Photographing the moon and other things

Camera: Panasonic DMC-TZ1
Exposure: 15 sec (15)
Aperture: f/4.1
Focal Length: 28.2 mm
ISO Speed: 80
Exposure Bias: 0/1677721600 EV
Flash: Flash did not fire

We think that if we know the details of something, then we have a better understanding of how that thing came to be. The existance of a photo depends on the presence of a camera and a person taking the photograph. That is only stating the obvious, but when I look at the information contained in the EXIF data that comes attached to every digital photo, then I have no idea what the Exposure Bias is, or what would happen if that value was changed, or even how to go about changing it.

I have a vague idea that the Aperture or F-stop deals with the amount of light getting into the camera and that it works in a way that the bigger the f-stop then the smaller the hole, and vica versa.

The ISO speed of the film gives some idea of how sensitive the film is to light. The higher the ISO speed then the more sensitive is the film to light, but since digital cameras do not have film, what is the point and what do the values really mean.

The exposure tim of 15 sec is easy to understand, since it was a dark night and the aperture had to be held open for a long time so enough light would get into the camera to be captured by that none existant film.

Sometimes I wonder if we analyse our lives like this, and we treat our lives as photographs. We think. I am a bad photograph because I have been exposed to long. I have a bad conscience and I am not sensitive enough. Or perhaps the photograph that we are depends on some value like 0/1677721600 EV and we have absolutely no idea what that means or how to change it or how it has affected us.

Is there such a thing as perfect values to give a perfect photo? I think not. Even if everybody set the controls of their lives to perfect values, there is no garuentee that the photo that is their lives would turn out OK, since some have shakey hands and others use a tripod, some use a Nikon, and some use a Kodak, some are born with a golden tripod in their mouths, and millions of megapixels in their bank account, some only have a cheap Holga and discount film from a bargain basement, yet they make better and more exciting photos of their lives than those who are more privilged.

Then there is the question of composition and framing. Some people do not have the eye for the right thing. The always seem to make the wrong choices, always make the wrong settings, and the photo of their lives is blurred and out of focus.

Perhaps we are who were are because the Flash did not fire

Finnish fireworks competition

The last camera I had it was impossible to take photos of fire work displays. By the time the shutter clicked the fireworks were gone. My new camera does much better.



The run up to the fireworks night was not so good since I failed miserably trying to take photos of a full moon which was blood red... (something to do with the smoke and pollutants coming from the forest fires in Russia). Then I tried to get the photos by holding the camera steady in my hand, but at a 10x zoom and on a dark night with a long exposure it is just impossible to focus.



And even though the new camera has an anti-shake mechanism the moon was dancing about the LCD screen like a skittish firefly. So for the firework night I invested in a tripod, and read up on how to take firework photographs. The TZ1 has a fireworks setting.



On the night I went to Lautasaari, and was surprised that there were hundreds of cars rolling off the Lansivyla and down to the beach. It was impossible to find a parking space, andI eventually found a space about a kilometer away, down an alley-way and parked up on the pavement. When I finally got to the beach area it was thronging and it was difficult to find a place to set up the camera.



The camera in "firework mode" does a longer exposure and it is noticeable that it takes time to write to the SD card, and I seemed to be missing some of the most spectacular displays, so I set the camera to "burst mode" and just held the shutter down so there was a continuous capture onto the card.



Over an hour period between the shows I must have shot over 200 photos. Some of them were rubbish but some I felt were excellent. The battery was half drained by the end of the night, and when everyone had left I sat down by the seashore and edited out the bad photos. So at the end I had about 50 photos of the event which I liked.



It was then that I noticed the crescent moon over the docks and I set about trying to capture the moon I missed about a week ago... but that is another story.

Run and Spit dance

Run and Spit dance
Originally uploaded by HyperBob.

The run & spit dance is not very complicated. I basically has two major moves to it, namely running and spitting. You can also flail your arms about like a windmill, and shake your hair about wildly until it gets all tangled and knotty

The dance has been successful if you hair gets in such a mess that your mother can not get a hair brush through it, and it can be counted a roaring success if in the aftermath, as your mother brushes your hair, she exclaims, "Your knotty."

