscious Mutterings - 28 March

This week's set of word associations from Unconscious Mutterings are as follows

1. Road trip :: finding yourself
2. Pool hall :: gambling
3. Extraordinary :: rendition
4. Jackson :: Pollack
5. Heartfelt :: condolences
6. Wet :: outside
7. Strangle :: Boston
8. .com :: startup
9. Touched :: engaged
10. Insipid :: tasteless

Station in the snow

Station in the snow
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

It looks as if I shouldn't have taken this picture in view of this story in the local press this week. Maybe they'll take away my rail pass?

Teaser Tuesday - 24 March

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

In Hell the boiling oil at least has smoke rising off it, but on nights with no moon and few lamps, there is little here to tell black water from black stone, and in the darkness sound moves differently, so that voices which start moving towards you end up surprising you at your back. Since many of the bridge parapets are higher than my nose and most windows start above my head, any journey after dark is like running through swerving tunnels, and there are moments where the water comes loud on all sides and my heartbeat interferes with my sense of direction.

Sarah Dunant's dark claustrophobic take on Venice In the Company of the Courtesan I'm hoping to have more fun with her Renaissance Italy than the Pope's Rhinoceros!
And as I'm still working my way through the 668 pages (just two over!) of Dostoyevsky's The Devils, here's another teaser:

You're an atheist because you're the spoilt son of a gentleman, the last son of a gentleman. You've lost the distinction between good and evil because you no longer know your own people, and you won't know it at all, neither you, nor the Verkhovenskys, father and son-nor I, for I, too, am a gentleman - I, the son of your serf and footman Pashka.

Hope to finish the Devils this week...

C

Set to music by Poulenc, Aragon meditates on the fall of France in 1940

Ô ma France ô ma délaissée
J'ai traversé les Ponts-de-Cé

Sung by Hugues Cuénod. Haunting music paired here with wonderful images.
I wasn't intending a tie in to the previous post, but here's more Cuénod and a mention of his civil partnership, entered into when he was 105.
Not many pieces in Cb...

I'm sorry

.. and want to apologise to all who are offended by this posting.

Mutterings - 22 March

This weeks Unconscious mutterings

1. Studio :: flat
2. Meetup :: mashup
3. Ostrich :: eggs
4. Jokes :: on me
5. Estranged :: partner
6. Random :: wibbling
7. Slap :: happy
8. Hotel room :: suitcase
9. Inscribe :: plaque
10. Polar :: bear (r, theta)

Twittering parents

Wonderful cartoon today from Foxtrot.

Early morning looking over Sparrow Park

Early morning looking over Sparrow Park
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

..begins to feel warmer in the mornings. You can just see Arighi-Bianchi in the photo. The crane is converting the old Clewes building into a hotel. Both those are visible from the West coast main line.

Street View - again

I suppose, due to having lived in one of the cities featured, there are pictures of two previous residences. Here's the terrace in William St, Leeds:

We bought it, but it seems to have entered the buy to rent market - at least when the camera went past! The coal hole has a plant in front to disguise it, but it has been replaced from the rusty cover in our time!
(And here's a link to a picture of the cats enjoying the hole in the coal hole cover)

Happy Go Lucky

Wednesday was the last Silk Screen of the season with an AGM and a showing of Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky. I thought it was a joy to watch, though it's easy to see how the character of Poppy - the lead, could grate. One would be very tempted to physical violence after a short time in her presence. As the Guardian Review says 'relentless chirpiness'. Wonderfully funny, but I'm still reeling from the emotional punch in the final scene between her and the driving instructor. Go and see it!

A final comment from Redbox:

Poppy does not see the glass as half empty or half-full; instead, she's ecstatic about the fact there's a glass at all, and overjoyed that there's water in it.

The Silk screen is now planning next years programme and at £25 pounds for 12 films that's pretty good value!

Mum, look at me! - 2

Looking again at the picture this morning there are subtle differences, and I'm definitely visible!

