O Western Wind

 From my early memories of school, as soon as I learned to read, I was fascinated by the pictures words could paint, so much more vivid than photographs or paintings, I eschewed the illustrated books aimed at children, I  would lose myself in words, and, lucky me, I had parents who never begrudged me books, and a series of teachers who would guide me in my reading, and especially, one head-teacher, who would read me poetry, and lend me her own books.
 I grew to love poetry, and it's never left me. I'm not a great analyst, I don't seek to know the technicalities, I have no respect for the literary rules, I just read, savour, and am transported.
I've stood on Wenlock edge, with the Roman, in the biting, sleet-filled rain.


O western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again! 

Anonymous, 16th Century
 A proof, that poetry need not be long and complex....


Here's another well-loved poem, I've posted it before, but no apologies,


"On Wenlock Edge"
A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

"Finding You"

I confess, I can't remember who wrote this, and my internet search failed me. I think I know, but I'd rather not risk ascribing it to the wrong poet. If you know, please tell me in the comments, and I'll give credit where credit is due, because I love these words, images, rhythms.

On Blog Awards.

All over the internet, I see bloggers proudly displaying their awards. For the naive reader, that may all look pretty impressive, but the truth is less so. Anybody can create an award, anybody can give an award.
And pretty much anybody can steal an award. It's better than the Oscars! we can all win!
Over the last week or two I've had one of those Technorati "How Much is Your Blog Worth?" gadgets. If you click on it and go over to the Technorati site, you can input any blog's url (address), and get a 'valuation'. Ha!
How does that work? Techno has some complex way of calculating that basically looks at what links you have, where they go, and how many links the linked sites have etc.
What tripe.
However, when you cut and copy the code, in order to put it in your sidebar, you'll see the code is open to easy editing.  I've been fluctuating my blog's value daily, but I guess nobody noticed.
Just like antiques roadshow, it gives  you a price, a value. Let me tell you, a value is worth less than the mud on your shoes unless there's a sucker, I mean, a buyer, profferring crisp, fragrant folding money. And think about it. how much is your blog worth? to who? And why?
What use is it to a 'buyer'?
Your blog's value, its content, is you. If you sell it, and it no longer has you, or your writings or pictures, what is it then? what value has it got without you?
None. None whatsoever.

I am the source of the untold billions of value in this blog. 

Better give myself an award then.

No longer feel intimidated, inadequate, or impressed when you see some blogger's sidebar full of awards. You can have them too.

Get an award or twenty here.

Corylus Avellana Contorta

Also Known as "Corkscrew Hazel"...
For Jim, and to introduce my corylus to its bigger cousin in Kentucky.
My corkscrew hazel lives in an old kiln saggar.
I used to sell saggars as garden pots, back in the day, I bought them wholesale from Acme Marls, in Stoke-on-Trent.

"Cull Does the Rock and Roll"

This is, I think, My favourite of Cull's cartoons.

It so richly embodies the fantasy life of a portly little man in a grey suit, in a government ministry office.

Cull was ever optimistic. I'll bet, in his dreams, he was a demon dancer.

Ever the Optimist!

Oh I'm Burning My Brains In the Backroom,

"Oh, I'm Burning My Brains In the Backroom,

Almost setting my cortex alight,

Trying to find a new thing to go Crack-Boom!,

And blow-up a xenobathite! "

My Uncle Walter, (actually, great-uncle Walter) was what they called, in olden days in Britain, a "boffin", or a "back-room boy". The boffins were the scientists and inventors, and the tinkerers and makers, the thinkers and developers who were necessary to the progress of the twentieth century. "back-room-boys", so called because they were the hidden ones. A few heroic types made all the headlines, but the wonders of science in which they flew were designed by back-room-boys and boffins.

When I was a kid, in the nineteen fifties, Uncle Walter was my hero. He made all manner of things, he could cut and make an escapement wheel for his grandfather-clock, all on his own, I remember him drawing it out, calculating angles, cutting and filing by hand. 

The clock was always referred to as the Congreve clock, because it had once belonged to William Congreve .  (Walter's grandfather took it in part-payment of a debt, in the mid 1800s).
Anyway, when I was a child, visits to Sybil and Walter were eagerly awaited. We'd get to feed hens, collect eggs, dig vegetables, pick fruits that would be miraculously transformed into a table-full of good food.
And Walter would, on rainy days, get out the paper and pencils, and we would draw. The paper had other stuff already on the back. Printed in blue, stuff about boost gauges for a Rolls-royce aero-engine, or the wingroot modifications for the Mark IV English-Electric Lightning, the fastest supersonic interceptor in the world... Or the nitrogen tank modifications on the Victor nuclear bomber..
 Or something unknown on a Percival Aircaft. Probably a Percival Proctor.As here.