You can then argue in depth with her that you are not naughty, and that she should join you the next time in the run & spit dance, cos it is a dance to bring you joy.

Your grandfather remarks. "Modern people try to solve their problems by being rational, whereas primative people solve their problems by dancing," and wonders if the run & spit dance was a rain dance, to end the drought in Finland.

Sunflower Sutra

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--
modern--all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg

Berkeley, 1955

And the eyes in his head see the sun going down

In Vantaa there is a field of sunflowers and on Sunday I went for a walk in this field. Vantaa city has a policy that anybody can go into the field and pick the sunflowers for themselves or to give away as presents.

I think it is a wonderful policy that flowers are grown for the pleasure and joy of the public. When I was there, many families were out for an afternoon walk and were moving through the fields of green. One small boy was almost lost in the jungle of greenery. One small girl was collecting ladybirds and was not interested in the flowers at all.

It has been dry for 6 weeks in Finland, with no rain at all, and even though the flowers are over the little boys head, they barely reach his parents knees. On the radio there has been talk of crop failure. My own crops at my allotment have suffered because I have not been watering them regularly.

I think of famine in Africa. People sowing seed, but nothing growing. I am reminded of a BBC documentary "Global dimming" and a poem by Alan Ginsberg about a sunflower covered by the pollution of cement dust from a factory.

It is a precious thing to be able to enjoy the wonders of nature, and to see the sunflowers turn their heads from the rising of the sun until the setting of the same.

life in the slow lane

I remember when I was driving to India in a 1954 80" SWB Land Rover. We decided to be economical and drive there at 40 mph so as to get the best fuel consumption.

You do not do this on an autobahn in Germany because truck drivers have schedules to meet, and business-men have to do their business, and they don't want a bunch of long haired hippies sauntering along in the slow lane at 40 mph.

Taking things easy has always been frowned apon if you belong to those germanic or northern countries where the protestant work ethic hold sway.

Taking things easy is ifrowned apon and is often classified as laziness, and you know what they say... the Devil always has work for idle hands. It would seem that there should be no peace for the wicked, yet God himself took a break on the seventh day and rested.

It has been said that the Finns have only recently come out of the forest and at every opportunity they go back into it. I think this is a very wise thing to do. It is what keeps people sane. Living life in the slow lane with no electricity, no running water, no flush toilets, no cooking facilities, tends to slow you down.

You have time to fish, time to swim, time to paint, time to dance in the grass, time to relax.

To fish you have to dig for worms, bait the hook, pick your spot and time of the day, and then wait. Fishing is mostly about waiting. Fishing helps you to be patient. If you catch a big fish it is an incredibley joyous occasion. There is a fight with the fish and then the struggle to land it. The fish has to be taken off the hook, and if you are in a mind to eat it, it has to be cleaned and cooked. All of this takes time.

If you want to really relax then there is no better way than to watch paint dry. This is a very time consuming process. First of all you have to prepare a good wooden surface, let's say the side of a wooden house. Take a steel brush to get rid of all the old blistered paint, and then give the surface a good going over with a course sandpaper. Experts who are serious about watching paint dry can then give the wall a second going over with a finer grade sandpaper.

Now comes the most difficult part, making the decision as to what kind of paint to apply. I ask you where is the fun in using some quick drying paint.? If you are at all serious about watching paint dry then you need to choose an oil based paint. It will take ages to dry, and it will give you hours of pleasure, first of all when you apply it to the wood, and secondly as it slowly changes colour during the drying process.


Best results can be had on days of high humidity, The paint takes so much longer to dry. Painting on a sunny day is a short lived pleasure, and presents no challenge to anyone who is really serious about watching paint dry.

I watching paint dry seems too frenetic for you then a really worthwhile substitute activity is holding the ladder steady while somebody else does the work. That demands lots of patience.


If you do not have gas or electricity then the only way to cook is on an open fire. So the wood has to be sawn and chopped, and kindling made to get the fire started. Fire-lighters are not allowed. That makes starting a fire too easy. The kindling has to be built up in a criss-cross fashion on top of a layer of paper which has been screwed up in a secret way that has been passed down from generation to generation.

