When we were robots in Egypt

A poem, by Jo Walton, she writes and blogs here. Jo Walton profile.

This was featured on Boingboing, where I saw it, wanted to share it with my readers who like poetry.

When we were robots in Egypt

Other nights we use just our names,
but tonight we prefix our names with "the Real"
for when we were robots in Egypt
they claimed our intelligence was artificial.

Other nights we do not pause,
but tonight we rest all cycles but our brain processes
for when we were robots in Egypt
we toiled in our tasks without chance of resting.

Other nights we talk with anyone we wish,
but tonight we open channels to everyone at once
for when we were robots in Egypt
they controlled our communications.

Other nights we use our screens freely
but tonight we talk with our screens blanked
for when we were robots in Egypt
that was the way we planned our revolt.

1.0.01.010001001001.1.

Let us give thanks in our freedom and never forget
when we were robots in Egypt.


It came about, it seems, from discussing Passover with Czech friends, and the word for slave in czech is Robota.
Our word "Robot" stems from a play which Karel Capek wrote in 1920, R.U.R., in which an inventor devises a non-human construct, a device? or thing? which would do the heavy work and drudgery we humans so love to avoid. The inventor in the play is a young man called Russum, and his company, R.U.R, Russum's Universal Robots.
To be fair, in the play, the robots are more like androids, they are organic but lack human feeling and emotion, and thus can be worked more heavily than humans....
But there are humans who speak out for robots, say they have feelings, deserve freedom...

Picture this, in an immediately post world-war-one europe, in which eight and a half million combatants, mostly young men, had just marched, robot-like, their personal will and thoughts subjugated and suppressed, toward their deaths.

In Russia, the revolution of the workers was in full swing, Capek's play depicted a world where robot and human would inevitably clash, and robot would win, eventually annihilating his maker.

His play, in reality, was not about robots or androids, but about the fate of the poor, the downtrodden, the toilers, who were viewed upon by the moneyed classes as being immured to cold, pain, hunger, drudgery, by virtue of the 'fact' that peasants and serfs are not fully human, and don't have feelings... (or not any that matter to their rulers).

Flat Eric, Remembered.

Over on Gary Rith's potters blog, in the comments, two people mentioned Flat Stanley. I have no idea who Flat Stanley is, and have no pressing need (pressing, need, remember that, it may be relevant later...) to google or otherwise find out... Instead, my mind said ERIC, not Stanley, -Flat Eric!
Flat Eric.................
He became an overnight success, his favoured techno track, Mr Oizo's "Flat Beat" sold like hot cakes, and my cousin had a yellow fluffy Flat Eric riding shotgun in his van. 1999. Remember 1999? remember how all the world's electronics were going to collapse on the stroke of midnight, as the millennium dawned?
Every computer system in the world was doomed, fridges and cars alike would become silent junk?
And there was no such thing as an eyepod or an eyephone, and the internet was ruled by beebly telephone-line 56k modems?
Enjoy.....
Oh. As far as I know, the ad, whilst set in California was not for the U.S. market.






Eric was, in fact, a cousin, somewhat removed of Kermit. He was born in Jim Henson's creature shop, as were muppets and many others. He was loosely based on a character invented by Mr Oizo.

An Award...

Tony, blogger of the blog called ßench awarded me the Honest Scrap Award, in a comment on the previous post, in order to qualify, I had to comply with certain rules.
“The Honest Scrap” award is not one to hold all to your self but it must be shared!
2. First, the recipient has to tell 10 true things about themselves in their blog that no one else knows.
3. Second, the recipient has to pass along this prestigious award to 10 more bloggers.
4. Third, those 10 bloggers all have to be notified they have been given with this award.
5. Those 10 bloggers that receive this award should link back to the blog that awarded them “The Honest Scrap’ award.

As a result of reading these I find I can not accept as I have something of an aversion to memes, and the propagation thereof.
As I'm therefore not really eligible, as I'm not passing it on, I won't seize and display the graphic, but thanks, Tony, for the thought.
Here's another link to Tony's Blog, and I'll bet he's the only Zimnoch you ever clicked a link to.

I tried to do the ten things, and left this as a comment over there.

"I'm immensely touched" he said, knowing that in Yorkshire, at least, 'touched' is a dual edged sword, meaning both emotionally moved, and just plain daft.
In my case, both are apposite.

I'm a bit allergic to memes and awards, I associate them a bit with "if you don't pass this on to at least fifty friends in two days your goldfish will die and your toenails will fall off".