The people walking past seem to have shifted slightly...

Mum, look at me!

Google street view has today added some UK cities. We were standing at this York bus stop in Clifford St last October when the google camera car came past three times:

I'm not sure whether we're there or not, maybe they came past other days too!

Synapse

Downloaded and installed synapse this afternoon - new instant messenger client. Drool worthy graphics but currently only supports xmpp - however that's extensible so you can layer other protocols on top. Looks worth a try though an alpha release at the moment! - took me ages to find the site - even when I could remember the name of the application - hence this post!

Tomorrow

I'm - unexpectedly - travelling on the Manchester to Leeds train tomorrow (and beyond) - maybe I should try wearing a white haired wig and see if I get feted.
I'm sure someone will understand this!

Teaser Tuesday - 17 March

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

There were, of course, many fine impulses and most commendable initiative in her nature; but everything in her seemed to be perpetually seeking its equilibrium and not finding it; everything was in chaos, in a state of agitation and restlessness. Perhaps the demands she made upon herself were too severe and she was unable to find in herself the necessary strength to satisfy them.

Phew! Dostoyevsky The Devils - following on from the reading the Rowan Williams about the author (and books) I felt I needed to refresh my memory - at least of this one (Here's my comment on a re-read of Crime and Punishment - over 2 years ago now!).

Careful where you put that sticker!

see more pwn and owned pictures

Requiem

Last night St Michael's choir sang the Fauré Requiem as part of choral(!) evensong. Plenty of space for meditation, payer, thought. Sometimes it's a work I find too saccharine - the waltzing into paradise at the end of the Agnus Dei but at its best moments there's simplicity and bare power. Beautifully sung particularly the young soloist in the Pie Jesu. We wondered to what extent the work was influenced by the horrors of the Franco-Prussian war but I see it's primary spur was the death of Fauré's parents. The work was interspersed with English liturgy, prayers, Bible reading and a talk.
A good congregation for a moment of quiet in Lent and particularly to enjoy the decidedly non-Lenten food and drink afterwards!

Hatred and Intimidation in the USA

From Mark Doty's blog:

Later, my legs feel liquid, my heart isn't ready to slow down. Thinking about how strange it is for a woman alone to come after two six-foot guys. Thinking how she wanted this to happen, somehow -- singling us out for her rage instead of the people in the car ahead of her, coming back to provoke us, then running into the restaurant to fetch the men. So that she could feel her power over them, or us?

But go and read the whole thing!

Dead Russian Composers

If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Considered the leader of the 19th Century Composer group "The Mighty Handful," I am indeed the teacher among them. My orchestration skills are superbly colorful, and are explained in my book on the topic, but works like "Scheherezade" explain my mastery better. Who would you be? Dead Russian Composer Personality Test

Inevitably it's the one with whom I have least sympathy (well probably as it doesn't tell you who the other possibilities were!)

Transfigured Night

A trip last night to hear the Northern Chamber Orchestra their soloists performing the Beethoven Serenade for flute, violin and viola Op 25 - I kept waiting for the bass notes to appear, I didn't think I knew it but the melodies were familiar so I guess I must have picked it up somewhere along the line.
Then Verklärte Nacht by Schönberg, in view of the title of the group doing the concerts I was expecting the chamber orchestra version, I hadn't noticed the 'soloists' qualification, it was an unexpected pleasure to hear the sextet original. I became familiar with this work at college in the Ramor Quartet version but I'd never heard it live. A wonderful performance which enthralled me - like last week's Ravel Quartet an sensuous experience - Schönberg at that point just two years before the Ravel was very much a traditionalist the Ravel sounding far more modern. Though some of the sextet effects must have shocked the original audiences (it was originally refused performance because of an 'unacceptable chord!).
Part 2 of the concert contained the Mendelssohn Capriccio (for quartet) and the Dvorak Sextet - the concert billing had the Schönberg and masterpieces by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Dvorak but my view was Verklärte Nacht was the masterpiece - with the Dvorak running it close.
I see there's a You tube uploaded version (3 parts):

Unconscious Mutterings - 15 March

And for this week:

1. Sunburn :: lotion
2. Aquarium :: weed
3. Otter :: tarka
4. Awesome :: man!
5. LOL :: usenet
6. Accordion :: du ciel
7. Hot Pocket :: rocket
8. Grandstand :: saturday afternoons (Dr Who...)
9. Shaved :: smooth
10. Upgrade :: problems

Five Famous Russian Novels

(or some permutation of those words!)