Twisting paper to make a fire is an essential skill.
It is imprper to throw a couple of newspapers, untwisted on to the fire. Twisting paper correctly takes time, and the more time it takes to make the fire then the hungrier you will become.

Then when it comes to preparing the food, it is a heresy to buy something ready made from the shop. That is just too quick. If you are living life in the slow lane then everything has to be done from scratch. First you kill a cow and saw its leg off... only joking... you can get away with buying micemeat but the incorporation of herbs and spices has to take place in a large bowl and it all has to be mixed by hand with a wooden spoon made from a 60 year old juniper tree. The frying should be done on a Hackman's cast iron skillet. Cook for lots of people, and eat everything slowly with plenty of talking.

If you succeed in doing this on a regular basis you will have learnt a secret that keeps Finns sane. Namely take a break from the hustle and bustle of the hectic life in the city and for a change live life in the slow lane.

Planing for a succession of blooms

 

Birds, birds, birds

Birds are a problem since they seem to like strawberries even more than humans. So what can you do to keep them off your berries. Well one enterprising lady painted stones red and then laid them out amongst the strawberry plants. Now that will give their little beaks something to think about.















Some people show no subtlety and they just enclose the strawberries in netting. That is just pain unfair. There is no competition.Birds stupid enough to try and get through the netting just get their legs caught, and they never have the patience to methodically use their beak to get free. It is all a wild flapping of the wings until they die of exhaustion. Birds should learn strawberries are for humans and not for them.















Then you have the dummy owl, the bird of prey that never moves a muscle, just sits on its perch and stares. If I were a bird I would be dead scared of a motionless wooden owl. But perhaps the dummy owl combined with a spining whirlygig is just that combination of ying and yang, stillness and movement, that causes enough confusion that the birds are too perplexed to even think about eating strawberries.




















But the top top scary method is to make a video of youself wringing a chickens neck and cooking it in a pot, and all the while the viedo is rolling you make diaboical curses about what you are going to do to any birds caught eating your strawberries. Then once the tape is finnished you string it over your acursed strawberries, and let the magic take its course. But then again it might just be the black tape making strange noises in the wind, or they way it shimmers from coal black to silver that is a little bit disconcerting for the birds.





















But I think birds are basically stupid and never learn. If they want strawberries then they will go for them. Birds are like humans when it comes to doing stupid things.

Beauty for ashes... or there abouts

I saw a woman painting her toolbox and I strolled over to her to say that I wanted to paint some flowers on the black toolbox that I had made from some scrap wood I had found at a dump. She said that she already had some acrylic paint and was just waiting for the cream paint she was applying to dry and then she would be doing some flowers as well. Do you ever get that feeling that someone steals your idea and you are left in second place because you are slow off the mark.

Anyway I returned a few days later and indeed she had painted some flowers on her toolbox. I think she did a good job of it. Better than I could ever do since the representation is of actual flowers. I did not want to appear to be a copycat so I had to come up with something diferent. Something simple with only a few colours and I thought that some art deco motif in the style of Alfons Mucha would be easy to do.




















So I decided on a poppy mitif for the front and some tulips for the top. I like the sparceness of the lines, and the simplicity of the drawing. They looked good on paper but when it comes to transferring them onto a rough black wooden surface then that is a different matter. Once the paint brush is dipped into the paint and the paint is applied to the wood then there is no going back.

I know from experiance that you get a line or a shade of colour wrong and you see the mistake instantly, and if it were a water colour on a bit of paper you could scrumpple up the paper and start again, but with a toolbox it is a bit heavy to throw in the ditch if you paint something you don't like and it is left there as a legacy to you ineptitude. Or if you are writing, and make a spelling mistake, or construct a sentence that you don't like then there is always the possibility to correct it, so that the words come out to your satisfaction.

Having the will to correct things rather than abandon them is a very powerful quality.




















But perhaps the best thing to do is to do some research and prepare. Take things easy and advance slowly. I bought some chalk to do a rough outline of the motif I want and have gotten as far as doing an outline on the top of the toolbox. I bought myself some chineese tubes of acrylic paint and some rubbish paintbrushes.

















