Life as a Fugger

070 - Flag Loss

2010-04-15T06:00:00.001-07:00

070 - Flag Loss, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

What makes me sad about this event, other than the loss itself, is the sheer lack of love behind the whole affair. It is 70 years since Katyn, so how can anyone who calls themself a Christian not be looking to forgive?

There are always excuses.

There are always new people to die.

Instead of excuses, I want to see the same amount of effort put into caring for the people and the problems of today. Luckily, this will increase Poland's exposure internationally, and I hope that it does encourage more people to come here in the future.

094 - Man in a Box (or 'Lublin Shroud')

2010-01-22T04:21:00.001-08:00

094 - Man in a Box (or 'Lublin Shroud'), originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

One of the problems Poland suffers from is the general inability of priests to accept their responsibility in the present day; they want to live in a past where their parishioners came to them for help, or so they would want you to believe. This would not matter, if it were not for the effect on society.

Back during the communist era the church felt it could justifiably oppose the sate by selling the 'family values' line to counter the community level action they felt that the communists where pushing. After all, if everyone figured out what to do at the community level, what would have been left to the priests? Gladly or sadly, the communists in power had no real desire for community action, it would have undermined their own, so people were left with two hierarchies above them, one with control over the body and the other with control over the soul. These days the threat of direct government control in one's daily life has largely receded, but the Roman Catholic church with its 'family values' line has become largely resplendent in its power, or would be if it were not for the actions of a few pesky priests and a slight but general drift away from the church.

The family value principal is based on getting people to care for their own family, but without much guidance in how to achieve this. The result is instead of a vibrant church where people in a community are aware of their neighbours, everyone stands or sits together in the church, eyes to the front, and no help if you are in difficulty. No welcome, no goodbye, just programmed responses and a loos of attention 5 minutes into the sermon.

I have a friend who is not Polish, and in his time here has become completely alienated from the RC church - who ignores him as the basic principal is that priests do not come to you without your express begging - you go to them for help. Priests have no real idea what people feel or if they are in distress, they only come around to your door but once a year to sit for a few minutes and, generally, take an envelope of money away with them.

This friend twice in December responded to separate incidents where an old person in a flat elsewhere in the block had fallen and was trying to get help by banging on the floor. This was ignored by everyone but this foreigner, even though one incident occurred on Christmas Eve when other people were still up and celebrating.

The RC church here teaches that 'bad things come from the West' and that they should call back their children who have gone to the West to find work because their souls are at risk in the West. If you were not born to a Polish family, let me tell you that the values, if any, that you learnt from your family are not values at all, only the Polish family is a true family. Poland is the Christ of all nations.

Poland needs help, but the priesthood is by and large making sure that it does not get that help. They could learn from the mistakes other nations have made, but they would rather just make the people feel guilty if they wander away from the family table, unless it is to visit the Church.

Three definitions one can apply from society here are:

Leadership: You do what you're told.
Responsibility: Why does not someone else fix this?
Freedom of Speech: Don't you dare make anyone outside aware that there is a problem.

061 - D--n your Age Appropriate

2010-01-19T05:22:00.001-08:00

061 - D--n your Age Appropriate, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We watch a lot of programs that deal with fashion, it is an interest that we can share and do on a wet day. One of the things that annoys us is the concept of 'age appropriate', not in itself but the implication that one should dress age appropriate.

First, it means that people will recognise you by age at 500m, and your actual qualities will be less apparent, just another 50-something irrelevant. Don't believe me - how many people do not employ people over the age of 50? Now go take a look down your street and judge how old each person you see is. What chance have the older ones of competing with younger people based on our practiced perception of people?

Second, what about freedom of choice. This is not just about not criticising other people for their choices but accepting them for their choices.

Third, what about trust? You think my wife is going to knife someone because she is wearing a leather jacket or that she cannot be trusted with a class full of students? Trust her, then, to make decisions on what she would like to wear.

Fourth, take a look at what you wear and decide how acceptable your clothes would be a century or two ago. Someone was first to wear the types of clothes you wear and it does not make you a mass murderer or other delinquent because your clothing choices are different to members of other societies or societies from the past, does it.. Unless you are, of course.

In this time of recession, decisions are still being made by people who cannot accept change and who will hold on to how it was in the past. If you want a better future, start paying attention to those who understand change.

Cost vs Equipment vs Opportunity

2009-12-04T00:12:00.001-08:00

EDGY06 zuk, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

The Żuk is a van made in Lublin, the city where I live, and this early version probably dates from the 1960s. I have a fond spot for these and have even had a website devoted to them, and this early type is so rare now that over the past decade I have only found five examples. As you can imagine, that does limit their photographic opportunities.
I often see people on photo website talking about their equipment, which I and many other people cannot afford either in time, storage space or cash, so does this limit our potential as photographers? One answer is to expand our photographic range by taking advantage of image editing software, which can be downloaded for free if we cannot afford the marketed equivalents. The problem here is that there is a marked coldness on the side of some 'equipment' people because we are not catching the image in the camera. This is an old question, and one with no resolution to some people.
More interesting is the opportunity question - what if there is no time to deploy all the equipment necessary? The amount of time I have had to photograph the five Żuks was between 15 seconds and 5 minutes, which is not a lot of time to deploy an array of equipment especially since the meetings were unplanned. I was simply lucky that each time I had some form of camera, often just a compact and only once my SLR. One shot was taken in the street as the van passed, the image above was made over a fence in someone's field.
With such fleeting contacts woefully short of equipment and access, how could I have arranged the above image? If I were a painter, would it be bad if I made a quick sketch and then made the 'proper' painting later in my studio? Paintings of fleeting events cannot possibly be completed during the event, so why do people apply such restrictions to photography?
The idea for this image occurred some two and a half years after I took the photograph, and I have no idea how I could arrange access to an equivalent van. The answer could be to choose a different van, but the intended use of the image required this early type of Żuk. For me to create a fresh image I need a good idea, and here the coincidence of idea and access time were a long way apart.
Let us assume instead, that I am able to organise an opportunity to create this image as a photograph. By preparing myself to take the photograph, I am influencing the photograph. The very act of preparing means I have already made some of the decisions: I am no longer going to respond to the situation but instead take control of the situation.
Control is artifice, and whether we control the players in the image or the pixels on the screen, it is all artifice. One type of event has no better intrinsic quality than the other.
Ultimately we only sense the world through our bodily organs, the best we can do for ourselves is to be interested in the quality of what we choose to sense rather than trying to establish if equipment X is better than equipment Y. If you can apply X better than Y, use X - but if you can apply Y better than X, use Y.

EDGY Poland - the concept

2009-11-28T01:10:00.001-08:00

EDGY05 car, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We have a new long term project to produce a new book about Poland, based on a set of images we are going to take. Having spent years editing websites and books about Poland written in Poland by Poles, we feel it is time that Poland had a chance of being what it could be. We are going to reject the old 'can't do, won't do' attitude, and show the Poland that 'they' prefer to remain hidden - that Poland can be FUN.

Bye bye stodgy tradition!
Bye bye lonely images of objects without humanity!
Bye bye monument counts pretending to be tourist guides!
Bye bye histories ending in 1945!
Bye bye 'the people are grateful for the beneficent government'!

An Hello Fun!

This is going to be a Poland of which my Polish wife can be proud.

Most of all, we want to turn our city of Lublin from the city of the dead into the city of the living - so no more grateful acknowledgments to small men in big hats, no more having to be serious, and no more 'if you do that you won't be Polish'. History is history, but this is our world now.

056 - AI is for Avoiding the Issue

2009-10-18T09:49:00.001-07:00

056 - AI is for Avoiding the Issue, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Marches and rallies are exciting things to do, but what is the point if people in your own community are still scared to say what they need to say? The problem is that the community is full of real people with real problems, while abstract people conveniently do not actually exist.

People often pretend that the abstract problems are more important because they are 'what God wants.' However, what God wants is for people to care about the local things first. That, though, is an unpopular view, but it would be.

055 - What Men (are told to) Want

2009-10-17T10:54:00.001-07:00

055 - What Men (are told to) Want, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

The suit - the uniform for those not in the military.

Wear a suit enough and one day you will discover that you have forgotten what it is to wear something different. Ever seen those sad individuals with three button tee shirts, socks with sandals, socks with shorts, or, perhaps worst of all, the man on the beach wearing a short sleeve shirt obviously designed to be worn in the office.

The suit - one more nail in man's coffin of confidence.

The suit, like any uniform, is a way of showing that you belong to a group; however, it is also a means of defence. Any external means of defence used over a long period time erodes the mind's or the body's ability to defend itself, even drinking coffee to boost awareness soon replaces the body's natural equivalent. Carry a gun in public to defend yourself and evenetually you will fear to go out without one - even if a gun is one of the quickest ways to escalate a bad situation and another way to avoid learning other effective eans of defence that support the mind and body.

A family vacation for the long-term suit user can be a confusing affair, and an easy way of embarrasing one's own offspring. A short-sleeved shirt is many suit wearers limit of variation from the mean - the suit. A short sleeved shirt is not beach wear, it's not cool and, most importantly, it marks you from a distance as someone with narrow views on the world.

053 - Rock Chick

2009-10-17T10:52:00.001-07:00

053 - Rock Chick, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is Ania's favourite jacket at the moment, so I decided to use a picture of her in it to make her a new screen image for her computer at work.

I still want to investigate more people's fears and feelings about dressing in ways that surprise. If I had told you that I had the great luck to run into some noteable rock star from the 1980's. and she allowed me to take this picture of her in some cool cafe I happened to be hanging out in, then the classes in your mind would probably have said 'lucky guy!' where4as if I said that I had run into some politician who usually dressed conservatively, you kight have said 'well, well!'. However, if I said that this was your mum or someone else you expect to be common, grandmother material as found on any street, you might be feeling some resentment, shock.

Whatever your actual feelings, the chances are you have seen the reactions I describe here many times over, there are even special words and phrases to describe women over about 50 who 'dress young' without being famous, including but not exclusively 'mutton dressed as lamb'. In society, the cost of being an individual is ridicule or complete rejection. How mature is it to make someone else unhappy because you cannot accept them when they have had to spend their life learning to accept you and your values? How intelligent is it to attack the only people who bring colour and depth into our world, if these people left today the conformists would have nothing new again, ever. No new music, no new videos, no new books, no new humour, no new fashion, no new electronics, nothing, but endless repeats of what has been seen a thousand times before.

Life would be a dead soap.

052 - NO is for National-ist Education

2009-10-17T04:35:00.001-07:00

052 - NO is for National-ist Education, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There is so much to do, and so few people prepared to do anything, which makes me wonder why.

Here in Poland we have friends who, like us, one partner is Polish and the other from some other nation. Either you live apart each in your native countries or together with one having to live in a foreign country.

Such is the price of love.

However, as a foreigner here you have no rights over any children you may have - they have to be put into some international school or force fed Polish culture in a social and education system that cares more about reinforcing Polishness, and force feeding the Polish view of the world than in creating understanding of the knowledge learnt.

Such is the price of love.

Humanity? Love? Respect? Understanding? If your nation sings the national anthem at school, flies the national flag at school and you do nothing then you are part of the process of allowing hate through differences to continue.

Free education of its national chains!

Say NO to Church and State in schools!

092 - Red

2009-10-11T10:30:00.001-07:00

092 - Red, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

After attempting to encapsulate various ideas into pictures, here is one I took for fun for Flikr Group Roulette. The theme was 'red mania', and since those red trousers had already done stirling service this weekend, out they came again. Or down they came again.

As a bonus, because my wife is away on business in New York, I was able to send her the link to my photostream so she could enjoy what I have been up to this weekend.

Note the boots, they were hard to find here in Poland, but they are fun.

091 - Moptown Classic

2009-10-11T10:11:00.001-07:00

091 - Moptown, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I didn't notice today's Flikr Group Roulette task until I had already finished my other pictures, but I decided to get dressed up again and, with my theory that given infinite choice anything can appear to be adapted to any other use. The task was to take picture with a mop and bucket, as an aisle cleaning whore, so here is mop-rock!

Who said work can't be beautiful!

My wife has lost a lot of weight this year, and that has meant we have spent a lot of tie buying new clothes for her, only to have her grow too small for them. However, it has also been a lot of fun, and I have had the opportunity to show her why I am so dissatisfied with the narrow choice available to men. Our confidence in what we can wear and what we like to wear has grown, and our understanding of each others needs and desires have grown too.

In this picture my hat, scarf, shirt, tee-shirt and trousers all come from women's clothes shops, which has meant some fun as I try out clothes in their changing rooms. Here in Poland the choice of men's clothes is worse than it is in western Europe or the States. Walking out in this kind of gear gets me some strange looks, the other day a young couple in a shop couldn't do their shopping for looking at me, which was rather nice for an arthritic codger who's gone grey early like me.

What is annoying, though, is that if we were some well known rockers, no one would think it odd for us to dress like this, they would actually expect it, so why can't society in general accept middle aged people of no stage experience to dress like this?

048 - Rocker Grainy

2009-10-11T09:46:00.001-07:00

048 - Rocker Grainy, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

If I was a rock star I could walk down the street in the clothes I want to wear and no one would mind.

Sometimes I consider buying a guitar to sling over my shoulder so that in their eyes I become a rock god they merely don't recognise.

Society - it's killing me in stages.

People often ask me where I get my ideas from, and the answer is through taking action. My wife was reading about a Polish woman who went to visit her American friends, who owned a beautiful apartment in Rome, right in the centre. She said to her hosts "I have always dreamed of having such an apartment here, in Rome." They replied "So why didn't you do it?"

I often say "If you don't do anything, nothing will happen, but if you do do something, something may happen." What this means is that I have ideas for photos because I don't just think about having ideas about photos, I take photos. But more than this, I don't just take photos, I select things, arrange them, take the picture, and then play with the picture. Every time you take an action, something happens, often more than you are aware of. Some of things you knew would happen, some of the things you thought would happen don't - but also, something always happens that you didn't expect. The more actions you take, the more chance you have of happening on the unexpected.

Take this picture: I saw that the blue LED of my phone's battery chager made a blow glow on my wardrobe door, and when I stood in front of it I could see my outline. Cool, I thought, took off my clothes and photographed th resulting shadow image. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, and because of the low light the resulting image was rather grainy.

Then I decided to take a picture of myself as a punk rocker, which I did, and then played around with that image, made it black and white and rubbed away the part of the image showing a flag motif on my tee shirt in color from the original image I had beneath it. Great, and then I realized that as a kind of 1970s rock image, the blue shadow image would go rather well with this one - so I added it as a new layer.

This was an unexpected idea, and a complex one as there was a lot of black on the shadow image while the punk rocker photo had a white background. Using a tool on my image manipulation software that allows me to delete specific colors I began to remove the shades of greyish/reddish black one by one.

Suddenly, out of the blue, as it were, I had this image, 'Rocker Grainy'. Well, I had to crop it down until it just showed my lower face, neck and shoulder.

That's what I mean about actions always result in unexpected things, this image exists because I was doing something else and this just popped out of the process.

046 - B is for Bad to be Human

2009-08-16T02:28:00.001-07:00

046 - B is for Bad to be Human, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

During our visit to Poznan I finally realized why the shops we didn't want to enter used shop window dummies without legs, while we were much more inclined to use dummies with legs.

At first we just assumed the non-leggers wanted to sell to a clentele with aspirations, but why would aspirers prefer legless models?

Eventually it came clear that the legless represented a dehumnised aspiration, that aspiring to a class as opposed to be aspiring to be a kind of human. Weird idea? Not really, you won't have to go far to find people who value your life less than their status. OK, it is a simplifaction, what explanation isn't. Sadly, sitting in a local church yesterday, I was seriously lonely, the priests had achieved a congregation unable to enter into dialogue with others, we were a mere class of people, not human to the priests. Contrast that with a visit to another church where, as strangers, we were helped to a pew, given books to help us join in, and spoken to by the congregation and priest afterwards.

Education spends too much of its time teaching through naming classes and then assigning those classes values. This is an important thing to teach, but you also need to teach with as much vigour that these classes are simplifications for our understanding, that the class is not real, but what it attempts to classify is. This gives a duality of vision - the class in question, and the broadest, loosest class we can imagine. I might be described as being middle class, but I fit better the wider class of human or even a living being. You might be reading this on a computer screen, but it is part of a much wider class of information presentation objects, of the larger class of human constructed objects, of the much wider class of brief coming together of atoms that probably won't matter one way or another twenty trillion years - but does now.

many churches teach that sex is bad because somewhere in its history it was worried about holding society together in the face of irresponsibility, disease and other social ills. But because sex was perceived as a problem, it came to be seen as bad. And if sex is bad,l the body must be bad. And if the body is bad, Man as a species is bad. And if man is bad, why care about the individual?