From this amazon search.
Thanks to Plaible for this! Lots more examples if you look around - apparently some Australian has uploaded a garbled database.

Entre les Murs

A trip last night to the Cornerhouse to see Bégaudeau amd Cantet's 'Entre les Murs' a film about teaching in an inner city Parisian school. Cinema 3 was packed out at 5:45 with hardly a free seat - and they're been showing it for two weeks! A slow paced absorbing film immersing you in very real dilemmas.
As Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review says:

This story builds quietly, almost invisibly, through the film, and culminates in the disciplinary hearing in which Souleymane's non-French-speaking mother is present and in which the gloweringly silent and defiant pupil must translate her passionate and heartbreaking defence of him as a good boy. Like the rest of the film, this scene is natural and unforced and effortlessly persuasive, but it is the non-dramatic sequences that I somehow found the most gripping. François has a lesson in which he simply demonstrates at some length the imperfect subjunctive tense.

Strongly recommended! Don't think it could have been filmed without the previous example of Etre et Avoir which takes a junior school, this one is very much teenagers and, for me, throughout, the shadow of yesterday's events in a German school darkened the picture.
Apparently the Bégaudeau novel is even slower paced, making it not to difficult for non-native French speakers to get to grips with.
A dinner in (too much) haste on the way back to the station at Don Giovanni's - risotto - delicious as ever!

A big difference

From A Flock Divided, Paul Elie on Rowan Williams

Barack Obama invited Gene Robinson to give an invocation at the beginning of the inaugural festivities – but only after he’d invited Rick Warren, who regularly speaks out against homosexuality, to give the invocation at the main event. Was that a token gesture, or something more substantive?

That’s our new president’s “contradictoriness.” It’s been pointed out endlessly that Obama is willing to sit down and have a conversation with people on different sides of an issue—meeting with the conservative journalists as well as the more progressive ones, and so forth. To some extent that was the point of having both Rick Warren and Gene Robinson give invocations at the inaugural. This is a president who's saying we can't resolve all of the questions beforehand. He’s saying we need to bear with a little contradictoriness and go forward together, even though we don't all line up on the issues in the same way. I think that's been Williams's strategy too. And it's a big difference from what we've been used to both politically and religiously.

We much prefer to be told what to think!
I've just - today - finished Rowan's book on Dostoevsky! But I probably need to re-read some of the novels to really appreciate it on a re-reading after that, I haven't read most of them since the 1970's (apart from Crime and Punishment!)

Click, click, click

see more Lolcats and funny pictures
It hardly needs music or choreography to summon up that film.

Teaser Tuesday - 10 March

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

And a swift turn from the previous two postings...

Exactly, Mack, so don't beat yourself up. Something may come to mind later

From Wm Paul Young's The Shack - our current book group book. People seem to have crawled all over this book seeking heresy, complaints about God as a black woman - to this Britisher - the Trinity as a Americans is far more suspect!!
Not sure about heaven as a grand family reunion either - which underlies much of it - but it is definitely worth a read!

Nature Watch (continued)

And while you have that image of a partially clothed man and a kangaroo wrestling in your mind, here's a tale from West Sussex about gay ducks in Arundel.

Kangaroos and Violence

Australian wrestles kangaroo from family home, hat tip to Andrew.

Ettlin, a chef originally from the Swiss city of Stans, wrestled the thrashing and bleeding 90 pound (40 kilogram) marsupial out the front door.
"I had just my Bonds undies on. I felt vulnerable," he said, referring to a popular Australian underwear brand.