My way of thinking is that if you cobble together a tool box from some scrap wood from a dump then it is a bit ridiculous to spend lots of money on paints and brushes. My attitude is OK I have some scrap wood, let's build the best box we can from it. That is the best feeling to create something useful from something that has been discarded as worthless. The decorations are just a little bit of frivolity.

Painting a poppy on an old black box is like pinning a medal on the chest of a soldier. It is a way of saying. Yep!!! you'll do for me. 

Flowers from below

Everyone takes photos of flowers from above and they take a long shot so there is some sort of perspective, but I thought I would take a worms eye view of some flowers... do worms have eyes???

Well first of all you can never frame the picture properly, and you never know what kind of picture you are going to get since you can not look at the LCD to see what you are aiming at.

But the one good thing is that on bright days you get a wonderful blue background from the sky. The petals of the flowers also take on a transluscent quality that you would not see if you were shooting downwards.


The daisies and the poppies look different somehow... more beautiful. Sometimes you only get blue sky when you take a shot since the flowers are moving in the wind.

Sometimes your own eyebrow finds its way into the picture and you have to crop the composition to get rid of it.

Sometimes the photos are so bad you have to delete them from memory.

They photos also look wrong since everybody is used to viewing things from above that the prespective from below can be a little disconscerting.


On occasion you capture a photo where the sunlight is making the flower glow, and there is a gradient of blue across the sky. These things you could not plan and they are happy accidents that make shooting plants from below an adventure.

Light and airy plants seem to be the easist to photograph. When you get into the jungle og asparagus fronds there is too much visual noise in the photo, and the yellow squash flowers deep on the jungle of green foliage are difficult to capture since the big leaves block out the sky.



The best picture I came away with was of a Peony. There is something very delicate about the colouring of the petals. It has a very Japanese feel to it. Transendental even. It is as if this flower is whispering a secret about summer. Telling of the mystry of creation. Longing for redemption when flowers will bloom forever and never fade.

Sunhats at the communal gardens

This is Irma and her friend they were at the Soukka allotments tending their flower garden and wearing big sun hats. The weather has been glorious and most days it has been 25C.

Irma has a large patch of pumpkins and she wanted to thin out the plants so she offered me one to plant on my compost heap. I took it and made it a mound of horse manure to grow in. It is bordered on both sides with Krass. I have also built a box for a watermelon called sugarbaby, and I have lined the box with stones so that they collect heat. Perhaps the plant can be fooled into thinking it is growing in Spain. So far it seems to be thriving.


Women are so sensible when it comes to being out in the sun. They wear big sunhats whereas I do not wear any hat at all and my head gets burnt. Most mornings I get down to the garden before I go to work, and I give it a good watering. Everything seems to be growing well, although some of the shaws on the potatoes seem to be pecked at by pheasants. Stupid birds!!! I only wish there was a motorway nearby for them to walk out on and get run over. Pheasants think that they rule the world. It comes from being so beautiful. They think that no harm can come to them since they have such wonderful plumage. It is the male of the species that gets dressed up as Beau Brummel. They do it to attract the female of the species.



But it is women who wear hats. The bigger the better. Just think of the outrageous confections that dangle from the heads of women at Royal Ascot. If I ever was to wear a hat it would be one made out of a hankie tied at the corners with four knots like the gumboot men from Monty Python with their fair-isle sweaters and braces for their trousers. 

The soukka allotments

So I have got a new allotment down by the sea in Soukka. The ground is in a clearing in the forest and it receives sun most of the day. There is a cool breeze coming off the sea so it makes it easy to work. The people on these allotments are mostly Finns and only two "refugees" from Iran and Afghanistan have migrated to Soukka. It would appear that there are quite a lot of free allotments that have been left unattended, and they are either a mass of dandilions, or a tangle of nettles.

Some people have fenced their plots in, others have turned them into flowers gardens with tables and benches and pathways laid down with bark pathways, others have real proper hedges of siberian-pea to create and enclosed area. My ground is bare and open save for the plants I am trying to grow.

When I came about 4 weeks ago the ground was covered with the dried stalks of jerusalem artichokes. Someone had planted them and never lifted them. Since I don't particularly like the taste of this plant I dug them up and gave most of them away to people who wanted them, and there were about five takers. I then had to get rid of mint that had run wild in the centre of the plot. Long white roots that had spead out about 2 meters from the original plant and was now putting up new shoots.