I suspect God loves the good athiest better than the average church-goer, because God cares more about humans than a class called 'Church'.

045 - Band in Print

2009-08-16T01:59:00.001-07:00

045 - Band in Print, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This was more of an experiment in technique, playing around with the perspective of images so that they appear to lie in the planes of things visible in another image.

However, it also shows some development in our series of band photographs - with its new name 'Band', and doing things with the concept other than creating band images. Not sure where it will lead, if anywhere, but it is a good demonstration of the principle of 'if you do something new, something else new comes out of it that you did not expect.

I think that what we often admire in people who achieve something is not what they set out to achieve, but something unexpected that happened as a result of their effort to do something new.

090 - nOT dEAD yET

2009-08-13T06:42:00.001-07:00

090 - nOT dEAD yET, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I really am concerned about the slow decline into death, partly because after getting arthritus in my thirties and learning how difficult it can be to simply move around when you are old, it set me to wondering what we are all doing here.

The older I get the more I become aware of people doing things because they believe that their age demands it of them. Why? Women chop their hair shorter and shorter as they get older because, they say, it makes them look younger. No, young women chop their hair short to make them look older - more to the point of women cutting their hair shorter is to help with hot flushes.

Most men always have a problem with clothes, and as they get older and less likely to go into the kind of store that offers something of interest, the more like a unifiorm their t-shirt+jeans or suit becomes.

I might look like a silly old fool to some people, but that is because too many silly old men wear the uniform of their age, and I am more of a surprise because I do not conform. Why should I conform here, I am not at work.

More importantly, my wife does not want an old fogey on her arm, she choses fun over conformaity.

044 - Cafe Meeting

2009-08-13T01:45:00.001-07:00

044 - Cafe Meeting, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I watch people when they receive calls, even by landline, and I watch to see who remembers that they have chosen to be with someone physically and those who forget, those who can say no and those who don't, and those that are simply too involved in what they are doing to remember to think about why they are doing it.

What kind of person are you?

This combines two images, each one taken from the two largest malls in Poznan. I only took the overlay one because of the tiype of lights hanging from the ceiling, of a shape I and many other people really like although seemingly impossible to buy in Poland if you do not work for some large design company. We first saw them in Orsay in a delicate pink.

Here they almost form tattoos on Ania's arms.

043 - C is for Concrete for all Ages

2009-08-13T01:40:00.001-07:00

043 - C is for Concrete for all Ages, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is Ania in Poznan, questioning why concrete should be the foil for the youth and very old in photographs, can't we all contrast with it?

The concrete in question is part of the base for a huge war memorial in Poznan, built by the communist authorities in that inhuman stylised way that they used to pretend concern that never touched them.

Ania was born in communist Poland and had to grow up with the propoganda, so another contrast of this picture is the ugly balanced by a mind that survived the propoganda.

Interestingly enough, the ever-lasting flame has gone out, but the ever-lasting youth has taken overt the monument as skateboard park.

Ania is also wearing a top she bought from Orsay, which after we had tried it on in the changing rooms there we run into a friend and former employer who had also been on the same diet as Ania. She seemed quite surprised to see us choosing this very bustier top, but I said I was quite happy with it, and why didn't she consider something similar. As we left the shop she was examining the rack in question, but I suspect that she will remain in cream blouses for, well for a long time.

042 - Band in the Hotel Polonez

2009-08-13T01:36:00.001-07:00

042 - Band in the Hotel Polonez, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Continuing our fun pretense at being in a band, here we are giving an impromptu performance in the hall of a three star hotel in Poznan, Poland, a city which despite its pretensions within Poland as a city of international fairs, still achieves a mere 'where?' when we mention it to most people outside of Poland.

Still, he there we were, on a voluntary 5-day trip we had organised to the city in order to learn a bit more about the other side of Poland and do some shopping.

Of interest is perhaps the fact that most of what I am wearing was purchased from shops or departments dealing in women's clothes because men's clothes are BORING!!!!

The only question left in my mind is whether Lublin is ready for a balding, greying man to wear these trousers on its streets? Are our grand nieces ready?

089-picture me

2009-08-13T01:34:00.001-07:00

089-picture me, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

As indicated by the number of the tltle, this one was done for the fuggers group of the day - recreating a painting. We chose Adam and Eve by Tamara Lempicka, a copy of which by a local artist hangs above our bed, the latter pushed out of the way for this shot.

Of course, our recreation has a few changes - my arthritus did not allow me to bend enough, and Ania is not ready to allow her students to see too much as most of them are from places east of Poland and often from cultures too steeped in sexless, human-less traditional Christian upbringings, the basis of the former Soviet states.

The apple is somethign that Ania eats every day, she has always loved them and is quite happy they are part of the diet she has been on for the past six months to lose weight. As part of this diet is an hour's exercise three times a week, something that has done wonders for her circulation, a great boon for a frequent flyer and train taker.

041 - Skin Deep Vision

2009-08-02T02:57:00.001-07:00

041 - Skin Deep Vision, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Living in Poland it has been interesting listening to the reaction of Poles who have gone to work in my native England. Poland has managed to convince itself that it is one nation, so what happens when comfortable middle-class well-educated people we know arrive in multi-cultural England? Often good, sadly too often 'I am not racist, but black people should stay in Africa'. Sometimes I feel I have reversed into 1950's Britain, and now I must go through the pain once more of racism, sexism, and deep and pointless nationalism.

I used to live in Birmingham, a city with a high proportion of people who could trace their roots back to the Indian subcontinent, but to me just people. What is annoying is being told by Poles returning from there that it is alright for me, I was born in the UK. Sorry, I was born in a small village surrounded completely by 'white English' people, I never saw anyone of another race until the arrival in my class at school of a girl from Jamaica. Luckily, we had had no pictures of the queen, no national flag on the wall, and no national songs to learn, so she just slotted in just fine with me, just another girl.

Am I white, am I red, or am I some kind of red and white panda? Does it matter, because under the skin my basic value is human.

038 - C is for Complacent

2009-06-08T01:19:00.001-07:00

038 - C is for Complacent, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I see many problems with the managements of companies, and this is one of my least favourites - where managers rush around politicking with each other but ignoring basic issues of communication within and between departments. Guess who gets the blame when things don't go right? Guess who is called lazy?

It can be fun being a manager, getting tasks set by those above them, attending meetings, putting together reports - but what about the procedures that are already in place or none existent?

I have worked for companies that create new products as part of their basic existence and also service companies. The latter tend to apply product thinking to their own systems rather than solving issues in novel and applicable ways. I think this is the result of the education and experience of the management team. By product thinking I mean sending managers on management or product-related courses, or buying in ready-made computer solution or other systems. having spent a lot of time talking to people in management in service industries I can see that they believe they understand innovation, but assume that innovation really means 'new'. a new course, a new system - all pre-made by someone else.

The problem is that many in-house systems are very specific to the nature of the business and the geographical relationship of branches and clients, and the assignations of duties between departments. Innovation is finding a solution that fits by examining the problem, and accepting that you do not know what the answer is before you begin. Not what package you can buy to solve the problem, but understanding what the problem is. This is where it gets tricky, because understanding the problem means abandoning traditional thought, leaving yourself naked to the universe - and naked to your staff as you attempt to learn what it is that they actually do. Yep, you have to admit that you have no idea what the solution is. You don't know. And that is hard in a world of service company management politics.

Hence, rather than learn how to deal with the unknown, whole management teams play internal politics and waste vast resources on systems that mysteriously do not work as well as it said on the package.

Play, play, play, like me in the left hand image, having fun while unnoticed on the table in front of you your internals systems are a mess. that mess sets up friction, and eventually one of your cards catch fire. Run, run, run around with your ass/card on fire, look for someone to blame - and still not see that the processes are still a mess.

036 - E is for the End of Creation

2009-05-18T11:17:00.001-07:00

036 - E is for the End of Creation, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There are two ways of looking at life - from the small bits up or the big bit down. Imagine that you defined a car as being a three-box sedan - engine part, passenger part and trunk. If you made a car without a separate trunk, a fastback or hatchback say, then this would not be a true car but a derivative of a car, not a true car. This is the small-bits-up view of life - define a single element as the ideal and then anything that does not match must be some other element.

The big bits down would say that a car is something that is self-powered and primarily carries small numbers of people around - three-box, two-box, truck and the rest would all be 'car'.

Many people consider language to have an ideal model, and anything slightly different is dialect, emotional speaking, corruption and the rest, not true language. This is small-bit thinking. The problem with small-bit thinking is that it excludes original thought, although many would argue that excluding the attendant change is a good thing.

Polish linguistics is caught in a small-bit thinking trap, where many of the practitioners vehemently reject ideas from outside Poland under the very weak argument that "Polish is different'. Polish is not that different, but the result of this thinking is millions of wasted pupil-teaching hours every year in the teaching of language in Poland while at universities the lecturers and professors every day walk past opportunity of greater and deeper understanding, instead enmeshing the next generation in the same trap.

The same thinking traps millions of people around the world into narrow worlds where you cannot even be adventurous in the home you live in without heavy criticism - the question of whether your home is a good design or suits the environment is secondary as to the question of how well your home matches the three-box-sedan model of a house. You must have lots of tiny rooms to ensure that your family spends time apart, houses must be separate from the garden, and vast quantities of rarely used items must fill in the space. The rooms must be featureless boxes that you have to fill with decor and furniture merely to take away the mind-numbing boredom of it all - rather than designing spaces to fit us.

To me a car is a loose concept to describe a whole bucket full of personal transport concepts that has no hope of being filled completely. I am a big-bit thinker - I see humanity first and try to ensure that life and the world is a happy place by meeting our needs.

033 - T is for Trust

2009-05-10T03:59:00.001-07:00

033 - T is for Trust, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I believe that trust is one of the many keys to life as we know it. For many long years I never could decide whether God existed or not, but eventually I came to understand that it is not a matter of belief but trust.

From where I am sitting I could hit half a dozen believers with a stone, should I be so careless to toss one, but I would be hard put to find one who would trust God enough to argue the toss with him and still come out with both of you winning.

Whatever form your God or god takes, trust him or her enough that they are there to help you find you, rather than a causer of trouble when things go wrong or bonuses when things go right.

032-E is for Experience Trap

2009-05-10T01:23:00.001-07:00

032-E is for Experience Trap, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We know people who have had summer cottages for decades, and it seems to us that rather than just being a benefit, they have twice as much cleaning to do and they spend a significant amount of time travelling to and fro almost every weekend during the summer.

We all have balconies, but they only use theirs for drying the washing, while we have an awning, a small herb garden and a place to eat, read and generally relax. It also means that we have total access to all our facilities, unlike in a summer cottage.

So, is it better to have a summer cottage or to choose a house or apartment location in the city that gives a relaxing dual purpose life?

Interestingly enough, when I first moved to Poland over a decade ago when I expressed the idea of living in a village or small town outside the city I was given some very odd looks; they thought I was crazy - you had to live in the city if you worked there. When the company I worked for changed locations to the other side of the city, everyone was worried how I was going to get there, and this is a small city of 400,000, where the bus ride would now take me a whole 30 minutes instead of 15!

However, now that more people are buying cars and getting some experience with travel they are beginning to take on board the idea that you can build a house just outside the city to live in and commute in. The next step is for people to build/buy houses in established villages and towns to live there, especially since so many Poles have recently been working for extended periods in the UK and Ireland and can see how many more living choices there are. Nowadays I get less strange looks and more wistful ones!

031-R is for Responsibility

2009-05-01T00:58:00.001-07:00

031-R is for Responsibility, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

All countries have their problems, just as all people have theirs, but what happens when you meet someone who always blames someone else for their troubles?

This year sees the 20th anniversary of Poland leaving behind it's Communist era, and perhaps it is time for a change, to turn its back on a whole sum of other problems of the past and try to create a better future for its citizens.

Some people say that a nation recreates itself every decade, and since 1989 we have had two periods - the intital struggle to transform a socialist system into a functional democratic one, and then a decade of expansion of the demcratic system. Companies, for example, transformed from State owned enterprises in the early 1990s, have spent the past decade expanding, remodelling their management process and often making remarkable amounts of money. Middle class people have absorbed this windfall and outfitted themselves with new clothes, cars, vacations, educations for their children and the like, much as one would expect.

What has not changed are the basic attitudes and life at the bottom of the pile. One would not expect rapid change in either area, but perhaps their time has come. However, we are still at the stage where the middleclasses still tell the world and themselves that they are poor - as they drive their high spec cars home from their comfortable job to their new high spec home in the new suburbs and recently absorbed villages of their city.

Smug in their comfort, they allow the nation to be ruled by the mini-dictators, also known as priests, professors, lawyers, doctors and politicians. These people look to the West for their model of a comfortable life, and then to the East for the service they give, smugly boasting of the high Christianity of their nation while at the same time attempting to ensure that the people who could make a difference remain in ignorance of their power.

Poland does not need pity, financial help, it needs some plain speaking from the international community.

030-Depression: someone else's problem

2009-04-29T12:56:00.001-07:00

030-Depression: someone else's problem, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Depression is not something that is particularly visible in someone until it is far advanced, and the trip there can be jagged with intermittent highs and lows.

I often wonder how many people end up there simply because most people never learn the importance of taking notice of all the people around them, it's just to easy to become wrapped up in one's own life. Worse, though, are those people who are focussed on their success, who pay attention to the handsome, the beautiful, the people and things that will advance them at work or sociually. These people are always full of excuses - they are too busy, they are too shy, they didn't realize.

In the working environment I am always working to integrate the lonely and the ignored into the team until hopefully they feel confident enough to make their own way.

Me? I am allowed to free fall by most. and as a consequence the workplace for me is mainly a very lonely place, but if I can save someone else some pain, then I have no choice, I must help that person.

Depression is hard to deal with, but it doesn't get better if you ignore it in yourself or in others. Make someone's day today, say hello to someone today, tomorrow and the day after who is unlikely to ever have an impact on your career!

If you want to know one way to view this image, try to take in everything at once while at the same time understand that none of it has any meaning and what you are doing is essentially pointless, but the very action of trying to absorb it all leaves you fully absorbed. What do all those pictures on the wall contain? Our brains have the capacity to contain a functional memory of each and all of them, but when they are all presented at equal depth, none take presedence - your brain has no way of making choices. In the end even the people end up at the same level, at the present with the past. You have probably been here before, and how many times more must you return?

029-Love is Living

2009-04-21T05:57:00.001-07:00

029-Love is Living, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is a conjunction of some song comparing love as a fact to another fact of nine million bicycles in Beijing, with the table-culture of Poland - and elsewhere.

It's Easter, say, and the family come together and spend the whole day sitting around a table, eating non-stop throughout the day, ignoring the children in a huge adult-fest that at some point includes some discussion on why some family members currently sitting around a different table in someone else's house or flat are failing to bring up their children properly. You know the kind of thing. The problem I can see is that the children present are not being brought up particularly well either - they are bored, desperate for attention and not being encouraged to discover their own thing. They are being trained by boredom into eventually taking part in the same custom in the future.

Why won't they play with the children, why is it only I that can make paper aeroplanes, take them for walks, teach them how to step from sawn log to sawn log, or be invited to inspect theit toys or drawings.

Because I notice them. Because I respect them. Because I have not become a boring fart adult who desires only gossip, porking, look-what-I-own and aren't-I-hard-done-by.

Love is not saying 'i love you' or simply being there, you have to move and hold them, follow them, take them by the hand, and notice them when things are going wrong. I asked Ania when she last hugged her sister, and she couldn't remember, whereas I could.

Love survives in contact, and since we are always moving, contact is a changing action.

028-Wearing your bank account

2009-04-21T04:33:00.001-07:00

028-Wearing your bank account, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Ania is currently attending a slimming club, which partly involves sitting on a fitness bike for an hour several times a week, along with a number of other people. What is interesting is that many of these people are more financially well off than we are, and they are boasting that they will soon be able to get clothes out of the attic that they have not worn in over a decade, since the last time that they fitted.

Proud of keeping clothes for a decade? How many clothes were they buying that so much did not get worn enough that they were worth storing? How good would one look in fashion a decade old? Is this really a bonus? Ania and I regularly get rid of clothes as they become worn, buying enough to wear and not too many that we cannot dispose of them to charity at a suitable stage of wear. Our parents and grandparents kept clothes for much longer, but pride in storage?

One might drag in that over used excuse here in Poland, and blame it on the shortages of the 1980s, but that was twenty years ago and we are talking about educated people, often very well educated people. Where did the programming in their heads come from, what is keeping it going?

Interestingly enough, these same people say that when they cook for their family they have to have something of everything. But these people are on a diet and proud of their ability to keep things for a decade in a wardrobe in their attic, how can you be proud of not wearing clothes that don't fit and wasting wardrobe room when you cannot do the task that is before you - stay on a diet. What about being proud of not eating what you should not be eating?