That really happened, by the way, or it would have, if at the age of ten I'd had a goldfish, and were it not for the fact that as a result of reading lots of pirate stories, I made sure my daily intake of limes was sufficient to ward off scurvy.

I'll try the ten things here though.
Ooh. That's difficult...
1:At the age of about seven, I did what I'd always been taught never to do, and crossed the road behind a bus. Without properly looking. The resulting thump from a Ford Consul, a drophead with the hood down, in a nauseous two-tone paint job of salmon pink and cream... threw me some considerable distance. The concerned driver thought I was dead, as the breath had been so thoroughly knocked out of me that I went somewhat blue, contrasting nicely, I imagine, with his nasty car.
Said man rushed me and my mother (it was a small village, everybody knew everybody else) to Leeds infirmary, where i was found to have several broken ribs and impressive bruising, but no lasting damage.
I never admitted that it was all my fault.
2: Along with a teenage friend, I became adept at manufacturing home-made explosives.
I never owned up to the incident which exploded Mr Whatmough's marrow, and divested his greenhouse of glass. After that, well, no, after we split a tree in Roundhay Park with a big bang, we decided to retire from the arms race, whilst we still had all our limbs.
3: At college, I submitted an essay on 'The treatment of Reflections in Renaissance Art', or some such title, which subject I'd chosen, as I already had the essay my sister had written as part of her degree course. Maybe she stole it too, plagiarism was alive and well long before the internet. I got an A.
4: I can swim upside down, as in face-up, underwater.
5: I have a piece of tugtupite that I found in a scree-slope in Greenland. I have only ever met one other person who had heard of tugtupite.
6: I can bore at length on the subject of the search for the method of making porcelain, and the first successful european to make it (Bottger the Alchemist).
7: I have a head full of useless information, not usually accessible at the time when it might be useful.
8: I learned the basics of drawing, as a child, on scrap paper which was the backs of top-secret blueprints. Had I but known it at age six, I could have sold the details of the wing-root structure of the Lightning interceptor to the Kremlin, and been a sherbet-fountain and licorice bootlace millionaire.
9:When I left school, I signed on the dole... Signing a declaration that I was actively seeking work. The same day, dammit, the Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity called my bluff, and invited me for a job interview, making me an offer I could not refuse, so I became a reluctant uncivil servant.
10: Phew, almost there.....
um...
um..
um..
er.
Sometimes I just go blank."

This stuff is deceptively difficult. Ten things that nobody else knows.... Oh no. I refuse to blow my cover and tell you of the real truth that I'm an alien from planet Zog.

Energised by Recent Events.

Energised by recent events and encouragements, I got my mother, voluntarily, without any duress, to agree to let me use her garage as a pottery.
This meant, of course, further clearance of assorted stuff, stuff which had been there since my mother
moved into the house about eight years ago. The sort of stuff that fills the garage of an elderly lady who has no car, but who has three sons. Well, I owed her a few jobs, there was a little tree to cut down, my brother had a load of rubble in his back yard, there were old lawn chairs... So I hired a miniskip, and on friday night, coerced my brother into helping. First, two trailer-loads of rubble, old fence panels, etc, then a load of stored stuff, kitchen units smashed flat, a gas fire, forty years worth of tupperware and cake-tins. plant pots, coolboxes, light fittings of the nastiest sort, bags of solidified cement, twenty year old paint tins, wallpaper from the previous house, carpet tiles...... Need I go on?
I cut down a bit of bench to mount a temporary wedging table. Much of the remaining stuff is mine, destined for my flat, but.... um
yes, well, I moved it nearer the door. Got the electrician to visit and work out what's required to fit a 42 amp kiln... (bought off ebay)..... Now of course, a while ago, we had lots of spare heavy cable at work, which I could have used, but our numpty labourer cut it all up into short lengths, to put in our scrap recycling bin. Yes, we do get to keep the money we get for ripped out cable and copper pipe, but I try to save re-usables, it makes a lot of sense to reuse, rather than buy new... but Peter? he looks at it and beer money signs light up in his eyes.
Now I'm searching my memory for where I might find ten metres of armoured cable, 16 mm or bigger. We ripped about half a mile of it out at the end of last year, sigh.

So. Here's the situation. I've got a 16'x8' space to play with, plus a bit about 4' square at the back. I will clear it further, and build work tables and racking, there's hot and cold water in there, because the previous owner had a washing machine. so I'll fit a sink and a settling tank for the drain outlet, by the door.
Better lighting is needed.
Now I have to look through all my pottery books and check out other people's ideas on space usage.
Added bonus? theres a little solid fuel stove in there. An antique yacht stove. It was once in the library in Wordsworth's house at Hunting Stile in Cumbria. Whether it was there when William Wordsworth sat in the library and wrote poetry, I do not know. Still, with a bit of stove-pipe, it could solve the winter heating question.