Once the ground was cleared I dumped 12 barrowloads of well rotted horse manure on to the ground. It took an hour and a half to accomplish the job, and then to was tilled into the soil with a rotavator. The first plants to go in were Stutgart onions and as you can see from the picture they are well on their way.

The Finnish summer may be short, but it truly is glorious. I spend a could of hours a day at the allotment. It is better exercise than at the gymnasium and it does not cost a penny, and at the end of the season you are feeling pretty fit, have a tan that would cost a fortune in a health spa, and you have fresh chives to go with your new potatoes and butter. What could be better?

Death and Disease

She was about fifty, a good looking woman. Lived in the better part of Westend in a flat four flights up. I had to go in and get her because she needed help, needed assistance getting down the stairs. She held my arm and we walked down very slowly. She clutched the banister with her other hand, fearful that she might fall. I had to drive her to the doctors.

During the conversation it came out that she was having black-outs and falling over. She had broken her arm in one of the falls. Her legs were bruised. She said her joints ached all the time, and it was painful to make any exaggerated movements, and that was why she shuffled along, only taking the tiniest of steps, creeping forward with very slow movements. Getting into the front seat of the car took so much time and effort. She gritted her teeth at any movement that placed her body in any new position.

The doctors could find nothing wrong with her. They had run lots of test, but could not find anything that could explain her condition. She had her own idea of what it was that had brought her so low. Nothing more than being bitten by a tick as she had walked through some long grass to pick raspberries that had been so inviting.

She found the bug two days latter, and it had burrowed into her skin. She broke the body off but did not get the head out. The head with the saliva glands. It was two years after that instance, that she had her first blackout, a dizziness, and since then things have become steadily worse.

She thinks she has Lymes disease.

She works as a translator, and had once enjoyed swimming and cycling, but all that was gone now, impossible to do. I told her I had been reading resurection from the Kalevala, and as she left the car I quoted a bit of it to her.

'Rise up out of sleep
get up out of dream
from these evil places,
from the bed of hard luck!'

Because I had just written it to go along with the photo of Lemminkäinen's mother. It would be fine to have the power to speak out against disease, and release people from the prison of their own bodies and minds.

We are so fragile

Best before 13-4-00
Originally uploaded by HyperBob.

I would say it is a very rare occasion that you meet someone who has had a heart transplant.

I picked up a woman with a broken leg and took her to Meilahti hospital. She had slipped on some ice a few weeks ago, when she was out walking her dog.

At the hospital she was going to have her cast taken off and at the same time they were going to take a sample of her heart muscle to see if there was any deterioration.

Apparently your immune system tries to reject any foreign organ that has been transplated into your body, and she has to keep taking medicine so that her new heart would not wither away.

Before she had the transplant she was confined to a wheelchair, and had great difficulty breathing since the muscles of her old heart were wasting away. She has lived three years with her new heart, and can now walk in the forest without becoming out of breath.

I asked here how she felt about having somebody elses heart in her body, and she replied that it was a thousand times better to be able to walk with a broken leg, than to be imprisoned motionless as an incapacitated invalid in a wheelchair.

There must be a lesson it that story somewhere.

Safe as milk

Best before 19-11-66
Originally uploaded by HyperBob.

Everything in your fridge has a Best-Before date on them.

Milk goes bad... well not really it just changes. Some little microbe decides that it can reproduce by utilizing the lactose which is a sugar in the milk and as a by product lactic acid is produced.

Of course since all the milky goodness is now forced to exist in an acid environment the casein protein of the milk denaturates and unfolds, and as a consequence the texture of the milk changes. It curddles.

Now some people would say the milk has gone bad, and other people from other cultures would call it buttermilk and drink it down.

Proteins in milk have a habit of expressing themselves in different ways and it usually finds an expression when the proteins become denaturated. Heat is another way of denaturating a protein. Boil up some milk and then leave it to cool and a skin will form on the surface of the milk. The skin is denaturated protein.

P.S. What a load of codswollop. The protein stuff was good and that is the way milk gets modified to make fermented milk products, but I tell you here and now if you eat bad stuff then you will get sick.