Here in Poland there is a lot of very expensive, rubbish quality, designer label clothing - which you can purchase from what the local middle classes believe are exclusive boutiques. You have a job which pays well - forget any stories about Poles being poor, by the way, the middle classes are rolling in cash, propery and cars - and so you spend a significant portion on clothes which only look good to other locals, buy more and then store the excess in a wardrobe. Poland, like anywhere, has a lot of good design talent, little of which seems to leak out into the stores, but the middle classes lap it up and then strut around like they were something special. do you remember the story of the king's new clothes, this is a bit like that, where people are duped into parting for cash for no quality.

The oohs, the aahs, when one of them arrives in a shawl, mocassin style shoes, black concealer trousers and bum-covering jecket or coat and a hairstyle that grandma had back in the 1940s, cut to the length that has been deemed suitable for one's age.

When women are young, they cut their hair short to make them look older and more worldly, and buy clothes for work more typical of a forty-year-old who has lost whatever grip they once had on style. The clothing is often cheap, replicas of the mature styles. Later, asa they grow older, they can buy more expensive versions, and they wear them more often, until eventually they wear them most of the time, desperately hanging onto something that they never really had. Men are not immune, the suit eventually producing someone who believes that shorts and short-sleeved shirts are acceptable beachwear.

Style, on the other hand, is something that has to be worked at, but once you allow other things to dominate in your life, the confidence for style just all too easily slips away. Ania has been working hard over the past couple of years to learn confidence in style, and as a consequence is breaking free of the clothing tradition. the clothes she wears do not cost much, and the greatest variation she has is with the smallest items - having more scarves than coats takes less room and less money than the oh so common more coats than scarves we see so often.

Any fool can spend their money on clothes, buying fashion and fashionable cuts and colours, while spending the right money on clothes that suit one's figure, colouring and needs takes nothing but the commitment to continue making conscious decisions throughout one's life.

027-Ones Nation

2009-03-02T10:06:00.001-08:00

027-Ones Nation, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Stop.

Your god is calling.

Look

Leaders teach division.

Listen

To your humanity

I get tired of listening to people in governments, education and religion teaching division, we're the best. I will always support a good cause, but please leave me the freedom to figure out what a good cause is based on my humanity and not somebody else's wants.

022-The Development Process 1

2009-02-27T06:52:00.001-08:00

022-The Development Process 1, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This was just supposed to be used to make a larger image, but it came out strikingly enough to be worthy of its own existence. The top part is very much like many adverts I have seen in magazines over the years.

I attempted to separate the graphical from the more picturesque elements, to put two very much different ways of expressing the same graph background.

I use these little cars, which are rubbery and cheap from my local branch of Tesco (a grocery supermarket change in Europe), to express more complex issues at work as I see many projects fail to meet their full potential because the team members are selected by department rather than by their ability to manage different parts of the project process.

The green car on the left is open top, and symbolises the go-anywhere, open mind needed when change is required. At the other end of the scale is the truck, the result of the development process, the vehicle that actually earns the money. In between are two closed cars, each driven fast with little thought beyond the destination - results now and solution implemented tomorrow.

I need to do a little more work on this image, but I am so busy with work related stuff that it will have to wait.

085-Revenge

2009-01-05T22:47:00.001-08:00

085-Revenge, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I am not really into revenge, life is generally far too short for such grief. Mind you, if one were going to do it, one ought to take it very seriously, and I think this is a cold enough method. Yes, nothing like a little cold steel. And the head comes free.

I like the idea of mixing text and hand-drawn images with photographs, just as I like assembling one picture from a number. I really have do not see 'doing everything in the camera' as anything more than a pleasant option - just on option. Creating this image 'in-camera' would have been a little tricky seeing that I lack a whopping great axe and lacked enough time and resources to mock one up - assuming that I would want to do such a thing. The contrast between the photographed part and the hand-drawn part and the text is interesting in itself.

084-Resolved for more than a year

2009-01-05T22:46:00.003-08:00

084-Resolved for more than a year, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

To me, one day follows another, if I do not have the resolve to make changes during the year, why should it make any difference at the beginning of a new one?

I am resolved to keep on loving my wife, and to continue to search for new ways of doing things, to give society a better chance for a greater future by empowering those who could make a difference if only they knew how - and to break the power of the callous and the selfish.

083-New year, new band

2009-01-05T22:46:00.001-08:00

083-New year, new band, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Having had no success in locating a copy of any version of Guitar Hero for the PC, we decided to create our own band.

Where would we be without the aluminium-vase-and-Hoover-tube guitar or, come to that, the chrome brush handle. Seriously, though, when the weather warms up we plan on taking this band on tour, photographing it in many different situations!

Anyway, here's to the New Year, and me kissing my microphone with those raucous tones.

Another festive death in Poland

2009-01-05T22:45:00.000-08:00

Another festive death in Poland
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This is the hill side Catholic cemetery in the samll town of Wawelnice, in eastern Poland. These grave lamps appear in bulk at most major religious festivals, particulalry Christmas, Easter and All Saints/Souls. They get bigger every year, especially with the increasing use of plastic in the lamp construction.

To see a hill side cemetery lit up at night is remarkable, and there are many such cemeteries here as hills are otherwise unusable for agricultural purposes.

082-Last Cold Farewell

2009-01-05T22:43:00.001-08:00

082-Last Cold Farewell, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

A farewell at an important junction of life.

This is a barely used narrow gauge railway line here in Eastern Poland, in the small, delightful, poor and untouched town of Wawelnica. There is a significant sanctuary in the town, but the significant money it generates goes safely into the pockets of the Church, leaving the town to molder.

081-Ode to Bread

2009-01-05T22:41:00.001-08:00

081-Ode to Bread, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Tonight we are having bruschetta - with prosecco!

Oh joy!

Oh joy!

Oh joy!

And it is still in the middle of winter

080-Seeing Red

2009-01-05T22:39:00.001-08:00

080-Seeing Red, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

080-Seeing Red

Would you believe that I took this through the door of a washing machine, the camera in the machine, with a crumpled piece of red plastic sheet stuck across the front. Why did I do it? Can't really remember, but it was an experience I probably will not be repeating on the floor of my bathroom in the near future.

I had to make a special layer for the vignetting thing, and I will keep it in case it comes in useful another time in case I forget how to do it.

079-Childhood Dream

2009-01-05T22:37:00.001-08:00

079-Childhood Dream, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is one of many model cars left to me by my grandparents, who bought them in the late 1960s and, to my delight, had them on display behind glass in their living room.

I used to have one just like this too, but it never survived me growing up. These days I take better care of my toys, and this and several others are on display behind glass in my DVD/satelite cabinet - thanks to a very loving wife ;)

078-Up Against the Wall

2009-01-05T00:26:00.001-08:00

078-Up Against the Wall, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today the task was to show 'legs up against a wall', which most people seemed to be interpreting as meaning lying with one's bum near one's wall, with legs leaning up against the wall. I felt that the wording allowed a much wider scope, and here is the result.

There always seems to be a lot to do in the kitchen at this time of the year, and then there is all that preparation needed for all those parties one just has to go to. Anyway, here we are, pressed 'up against the wall' trying to get everything done on time.

Note that we actually bought the stockings especially, and they are too small for Ania as here in Lublin people with Ania's shape are not supposed to be interested in such wear, apparently, just as you are not supposed to have breasts larger than C-cup or possibly D-cup, according to what the shops stock.

077-No Ghetto

2009-01-05T00:21:00.001-08:00

077-No Ghetto, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today's group was set up by an English couple who emigrated to Australia, and then decided they did not want to lose their 'Englishness' - and decided to take pictures of themselves drinking tea in different places.

This desire to retain one's nationality-ness is the worst thing imagineable to me - it reduces you to an icon, you are no longer a real person. As an icon you are prime target material for those people who create stereotypes, making life hell for anyone who just wants to get on with their life in a country different from the one they were born in. I mean, if you want to retain your nationality-ness, why bother moving elsewhere?

Having lived in my present country for eleven years, people still cannot accept me as being a valid member of the community - any discussion about anything important and you notice that people start associating you with your 'nationality', and the real 'you' no longer exists. So, everyone around you can complain about the state of the nation, you cannot - wot the fuck? I am married to a national of this country, so either I get treated as an icon here, or she gets treated as an icon of this nation there.

So, our view is - drink your tea because you enjoy it, but don't do it to maintain your nationality-ness because you are just reinforcing the difficulties of other, innocent people.

076-All I have for Christmas

2009-01-04T23:24:00.001-08:00

076-All I have for Christmas, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Back, for one week only, taking advantage of the time I have off for Christmas. Actually, I thought it would be interesting to try out some of the ideas I have been developing in my other main blog, Life by Design, to see if it would make any difference to the pictures i took.

I did take more pictures with me partly clad than I have recently, but for each challenge I did make more effort to show problems or issues related with the subject, resulting in some interesting pictures. I also aimed for contrast between the apparent images and the text that went with them.

Right, and now about today's picture.

Living in a different country from where I was born, I am tired of being told I should either follow the local tradition or abide by my 'native' tradition? Why on earth would I want to make an icon of myself for one or the other of the societies I live in? Can I not simply represent myself, my family or my community before my God?

Today, Christmas day, I can escape from national and religious so-called 'tradition', and instead get on with continuing and creating our own traditions, surrounded by people who see me as a person and not a representative.

Hot off the line

2008-12-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

019 - Citroen C1
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

You know the feeling - the lights turn green and the middle-aged, middle-class business type whose total contribution to achieving rapid take offs is his or her investment in an expensive driving machine. They have, as it were, bought a heavier right foot than you. If it were some lad in a cooking and aging near-future scrap yard material it is not so bad, it's what you expect - young and desperately pushing.

Why then, is my 1 liter Citroen C1 in standard trim almost always the first across the junction?

If you find yourself at the front of the queue at the lights, do not stop on the line but instead something like a meter before. Road regulations usually state something like you are not supposed to cross that line except when the lights are green - so you need to be rolling forward on amber in order to cross on green, hence you must first have stopped before the line.

When the light has been red for a while it is time to slip the car into first, lift the clutch slightly, hold the car stationery on the handbrake / parking brake with that little button pushed in, and your right foot resting on the gas - not on the brake. When the light turns amber / orange, start moving forward, the exact timing will depend on how long your set of lights spends on amber before turning green.

You will be surprised ho much advantage being moving makes, and you do not have to burn rubber to achieve it.

Tradition for who?

2008-12-16T05:38:00.000-08:00

016-Tradition for who?
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This picture was an experiment, hence the odd looking angles of the 'children', although i am not concerned because it meets my 'pure Art without Craft' specification - in that I could have spent the time improving my craft to get the camera angles 'right', but in doing so would have lost the Art, which is in the message and how i produce that message.

Being born English and living in Poland means that I am surrounded by people, possibly people like you, who are continually trying to strip away elements of me and replace them with 'Polish' elements. I am under pressure, even from the nicest of people to conform, simply because that increases their comfort. What is the problem in accepting people as they are instead of trying to forever ram them into shapes that they do not fit? It is nearly Christmas, and we will have a small pre-Christmas party at the office, where people expect me to either bring some Polish or British Christmas food, the latter for the 'ooh' factor and because many obviously believe that living the British tradition is what I most desire. Why can I not bring something from a third culture or, may i be burnt at the stake for contemplating it, something that is not of the standardised version of any culture's Christmas tradition? Well, I will be bring white bread, a toaster and some marmalade - that is what i want and, since few people here have ever had such a combination, I want to share it with them - and sharing is supposed to be a core element of the Polish Christmas tradition.

The sad fact is that few people even bother to think about the meaning of tradition, and by such a lack hurt people from outside their vision without even understanding they are doing so. What partly makes me me is the ability and care I have in thinking about things, so in the case of the Christmas party if they want to bring what they consider to be traditional then fine, I will be happy for them, but why can they not be happy with me?

The answer is that they have too tightly moulded their tradition - it no longer serves its purpose but instead is a mere passage to oppress more people in the future - and my ego is not so large as to insist that future people have to live by my custom. So what if they do forget all we do now, will there lives be any less for it, or will they indeed have enough people of talent to create new traditions?

Penjection

2008-12-07T23:45:00.000-08:00

014-penjection
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I meet a lot of people who are book junkies, partly because I work with translators and teachers of language. Although bristling with advanced degrees in linguistics, a great interest in consuming books, few have the the courage or the conviction to turn their back on their professor's preaching and find their own place in this world of words. The result is that they largely remain passive consumers of words, ever-looking for that next fix but never really taking all that knowledge anywhere.

Society generally encourages people to collect things, as long as they are safe things like stamps, ornaments, paintings - things with a secure tradition as collectables, but for what purpose? To meet people with similar interests? An archaeologist is also a collector, but does not collect to amass an impressive array of object, to meet people of similar interests or to learn what is known - the archaeologist instead wants to deduce the unknown, to write the books that other collectors to define their possessions.

Book knowledge is similar, if you only seek to learn what is known then become like a silent partner in a conversation - offering nothing but silent disapproval of any error in grammar or vocabulary.

When I was at primary school I always had to use a pencil, as my handwriting style never achieved a level deemed by the teacher good enough to warrant one of her cartridge pens. At schools here in Poland they are taught really fancy forms of lettering and insist that they are used - nothing but hell for students like me who lack the skill in forming fine letters inflicted by teachers without the ability or vision to know how to teach me any different. Our niece is able to form these letters, but she has dyslexia, and the teachers have no skill in dealing with her problem.

Even scarier, many of the linguists teaching at university here will downgrade students work for poor calligraphy - so what would they do with me in an exam, as I have arthritis and on some days find it difficult to form letters even to my normal rough and ready style?

Writing is an ill-taught skill, with little understanding of how to encourage the art in writing. We are told that presentation is very important, which is a pity as potential employers must get as tired of well-presented trash as they do poorly presented quality.

Things to do with Ladders

2008-12-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

011-Things to do with Ladders
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Continuing my exploration of Bond-M-Q personalities, here are three aspects of me with the 'Bond' in ascension. I store the images I use here on Flikr, and back in the summer i got involved in a group that takes photos every day on a chosen subject, and built up quite a following. These days I spend little time there and as a consequence the popularity of my images has fallen drastically, largely because many people count as their friends those people who admire them - you get feedback as long as you continue to admire, and you are much more understandable. Looking at work that is not going to generate some feedback is of much less interest. Spend you time in bond mode and you will generate much more interest, be beautiful and people will want to be seen with you for comparison (like having your photographs being shown alongside those of a famous photographer).

OK, fair enough, but where does this leave people unable to be beautiful of engage their bond? The answer is, too often, alone or unable to demonstrate their full ability. I quickly get bored by bonds and the beautiful, while they impress early it is not long before their smiles wear out their welcome, I am much more interested in people who have to struggle to achieve anything, I look for that hidden potential and try and draw it out.

This photo is for all those people who are alone, not for those who have many friends and a reasonable job but are merely dissatisfied. You can achieve without expensive equipment, learning how to do more with a little can help you to focus on position, layout and the relationship between people and objects.

How to drive - around corners

2008-11-28T04:10:00.000-08:00

I thought, since it is Friday, why not talk about something less serious and yet still useful. When I learnt to drive, most cars available still didn't steer or brake very well, and, luckily, generally didn't have that much power either. These days though it is easy to buy a new or second-hand standard car that is equivalent or much better than the 'fast' versions of standard production cars of back when I was a lad, especially in terms of the potential to get around corners or to stop. With a very tired and ageing 850cc Mini, I had to learn how to drive merely to keep up with the traffic, let alone get past it, but i had to learn through practice and thinking, as publications on how to do it were effectively non-existent, while techniques that did get passed around were often wrong.

At the moment the roads are wet, not as slippery as they were a few days ago after a night's worth of snow, but still interesting, reminiscent of the couple of weeks I spent with my brother, David, in northern Italy driving around with our friend's stock Mini 1000. We were there as part of a charity Mini event, and it quickly became clear that despite how much many people had invested in the engine and suspension departments, they simply had no idea how to drive quickly except in a straight line. So, what were they failing to understand in getting their cars to go around corners quickly? The answer, I feel, is still of relevance, because i still see people driving very capable cars incapably around corners.

First we need to establish some terminology, a toolbox of words and concepts we can use to describe what we and our cars are doing when going around corners. Imagine that you are driving around a roundabout in the wet, that your car was rear wheel drive, and you had any anti-whatever system switched off. It would not take you long to discover that if you put your foot hard on the gas pedal you would end up facing the roundabout as the rear of the car broke loose and tried to overtake the front of the car. This is 'oversteer'.

'Understeer' is the opposite. If you drive a standard front wheel drive car around the same roundabout faster and faster, eventually, no matter how hard you turn the steering, the car will just drive off the roundabout. Many accidents are caused in icy conditions where the steering does not seem to work and the car ploughs on ahead and off the road - this is understeer, generally.