A A Milne was never like this.

Bring out my bath chair

E Music asked me to fill out a survey last night. It asked for my date of birth and the earliest date specified was 1950!
.. Nearly falling off the end!

Prescient!?

From a review of Sallinen's 'The King goes forth to France' in yesterday's Independent:

Battered by climate change, England is in hock, its economy unmoved by the Prime Minister's "very best fiscal stimulation". Icebergs are "breeding like rabbits" in the North Sea and fuel has run dry. On the shores of the frozen Channel, the King prepares for a war without point or justification, while the icons of national identity – telephone boxes and post boxes, currency and stamps, Marmite and victoria sponges, Tube maps and brown ale, policemen's helmets and Routemaster buses, cricket bats and (ouch!) newspapers – are assembled for a final closing-down sale.

Probably a carefully tailored summary - I just about remember listening to this from a broadcast in the 1980's(?). Unfortunately for me, this is being staged in London!

Looking down

Two examples of local Google Earth Imagery. Recently Macclesfield has had new images and this is our back garden.

I spent some time trying to identify the indicated object wondering if it had caught one of the household occupants but I think it must be the bird table! Meanwhile in the town centre -

this dates the image pretty well, you can see the green hoarding placed in front of ex-McDonalds while the bulders did their work!

Mutterings - 9 March

This week's Unconscious mutterings:

1. Mourning :: Dancing
2. Approval :: Tick
3. Lotion :: Sun tan
4. Perspire :: Walking
5. Language :: Barrier
6. Defection :: Berlin Wall
7. Play :: Group
8. Graphic :: ASCII, sex
9. Spicy :: Sausage (ummm.. sex)
10. In love :: devotion

Thought for the day

Institutional religion, by its very nature, always looks for a way to be authoritative. The process of transformation into enlightenment is itself authority. When we have been through such a process of transformation, we do not need to look outside of the experience for authority: the process itself becomes our authority.

Richard Rohr (a Roman Catholic...)
Hmm, maybe I should have stuck with the first sentence?

Listening to each other

Off this evening to a Bollington Chamber Concert to hear the Barbirolli Quartet (used to be the Stillmans). They played Mozart (K589), Brahms Op51 No 1, Emily Hall's 'From Listening to Trees' and the Ravel.
I was mainly there for the Ravel, not sure why I enjoyed it so much more than the Mozart or Brahms, maybe the surface sensousness, but it was a magical, rapt performance, much appreciated.
The Emily Hall was written for this Quartet - I see they're performing it in Woking tomorrow, strong Reich and Nyman influences (in my opinion) I began to enjoy the work more once they got past the first movement where I could hear fingerprints of 'Different Trains' all over it, the other two movements were more of her own voice and the work is well worth a listen.
But the evening - for me - belonged to the Barbirolli's performance of the Ravel!
(An account of our visit to this series last year is here)
We recommend you take a cushion for this venue - for the seats!

Lent i

We'll see how this develops, an initial Terragen render

Anyone there?

Great amusement at this letter left in reception at work:

I've blurred out bits of the address, but probably not a lot of point.
Meanwhile The Register has a classic SPAM purporting to come from Fred Goodwin. It appears to be genuine (genuine spam that is!).

Mutterings - a bit late

Unconscious mutterings has -

1. Pain :: Bread
2. Lego :: Denmark
3. Trooper :: Super
4. Flicker :: Gaslight, son of
5. Character :: Part
6. Determined :: Set on
7. Wing :: and a prayer
8. Control :: C
9. Automatic :: Manual
10. Yeah :: Yeah, Yeah

If anyone will have him!

Email from the AFA (American Family Association) clearly they're trying to get rid of their toxic liabilities.

D'hyacinthe et d'or

Gérard Souzay singing Duparc's L'Invitation au Voyage:

Thanks for rmcr for this link.
I remember - still - hearing Souzay leading a master class in this song on Radio 3 back inthe 70's - or maybe even the 60's - it was my first encounter with this work and the spell still entrances.

Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!

As Souzay said, always `his sister'!
(hmm where's the youtube video gone!?, try here if it remains invisible)

Been away

Bare in Sussex
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Been to Sussex for the weekend, I will catch up slowly! The fields were bare and dry as I walked across them to go to a Sunday morning service to hear the new Rector of St Mary's David Beal, it was a thought-provoking talk for the first Sunday in Lent. Also to the Squire and Horse (again!) for a delightful Sunday lunch and home.
Today's David Shenton cartoon is worth a look

Newcastle again

At work
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

A few hours on the train today with a trip to Newcastle doing computer support things. Added to it with a half pint in a local pub with Mad Priest, a local blogger who it was good to meet - yes he does exist and has - to me - an alarming resemblance to Stanley Baxter (no that Stanley Baxter, the other S B!).
This is a picture of the wonderful historic inside of our Newcastle offices. I linked to other (not taken by me) pictures on our last trip.

Full liturgical gear

From the local press

That’s because the petrolhead pastor, 40, of Macclesfield’s Elim Christian Life Centre, will see her work and hobby harmonise as she delivers a sermon to more than a dozen motorcyclists – in full leather gear.

Unfortunately I shall be out of town. Unfortunately the picture has her without headgear in defiance both of St Paul and the Highway Code!

Not funny but...

admirable control from the newsreader.
Hat tip to Non Working Monkey

Crane and trees

Crane and trees
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

I've been very taken by the crane at work on the old Clewes building. I liked this combination of the old and the new, of the natural and the man-made.

Club Franco Britannique de Macclesfield Annual Dinner - ii

Club Franco Britannique de Macclesfield
Annual Dinner - ii
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

A pleasant evening out at the Franco Britannique dinner, I'm not sure I'd even noticed the Sylk restaurant before, but it was really rather nice!

Now I are one!

Back when I was young, the student joke used to be

Last year I couldn't even spell engineer, now I are one."

Well from this screen shot you can now do both:

Someone has been spamming newsgroups with these adverts, I doubt if the address or the names are genuine!
I just hope they spell it like that on the 'certificate'!

Teaser Tuesday - 24 Feb

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

This feels a bit different:

It is good to put figures in drawings like these, he has learnt this, his tutor said the presence of people lends a sense of perspective, so he sketches her in and later he will include also adults. And the dog he promised her.

Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - strangely poetic!

Cats in winter

more animals
Don't seem to have had a cat picture for some time....

Mutterings - 22 Feb

And this week's Unconscious mutterings:

1. Carpet :: chew
2. William :: Just
3. Oh! :: La La
4. Board game :: Scrabble
5. Sunlight :: shadow
6. Delay :: queue
7. Winner :: lottery
8. Concubine :: Solomon
9. Comatose :: Bauby
10. Satisfy :: Sex

Ca c'est moi

Here's that sequence from Le Scaphandre et le papillon

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon

Wednesday was marked with a second trip to see Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) - I originally saw it back in early 2008 having read the book in 2006- this week it was a trip to the Macclesfield Silk Screen. Here's the French trailer
in my opinion this is better than the English trailer which is more concerned with surface and effect rather than content!
A wonderful film which will challenge, as quotes:

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.
You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.

.. you can be whereever and whoever you want.
Though the English trailer does have that skiing sequence. I've also had Charles Trenet La Mer echoing in my mind ever since:

wychfield 2

wychfield 2
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Brian and Richard doing a little croquet - way back in 1975. I've found 3 more which I shall scan later today and put on flickr also with the wychfield tag

State sponsored vigilantes

.. in Italy, and guess what their principal target appears to be non-Italians!
In today's Guardian:

Silvio Berlusconi's cabinet yesterday issued an emergency decree allowing mayors to enrol citizen patrols to combat crime following an outcry over a number of rapes blamed on immigrants.
The measure was already contained in a security bill working its way through the Italian parliament, but the prime minister said the decree would allow the government to quickly respond to "the huge clamour raised by recent episodes".
Local officials will oversee unarmed volunteer citizen patrols tasked with alerting police to criminal behaviour.
Six police unions warned in a statement that the decree could encourage vigilante behaviour. But the interior minister, Roberto Maroni, argued that it was designed to cut back on such vigilante behaviour, not encourage it.
Assailants beat up Romanians in Rome after a girl aged 14 was raped on February 14, and immigrants were also attacked after four men raped a woman in Guidonia, south of Rome.

It could be just a means of boosting the police force but the examples and

the huge clamour raised by recent episodes

give the lie to that

A shilling for the meter?

gone!
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Not turning off the power seems to be endemic in Macclesfield branches of companies which go under. here was Music Zone last year and now Woolworth's is all lit up around a hollow shell.

Teaser Tuesday - 17 Feb

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

There can be places in this world, and in human hearts too, that are opposite to war. There is a kind of life that is opposite to war, so far as this world allows it to be.

From 'Hannah Coulter' by Wendell Berry (our current Book Group book)

Sheesh!

I see that John MacKay of the Australian Creation Research is speaking locally on Tuesday. Unfortunately I've got another meeting that night, otherwise I'd go and ask pointed questions. Lots of useful information on him on the web - if this inspires anyone else to go and expose the charade. Bringing the Christian faith into disrepute ...<grumbles>

Mutterings - 15 Feb

Unconscious Mutterings has this week:

1. Be mine :: Valentine
2. Ecstatic :: Strings
3. Orderly :: Batman
4. Sebastian :: arrows
5. Sore :: saddle
6. Don’t need :: no educashun
7. Rockstar :: guitar
8. Tinfoil :: hat
9. Addiction :: internet
10. Where? :: There!

In case you weren't awake

.. at 11:31:30 last night, the Unix Epoch time reached 1234567890 seconds. There you missed an exciting moment!

I was awake, but you can relive the moment at http://coolepochcountdown.com/
I'll leave those other tabs and references in my firefox session unfuzzed...

Get your snow here!

.. it's lovely and cold

Currently on the Guardian front page

Wychfield

Wychfield
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

I think I lived in the room with the slightly open window on the first floor.
Wychfield was owned by Francis Darwin - probably the wrong Darwin to be commemorating today but he did do a lot to make his father better known.
Note the croquet lawn!

That bicentenany

Create 'devolved' pictures of yourself for the Darwin 200th anniversary at the OU commemoration webpage.

When I was in Cambridge I lived for a year at the house (Wychfield) which Francis (Charles' son) had owned. I have a picture somewhere and I'll try to find it this evening...idyllic summer evenings on the croquet lawn are good memories for this cold February day!

That's how it is

and may it remain so - uncomfortable as it is!

Firstly, the Church of England is perhaps the only church witnessing to the pain of holding together instead of taking the easy option and simply splitting and going where your mates are. It costs nothing to form yourself into a community of like-minded people among whom you won’t have to struggle with challenge or difference. But that is not the Church. Just like the first disciples of Jesus, our vocation is to follow Jesus together. Jesus did not give any of his disciples a veto over who else should or should not be called into the company of disciples.

Nick Baines bishop and Scouser - he must be ok, from my privileged position at the posh end of that bit of the Lancashire coast!

I like minimal, but...