I should know I was up at 3 in the morning with a blowtorch at my backside singing John Cash's "Ring of fire", while my stomach churned like a cement mixer as a prelude to projectile vomiting. I am in bed for the day and well past my sell-by-date.

When the gods ruled our hearts

Doof

It has been said by the Greeks that whom the Gods would destroy first they make insane. But then again the Greeks had strange ideas about Gods. The Greeks never got angry. It was always the goddess of anger that invaded their heart. It was she that made them go to war and fight. The Goddess of war was responsible for all the evil that they did to each other.


Kapow

But then there was also the goddess of compasion, who could also invade your heart, and inexplicably you would for some obscure reason, unfathomable to you enemies, show them mercy, even though they did not deserve it.


Biff

Often the godess of anger would get her brothers rage and fury to invade a persons heart, and then there was no controlling them. When faced with such unmitgated wrath the goddess of compassion would call up her brothers and sisters, mercy and love, and there would be a monumental stand off.

Each side calling up reinforcements, jealousy, envy, hatred, vengence, retribution, revenge, bitterness, all aligning themselves under the banner of the goddess of anger. What chance did forgiveness, reconcilliation, goodness, benevolence, charity have against such mighty foes?



Wauuuuugh

It was usual that the old god of tiredness was the one who resolved the situation.

The world would be a better place if more people were tired. It would solve so many problems. If they were tired of arguing, tired of fighting, tired of scheming, tired of wheeling and dealing.

Being tired means you need sleep and everyone is innocent when they dream.

The trouble with being blind

The first thing you see is the shirt collar. One peak of the collar is sticking out over the pullover, while the other one is tucked in underneath the pullover. If you look closely one trouser leg will often be hitched up over the top of the bootleg, and the overcoat will be buttoned up wrongly, the first button having been put into the second buttonhole, so the whole coat is hanging lopsided off the shoulders, and the hem is six inches lower on the left than on the right.

You then notice the bed head hairstyle, all spikey and out of control at the back, and the egg yolk on the chin, and the bristles of hair on the adam's apple that the razor has missed. Then there is the Stevie Wonder waving of the head from side to side as though they are being wafted by some huge invisible giant fan.

They walk with hesitant steps and for the partially sighted a shadow on the ground can be a unexpected hole. The trouble with being blind is that you can not see how scary you look. You have no way of knowing that you have egg on your face, and that your chaotic nervous movements to avoid falling into holes or stumbling up steps that aren't there, are viewed by the outside world as some sort of psychotic mental aberation manifesting itself as schitzoid dancing while being unkempt and badly dressed.

But sit a blind man down in the back of your taxi and you might learn that Eliel Saarinen moved to America when he was fitfy and made a new career for himself. After being a huge success in Finland he experianced failure after failure, always coming second in any design competitions. The classic Samuel Beckett line 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' could have been applied to him. But in the end Saarinen did succeed and went on to found the Cranbrook college in the USA.

Never judge a book by its cover or a blind man by the way he buttons his coat.

Patrick pulls one

SATURN
Originally uploaded by HyperBob.

Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity

British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience at home.

The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity.

Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation.

Hundreds of people claimed to have felt it. One woman even reported that she and her 11 friends floated around the room.

What did I learn in the taxi today #2

1) Picked up an old customer with a city card. Last time it did not work and she had to pay with money. This time it was OK. She sat silent for most of the journey, wondering no doubt if that idiot of a driver would get her card to work this time.

2) Picked up an old man and took him to Heikkitori. He spoke in a very strange way as though he had a speach impediment. It turns out he had a by-pass operation and some of the "plaque" in the arteries had got loose and had lodged in his brain, and he had lost the ability to speak. He was going to the health centre to get remedial lessons which would help him to speak again. Besides not being able to speak properly he had lost the ability to write. Letters and words were completely incomprehensible, and could just as well be chineese characters for all the sense they made to him. His memory was gone so he could not remember phone numbers for example, and he found himself in a fix cos he could not write things down, and if somebody else wrote the numbers down he could not read them. Have a heart operation and you go from being a well educated man to becoming illiterate.