'Sliding' is the third condition, where all four wheels loose traction. It is quite hard to slide sideways, more often you end up in understeer or oversteer (and spinning the car), but it can be easy to lock up all four wheels while braking in the straight ahead direction while on ice - a very dangerous thing to do.

My Citroen C1 will slide gently sideways on very wet or slightly icy roads, and I can make it do it well enough that the passengers and onlookers generally do not notice. What is important is a small piece of philosophy: you will find frequent references to 'car control', an internet search on this phrase will dig up lots of references to car safety, skid pans and the police, but it is the wrong perspective. You cannot control your car, and attempts to will result in stiff 'learned techniques'. It might sound dumb or pedantic, but you really need to achieve is 'car management' - your car is a powerful tool, and like any tool, advanced users do not control the tool, but manage the effect of the tool. That gnarly old craftsman points his tool in the directions he would like it to go, and lets the tool do its work under his direction. There is no struggle for control. My Citroen C1 drifts gently and unnoticed because i am the only one listening to the car, I am the only one who has learned to feel where it is going - and because I have learned to listen to my 'tool', observed it, I have been able to learn how to direct its energy. Zen? maybe, though why listening, feeling and observing should be limited solely to a far Eastern religion, I fail to understand.

Oversteer and understeer occur because if there is a significant difference in 'traction' (how well the tyres/tires stick to the road) between the front tyres and the rear tyres while driving around a corner. If there is less traction at the back than at the front, you get oversteer. If there is less traction at the front than at the back, you get understeer.

My Citroen C1 is front wheel drive and can easily be made to understeer on the icy roads around the garages and car parking area near our flats, and so I drive extra carefully there as I have no wish to hit anything, car, curb or person. If I had a rear wheel drive car under the same conditions it would be easy to get it to 'fish-tail' where a little too much gas and the rear end of the car begins to slide out sideways, you overcompensate and it slides out the other way, and so on, a very scary experience, and one to which my old 1973 Vauxhall Viva Coupe was highly prone!

You can get a front wheel drive car to go into oversteer, you 'merely' have to engineer a situation where the front wheels have more grip than the rear wheels, and there are a couple of ways of achieving this. Traction depends on the friction available on the ground (is the tarmac wet, dry or icy, or dusty?), the tyres (cheap/expensive, hot/cold, new/worn out), vehicle speed, and the vehicle weight on the tyres.

The weight on the tyres is very important. Get a bicycle and strap the brakes so that they are locked on and try to pull the bicycle - it will drag a bit, bounce a little, but you can pull it. Now sit someone on the bicycle and try to pull it - probably impossible to move it unless you have used a small child or you are uncommonly strong.

If you drive down a straight, dry road and hit the brakes hard, you can feel the front of the car go down, and the rear of the car rises. This is called 'weight transfer', and it increases momentarily the load on the front wheels while at the same time removing the load on the rear wheels. Anything that you do that alters how 'nose up' or 'nose down' your car is, will effect the traction on the front or rear wheels. As an example, if you accelerate hard in a straight line, you can feel the front of the car rise and the rear of the car drop, which is great for a rear-wheel drive car as it gives you more traction on the driven wheels, but not so great for front-wheel drive cars as the driven wheels (front wheels) are more likely to spin.

Imagine me in my C1, drifting gently sideways in the wet, how do I manage it? well, first you have to be doing some speed, not 5 miles per hour (mph), but first time out not more than about 30 mph. The C1's natural tendency if you corner hard will be to understeer, so you need some way of increasing the traction at the front, or reducing it at the rear. You could try pulling the handbrake on hard - that will lock the back wheels up, but it is not the most elegant method and has the disadvantage that you have to take one hand off the wheel. The handbrake is a worthy tool for altering the traction of the rear wheels, but mostly its use is for fun situations because of the problem of having only one hand on the wheel.

The 'trick', if you could call it that, is in the steering. One way of escaping understeer is to reduce the amount of steering you have applied to the steering wheel - basically, back off the steering towards the straight-ahead position until the front wheels point in the direction the car is sliding. Instead of sliding, the front wheels will start rolling again instead of sliding, and you will have regained some control. More to the point, unless the surface is pure ice, you will rapidly have more grip at the front - the tyres will bite and tend to pull the front of the car down, and transferring weight off the rear wheels as it does so. What is more, if you balance a ruler on a cup, say, and push gently down on one end of the ruler, the other end will tend to lift, but if instead of pushing you tap the end of the ruler then the other end of the ruler will jump up. If you suddenly get more grip at the front, it will pull the front of the car down quite quickly and the rear of the car will be momentarily left with little weight. A lot of grip at the front and little at the rear will put you into oversteer, it only lasts a moment but can result in a significant sideways movement at the rear of the car, helping to rotate the car in the direction you are trying to turn it.

Quickly apply more steering, let it go into understeer for a moment and then back off the steering again to get that rear end oversteer. You end up 'sawing' at the steering wheel, moving it about 30 or 40 degrees, back and forth. Get it right, and the car will appear to float, drifting in the direction you want, facing in the direction you plan to exit the corner.

It might sound a little unlikely, but down in the Alps in a standard 998cc Mini, I once did it in the straight ahead position as I waited for a good moment to pass the car in front - the front wheels were actually spinning faster than the road speed, the car rotating gently left and right, until I stopped sawing on the steering wheel, the car sank and the Mini accelerated remarkably rapidly.

On another occasion, to test the theory, I kept up 50 mph into a right-hand bend that tightened up significantly as you drove around it, until the Mini went into understeer. A quick left-right, the rear end stepped out and we were suddenly pointing in the exit direction.

Go out and find yourself a nice damp road with good visibility, no traffic, and plenty of safe run-off area, start off at about 40 mph and play with your front wheel drive car and see what you can do with it!

When you don't know HOW to trust

2008-11-26T00:11:00.000-08:00

010-When you don't know how to trust
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

A few blogs ago i talked about Classical Success, where you study for a long time to gain knowledge and then become erudite in the that subject. Well, today I want to explore one of the major problems with the Classical Success model, which is the failure of books to teach social patterns of success.

Imagine this: you are an only son or daughter and you are encouraged to study, spending time that other children use to socialise to instead study books. You go to university, and by now you have become addicted to high grades and that important job you will achieve afterwards.

Well, the truth of the matter is that the more 'classical' the field of study, the more likely you are to end up unable to deal with other people, there is a great chance you will be arrogant and unable to trust others to do your job. Linguistics is such a field, it is often becomes an introverted subject telling other people in society how they should lead their life (use language, in this case) when they themselves have barely partaken in that same society.

If every one holds on tightly to their tasks and does not communicate progress, control of the total process collapses and there are frequent delays while one person finishes their task. indeed, the tasks are often not well planned in the beginning and again time is wasted, or their are frequent arguments as people with little experience in planning try to apply 'tradition' as a planning model whether that tradition has any relevance to the subject or era.

This is just one of the many problems with Classical Success, but the major theme running through it is the inability for the believers to adapt to changing circumstances, even though it is apparent to society that we no longer live in Ancient Greece.

Why Poland sells so few newspapers

2008-11-25T02:17:00.000-08:00

Despite having a well educated population, Poland has a very low rate of newspaper readership. One might trot out the reason being that in the past the choice and the allowable choice of subjects was so narrow. But that was a whole generation ago, what steps has the Polish media made to improve its image and readership? Well, actually, not a lot, despite a number of new titles being released.

The effect of the minimal effort can be seen in the quality of writing, and even I, with my liberal attitude to grammar, am shocked by the appalling way that texts are, eh, let's be generous here, 'created'. There is a key that sees a surprising amount of use on the average Polish journalist's keyboard - the hyphen. A paragraph of speech might go something like this:

- It turned out that information had surfaced in Poland that Russia wanted to eliminate him as their agent - Jan Kowalski and to be more precise that they were personally interested in stopping him – added Kotlarz.

When you look at the paragraph as a whole it can make sense, but, assuming that you are a Pole and you know that the hyphen is used as speech marks, it is so easy to assume that it is Jan Kowalski who was being quoted, but no, it also functions as brackets, markers for extra information and so on. The number of reversals you have to make in a single report can be phenomenal, and that is just the start.

Why don't I write a paragraph like a journalist.
I feel no reason why I should bother to connect one sentence to another. The clock has no hands. I might start a new line. There is continuity in my thoughts that I can see as clear as the day is long.
And that is why it is so.

Continuity is a fun thing to play around with, but not when writing to a broad audience who want some light entertainment and to learn what is going on in the world over breakfast or on the way to work. As a consequence, few people want to bother to read such badly composed gibberish, it would be better to wait until one gets to work and then read someone's blog.

Ah, but there are some well-respected newspapers there, in Poland, one might say - but only respectable in terms of the 'writing style thieves' at the top are not as bad as those underneath, working for local papers. The sad thing is that many of these same journalists put in a lot of hard work in their research, it's just that writing is not the same as speaking, it lacks body gestures and vocal inclination, so you cannot write as the words would tumble out while speaking.

Death by Tradition

2008-11-24T01:59:00.000-08:00

008-People We Know
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Continuing on from the previous entry, we decided to show you how people we know of our age dress: it was a difficult task as Ania has little of the kinds of clothes we needed.

Some of the media bang on how bad it is that there is so much pressure to appear young, but care little about the pressure to conform to dressing to suit one's age, ensuring that one is not judged for who you are, but the age you are.

Middle-age, Middle-class (f)Arty: As our home city here in Poland has several universities, there are large numbers of the Polish middle class and middle-class wannabees who, once over 40-45 abandon any sense of style and dive into the 'elegancka' , with beaked hat, scarf thrown over on shoulder, shapeless trousers (usually black), moccasin style pumps and a straight sided coat down almost to the ankles. Indoors, the coat and scarf come off to reveal pearls and either a blouse or a twin set. They gather at theatres, symposia and other social events and bore you endlessly with their talk about money, the spending and saving of it.

the Nun: dark, shapeless colours to conceal a body society has taught them to be ashamed of. The clothes hang off breasts encased in a too-small bra that is too loosely fitted. The neckline, well, that is known as a 'decolletage'... Rather than concealing the body, the hard-edged shape makes the wearer look bigger, unless one stands in a darkened area. Black, we hear, makes one look younger - but it emphasises silhouette and ensures that any wrinkles stand out.

Grandma: The essential ingredient is the blouse, preferably well buttoned up. here we present the festive version, red instead of the uniform white. Hair is best put through the roller treatment and never more than collar length, or pulled hard back. Long hair, we hear, makes you look older - but instead you can estimate how old someone is by the shortness of the hair. Note the amber necklace.

my Wife. Hair to soften her features, cleavage to distract, the right size and properly fitted bra, modern necklace, cardigan to emphasise her curves and stay warm, and a smile.

007-That Special Woman 1

2008-11-24T01:11:00.000-08:00

007-That Special Woman 1
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

My wife, Ania, is my James Bond, and I am her Q. This combination leaves little room for authoritarianism, which is part of the reason we leave in a flat that is moderne in style instead of some mock-baroque or twee pretend manor house type of flat. We do not need to surround us with signs of comfort, we can do that well enough in our heads, and simply by being together.

The sad thing is, at around half a century a worryingly large proportion of our generation here in Poland are in a slow dive to the grave, having long ago given up on the will to explore - they were convinced that they knew enough, but life moved on and new ideas have replaced the old, consigning our generation to the scrap heap of society. This is reflected in the way that they think, and the way that they dress.

Ania, though, is like a diamond among them, she can see outside the box that we all live in.

Partner

2008-11-20T01:59:00.000-08:00

006-Partner
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Life is a continuum, but what we often chose to write about or show are the highs or lows, the exceptions from the continuum. Here, then, is a snapshot of the continuum, as my wife waits while I set up the camera, thinking about what we are about to do next.

She has just finished a set of poses that I failed to capture, and is about to squeeze her boobs. You would never know any of that from this picture, just as those special situation pictures never show the continuum on either side of the recorded moment.

If you were to regularly photograph your own continuum and the images all turned out all pretty similar, what would it say about how you feed your mind? perhaps we should spend more time observing how we survive the time between the highlights, learning to enjoy all that time more.

The Three Faces of Man

2008-11-20T01:29:00.000-08:00

005-Three Faces of Man
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I have a theory that we all have three facets to our personality, with a fluid relationship between them that varies depending on circumstances, age and experience. We do not always get the personality we would prefer, and it can be a struggle to give the most appropriate part of our personality voice.

Somewhere in there is a selfish being, another with complete faith in eternity, and a final one who really believes in other people and their works. A common theme in western thought is the importance in a belief in oneself, a mistake in many ways simply because people have not taken into account the consequences of choices. If you believe in yourself, then what you produce will be yourself for yourself and, as a consequence, impenetrable to others. It will be hard to help you and your weak areas (and there will be plenty of those) will absorb far too much time, time better spent on the areas you are good at. If, on the other hand, you believe in others you will be giving them the one thing that they really need - your trust. You already know that many people will fail, so at the beginning in believing in others you are already prepared to meet some failure, you will be less blind to their weaknesses than your own.

What are your proportions? Do you believe more in yourself, a higher being or in mankind? Not sure, well, look to how you treat strangers and people who do not figure large in your life, the answer will be in their faces - but you might have to look very carefully.

Men - Apes in the Bathroom

2008-11-19T00:46:00.000-08:00

004 Men - Apes in the bathroom
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Men often do not communicate very well about personal grooming, and many have to learn by themselves, alone in a bathroom full of mysterious bottles and creams. Where is the instruction manual? The men's guide to grooming website when you need it?

I love to spend time in the bathroom while my wife applies her make up or applies some cream before she goes to bed. I can ask her why she does the things she does, and maybe even have a go myself. If only I had had the courage to talk to other people in such situations years ago!

So, this picture is dedicated to all those poor souls who never really learn to get the best out of their bathroom, and if you know a man who is a bit limited in their grooming repertoire, perhaps now you can understand why they are they way they are.

Who is in control - and why?

2008-11-18T01:48:00.000-08:00

003-Who is in control - and why?
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Further to the last post, I wanted to show possibly the most typical situation in a two person relationship, where one takes the traditionally defined male role of decision maker, and the other takes the equivalent female role of social controller.

The male sees a need for change and attempts to either enforce that change or engage in dialogue to achieve the change. The female may agree, but after a lifetime of playing social games is adept at appearing to agree to anything without actually doing so, the ultimate poker player. For the male decisions have to have some durability, you cannot plant beans in March and then rip them out in April to grow carrots.

Dialogue is everything, but it is not just the male of the species who has to change, it is time for the female to learn that controlling a relationship is to put that relationship on the road to divorce or internal separation where the couple stays together but essentially leads separate lives.

Grandma Matriarch

2008-11-18T01:19:00.000-08:00

002-Grandma Matriarch
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I have long been interested in why the matriarch is such a poorly observed yet strong feature of Western society. Imagine living in a village several centuries ago with only a limited contact with anyone from outside the immediate environs of the village - where a trip to a market or fair in a town some five miles away might only happen once a year.

If were male and a farmer, a lot of your work would be outside, physical and requiring a fair amount of problem solving as things broke, the weather affected the crops in different ways and animals did what animals do. The further you work from the farm, the more you would have to rely on the tools you took with you and being creative with what was to hand if a new situation occurred.

If you were female and lived on a farm then the working environment would be smaller and consequently more predictable, and you would be surrounded more by finished products such as clothes, furniture, pots and pans, knives etc. Help in terms of people and products would be closer on average than for the equivalent male, the value of social manipulation would be much greater because you would be living in an environment where you would have a greater chance to practice it.

Of course, this is a great simplification, there were many males like shoemakers and blacksmiths who worked much closer to home, but whenever did the exception mean much to social commentary anywhere when creating traditions and the model of the ideal? Even today, boys are brought up to travel far on the bicycles, climb trees and play with toys, like Lego, where you can build something of value and then the next day take it apart to create something new to meet today's needs. And girls? How many still play with variations of dolls, where you are given a set of clothes and you spend your time dressing and undressing using the same set of clothes and very little new, where the real learning comes in trying to control one's friends.

Ania's sister is now a grandmother, and she has gone from being a social rebel to a control freak, unable to trust anyone with anything she values, unable to be effective in the position of the family's matriarch. This is not uncommon, but it is very destructive in a society where you can live at a distance. It is also very lonely being in control, being able to make all the important decisions sometimes is not enough when the action takes place far from you. Ultimately, though, no one really likes a control freak, the controlled people either stay near and remain frustrated or move out of the area of control. In the end, if no one can trust you not to control them, they are not really going to like you.

Here is a normal situation where Ania attempts to take one of her sister's grandchildren out on a treat; it is punctuated by repeated calls. You would hardly believe that Ania is a doctor of language, and for the past quarter century has been teaching and been responsible for late teens studying Polish at the university where she works.