For the past 5+ years I've used blackbox as my Linux window manager/desktop, it's very clean, fast, wonderful as far as not hogging memory is concerned but you have to do the application integration yourself - for gnome applications you may need to make sure dbus is running, for amarok you need to start the sound backend yourself, you need to check periodically for security updates manually, rather having them presented to you.
So yesterday while not wanting too much pressure and recovering from a bout of asthma, I took the easy path and tried KDE4 and was fairly impressed, you could forget about the nuts and bolts and just run the application. There was though a feeling of being constrained - it knew what you wanted and you had to fit things around it. When I found it had stolen the Ctrl w key - not idea what for - and no doubt there's a way of grabbing it back for emacs where - for me - it is incredibly useful - I decided I wanted something else.
I'm currently trying the Mandriva integration of fluxbox - slightly different to how it appears in Ubuntu but the integration seems good, rather than having to - in blackbox - do it all yourself. I'll see how it goes! It still seems to come with the kde sounds - click on a tab in firefox or pan and I get blasted with a 'cute' noise, no doubt I shall eventually find the off switch!
Here's a screenshot:


pretty similar to blackbox, minimal just the background a term window and the toolbar, really except that I'm trying it with hiding the slit:
this is a sort of dock which contains applications useful in many contexts - so there's mainly gkrellm giving a snapshot of machine activity, facilities for taking screenshots and email notification. I'm also running wmbiff to tell me how full are my various (mostly) spam bins.
The toolbar gives me current state of the music player and will show when when there are security updates/application upgrades available.

Afghanistan and Iran follow ups!

Last week I quoted from Rory Stewart's The Places in Between - a walk through the wilds of Afghanistan, one of the commenters, gautami tripathy, referred me to her review which I've just - now! - got around to reading, well worthwhile a visit and here's the link.

The Places in Between uncovers and revels in the diversity, strains and struggles of the people, their land and culture. It is a fascinating journey into a place as diverse as Afghanistan. A man’s walk brings all of it alive for us. We get a very good glimpse into a world wholly unknown to us.

In Iran, following the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Shah Pliable writes a piece about the changes and non-changes especially viewed though the eyes of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. He also covers the present state of Iranian music:

He quotes wikipedia:

'In 2007, Keyvan Yahya, young mathematician and musician that has done many works on mathematical foundations of music theory and his special field image processing, established a symphony orchestra named Satrap Philharmonic Orchestra,this orchestra performs some classical and modern music by western composer and also concerns Persian symphonic pieces in its repertoire.

It is excellent news that contemporary music is now being programed in Iran. However, 30 years after the revolution, the cultural climate in the country remains fragile.

We went to see Persepolis back at the end of 2007.

Memories

RIP Blossom Dearie

Blast from the (Linux) past

TuxRadar has a reprint of an article from the first Linux Format magazine with a survey of (then) current Linux Distros. I had that magazine (I think assuming it was the first under that name, I think an early issue appeared under a different name) and installed the cover cd of Definite Linux - now long gone! I then had a brief dalliance with Red Hat before moving to Mandrake/Mandriva where I seem to have stuck - apart from various Ubuntu installations on household and work machine!
And now blasts from the Linux present....in case anyone wants to offer suggestions!
I upgraded to Mandriva 2009 a few weeks ago but still have a couple of issues:

• Brasero won't run at all:

  [robert@faure emacs]$ brasero
  Segmentation fault (core dumped)

  K3b will work, so I can burn cds but I'm used to brasero...
• amarok 2 really dislikes music with non-English characters in the file name (or is it the tags), i.e. French accents, umlauts etc.. it either stops for a break before that item on the playlist or won't play the track at all! I've upgraded a fixed pulseaudio which claimed to fix this issue but I see no improvement with amarok
• On my work laptop I'm using the amarok nightly builds which seem to be a lot better, no stopping for a rest and it also has the 'stop playing after this track' (use it all the time) but I've - so far - not found a source of rpm's for this and am resisting building from source on a daily basis!

Get the notes right - otherwise...

see more pwn and owned pictures

Especially for a Sunday morning!

Mutterings - 8 Feb

Unconscious Mutterings has this week

1. Cups :: http://localhost:631/
2. Brilliant :: Brillant (see the daily WTF)
3. Disobey :: defy
4. Abstain :: alcohol
5. Daily :: bread
6. You make me :: mad!
7. Hurl :: Urrrrrrgh!
8. Intensify :: Burn
9. Fuck! :: Sex
10. Race :: Nation

E Lucevan Le Stelle

And whilst on the theme of bite sized Italian opera -

- Tosca!