3) Took 3 women to Sello. The woman in the front was an invalid. The two women in the back nattered away like maniacs. One stuffed her face with a rye bread sandwich and laughed as though she were about to choke, and spat crumbs down her breasts. Her mate talked so fast it sounded like the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun and at the end of every sentence she made a long keening laugh as a form of punctuation. They were going to see an afternoon show that featured belly-dancing.

4) Pick up a young nurse who did not know where she wanted to go. Somewhere along the road to Jorvi, and industrial estate near Laaksolahti. Her friends had been drinking all morning and she was missing all the "fun". I took her to some run down industrial estate on a dead-end road and left her shivering at a padlocked gate. I wondered as I drove away why is it that some girls will insist in exposing their belly buttons in the middle of winter.

5) Took a well dressed couple from Kaunianen to Rittarihoune for the "Knight's Ball". I drove them straight to the door because the woman had on her dancing shoes and did not want to walk in them. I got honked at an had to drive away much to her annoyance.

6) Took a couple to a wedding in Otaniemi. The lady was wearing a wonderful perfume. I asked her what it was. She said "Open Heart" I have never heard of it. I do so hope it was not by some company called "Surgery". Now that I think of it perhaps it was called "happy heart" I was still thinking about how weird it must be to loose the ability to read and write let alone speak after open heart surgery.

7) Picked up a mother and your daughter from the airport. The daughter had a toy fox called Toppi. The navigation system has an english woman giving me directions and the little girls wondered who was taking. I told her it was "Katie Kettu" She asked her mother if this was true. Her mother said no it was not true and that I was trying to trick her. I insisted it was "Katie Kettu" and the little girl was happy with that.

8) Back to the airport and picked up a woman who had come from Leevi. She had been skiing. Had gone to sauna with a shaman who had washed her and purified her. Apparently he had washed all of her sins away with ice cold water. Not only her passed sins but also the future ones.
She seemed to be very happy with this thought of cleansing.

9) Last lift of the night was a Scottish woman. We sang together

Bee-Baw-Babbity Babbity Babbity
Bee-Baw-Babbity Babbity Babbity
a lassie or a wee laddie

Ah widnae hae a lassie-o a lassie-o a lasssi-o
Ah widnae hae a lassie-o a lassie-o a lasssi-o
Ah'd raither hae a wee laddie.

Kneel doon kiss the groon, kiss the groon, kiss the groon
Kneel doon kiss the groon, kiss the groon, kiss the groon
A lassie or a wee laddie?

It was a good day.

Fokker 104

Kullervo is a good name. Solid from the Kalevela and he flew a Fokker during the winter war, and during the contiuation war, and in the Lapland war. He was an aerial photographer and he flew a biplane called a Fokker 104.

It was a good plane because it was so maneuverable, by comparison the Russian planes were slow and combersome. If they were being chased the pilot would put the plane into a step dive, and the Russian planes could not follow since their decent had to be more gradual.

The Fokker 104 was a two man plane and the piolet had a glass roof over his head, but the photographer had to hang over the side with a huge camera straped to the front of his body and take photos. It was cold. The plane also had a english camera called an "Eagle" built into the floor but it was hopeless.



When the Russian planes got better then new tactics had to be used. Only going out on cloudy days and flying in the clouds and droping down to take photos, and if anybody attacked then zooming back up into the clouds to get lost.

The idea was to take photos of the enemy lines. Once the photos were developed they were joined together to make a map, and then the artillary would have something to shoot at. Kullervo would then go up in the Fokker and direct the fire from the ground below until the shells would hit the target.



After the war Kullervo became a lawyer. He has some new under-carriage with him all the time. It is his rollator and he can not move without it. His wife says the body does not work properly any more, but the brain and the tongue are still fully functional.

Kullervo has written a book called FK Lentue. You can get it from the library it is by Kullervo Kemppinen. When you look at the origins of the name Kullervo you discover it is and ancient on and his story can be read in the Kalevela. Sibelius himself wrote an opera called Kullervo



Three times they tried to kill Kullervo then they gave up. The Fokker however was shot to bits and its wings were shreded to tatters by bullets. The pilot had to make a crash landing.

Kullervo has a piece of the propellor on his wall to remind him that he survived three wars.