For the love of figures

2008-11-11T00:36:00.000-08:00

001-For the love of figures
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

You know when you are in your M when you do that extra task to improve your position in a hierarchy at the expense of your family, friends and community. We mall have that M moment, it is the equivalent of the Q moment when you are suddenly hit by inspiration, both can be equally inspiring - but only the Q moment is worth sharing with anyone else.

There can be a problem with bringing work home from the office, but how does that compare with taking time out from work and doing something non-work related? For many high achievers, bringing home work fro the office is routine, but since education for the achievers involves a lot of homework, are we not setting the trend for work-at-home for the next generation by mixing their school life with their home life. How can they ever learn a distinction if we blur it for them? Are we, as the adult generations, not guilty of creating future strife and even divorces by maintaining a society where work-at-home is taught as a norm during childhood?

Strong M meets Strong Q

2008-11-06T01:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had an interesting exchange of emails with a contributor, Ela, to a prominent UK feminist website and blog, interesting not just in its subject but in the how I came to recognise the type of person who I was corresponding with. In an earlier blog I outlined my James Bond theory of personality, where we all contain varying amounts of Bond (dynamism), M (belief in hierarchy) and Q (belief in change), and I freely admit that I am a strong Q with Bond as my second suit. Although the format of James Bond seems a little strange in terms of feminism, I used the Bond characters because most people have at least seen some of the films rather than by Bond’s gender or views on women. The interesting thing is that the personality traits I describe are equally shared by men and women; they appear relatively impervious to the influence of society.

OK, so as a Q I believe that change will happen and that it is best we accept this and learn how to manage it, and even use it to look for competitive advantage where necessary. However, all changes are basically changes to how we as humans think and act, although on the surface they may only appear to be a change in technology. To the Q, the human is the basic element of society.

To the M, the basic unit of society is the hierarchy. Ms want their view of hierarchy to be maintained so that they can climb it to gain power, and they will quite happily kill, maim, or just be completely unpleasant to people they see as threatening their hierarchy. If their hierarchy of comfort is not the one in power, they will seek to destroy the competitive hierarchy and replace it with their own.

Anyway, here is the email exchange, I have merely changed names and tidied up the format a bit: first up is my comment on a blog entry dealing with a men’s group complaining of sexist adverts from a group helping survivors of family violence.

Oh no, not the 'violence in the home is instigated by men' thing. I am a man, and I have been the target of violence from my partner. All I could do was escape, with nowhere to escape to because who was going to take my predicament seriously? Eventually I was able to leave permanently, but how many more men are there out there who cannot because they are surrounded by male and female bigots who cannot accept that violence knows no gender.

Here is Ela’s reply, explaining why my comment would not be published:

Subject: New Comment Added to ‘News today'

Dear Geepig

Thank you for your comment on The Femini, unfortunately I won't be publishing it. I absolutely acknowledge your bravery in speaking up against female violence against men and would seek to support any person who has experienced domestic violence. However your comment ignores the decades of research on relative rates of domestic violence which show it is largely male violence against women. I note your mediation of this in relation to "instigation" and assume you're referring to the argument that "women start the fights, men end them". Sadly we live in a country were at least two women a week are murdered by current or former partners so even if that argument were correct (which research suggests it isn't) then that's no justification for the end result. Women's Aid have some really useful statistics on this (see Link1 : Link 2 : Link 3 ).

What we do know is that domestic violence accounts for between 16% and one quarter of all recorded violent crime. (Home Office, 2004; Dodd et al., 2004; BCS, 1998; Dobash and Dobash, 1980) and 45% women and 26% men had experienced at least one incident of inter-personal violence in their lifetimes. (Walby and Allen, 2004) ) – however when there were more than 4 incidents (i.e. ongoing domestic or sexual abuse) 89% of victims were women. In 2007 there were 27 murders of men by their partners (including gay and bisexual men with male partners) and around 110 murders of women by their male partners alone.

I do want to point you towards some helpful organisations though, as it seems you still have ongoing issues around your experiences. There are useful resources at the following sites:

Link1 : Link2 : Link 3 : Link 4

One thing I would say is that patriarchy disempowers both men and women and issues around male survivors seeking help are often connected to the feeling their masculinity has been somehow damaged by abuse by a woman. This is just one way men are disempowered by patriarchy and feminists have long worked to challenge this.

I hope you find the helpsites useful and do continue to contribute to The F Word.

Ela

Right, there is a lot of statistics in their, I thought, and a bit of a shotgun approach to links – which is a fair response as there it is highly likely I will not answer and this would then be her only shot at supplying help.

I was a bit surprised at "women start the fights, men end them" as I had only stated that a woman had started the violence and I had responded by attempted to leave. My belief is that violence only leads to more violence, and my response is always to run.

Secondly, I wondered what was the root of this comment: patriarchy disempowers both men and women as in my experience, matriarchies do exactly the same – unless you are an M that has climbed that particular hierarchy.

Subject: New Comment Added to ‘News today'

Hi Ela,

Thank you for your taking the time to respond even though I am sorry that you will not be publishing my comment, although I wish I could say I am surprised. However, you do realise that in doing so you have put yourself in the same position as, for example, publishers of the 19th century who would not publish work by women? ;)

Anyway, that aside, I think you might find it useful to learn more about my viewpoint. First of all, I do not feel that rhetoric like 'women start fights, men end them' nor quantitive assessments about who suffers most helps in any way at all, in fact they block one's understanding about what is really happening. You are an individual, and if you suffer violence it does not matter what sex you are, just as it does not matter what colour hair you have, that fear is very personal, and it is you, as that individual, who needs help. You look for help or simply a place to share, but no, there is no room at 'my' inn because your face does not fit. By looking at people as men or women, you are damaging your own humanity, you are seeing certain kinds of people and not the similarities in experience. I am a man, therefore I must have x and y views. Are you not, therefore, ignoring decades of research on how individuals think and feel?

Whether or not we live in a patriarchy often becomes irrelevant. I live in a world where I am not seen as a human being, but as a walking set of classes - man, engineer, husband, psoriasis-sufferer, alien-in-Poland etc. Inside, though, I am a human, where my gender is about as relevant as my height, hair colour, or native language - none of which I had any choice in, and none of which I reject. To accept a woman's view and not a man's view based on the quantity of incidents would be like rejecting comments concerning violence against dark-haired woman because it is less common than against light-haired woman (assuming we had statistics that showed violence according to hair colour , of course...).

So, are you content that you have rejected me based on gender and incident count and not on the quality of my experience? Does my basic humanity count for so little? Would you prefer if I just moved along, away from the doorstep of your consciousness, and stayed with people of my own class?

Good luck with work,
Geepig

So I thought, if she can push her views, let he be subject to mine, I will give her some data on my world view.

Subject: Re: New Comment Added to ‘News today'

Dear Geepig,

Thanks for taking the time to respond, we do welcome dialogue at The F Word.

> However, you do realise that in doing so you have put yourself in the same position as, for example,

> publishers of the 19th century who would not publish work by women? ;)

I would disagree - publishers in the 19th century refused to publish works by women because they are women. I decline to publish your comment because it was factually incorrect and our Charter clearly states we will not publish comments which make assertions which cannot be evidenced.

> You are an individual, and if you suffer violence it does not matter what sex you are, just as it does not

> matter what colour hair you have, that fear is very personal, and it is you, as that individual, who needs help.

I'm afriad I have to disagree - in terms of the person yes the fear is real, justified and individually help must be provided (and I've been working with groups seeking to start refuges for men for a long time). However you cannot dismiss the social trends data - take the analogy with education for example. Policy makers are talking about a "crisis" in male education at the moment based on the gender differential of achievement between boys and girls at different Key Stages. Would you also argue we should actually be saying "achievement is an individual matter and therefore we should dismiss the quantitative research evidence"? What about, returning to domestic violence, the statistics were reversed and it was 1 in 4 men who will experience DV in their lifetimes and around 110 men a year killed by their female partners? Would you still say this was an individual issue? Plus the notion of this being "individual" is closely aligned to the arguments, often made, that this is a "private" issue between individuals rather than a social one. But there is a good evidence base as to the social and economic costs of domestic violence including lost productivity, health services costs, policing costs etc. If we eradicate domestic violence (against all genders) we lessen the policing workload by 16% based on the latest figures. This isn't just an individual issue, it is a social one.

> By looking at people as men or women, you are damaging your own humanity, you are seeing certain kinds > of people and not the similarities in experience. I am a man, therefore I must have x and y views. Are you

> not, therefore, ignoring decades of research on how individuals think and feel?

My humanity is fine and dandy thanks. I see the people I meet as individuals, I see the collected data, both qualitative and quantitative in terms of trends by gender, race, class, sexuality and other social divisions. That doesn't mean I assume x group has y view - that means I see that x group is experiencing a phenomenon mpre than y group. I agree there are some similarities in experience between male and female DV survivors - but there are also major differences in that experience. Just as I see similarities between heterosexual male and bisexual or homosexual male DV survivors and also major differences.

> Whether or not we live in a patriarchy often becomes irrelevant.

Only if you have privilege in that system which, given your identification as a professional white man is undoubtably the case.

> To accept a woman's view and not a man's view based on the quantity of incidents would be like rejecting

> comments concerning violence against dark-haired woman because it is less common than against light-

> haired woman (assuming we had statistics that showed violence according to hair colour , of course...).

I am not sure of the assumption you are making here. Is your argument that we should count number of incidents reported by the victims and the perpetrators and compare them? How does that further the issue when in actuality one is too many?

> So, are you content that you have rejected me based on gender and incident count and not on the quality of > my experience?

That's not what I've done. I declined to publish the comment because it was factually incorrect. Your gender is irrelevant (in exactly the way you are asking it to me) - read more of the site and you'll see we publish comments from all kinds of commenters not just women. If however you want to make the argument that being a man therefore makes you a "special case" I don't see how that fits with your gender neutral argument - either men are subject to the same rules of factual accuracy as our women commenters (or indeed as I view it factuality is the issue not gender) or they are a special case. Unfortunately you can't argue it both ways.

Ela

…and she has responded with lots of facts – lots and lots of them, but she is not accepting that I am a human, I am a minor statistic, and as a minority I have no real standing in her view. It seems that violence against males will have to wait until someone can show undeniable statistics that 110 men are dying every year, killed by their partners, before even one male deserves respect.

Ela is a strong M, and as a consequence her care and help are nothing more than notches on the bedpost of her career. Humans as individuals have no meaning, her real interest is to see her vision of hierarchy is instigated without one thought what the consequences might be.

As a strong Q, I can see that change needs to happen, but I also know that replacing one hierarchy with another just because it suits one power group is not the way to do it. Society needs a new hierarchy – and one that is neither a patriarchy nor a matriarchy, but one that does give equal opportunities to all human beings.

Subject: Re: New Comment Added to ‘News today'

Hi Ela,

One day, when you see me chained up to the railings outside your place of work, perhaps you will realise that to understand statistics, first you have to understand that they only express what you seek to measure, and not what you have yet to realize you need to measure. I am a suffragette for humanity, not merely one of your statistics, and the more links and statistics you throw at me, the more I can see that you do not really see people as human beings, your classifications have eroded your ability to see.

If you were to reject those comments that cannot be evidenced, you would have to reject over 90% of the comments that have already been accepted. I am sorry that you cannot see me as a human being but just the class you have conveniently fitted me into, because it will forever distort the help you believe you are undoubtedly giving.

By the way, who said that I am white?

Geepig

Subject: Re: New Comment Added to ‘News today'

Dear Geepig,

I don't engage with writers who resort to ad hominem attacks - it's a sign of the weakness of someones argument to do that.

Ela

‘ad hominem’ is Latin for ‘without evidence’, and is a sign of weakness to use terms your respondent may not know.

Subject: Re: New Comment Added to ‘News today'

Hi Ela

Well, I am sorry that you feel that way. I work in innovation, the domain where evidence does not yet exist in the formal sense, so I feel your denial of my attempts to present my existence as a human and as a thinker as a double blow.

I am sorry if you feel offended, it was not my intention, and I hope that your future is full of verifiable data, it sounds like a comfortable place to be. ;)

Geepig the inconvenient

A strong Q meets a strong M - what we really needed was a good Bond :)

The scary thing is that most organisations are riddled with Ms, they are the ones who are attempting to beat other people based on statistics and quantities - while the essential human element of 'quality' is ignored. Strong Ms really do fear other hierarchies and anything which looks like an attempt to damage their own. Find a group of people and mention 'grammar' and you will see who is an M because they are the ones talking about how the teaching of it was better in the past and how in the future everyone will be stupid because they will not be able to use the language properly (even though language has spent most of its long life without the 'benefit' of education).

Statistics: Hype'n'fantastic

2008-10-12T01:21:00.000-07:00

Statistics are everywhere, everyone is doing them, and there are a whole bunch of tools to help you produce them and then present them as pretty little charts. They give a report a certain standing, and they are eminently quotable at meetings, and they are evidence of the work that has been put in, quite the stamp of research. However, do the mean anything?

Sadly, statistics have three essential problems:

- They represent only the data that has been included in the research or calculations
- People tend to believe them over the reality
- The calculations themselves ignore certain kinds of data

Since statistics are most often applied to supersystems, when you gather the data, some of it will not fit, if not today, then when someone tries to repeat the test. If you are not aware of this and try to tighten down the tolerances of the calculations to give more exact, repeatable data then what you get is a set of answers which varies from week to week, from test to test. This might be a brilliant way of generating more reports, but it can actually make understanding the results much more difficult. If you get a better trained statistician to try and help you refine the process, they will not understand the significance of the data they are seeing. Statistics are nothing more than a guide, and the best way to prepare results using them is to remember that you should be generating insights not definite answers.

Because statistics seem so authoritative, they are seductive in their believability. If you want to use results presented in this way for anything beyond an opinion, you have to learn more about the situation and the conditions under which they were taken. Generally you will find a ton of special circumstances that invalidate the statistics for other situations.

The main thing I want to focus on here is ignored data, the greatest problem for people who apply statistics, and I see uncountable numbers of scientific papers where I have major questions that are left unanswered because the researcher seems unaware that there was a problem.

If you look at data relating to people during their lifetimes, you have a great advantage - no one existed before they were born, they continue to exist throughout their lives, and never return after they die - yet. Statistics works well with such life-cycle data. However, imagine for a moment that you could die when you were forty and get reborn when you were fifty? If this were possible, it would completely invalidate life-cycle statistics, because you could not predict when, where and for how long people would be dead, and so the number of 'living' people you use to calculate the mean, for example, would be false. Luckily, people do not tend to die and get reborn, but a similar kind of thing does occur in other data. I have read of a report where it was observed that dandelions remove heavy metals from the soils, but failed to analyse what happened to heavy metal in the dandelions that died or the weight of dandelion mown or eaten and so removed from the parks in questions - and completely invalidated the monitoring of heavy metal in those soils.

Statistics can also be applied to continuous systems, such as flow in a pipe or the grading of translated texts. Again, a good use - as long as the pipe does not leak between testing points or you do not have new translators beginning work and others leaving. I have seen both of these problems ignored in scientific papers written in the relevant fields of engineering and linguistics. There are uses elsewhere: I remember my father describing how, as a Royal Engineer building roads during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, they would count the locals they employed in the morning and then at the end of the day - assuming that if the latter count was larger there were some Mau Mau infiltrators in the group. However, it could not possibly measure any Mau Mau replacing workers, or any change in sympathies during the working day, and as such it was a dangerously unsafe methodology.

The kind of data the straight application of statistics ignores are, therefore, those little datalets that enter and leave the system unobserved. Rarely do I see checks for this kind of problem since too often their is overconfidence in the use of statistics, too much effort in their application and a consequent lack in the assessment of likely data leaks.

So, next time an authoritative reports thumps onto your desk or into your inbox, spend some time thinking about what might have happened to the tested quantities between observations.

Supersystems: So what about me?

2008-10-11T01:11:00.000-07:00

How you use the concept of a supersystem to help you learn is dependent on you, because not everyone's brain works in quite the same way, you might be a Data Acquisitioner or a Conceptual Integrator. Actually, I just made up those two names, what I really mean is: do you, that's you personally, learn best by memorising lists of facts, by experimenting, or by soaking up events and allowing understanding to happen somewhere deep in the recesses of your mind? This is something you need to work out for yourself, and it is important. I am hopeless at learning lists, and even if I do then what I learn is not of particular importance unless I have some exam to take, I experiment with data by playing around with concepts in my mind, and if the data is numerical I might enter it into some kind of spreadsheet and play with it on there to see if I can see any patterns in the data.