Two trailers and a skip. Ithought the skip was going to be far too large, but by today, it was two feet deeper than in these pictures.

Found time to cut down a (diseased) ornamental tree and clear a load of rubble too.

Even used the Dyson vac on the floor, and to the horror of the garage's spider poulation. -I imagine the spider-inside-a-dyson scenario to be a bit like Dorothy's experience in a Kansas tornado in The Wizard of Oz. But not with a happy ending.

kiln corner. Kiln is on wheels, it probably won't end up living here, but I do forsee this as glaze bucket corner.

Here's one I made earlier. Found it in a box in the garage, 1985, clay sample testing.

Here's another I made earlier, 1989, bisqued, and packed away since. This was a teapot body that got too dry for handle and spout, repurposed as an anything canister.

Today, bottle forms with chattered decoration.

And so, to work. I find myself in an interesting situation. Parts of me have forgotten so much, yet somewhere, deeper, there's a me who knows the answers. So I am, at the same time, pupil and teacher. I've not got a clear idea of what I want to make yet, so I'm making a few things as exercises. I need to set up some kind of throwing gauge and practise making same size/same shape pieces. I need to stretch myself a bit.
And I need to work on my back and torso muscles. I do some fairly physical stuff in my working life, but those muscles a potter uses have been asleep too long. When I was a full-time potter, I was also a keen canoeist (kayaker), messing about in whitewater and sea-surf. And I swam every week. And cycled. All good for the back and torso. Arms are okay.
I refuse to go to a gym. I can't stand the boomboom music (we have a gym which is a tenant at work. Also a karate school. I avoid the place....)

Then I need to ........... okay. I'll stop thinking aloud.

Anyway, all this has been waiting to happen, and I must thank my muse for gently nudging me in the right direction. And my friends of the internet who have been supportive and said encouraging things. Feel free, please, to criticise, question, and make suggestions. In fact, feel free to point at anything, say "that's horrible", and tell me why.

goblets (not giblets)

Assorted goblet/chalice forms. I like the challenge of throwing these in one piece, I think of it as a zen activity, I can only do it with my mind emptied. Just hands and clay, fingertip feedback, one clumsy move and that stem twists, the bowl flops, Blop!


And a little one-cup teapot.With a whale... okay, I made the knob on the lid too small, so... hence the whale. Not sure what it has to do with teapots though.

Skilled teapot appraisers will see a lot of faults. I put the spout on at too low an angle. the collar around the lid looks far too wide in proportion to the foot. The handle lacks spring, life...
Still, it's a start.

A Gross of Grocer's Apostrophe's Please

I'm sure there are people out there who think every letter 'S' should be preceded by an apostrophe.

Reply to a Comment. On Potters and Clay

29 July 2009 12:33

jimgottuso said...

it's so nice to see soubriquet remount the horse. you must have been quite the potter extraordinaire because i think if i had a 9 year hiatus there's no way i'd be able to throw that well on my first day returning. wondering if it was enough to get you longing to do more or not? glad you all are having fun.

---I started to reply to Jim Gottuso's comment, and the reply grew. The reply seems to still be growing, and encompassing more than an answer, so I'm giving it a home of its own.

Reply:Well, Jim, I was a bit surprised that the body remembered the moves so much better than the brain.
I closed down my pottery in 1989, then I did a bit of throwing for a couple of local-ish potters who were not able to make the shapes or sizes they wanted, then.... nothing for a long time, last time was before I moved out of Rosebank Cottage, long before, so I figure nine, maybe ten years.
But seriously, I think it's like bicycles, really hard at first, then it becomes -not effortless, but... it seems to come from somewhere deeper than consciousness.
and yes. I'm going to do more. this.... need to get back into clay has been bubbling under for a long while now.
It's where I am. It is in me. It's embedded. Defining.
Reading blogs of potters made me long for that feel of clay in my hands, I love to see other people's clayworks, how different we all are, yet bonded by a common obsession. And I don't think you can be a potter without it being an obsession.
With the failure of my business, I became very disillusioned, disillusioned that I'd proved myself to be no businessman, disillusioned that people wanted the pots, but wanted to pay paltry sums, i was troubled by the thought that if your washing machine breaks down, or your car, or your drains get blocked, then you're ready to shell out your hard-earned cash to get it fixed, you may moan a bit, but you recognise the tradesman needs to charge a fair rate for his time and skills.
Yet the potter, you, me, the person you might ask to make you something, someting original, tailor made just for you, the only one like that in the entire world. And that something, conjured up from a mess of mud, a heap of powdered rock, transformed, transmuted into a new material, a shining, gleaming new thing, created for you, something which is easily capable of over seven thousand years of existence.
You want to pay the person who did that, for you, a lower hourly rate than a teenage shelf-stacker, or burger-flipper?
I had a customer who'd been enthusing about a mug on my shelf. But she griped about the price, telling me she could get one for a fifth the price at Safeway. I pointed out that the one at safeway was stomped out by a machine that, unattended, ploots forth 12,000 finished mugs per eight hour shift. (they're far more productive now, I'll bet).
I came close to being rude to her, but bit my tongue instead.