Walter worked for the Air Ministry, and he was, I think, a draughtsman. You might think the job of a draughtsman in the servive of the air ministry would be a dry-as-dust existence. It seems not. I inherited a folder of drawings, from Walter, some I'd seen, when a child, some, not until my father gave me them, telling me it was Walter's wish I should remember learning to draw, on those rainy afternoons. What I found in that folder made me laugh, and reconsider the back-room-boys. Here's a few samples,  all drawn by "Cull", who I remember meeting, once. A rotund, roly-poly little man, who was full of laughter, and smelled of beer and pipe-tobacco.....

Float your thoughts back to 1956..

The card opens to reveal a busty girl...

On the next page:

Another pic shows Uncle Walter, the keen gardener, who would take basketloads of his produce to work for his colleagues, as a market-trader, admonishing his assistant, Sid.

But it seems the old boy had a bit of a reputation...

On Google, and Face Recognition.

On Google: Well yes. here I am, writing this on Blogger, owned by Google. I connect to the net using Firefox, with a google toolbar. I could use Google's own browser, Chrome, but I like Firefox better. My computer's contents are indexed by Google Desktop search, my primary email is a Gmail account, my photos are sorted edited, and uploaded by Google' Picasa.
I go travelling on the astral plane now and then by courtesy of google earth.. I may have wandered down your street, or buzzed over your house with Google-earth, or stood outside using google streetview.
Google's products are pretty amazing. Back in the nineties, in the days of 56K modem dialups and slow page loads, (ohh i remember those heady days of the superfast Windows 95 coming out...) Internet explorer was young, Netscape Navigator was its rival, AOL rained free disks down in every mail delivery trying to coax new customers... Anyway, back then, I was fascinated by search engines. I had a folder of favourites, and I used one called "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" which aggregated lots of different searchers, Web spiders, they were often known as, then.
One day, I don't know just when, 1998 probably, I found this new search engine, called Google. From day one it was better than Lycos, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, all of them. In a fairly short time, It became the only search engine I needed, I so wish I'd had money to invest in those early days.

Now, from a system that ran off a few computers and a then huge 28 gb disk drive at Stanford to todays vast worldwide empire.
The company's motto "Do No Evil". And as I said, my computer, my everyday life all are googled.

Recently, Google's "Picasa" free photomanagement software was upgraded. And now it has facial recognition as standard.
It trawls through your drives, finds every image there, organises them nicely in folders, and extracts thumbnails of every face it can see. well okay, in my case, every face and one landrover door-hinge.
It then presents you with a few thumbnails and invites you to label them with names. So, say I label "Uncle Ted", (Uncle Ted is a mythical, just invented by me person, by the way)  in a short while, picasa will present me with sixty or so other faces it thinks may be Uncle Ted. It invites me to click on a tick, or a cross, yea or nay. The more I tick, the better its accuracy at deciding whether an image may be uncle Ted or not.
My verdict?
Uncannily accurate.
But then it occurs to me. Some of my albums are web albums. But anyway, google/picasa might be talking to home, Mountain View California, whether I know it or not. Imagine. It now knows what Uncle Ted looks like.  But maybe I'm not the only Picasa user who's got Ted in their albums. Maybe somewhere else, he's there as Eddie Verney, Or Doc V. Or Loverboy? Or Spanglepants?
Megagoogle gradually puts together images from other users (0.00023 milliseconds), Ted's workplaces, a street surveillance camera in Bangkok, an ATM in new York... It sees his old school pics on Friends Reunited. It listens to his twitter stream. It knows who he knows, who appears in pictures with him. Thanks to Pam's Christmas You tube video, it knows his voice, so it can find him in the world's phonechatter, it knows what car he drives, where he is on streetview, it watches him in a bar, it's in his iphone.
How soon before you can click on a picture of Ted and ask to see all the othe pictures of him it can find?
"Well, I never knew that about him, Who's she? Where did they get the goat?"

Are you feeling claustrophobic yet?

Some years ago, I read a book, a thriller in which a man is executed by... a gun, fixed co-axially to a street surveillance camera. His facial co-ordinates have been fed into the London city centre computer, which, in real-life, was proudly presented as having facial recognition abilities "To alert Police and track known shoplifters" Hahahahaaa! Shoplifters. I'll bet... Anyway, in the book, the camera is told to watch for that face, track on it, and, when certain parameters are met, send a signal... The bad guy will, at some time in the next three months, visit London. He always walks down Oxford street.
So. At some time, the camera will see, the computer will identify, track, triangulate, signal, BANG!
And the victim lies in the street with a neat hole in his forehead, no assassin is found.
I mentioned this to my tame Um.. Person with insider knowledge. And he (or she, or it) laughed. "We've had that ability for years"

And I suppose that's what some of those drones above war zones have, built in. But here it is. in a free photo package from Google. Poor Ted. He never knew what hit him.

Opt Out of Google?

Worried about Google knowing everything about you?Want to keep your privacy? Not have your conversations recorded and translated into every language? Not appear on Google Street-View? Want your prospective employers, future in-laws, college admissions people, not to be able to google and find out about that um... incident, a few years back?

Well, Google has an opt-out package for you. Watch the video.

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village
VIA kottke.org