If you learn by memorising, or perhaps you believe that this is the only way to learn even if you are not successful at it, then there is one thing you must understand - facts/knowledge/data is essentially random. You can learn as many as you like and it will never be enough, rather like preparing yourself for some quiz where you know that there is a good chance that you will not know the answers to certain questions. I remember back in the 1970s there were a number of different kinds of gameshows on TV in Britain, and then one year they decided to organise a competition between the winners of several of these gameshows. The winner of this super-competition was the winner of a gameshow involving working out solutions, and the one who came last was the winner of a gameshow that was a pure memory quiz.

Facts by themselves are essentially dead things; they lead nowhere. If I asked you what was the capital of China, you would probably say "Peking" or "Beijing". Great! But where does that lead us to? Is this anything that I could not have got out of an encyclopedia or other fact-based book or knowledge source? I have a very small car, a Citroen C1, and yet when the lights go green, most times I am across the junction first, and without spinning the wheels or revving the engine hard. The facts like 'press the gas pedal to go' and 'go when the light changes to green' are all available to everyone, even to that guy in his powerful car who kept creeping forward, impatient for the lights to change and who is now having to accelerate hard to get past me. Facts are easy to teach because they are like bean cans, always there on the supermarket shelf. Teaching how to use facts is much harder, because use seems different every time, and future use is something you do not know now. Teaching, therefore, works best for what is known, and wrks worst for what is not known.

When I leave the lights ahead of the pack and my wife is in the car withn me I make a joke and pretend to say 'bye' to the other drivers, making her smile in this way is just one of the many benefits of learning about what is not known. Knowing what many other people do not know can be very satisfying, and if you create it yourself then it costs nothing more than some time and does not take up room in your car or at home, and the only dusting it requires is simply to remember it from time to time. To make my C1 so fast I gathered all the facts I could think of and which seemed relevant, and then arranged them in some order. I tested that order and then adjusted the original order, added some more facts that I had accumulated, and tested this second concept. The key was to understand that getting across the line quicker was not just about getting my car to go quicker - that would mean investing in another car or in making this car quicker, something I was unwiling to do as it would consume my time and other resources. No, my car did not need to go quicker, I had to waste less time moving from one event to the next. Make sure car was already in the right gear, right foot already pressing slightly on the gas pedal, left foot already with the cluitch pedal partly raised, one hand on the handbrake waiting to release it, other hand on the steering wheel, eyes watching traffic, pedestrians and lights, and brain with the course already plotted. When the lights begin to turn green, assuming it is safe to proceed, I lift the clutch, press the gas, and release the handbrake together. That's all it takes, it works, and you can practice it every day and still have a good car to sell when the time comes to replace it.

Interestingly enough, I have now converted my concept into new knowledge that you and anyone else with a car can use. Concepts created in real time convert to knowledge, and they seem to fill all the available space. What other knowledge do you need to know? At this point you need to stop and realise that cars-at-a-junction are a supersystem, and this is one model we can apply to that supersystem. As such, we know it is only going to work some of the time. What happens when the person in the car beside you has also read this text, but has a much faster accelerating car and quicker reflexes than you? What if you are not at the front of the queue? Well, this junction is just one of many, and today is just one of many, perhaps instead of listening to music you could start watching how other drivers typically respond to different situations. I have a whole stack of knowledge models I have developed to deal best with many different situations, because I have devoted much of my time in cars to observing how other drivers react, and how I react.

Time and devotion are essential to creating new concepts, as is the belief that you cann develop them. Society tries to pressure us into the belief that the answer lies in learning more facts, in copying what others have done, but perhaps the best answer lies within ourselves. Once you have gained knowledge in one area, you can apply it to another. Having developed the 'be faster at the junction' model I began to apply it elsewhere in my life. After leaving university I spent seven weeks working nights in a meat factory to earn some money for a vacation. Most of the time I worked the grills, char-grilling burgers for microwave meals, working alongside two women who had been using the grills for years. In such a short period I had no real chance of honing my reflexes to match theirs, and I know that they chose to use the better pair of grills. Once I learnt the basic techniques I spent every night trying to minimise wasted time, optimising burger layouts on my grill - learning the hot and cool spots, and all the rest. I never was able to match them for speed, but I was 90% there, far better than anyone else. Was it worth it? Of course, the grills are the only warm places at a meat factory, everywhere else is cold so that the meat does not start to go off.

I stated earlier that facts are random, which is not quite true. If you were to go to a zoo and saw a zebra you are likely to think 'black and white stripey animal, like a horse, from Africa', an amalgam of facts based on observation and prior learning. Have you ever looked closely at a zebra's eyelashes? Are they like a horse's? What about zebra feeding patterns? Observation is limited to survival traits, interest and comparison to previous knowledge, which takes some of the randomness out of the knowledge we acquire, but in terms of the universe it is still fairly random. Take cats, for example, many people do, they have been living close to us for thousands of years and yet people still believe that they are independent creatures despite the evidence to the contrary. Cats go off when they want to, but so do children if they can get away withn it. Oh, they don't tell you when they will be back, isn't that a typical problem with children? They don't take orders? Well, who do you know who does if they can get away with it? They go live next door? Hmm, if you were my friend and your neighbours cooked better lunch I might spend more time their too. Cats are like God - you have to notice them first, and being small and easily abused by big humans, it is up to us to prove we respect them first. Cats are very communal, and generally have lots of friends they like to hang out with, including us. When the day comes that all our friends are comfortable sitting on our laps, maybe cats will trust us a little further.

Knowledge being essentially random means that they are only some facts and they are not necessarily the ones that will be most useful to us, and some facts may not be as true as we imagine. Since in any one subject we do not have all the facts (knowledgelets), what if we were to place all our subject knowledges on top of each other in some kind of trememdous sandwich? This is what encyclopedias do, in a way, you may well find 'cat' on one page and 'Catherine the Great' on the opposite page. What would happen if, instead of reading the entry about cats as a complete unit, we read the first line of the 'cat' entry' and then the first line of the 'Catherine' entry, the second line of the 'cat' entry' and so on? This might sound silly, but if knowledge is essentially random, and most people gather information in similar ('normal') ways, then by applying a non-normal acquisition method we might discover something new.

Two of the biggest blocks to non-normal acquistion are 'what would the neighbours say' and the 'three wise men'. Discovering new things automatically is doing what the neighbours would not do, unless your neighbours are already busy doing things differently. There are elements in any society which attempts to block change, so you might have to practice being an innovator in private or in forums where your neighbours do not go. The three-wise-men block is the conviction that someone greater than you has already plotted the best path, has already maximised quality, method or whatever. However, the point of supersystems is that there is no Holy Grail, no ultimate method, not wise person who has a handle on the best method. What the wise person knows is what works best for them, not for you. Grammar Hammers are a good example of people relying on the three wise men, 'someone' in the past has created a system of language that is 'right'. This makes innovation in written language very difficult, because you know they are going to start telling you your grammar is wrong, you have used the wrong words etc.

So, find that quiet place away from the people who you feel are blocking you, and practice there.

Even then, you are unlikely to make a world-shattering discovery in the first forty minutes of trying. I like to use the time in my car or on a bus, when I know I am stuck there for the duration and there is nothing else I can do. I have pretend arguments with people, where I have to take each side in turn and often either demolish my own arguments or learn something new from the second person's viewpoint.

A bus or a train has many opportunities for thinking. Often when it is dark and cold, and I am sitting shivering on a poorly heated bus in the wintertime, I shut my eyes and try to imagine where we are every second of the way. This quickly shows you how little you remember about your surroundings, even though they seem familiar when your eyes are open. Not all memory is accessible, the brain does not deem access to the 'familiarity' memories as being particularly high, and it takes practice to lever that particular door of your mind further open. Hypnosis is another way into this particular memory store, and it is known that this particular type of memory is particularly open to suggestion, perhaps because the brain has to continually edit it as trees grow, buildings get built, we redecorate our rooms or just plain get older. Whatever it's advantages or disadvantages, using the imagination in this way pays off -it gets easier to build and modify whole new concepts in your head.

To conclude, knowledge is essentially dead, random and partial, and what is important is to examine this knowledge from different perspectives. It is this practice of looking that educates our minds into being more innovative, but to do so means fending off the social pressure to conform in all aspects of our lives.

Supersystems: when your logic is not enough

2008-10-09T02:53:00.000-07:00

if you check out the meaning of 'supersystem' you are likely to come up with the definition that it is a system made up of other systems, but this is a back-to-front view. All systems are part of our universe, everything eventually connects with everything else: you sneeze today and it moves the air in front of you and, like the ripples on a pond when you drop a stone in, the effects of your sneeze will reach the limits of the universe, imperceptibly, some time in an unimaginably distant future.

A supersystem is one small corner of the universe that is big enough for us to comprehend that it is a system, but too complex for us to understand its workings. Our brains are a good example of a supersystem, we apply a range of simplifications to try and understand some of its workings, such as 'vision', 'hearing' or 'memory', which makes them sound as if they are separate systems (subsystems) in our brain, while in fact they are interlinked and share many operations. If your memory and vision were separate functions, for example, no one would ever shut their eyes to help them remember something almost forgotten or to hear a recorded message clearer. Vision consumes huge amounts of your brain's resources, and by shutting your eyes or staring into space you free up lots of resources for thinking, and vice versa - if you drive you probably can remember a number of times when thinking about problems has resulted in a delayed reaction to events on the road.

All systems are supersystems in practice, but some are easier to think of as simple systems than others. If you balance a book on the edge of the desk, small road-traffic or wind vibrations on your building are not going to affect it noticeably - you pushing it or putting some other object on top of it are about the only things that will decide whether it remains on your desk or falls to the floor. You already know a lot about balance from a lifetime of experiencing the effects of it, and although it is only a simplification, this assuming that things with small effects can be safely ignored is one of them most important precepts underlying that mathematical subject of calculus.

Better still, our brains our able to analyse supersystems so complex that, if asked to describe them, we would be unable to do so. You can watch the branches of a tree blowing in a wind and understand exactly what you are seeing and what will happen if the wind becomes stronger or weaker, or if someone throws a ball towards you then you have a good chance of catching it even though its flight is effected by gravity, trajectory, spin and wind. We can do this not by learning traditional mathematics, but by accessing a system that is much older, one that is built into our brains.

We do not have direct conscious access to this part of our brain, as it mainly deals with things like coordination, but we can train it and we can access it indirectly in many ways. In our conscious thoughts we generally try to classify everything, so we might say that we are bad at maths and good at languages, and use this to condition our career choices - becoming a translator rather than a mathematician. We use this idea to create our education systems and then, lo and behold, translators all tend to be alike, mathematicians all tend to be alike, and translators and mathematicians tend to be different. However, this situation only happens because we all get used to allowing our initial classifications define our social systems, and as a result we come to believe that the skills required to be a mathematician or translator are different. This, though, is only a social belief, albeit an extremely strong one.

Advanced linguistics (the science of languages) is much like advanced mathematics - mathematics is only another human language that attempts to describe numbers of things, while linguistics is yet another application of mathematics. The more we push forward our understanding of linguistics or mathematics, the more the methods and results we learn in these fields come to resemble the systems already built into our heads, moreover, they come to resemble the same systems.

Thousands of years ago we understood little about the environment that surrounded us, other than as a set of in-built and trained responses to the way we lived in that environment. Sometime in our early experiments to test how the universe worked we decided that we were separate from the universe, and that by gathering more and more knowledge of the outside world we would come to understand it. This has conditioned the way we perceive the world, that mathematics and linguistics are separate fields that perhaps overlap at the edges. Today we are beginning to understand that everything we know are nothing more than variations of the same things - linguistics and mathematics are but two names for the same thing. The only difference between them is that they are two different ways of looking at the same thing, like taking a pumpkin and carving 'mathematics' and 'linguistics' on different sides - while the pumpkin may appear different when viewed from different directions, it is still the same pumpkin.

Linguistics is really the way the brain processes a particular group of information, in this case a vast databank of sounds. The brain is not like a dictionary of words, we only think of it that way because our education presents them that way as a convenient method of dealing with making readable symbols of our language. We are at our most inventive linguistically when we are about the age of eight or nine, when our brains are good enough to conceptualise but not yet old enough to have succumbed fully to common social beliefs about language (such as that of 'vocabulary' and 'grammar'). If you can still find someone intelligent who has not had the 'benefits' of education, their concepts of language are likely to be very different to yours, even though their language use is as rich as yours. Most of our vocabulary is learnt by observation of other people's usage, and we can readily create new words and fit them understandably into the 'pelonia' (I just made that word up, as a replacement for 'language').

So how can we use this to help us think? Ah, well that is the subject of a later blog, I have covered quite enough for one day! Suffice to say that supersystems are those too complex for us to analyse rationally, although our brain can usually figure them out subconsciously. All supersystems are basically the same, as all are by-products of the way our brain understands the world.

Czestochowa: For your salvation

2008-10-08T09:06:00.000-07:00

If you were wondering where the centre of religious life was in Poland, and I am only talking about the Roman Catholics here, then should go to Czestochowa. One of the most interesting times to go is the 15th of August for the Ascension of Mary holiday, when people arrive from all over the country on foot as part of large pilgrimages. Well, everyone needs a 'local' place to make pilgrimages to, they are such a great way to escape from the reality of daily life and to spend time with other people with similar aims.

My only visit to Czestochowa was in 1995, and when I arrived on my own I only had a basic guidebook knowledge of what I was supposed to find there. Those were days before the internet took off, when one had to scour the shelves of the local library and then probably illegally, certainly irresponsibly, take a book with you on your trip. I sometimes wonder how many travel books made frequent trips to the places they described - some of them may well have been more seasoned travellers than I was. The city was a bit of a disappointment, a rather drab looking monastery on toop of a worn grassy hillock set amongst a sad district in that Socialist way. Once inside I found myself among a group of believers at the beginning of a mass - for a moment I nearly turned round and left by the nearest exit, but then I decided that nobody would notice me, a foriegner, among this group of strangers. There was not much fuss, and from my position at the back of the church I could hardly see the star of the show, the Black Madonna, although what I could see of this early painting left me puzzled as to why they had dressed it up in jewels. I believe that God cares for me as an individual, and that he is always there, whether he wants it or not, but I am aware that I am surrounded by people who are happier believing that their god is elsewhere, safely concealed from observing their actual life by a thick barrier of priests and idols. Maybe that helps explain why I have low levels of jakraj?

On the walls of the monastery church, which since my Polish was almost non-existent I had plenty of time to examine, were covered in crutches and all manner of silver and gold medallions, many given to the church by grateful former sufferers of a wide range of diseases. Perhaps their god cured them, perhaps my God did, or maybe the actual time spent focussing on hope of a cure did the work all by itself. After leaving the monastery, I was mooching around on the hillock, wondering how I could fill in the next four hours or so when my train was due to leave. At this point I met a couple who were sitting on a bench nearby, they were Polish, but living in Sweden. We went back to the apartment they were staying at, loaned to them from some of their friends, and spent the evening eating blueberries from a huge bowl and chatting.

Faith, then, is a remarkable thing, and not something we are going to understand in the near future as it remains as undefineable as it was to primitive man. Having something to believe in can make the most remarkable of changes to your life, although you having one belief is no justification for insisting that anyone else in the world has to have the same one. I recently read of some research where they showed a picture of Mary to a number of Roman Catholics and athiests, and then applied electric shocks to them. The Roman Catholics felt less pain after being shown the image of Mary, and that is the power of faith, and useful for more than warding off stray electric shocks. There are other alternative faiths, even for Poles, even for Roman Catholic Poles.

I have on the table here a booklet in English and German advertising a honey from the deep and ancient forests of Bialowieza... I know of dozens and dozens of small farms and individuals producing honey in my region, some of them also producing mead, but since it still lacks much in the way of support don't expect to see much in the way of Polish honey in your local store. The Polish word for honey is miod, and the English name for the honey-based fermented drink is mead, just another example of how words have always drifted from nation to nation.

Back to the booklet, it has four pages describing the honey product and its benefits, then one page as a welcome letter, followed by a dozen pages of excerpts from letters sent the honey producer. Personally, I would have preferred the welcome letter on the first page, more information about the product with perhaps some history and something about the bees, hives and the plants the bees use, and then far fewer grateful letters. Well, that is what I would have preferred had not the translation been so bad that it is often hilarious, like "I have two children who frequently catch diseases." leaving you wondering how many they have who don't catch diseases, or "I have a pleasure to inform you that since my children started eating your Honey, I do not need to visit doctors any more." - I wonder who would be cured if I started eating the honey?