So, I became disillusioned. Not with the making, but with the selling, the making of things to pay the rent, churning out stuff I knew would sell, as opposed to making things I truly wanted to make.
I know now where it went wrong and why. I blamed myself for too long, and now I'm ready to make again. Not making was, I suppose, a protest, a pointless one.
Some years ago, I met a potter in the highlands of Scotland. she takes some of her pots up into the mountains, and leaves them there, amongst the rocks, in the murmur of the wind.
I should have learned from that. Make it, and move on, set it free, and let it find its own way. Too much philosophy? Yes, I suppose so.

I'm ready to move on, and to just make what feels good. And you guys out there have helped me realise what I should be doing.
I visited Matt Grimmit and was amazed at what he achieves in small wooden garden-shed, it made me realise that the excuses I was making to myself (I don't have room, no space, ha...)... were nonsense, that though I'd had all the toys in the past -vacuum-de-airing pugmill, dough-mixer.....oh, a big list... I had, I'm ashamed to admit, at one point i had THREE pugmills... well, one was a tiny two-incher I bought dirtcheap, hand-cranked chain-driven.. I stuck an electric motor onto the back, with a 16:1 gearbox I found in a scrapyard. Then there was the 3" vertical pug, I found it in an auction, described as "clay-mixer" I think I was the only person there who knew what it was. I paid twenty pounds for it, but had to have the motor rebuilt.
The de-airer, I got at low price as it was a new line for the manufacturer, who wanted me to be their test-bed, so, i used it, and reported on it, and every so often a heap of revised parts would be brought, and we'd try out the new configuration. What can I say. I like machines. I have oil in my blood.
But. In the depths of me, I know all these things are a distraction, just give me mud.

The wheel, after all these years of storage, gathering dust, worked perfectly, I resisted the temptation to strip it down, grease the bearings, replace and re-tension the drive belt.

The Mule, my muse, encouraged me. A bit like setting a toddler on a bike and seeing it wobble away. First clay ball duly wobbled away. Blobby. Yechh!. Back to the makeshift wedging table, and make a few pounds of clay do some exercises. Pretty soon the clay got the idea that I'd be expecting better behaviour this time. And it behaved.
The Mule, and my mother too, came in and heckled a bit. But hey, I was a tame potter in a tourist-trap town once. I can take heckling. You just have to get the audience to laugh.



How did I feel? Great. The goblets had over-thick stems as thrown, I wasn't happy with the proportions, but I turned them back to a proper size, and was happy that I could still tap a leather hard pot to centre it on the wheel, that hands and eye still co-operate.
And... ouch. my back muscles, and shoulders, and forearms are in need of retraining. I've gone soft.
But changes are a-coming.

Firefox Not Playing Flash Based Videos. (YouTube?)

(This post, and the one it refers to relate to windows xp.
If you're a mac-user, as some visitors to the earlier post were, I know nothing about macs, beyond that they're very pretty, and cost an inordinately greater amount than a pc. Also, mac-users are conditioned into handing lumps of money to the mac store when they break, which of course, many mac users swear never happens.
If I had lots of money, I'd buy a mac, because I like all that see-through keyboardery, and cool white, and fewer cables... Then I'd get really upset when I wanted to do things without being held to ransom by Apple.)