Yum!

Whilst on the Russian theme -

Good enough to eat - hat tip to vrovke. No I still can't read Russian! As the still frame says, it is Verdi's La Traviata.

Rolcats!

Яolcats are here, unfortunately you can't embed the pictures in a blog post (well you can but it is not encouraged like at LOLcats - you want the salt-mines? we can arrange a trip to Northwich!) so you'll just have to go and look at it yourself. Fluency in Russian helps apparently! (link thanks to B3TA)
I think - so far I prefer the current latest one:

Have strength, my little cabbage. By the mercy of NKVD Order No. 00447, we have been chosen for Resettlement.
We will show the tin mines of Kolyma the true power of the proletariat.

Pete Mathews

Pete Mathews
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

After last night's climbing trip, it is appropriate to remember Pete Mathews who was one of the teachers led my school 's climbing group who died a few weeks back. This picture was taken on a week's climbing holiday in the summer of 1970 in the Lake District. The other teacher, Ron Bailey, who was in charge of the group, died long ago - a moment of passing

First pitch!

Ella, Russ and Mustafa
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Just back from a trip to the Manchester Climbing Centre with folk from work, here are some colleagues, the set of photos are here. (Maybe this link is better - as it has just the pics from yesterday). An impressive place!

Tuesday Teaser - 3 Feb

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Abdul Haq unslung his barrel-chambered Kalashnikov and handed it to me. It was heavy.

.. this is a travel book! Rory Stewart 'The Places in Between' - walking through Afghanistan in Spring 2002! Photo of Abdul Haq and his treasured possession. New York Times review is here.I'm still only about 50 pages in...I acquired it in an unwanted and in this case also chewed stock sale at the local library. I shall see whether it gets fraught enough for me to chew the book a bit more!

108 steps

108 steps
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

On the way to work this morning. No one wanted to use the hand rail but those steps are a lot gentler than they look!

Mutterings - 31 Jan

I'm a bit late getting to Unconscious Mutterings this week:

1. Take :: That
2. 350 :: Underground (do I have the number wrong there?)
3. Stand :: and deliver
4. Raspberry :: sorbet (phhhhhht coming a close second)
5. Turnstile :: football
6. Infomercial :: eugh!
7. Dejected :: down
8. What’s the word? :: errrrrr
9. Awestruck :: Christopher Wren
10. Smashed :: Pumpkins

The perils of too much security

from today's xkcd

It appears to be missing Prince of Darkness

There's a wonderful set of titles on this Royal Opera House registration page. Somone has had a lot of fun entering all those - 'Your Majesty' also appears to be missing!
Via Geoff Coupe

Might as well join in the fun

Generate your bus slogan here. Here's my weak effort

Clarity from Poster

Went to the Macclesfield Music Society last night to hear Tom Poster in an interesting combination of works:

• Mozart Sonata Eb major K 282
• Chopin B minor Sonata
• Brahms Klavierstücke Op 118
• Stravinsky Three Movements from Petrouchka
• encores were the Schubert Gb Impromptu and Gershwin 'Someone to Watch over me'

The interval was after the Chopin but it was a concert that could have done with two short intervals, as I'm not sure that going straight from the wonders of the Brahms Op 118 No 6 to Stravinsky's Yule Tide Fair without even leaving the platform really worked! A great evening of communication - we got the Chopin B minor last year from Andrew Brownell. I think I preferred last night intense clarity and control, and the detail he put into the Stravinsky... (Holmes Chapel had a chance to hear that work last week from another pianist!). I don't think I'd heard the Mozart before - as Poster said, unjustly neglected!

A long way from Rovno Gubernya!

Christa Ludwig hamming it up in I am Easily Assimilated from Candide

thanks to Al on rmcr for finding this.
I remember seeing it many years ago - though I thought it was from New York - but maybe she repeated the treat?