The truth is that with such miraculous products as this honey, sorry Honey, on the market, who needs religion? Given a choice between sitting in a cold church every Sunday where no one will talk to you and sitting around a warm table eating Honey with your family and friends, I know where my preference lies. Seriously, if faith in Czestochowa is matched by faith in Honey, what value does religion have, except to those who are allergic to honey or who simply do not enjoy its taste? With all the manpower that religion can wield, why can they still not surpass a few hives of bees? Ah, you may say, but religion also includes some valuable afterlife options, and you would be right to an extent, except that the Roman Catholic church in Poland focusses its parisioners energy on the miraculous in the present and prayers for the already dead, and puts as many barriers as it can to prevent parisioners understanding enough of their religion to make any intelligent decision that will improve their chances in the afterlife. You are, it seems, better off putting your faith and your money in the Honey to solve your problems in your current life, and simple faith in your god for your afterlife, religion having nothing better to offer either way.

Football: Basic Instinct

2008-10-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

I really feel sorry for people who follow football, but then, I was never much of a spectator, probably why I do not do much in the way of commenting on current affairs. Much better is to be involved, in actually creating new solutions rather than sitting on the sidelines being Me Clever.

However, wouldn't life be boring if 'never' was a real word.

As a result, even I can spend some wordage on commenting on football, especially when it comes to the current situation with Polish football. Football here has long been more of a mafia scene than the mafia, as dumb ass people slip money here, there and everywhere so that one particular group of players 'win' some championship or other. Who cares, if it is not one fairly then the 'win' has no value, and if it continues the supporters should simply walk away - don't worry if you are a supporter, there are plenty of other things to do with your life than watch Polish football, and as long as you do and sit around letting people abuse the game, you get the kind of situation you deserve. And we can all do something, even if it is only walking away. Once people in Poland put their televisions in their windows and went out for a walk to demonstrate their belief that at least one can publicly demonstrate one's disapproval of the current situation.

However, I never found anyone who would do anything about the corruption in football, and now that Poland is set to co-host the 2012 championship it is a bit late to demand any action. Recently the Polish government has dismissed the board of the Polish national governing board, an action that goes against the constitution and the basic precepts of law. But no, people think it is OK, but how can you prevent one criminal action by using another? It is just for this reason that Poland remains in the mess it is in - the sitting on backsides when something could be done, and only shifting off them with the realisation that international embarrassment might outweigh any benefits of non-action.

As an interesting aside, the other co-host for 2012 is Ukraine, and Lublin lies on a direct line between Warsaw and Ukraine. A new road is needed between Lublin and Warsaw and on towards Ukraine, so where are the plans? Um, eh, in the current situation... blah blah blah." The reality is that Lublin sits on its collective ass (a kind of donkey), and I just wonder at what point soemone else will notice that opportunity came and passed us by.

Driving to Kill

2008-10-05T04:07:00.000-07:00

Driving in the former Soviet bloc countries is incredibly dangerous, the roads, drivers, police and regulations form a cocktail best observed from a helicopter, tall building or mountain - just no where anyone could possibly drive or kill you by driving into it.

Roads. Safety and flow regulation systems are inconsistent, while approaching an unfamiliar junction you must do more than observe the cars, people and stray animals, you have to work out which flow control is in use there. At one junction in Lublin, the traffic lights are positioned not beside the stop line but on the other side of the junction, and as the side roads are staggered it is not clear where you should stop - and as a consequence drivers frequently overrun the actual stop line into the traffic coming from the right. It has been like that for years, no one in the local government sees it as a problem because it is an unfashionable part of the city. I need not mention the state of the direction signing as I don't think there is a nation on earth where the local planners employ people unfamiliar with their city to test for potentially confusions - and every city is, as a consequence, a nightmare to navigate. Locals genrally know where they are going, signage is always for the unfamiliar and always created by the familiar.

Regulations: Back when I was a lad, most cars had such poor brakes and handling that the only safe road was a very straight one with no other traffic. In those days, in the UK, they still had what was called a 'suicide lane', which was a third lane in the middle of the road that traffic going either way could use to overtake. With a name like that, you can imagine why by the 1970s they had all gone, along with all those people who helped give it its name, except for some places where use of the lane depended on time of day. Here, for most out of town main roads, there are two normal lanes, but on either edge of the road there is a half width lane. If you sit in this half-width lane to let a van overtake, the van still has to cross the centre lane, and while they are going past, someone might be trying to overtake him... If there is someone walking, riding a bike or similar in your half lane, someone overtaking the other way expects you to brake hard and somehow avoid the hazard in the your half lane. Dangerous? Incredibly so.

Police: If you find any, make a note in your diary. In a land where they can make instant fines on the road, the police force should be the richest government organisation. I mean, I could pull over a dozen vehicles on my trip home and bill at least half. I think I should see if they will subcontract traffic policing to me, all I would have to do is fit a few video cameras to my car and cruise the city all day. Keeping 10% of the take I would have a fleet of vehicles and no need to work myself in a couple of years. The saddest thing is that if you have a bump you have to call the police - and not move the vehicles until the police have checked the situation. Yep, seeing bent but drievable vehicles sitting in the middle lane or on a junction waiting for the police is common, and with poor driving on a poorly designed road systems the police spend more time picking up the pieces than preventing problems by forcing drivers to not drive poorly.

Drivers. With poor road safety regulations, ill-thought out traffic flow, and almost non-existent policing, I can see why many drivers become the selfish pigs they are. Driver training is second rate as few trainers have any idea of what constitutes risk even though many surely believe they know everything they need to know. The trainer giving my wife refresher course wanted her to make a clearly illegal left turn across the traffic to enter our estate; he was lucky I was not in the car because, while I do not believe in violence, I would have dragged him from the car and beaten him to a pulp as who knows when that bad habit is going to kill a former student in the future?

Finally, which group is the most dangerous on the road? The young? No, not enough of them. The old? Again not yet enough of them on the road. No, men between the age of 45 and 60, and women 25 to 45. These bad driving men have never had such powerful cars before due to the limited availability in the part, while the bad driving women have been brought up to the belief that there are men's things and women's things, and therefore think you can change lane like you were walking down a street, or sit a couple of metres behind the car in front.

Come to Poland, there is a lot to see and you will not regret it, but just take care if you hire a car.

The Grammar Hammer

2008-10-04T08:16:00.000-07:00

One of my pet hates is that almost any language discussion seems to reach a point where someone says 'They don't seem to teach grammar these days'. My response often goes something along the lines of 'what, as compared to three centuries ago?' If you actually read old books, such as those written fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years ago, then you will discover the same whine, the same complaints. So:

Shut the Eff up! You have about as much understanding of grammar as a dead ant.

Boy, how long have I wanted to say that.

Not that it will make the slightest difference.

But it felt good!

One of muy favourite pieces of bigotry is the insistence that Latin grammar is the ultimate controlling grammar of English, well, with a good measure of Greek. Latin is a pure grammar, did you know that? Yes, that English in your head, no matter how well honed, no matter who utters or writes it, is mere second rate bumbling unless one applies Latin grammar to it. Our education system in terms of language is based on this principle, hence the never-ending whine about the state of teaching language. Luckily, there are vast numbers of teachers who realise that English is a language in its own right with its particular grammar, one in many basic ways deeply different to Latin: You cannot split an infinitive in Latin, and articles mean almost nothing. However, this only serves to widen that gap between happy English users and the Latinite Grammar Hammers.

One of the most hallowed Latinite principles is that a noun is a noun is a noun. A noun can never be an adjective, verb, or adverb, and so on. Once a noun, always a noun. Once an adjective, always an adjective, once a, I think you get the picture. Fair enough, 'table' must always be a noun, 'chair' must always be a noun, so why don't I chair a meeting on this and table a motion that English grammar be thus - except that I cannot since I have just used 'chair' and 'table' as verbs. Similarly, if I teach maths in a traditional way, I cannot say 'two twos are four' as numbers are adjectives and can never be plural.

Switching words between grammatical forms is a very powerful feature of English, as is the ability to split infinitives and subtly edit meaning by varying the articles, and yet these areas of thw language are among the most often ignored or attacked by the hammers. English, like most languages, was not officially taught until at least a thousand years later than Latin, and the teaching of other languages was done by comparison to what had been observed and taught about Latin. As a first methodology for teaching, it was a good an idea as any - if you were a teacher in a classroom its better to teach what you know rather than have to research the whole subject. As a result of tradition, many of those early make-shift teaching methodologies hung on, they still control people's thinking on the language even today.

I think this is another area in which a reappraisal is long overdue in the public areana, it is time people writing or speaking the langauge they were brought up with were made to feel guilty because their image of the language fails to match another's.

Changing jobs, and the Polish university system

2008-10-02T23:15:00.000-07:00

From Today I will be using a shorter, rougher format with less proofing of what I write - which might sound strange coming from someone whose current gainful employment is editing other people's texts. However, I once served an apprenticeship as a mechanic, and the state of my car was no measure of my skill with a spanner it was rather a case I had a better lifeplan than spending 24/7 doing exactly the same thing. looking back i have never spent a great deal of time doing any one thing in particular, being married to Ania for eleven years breaks all records for my interest span. In fact, the difference between my relationship with Ania and with other people is that eventually I want to push the borders of understanding well beyond the comfort zone of the kind of people I work with, and most are not that happy to move out of their niches, in their lifeplans work is generally something you do to earn money to pay for whatever they get up to, including bringing up their families. I am not an ogre, and I find it better for everyone if I move on.

Ania, though, was already ready for change, her feet were itching for change, and continuous change is what she has got. So much change, in fact, that she is now noticeably different from the people she works with, most of whom have been ground down by a university system that has yet to move out of the dark ages in terms of management. If anyone reading this has experience with Western universities and what goes on in them, be aware that no matter how hard life seems there, it is only a pale shadow of the problems faced by Polish universities and, I suspect, those of other former Soviet bloc countries. There are two main ways to survive teaching in Polish universities - by outright greed or by shutting down your will to innovate. Knowledge is spoonfed, books can generally be accessed by request in libraries (often with a 24 hour wait), and at the end of every semester the students have to chase their lecturers down to get a signature in their 'indeks' to prove at the end of the course that they attended the lectures. Exams? If you fail in June, you get to retake the ones you failed in September, and if you fail that you get a retake a week later, and a week later if you fail that. The exams themselves are generally oral no matter what the subject is, and passing an envelope of money to the examiner at some point prior to the exam, or by attending a paid 'exam booster course', and your chances of passing are higher.

Corruption rules, and it stinks, too.

Ania, though, does not overcharge for her services, but does introduce well thought out innovation into her teaching and course design. As a consequence she is overworked and will soon have to make a decision on how she plans to spend the rest of her working life.

075: Your Local Friendly Alien

2008-10-02T10:42:00.001-07:00

Your Local Friendly Alien, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I think I might be a Cylon

This is my final photo for FGR, I have popped out of my box for the last time - with the help of a few things I found around our apartment. The days when I thought science fiction was the future are long past, humanity in the present is a far more fascinating problem - so many people with so many problems.

So, thank you to all those of you who have followed my progress, it has been a lot of fun.;)

074: A Calmer Sultry Night

2008-10-01T23:39:00.001-07:00

A Calmer Sultry Night, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We found a manual to help us with our time in bed, but we haven't got a torch so its hard to know if we are looking at a big end or a tired rocker. It is kind of cosy, though, and we might need a soapy bath afterwards, so things are looking up!

I took one look at today's group and it seemed full of the usual 'beautiful people' shots, you know the type of image taken by someone youthful who mistakes the youthfulness they capture on camera as being their art, and who are rewarded by a large number of views by people who really want to look at unclad youth. Some of the best, most innovative work I see are by the people who's bodies are roundy or aged and who, partly as a consequence, have to work on their art to achieve a modicum of success.

No 'here's my bust, please ogle it and comment on how you wish I had undone my bra' shots here. Instead i dug back into my past when I trained as a car mechanic and spent a lot of time on my back under it. Beds are also something I used to hide under to have a sulk when I was a kid. Here then, Ania and I are together, working on our marital bed, equal, and spending time together out of view of the people we spend our days working or socialising with. We are doing our own thing because we believe it is important, not because we think it will make us more popular.

073: Cracks in the Paving...

2008-10-01T23:12:00.001-07:00

Cracks in the Paving..., originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Nightmare

Many children learn to fear the cracks in the paving, and the dark horrors that live down there. Of course, no one takes it seriously, but what if you could slip down...

Today I kept it simple, or did I? Today is my late shift day, which means that I get home tired and have little time or inspiration for my images - a good time, then, to work on my craft. A lot of craft is honing the reflexes - being able to make repeatable movements such as being able to form all the letters clearly when you write. I experimented here with the colour tools to see how much information there really was buried in the original similar shades of grey of the paving, and trying to produce convincing shadows.

The reference to a childhood dear made this image quite different to the gothic-adult horror images produced by many other fuggers, and yet it is the remnant of the childhood fears that often form the basis for our fears in later life. Life in Poland often leaves me feeling insubstantial, unable to dent other peoples behaviours they learnt in childhood and to which they desperately hold onto even though it is slowly destroying them.

072: Playing for my baby!

2008-09-30T05:36:00.001-07:00

Playing for my baby!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Music and Sugar

This shot is more important for me than my other, more humorous or naughty ones, the doing of something that makes Ania happy, the continual reaffirming of our love.

I have noticed that many people producing series of what they call self-portraits are really producing self-images. What do I mean? Well, a self image uses only that person as the image, supported by a series of props - objects found or purchased with the intent on producing an image of how that person imagines him or herself.

A self portrait, on the other hand, attempts to show how that person really is, and because the emphasis is less on using props to support this vision of self, the use real objects, real dreams and real people.

Meet up with a bunch of self-imagers and you may make the mistake of believing you have joined a group of single people. meet a group of self-portraiters and you can see who is single and who is in a relationship. Reality, of course is much more complex than this, and there is nothing wrong with either form of production - but it is something worth bearing in mind when you interact with people producing what they call self-portraits.

I can see that my preference is mainly for self-portraiture, and as a consequence I aim to show my life and dreams in my images, even if any one particular image shows a situation I have never directly expereienced.

When I view work by self-imagers I am left wandering what is it that they are leaving out, what is not being shown. These images are often high-craft and popular, but they are also empty of real emotion, perhaps because they are only ghost images of a real person and their life?

068: My Procrastination

2008-09-26T01:33:00.001-07:00

My Procrastination, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Procrastination Station

When I procrastinate, I distract myself with my own thoughts, but that is a little less than interesting to watch. I thought about this shot all day, but then eventually I could not put it off any longer and got my camera out...

Did you know that studying can seriously affect your ability to produce art? And this includes discussing your work with other people from the same field. This seems to be partly an effect of distraction by the influence other others work,and the absorption in gaining craft skills at the expense of cutting out your own niche.

It can be beneficial instead to concentrate on the acquisition of raw data and the post-creation analysis of your own work and others. understanding through teaching is often achieved through a process of comparison with 'great' works or traditional methods. The final result is that your view of the world can become restricted, you lack the vision of an empty horizon that the originator of the great work or tradition had.

It seems to be better if you talk about what you see and feel, and limit your examination of the world to what people are doing in other fields. You have to get out of the cage that is peopled by those competitive to you, and talk to people who are not but who have a different view of the world.

067: First Light of Life

2008-09-24T01:38:00.001-07:00

First Light of Life, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Flying Feet

Growing is like flying, a long, slow movement towards the sun. This shot is straight out of the camera, taken at dawn with still a lot of blue in the light. It took quite a few attempts to get it right, especially as we were using the timer and had little time to get into position.

Most of my effort went into the planning of the shot, it was Ania's decision to shoot in the morning, and she did almost all the work in making it a reality - all I had to do was lie back on the bed while she repeatedly jumped on me to get in position before the camera timer triggered the shot. There was no flash, the white light is from a halogen room light and the blue is city light reflected off the sky at dawn. Notice how Ania's hands seem to grow over the solid reliability of my feet.

065: Monday Moaners Are Mad!

2008-09-23T01:39:00.001-07:00

Monday Moaners Are Mad!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Monday Mugshots

How do you think other people enjoy listening to us moan about the fact that it is Monday? Are we not just being a teensy bit selfish by imposing our lack of thought on our our family, friends and co-workers? Being miserable is often a tool in the hands of those who wish to make headway in business, being miserable in the office to gain sympathy and, as it happens, free information from people around trying to make that person feel better. Don't believe me? You need to observe office dynamics a little closer.

Today, my bunny ears are my two fingers up to those who seek to abuse others in order to aid their own climb of the slippery pole of company success. one day they will have more money, bigger cars, larger houses and more expensive houses - but as much ability to talk seriously about things outside of work as a low-IQ bum.

063: The Essential Guide

2008-09-21T03:33:00.001-07:00

The Essential Guide, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

The People's Group of Professional Amateurs.

Life is full of problem, often because various elements of society would rather you did not communicate. Husbands and wives are often badly unprepared for married life simply because even talking about how to help your wife fasten her bra is an unmentionable subject. You can often spot the worst culprits in society, they are the ones who talk about 'family values'.

Women often exchange bras several times a day, it is an awkward job that certainly does not become easier as one becomes older. What better daily activity could a couple share than the fastening and unfastening of the bra? You are, of course, only one small move away from a cuddle.