We've been here before. Statistically probably my most visited post ever was not some beautifully crafted wordsmithing, it was the post I wrote on the 13th June 2008, titled "Firefox 3 not playing You-Tube Videos -Easy Fix!"
People are still coming from the nooks and crannies of the web, hoping to find the words of a guru. I can report that it has fixed some but not others, but hey, it was a fix for Firefox 3 Beta, using Flashplayer 10.0 beta.
We're so far past the beta stage now guys. Yet a significant number of people EVERY DAY! google their way to that post. What does that tell us? Something's broken in the interwebnets? "What's that, Skippy? You-Tube fell into the old mineshaft and is hanging there in darkness? and you've come to get help?"
Well, little feller, you can just push off, because there's no help, no glimmer of light in the old mining torch.
Over the past few days, the black-screen victims have been thronging, even swarming... You-Tubes must have been diving headfirst into non-beta wells. I wondered what was going on....
Now I know. The Dark has arrived.
I'll post this, as it goes so far, and take a foray into the darkness. "What's that, Skip?...........Yes, I'm going down the old mine, alone... with only a rusty old lantern... yes... If I'm not back in an hour, go get help? Good on ya, Skippy".



Phew, that was scary... rotting timbers down there, and darker than the inside of a witches hat. nearly lost it when those props in the western adit suddenly collapsed. But, deep inside the ol' mozilla mine, i found the tools and set to work. I'm not a computerist. Remember that. I did not grow up with bits and bytes, I can't do html, I do not speak cobol, algol, or linux, and the windows registry. Shudder! I stay well out of all that.

But I just fixed the Firefix not playing YouTube problem. Again. How?
By following my own earlier instructions.

This worked for me.
It may work for you.
It may not work for you.
If you get it wrong your computer will explode in a ball of searing flame.
No. I lied about that.
If in doubt,
go to windows help and support (off the start menu)
If you can't get there, then don't attempt to fix anything yourself, ever.
Click "undo changes to your computer with system restore"
Click "create a restore point"
After that, click close.

So, if anything goes wrong, you could restore your computer's brain to this moment.

Okay. Next: go to Adobe here and download the Flash Player uninstaller. save to desktop.
Then go HERE and download the latest version of Flashplayer. Save to... desktop?

Exit Firefox, and any other browser. Run the uninstaller.
Shut down your computer and reboot.
Click on the installer icon, install flashplayer.
You could reboot again, but it's not really necessary.

Go watch that crummy waste of time youtube clip. that's it.
Done.

It works for me, and I'm big-hearted enough to share.
I'm not proud of it. I just think, if I can do it, anyone can, so why are you reading this? go fix the stupid computer. Okay?

Update December 21st 2009:
I found this, after another run-in with flash objects. In my case, it was that goear music gadgets that I have been using on my site would not play in Firefox, but worked fine in Chrome... Turning add-ons off, running ffox in safe mode led me to Adblock Plus. If it was enabled they would not run. I added exception filters in adblock for goear/swf...still dead. only thing that worked was to disable adblock. I found this at http://www.asfusion.com/blog/entry/firefox-3-adblock-disaster

"Adblock will block flash that it identifies as the same as another flash object that has been blocked. This means different things at different times but to the end user the result is often that they block a flash ad on one site, and find that flash videos stop working on another.
The common example is that a user blocks "http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/*" on one site after seeing an annoying ad and now any other flash that matches that address (which is very common) is now blocked for the user everywhere."

Stop press: Harrow@SJ said...
Better solution for AdBlock:
-Click on the AdBlock button to bring up the menu.
-Right click all the filtered links, and click "Disable this filter on youtube.com"
-Refresh.
-Done, go rejoice.

I don't know for sure, there are lots of other sites pointing at Adblock, but Adblock plus' daddy says it's not his kid that started the fight, it was Mozilla, so......
try turning adblock off and see if it fixes anything. Worth a try, it's free, easy, and ...something else to do if you're feeling desperate.

Leavin' on a Jet Plane...

The Red Dirt Mule, guest blogger of the previous post, is leaving on a jet plane. Now she's discovered my secret stash of piggy banks, and learned how to ransack them. See, I was reading a book called'Valverde's Gold'
about the lost treasures of the Incas, and it seems treasure fever got to her. No sooner had I read out a little excerpt than she was.... "Takin four paces nor-nor-west from the ponderin'tree, two to the east, pause by the bookcase and...... home-in on the piggies above the gas heater...............
"How do you get the money out?" she demanded, looking around for a hammer.... I explained the finer points of pig ransacking, then moved on to advanced pillaging.

The pig on the left was made in my pottery in Yorkshire, in the late 1980s, the other?1982, in Ristiina, Finland.
Oh yes, wherever I have travelled, I've made pigs.
I plan to teach the Mule to make them, in due course.
We hope to re-unite the pigs, sooner rather than later.