This is another story told through a set of images, although here there are two stories - that in the coloured images and that as the 'guide'.

062: Master Cad

2008-09-21T03:30:00.001-07:00

Master Cad, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Priceless Parodies

Every day more people get into trouble with credit, and I bet not many of them think that credit card adverts are funny then. This group was about imitating the humour used in a credit card advert, but I am more concerned about the ease in which many people end up in financial difficulties through too free access to credit. The strain financial problems can place on any relationship is huge, and finding help can be extremely difficult.

Ho ho ho, new, new, new!
Must, must, must, buy, buy, buy!

We have had little in the way of financial problems, largely because we do not value goods over thoughts and are hence quite prepared to do without. It makes a great story, though, and being able to split that story into four images in one whole has great potential for expressing art!

061: Art for your sake

2008-09-19T00:46:00.001-07:00

Art for your sake, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Jump for Mikey etc.

Jump? After fifteen years of arthritis the chance of leaving the ground all together is a feat in itself, a real jump is about impossible. But, hey, who said that you have to jump with your legs, that's just plain limbist! However, the truth is that the few practice jumps I did make scared my cat.

The image required a quote, but rather than follow the Craft route and find someone else's, I decided to use the Art approach and devise my own. After all, that is supposed to be the purpose of this exercise! I had an idea about what I wanted to say, but it took some effort to get the same form to fit both - such as using the same verb - in order that both are treated equally, at least from the language point of view.

059: Travels in a Suitcase

2008-09-16T11:34:00.001-07:00

Travels in a Suitcase, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Half Dressed Tuesdays

The suitcase exists to help take us on our travels, but for most of the time it simply gathers dust and stores things that we probably do not really need. I like to relive past journeys and plan new ones, and what better companion on these memory and dream trips!

Dreams are something that most of us have, often having the same or very similar ones throughout our lives. Daydreams, though, are an important way of accessing our mind's treasures, but too many people either believe daydreaming is a waste of time, or know not how they can make them a reality.

Oh, and half dressed tuesday? Don't you remember that sixties series "Man in a Suitcase"? Perhaps not :)

058: Me Man

2008-09-16T07:28:00.001-07:00

Me Man, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

My Pet Peeves.

Well, with such a challenge, where should one start? To be honest, the most long-running thing I get annoyed about is the way people assume that because they see you as a man/English/white/etc. that you must fit whatever mold they have in their heads. Great, it saves them from thinking, from treating one as a human. Eventually, these classes they assign become more important than the people themselves, and from there it is a short walk to there being blood on the floor.

I just want to be me, not a dog that responds to the commands of the so-called leaders of society without question.

You will find that it is not the classifications of what you are that is important, you are not a set of classes, you are an adhesive body that you can stick classifications to, and change them if need be. Changing these classifications, these labels that one applies to oneself, or allows society to to, can be hard to change, but the process will never get easier unless you practice. That means putting yourself in new situations deliberately, not waiting for life's wiles to force you to change. No matter what you are or what you become, the essential you will remain, holding together with the force of life itself.

056: Raindrops

2008-09-15T02:42:00.001-07:00

Raindrops, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Covered Faces

This is the view through my windscreen of our Citroen C1 on a rainy Saturday morning as Ania shops at the nearby market, with a view of a nearby housing block, trees and bushes and a blue car - and a partial view of me in the mirror, of course! I usually shop with her, only today we had a lot of things like laptops in the car, which we did not want to leave unattended. Shopping together is a very important social function, an opportunity to help each other in an environment which is neither the home nor work.

I applied a texture from the GIMP library, and this is the first texture that I have used. I expanded up a small one to the size of the screen to give a kind of raindrop texture.

055: Superwife

2008-09-15T02:27:00.001-07:00

Superwife, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Feeling Super.

Your partner has more to offer than you realise, they also have their own personality, something worth paying more attention too. Here Ania has an expression that I never asked for but which she has brought into the image. She is much stronger than she will admit, even to herself, especially in the environment of Poland where the social pressure is to keep saying how unable you are - until you eventually subconsciously believe it.

I wanted to create an image for her to show how much I respect her remarkable skill and power, and how much i am in awe of it. Interestingly enough, some of the composition was not conscious but my practised and acknowledged reliance on automatic input from whatever its source is within my brain.

054: Helping Me To See Clearly

2008-09-12T00:20:00.001-07:00

Helping Me To See Clearly, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Peek a Boo

Having a partner helps you to see the world in a different way, and Ania gives me the best vision possible. She is still a bit jet-lagged after flying back from New York to here in Poland on Tuesday, but she was quite happy to participate in today's picture.

I gave this image a border as I was a bit worried that the image itself would look a little washed out when viewed against a white background, but it also helps to make a strong image.

I like to include her in my pictures, as without her it would give a distorted image of me and my life. The question is how often to show her, and the answer is whenever the idea needs her. I don't have props, and I don't use people as props - everything is simply waiting for an opportunity to show off some aspect of itself. The strongest relationships are with those things closest to me, and by going out to seek photo opportunities means creating what may look like a strong image, but one's art or relationship with it is in reality weak.

053: Gin - A Step-By-Step Guide

2008-09-11T01:00:00.001-07:00

Gin - A Step-By-Step Guide, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Cocktails!

I did not want this ending up looking like an advert, nor like something from a night out with the lads. Drinking is a process, and I wanted to use a set of five images to try and show the whole process.

One of the problems of using an automatic camera is that it makes its own decisions on colour of the image, so the backgrounds of the two images to the left are different, even though they are the same background - with the green bottle and you get a yellow background, without and it went pink.

052: DeepThreat

2008-09-10T00:38:00.001-07:00

DeepThreat, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

reimagining movies

Today I was very tired after driving to the airport to pick up my wife, but i managed to squeeze in a little time for this. it was supposed to be a movie scene, but art is all-inclusive of its parts, and the poster is therefore part of the movie. For the second day running I had problems with camera auto-focus problems, but with different cameras. Strange.

This shot I dedicate to all those people from all walks of life i have dealings with here in Poland who say "it can't be done", who want to either not do it, can't imagine that it can be done, are too afraid to do it, or just don't care. And this is all due to the efforts of the effing wonderful mixture of the not-so holy Roman Catholic church here and the state, whose main interests lie in ensuring that people do not have the courage to complain about the level of service either gives and so maintain a suitably servile attitude..

051: Play With My Tiles, Baby!

2008-09-09T23:38:00.001-07:00

Play With My Tiles, Baby!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

shatter, crash, destroy

I had very little time for this one as I had to go to bed early because the next day I was getting up very early. Real life is an important part of art, it can never be separate from it, art is part of the way we think, and the way we think is related to what we have to done and have done.

I had no time to break anything, and nothing really to hand I could break that had any relevance. However, I could do another form of breaking, breaking me up into the different parts I play in life, and showing them in the mixed-up, shattered way I seem to spend my life. I think it is also like a cry for help for someone to come along and help me sort it out.

050: Who is the fairest of them all?

2008-09-07T07:13:00.001-07:00

Who is the fairest of them all?, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Spot the Difference / Diptych

Todays group themes were 'spot the difference' and 'diptych', but instead of the normal one image lacking things that appear in the other I decided to change what appeared in the image.

Two shots was all it took, other than the couple to make sure I was getting everything I needed in shot and that the lighting was OK. The editing was remarkably easy, although I experimented with a new-to-me function on Gimp to blend the images. I can tell by looking at the images which one I did first, so I must have improved :)

I pulled my sweatshirt tight to make it body-hugging, and so created the feminine image, while the shirt seemed to work quite well to produce a masculine image. Working with mirrors is hard, though, especially in the tight space of my hall cluttered with the step ladder I had used to mount my rather low tripod on to get the right height.

048: Temperate Horseface

2008-09-07T07:00:00.001-07:00

Temperate Horseface, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Horseface

I had never heard of making your face resemble that of a horse, I assume it is a cultural thing. Anyway, since I used text yesterday as part of the image, I thought I would do something similar today, except this time I chose a proverb for the basis. Out came the bottles again, anybody would think I am an alcoholic judging by the number of times I use them as props.

I tried to use a gap between the water and the drinks bottles and split the text so that it looks like each piece of text goes with separate parts of the image. Bending my head and the long slope down my arm seems to help as well (the slow fall into alcoholism). I even chose the sweatshirt as something horsey colour.

A number of my photos, including this one, does not seem to fit the pattern of masculine-feminine, although the ones that do not seem to fit are intended to contain some humour. This has been an unconscious choice, I think something within me has waited a long time for expression.

047: Flikr to Quit!

2008-09-07T06:51:00.001-07:00

Flikr to Quit!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Fake News

Since I work with words, I though I would focus on the text content and write some fake news myself, relevant to the fugger challenge for today. Luckily I had a few minutes at work to hammer out an article, but you may have to look at it in large scale to read it.

In one of the comments to this picture, someone asked if this could be considered a photo or a screenshot, and my answer was that it was a photo with a very large border. In reality there is no difference between a photo and a screenshot, as long as you control the content. How many works of art have been created by stacking books, wrapping buildings or sticking cut out images from newspapers and magazines to form a collage? The question of whether you use a camera or the print screen function of one's computer to put those pixels together is immaterial.

045: My Love for Ania

2008-09-07T06:36:00.001-07:00

My Love for Ania, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Catchlights

The sun is setting in the west as I look towards New York, where my wife has to stay for another week to teach a course.

She lets me become what I am, more than I ever was before. She listens to my dreams and my philosophy, letting me do what I have to do, even if that is quite different from the other people who surround us. I love her more than anything else in the world.

Catchlights are where you put reflected lights in the eyes to make them more noticeable, and here they look rather rectangular because they are reflections of the sky over the building opposite. In the same way, I processed the image so that the background has become fuzzy, putting more attention on my face rather than losing it among the kitchen units.

044: Old Magazine

2008-09-07T06:32:00.001-07:00

Old Magazine, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Magazine Portraits

What do you see when you look at the model on the front cover of a fashion magazine? Yourself inside? Many people never understand how destructive it is on one's sense of self worth to repeatedly view idealised images, especially if one perceives one's image in the mirror to be far from that of the cover model.

These images are not the ideal, unless you let the contiual parade of such images program your mind to accept them as such. Different societies in different times have valued different things - it is nothing more than social programming.

My Sony camera is dying, and I was too tired to take enough shots to get the view I wanted without the pink lines that mar so many of the images the camera now often produces.

040: Drinking the Sky

2008-09-07T04:57:00.001-07:00

Drinking the Sky, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Sky

After a week in Manhattan we escaped for the day to visit Bear Mountain, and since we were taken there by car I still have no clear idea where it is, except somewhere near West Point, presumably on the Hudson River. There were so many photo opportunities, but little time as we did not want to bore our host.

I like the way that the clouds swoop down towards the right, the water bottle kind of following the line. This was not intentional, or at least not intentionally so. However, our brains absorb more information that we are consciously aware of, it mainly feeds us with information that it thinks we believe is important. Getting beyond this internal filter is important if you want to see what is really there rather than our subconscious mind's opinion. Art training often involves a lot of training in this area, but you can teach yourself by taking the time to think about why things are the way they are instead of accepting what other people would like you to believe.

039: Stripey Bottom

2008-09-07T04:50:00.001-07:00

US Male, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

US Male.

US Mail meets English male. I played with the colours on me to help create contrast between the two essential parts of this image.

I was more concerned today in introducing Ania to creating photos, and enjoying New York - and enjoying Ania's company, which is the best of all. Our target today was bum, and I have little knowledge of how and where my bum looks best, it looks here as though I need to do some more exploration of this area of me, and perhaps ask Ania for more advice when buying trousers.

038: Kissing at Central Station

2008-09-03T07:07:00.001-07:00

Kiss, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Kiss.

How many lovers have parted with a kiss at Central Station in New York, i wonder? We were not parting, but the concept seemed important, and i managed to get into view part of one of the almost church-like windows of the upper concourse. Note the scarf, a sign of being outside, travelling, and the cropping of the image was designed to focus on this, an unexpected bonus i found in the image.

We saw few people kiss in the city, so I used this occasion to try in a small way to encourage kissing in New York.

I have always been interested in cartoons, and this is another image where i have experimented with minimising the colour palette. Doing this gives me a chance to work on the problem of what is art and what is craft,what both and what is neither. What is my personal art and what is the highest achievements of all humankind figures somewhere in this.

037: Hotel Peeper

2008-09-03T06:49:00.001-07:00

Hotel Peeper, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Peeper.

Funny things happen in hotels, many long corridors and an odd mix of people free of the restrictions they might feel back in their normal environment. I still feel a kind of alien, ghostly quality about hotel corridors, and i wanted to explore this in an image.

Notice how the white light that forms most of me has no form or texture, only an outline, pushing your eyes away, letting them seek other objects to focus on. This use of empty space and strong images affects how our eyes respond, and is the same for writing - it is just a pity that the visual side is such a poorly valued part of writing courses.

036: Pee'er

2008-09-03T06:40:00.001-07:00

Pee'er, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Water

Ah, well, if there was no direct humour, it just would not be me. One of the few school report comments i can still remember was from a maths teacher - "Trevor gets on with his work with occasional flashes of brilliance - and humour!".

Words are what I deal in during my working hours, and I am fascinated by hour sounds and spelling relate. This combination of image and words was just too great to resist, and although it might look silly i thought it was important that anyone trying to understand what i am saying also realises this part of my thinking.

Although simple, it did take a moment to select the right position to stand in relation to the images, and the best position for the camera. luckily the sun was in a good position, so there were no awkward shadows to deal with.

035: Belly Button

2008-09-02T08:13:00.001-07:00

Belly Shot, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Belly Shot.

Typical view of New York, or is it something else? Actually, this is the Flikr Group Roulette belly button shot, but I have concealed the real purpose of the picture.

First day in a new city and a new country, and you realise you do not know what the locals consider to be acceptable behaviour. So we were a little shy in setting up this shot.

The Art Deco buildings dominate the background, Ania's arm and hand the foreground - but follow her finger like a secret sign and you will discover the surprise!

034: It's In The Mouth

2008-09-02T07:56:00.001-07:00

Farewell Kiss, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today we jetted off to New York from here in Poland for a week. Hugo the ginger cat is a mischief, you never know what he will be doing or where he will be in thirty seconds time. "That was then, this is now," is his motto.

The symmetry in the original image was too good an opportunity to miss, but I partially concealed this by offsetting the image. Like using the things one finds around oneself as props, one should also use the potential one finds in the image - it is your image and your art after all.

033: What Dreams May Come

2008-08-21T09:20:00.001-07:00

Digital Well, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I was looking for an opportunity to play with the GIMP photoediting software, but perhaps the day before we fly to New York was not the best choice. Especially since my wife wanted some complex editng of her image as well. I gave the lion's share of my edit time to my wife, as I feel it is more important to encourage others than to indulge oneself, their responses give much better feedback than one's own.

Today I explained to my wife my concept that the first step to art is to understand oneself in one's work: if you cannot find yourself in your work, you are copying someone else's far too much or you have yet to discover yourself - whichever it is it will not help you to develop your own art. If you think about it, if an unmarked piece of art is discovered, experts can deduce who is likely to have painted it by recognising that artist's hand in the work.

Once you understand yourself well enough, you are ready for the next step - that of understanding how you relate to everything around you.

032: Make it Funk

2008-08-20T07:40:00.001-07:00

Funkin Down That Groove, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Funk? Been on nodding terms with it a long time ago in the past, but how to create me in the image of Funk? Inspiration hit in the bathroom, as it often does as you cut yourself off from all the activities you are involved in and can concentrate on your worries and planning. Or, at least, that is how it is for me. I had had some thought of mocking up a trumpet, but then, sitting there, I saw one of my wife's perfume bottles, and it almost resembled the mouthpiece of a trumpet.

From that point on it was a downhill slide as the the rest of the props fell into place: a jacket from Kazakhstan, presented to my wife by her students, and her new pair of sunglasses; one of my hats and a piece of tube that had been lying around as part of a door mechanism. Colour was thanks to an accident on Gimp, the nightclub style lights were a straight photograph of one of our halogen room lights.

The result is nothing quite like I have done before, which is pleasing, as is the fact that it both resembles funk and somethiong else at the same time.

031: And the Winner is...

2008-08-19T06:27:00.001-07:00

Everyone Loves a Winer!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today I decided to hide the Fugger challenge very loosely behind an apparent typo, or perhaps an apparent mistaken subject choice. The real image is buried deep in the picture, with me visibly celebrating a success.

The main aim was to get the bottles and glasses in focus, leave enough room to write at the bottom, and hide myself just off centre and out of focus in the background. Once more, I attempted looking at the whole winning process, and then choosing an image that belongs in the set but which has a slight twist.

030: Freestyle Walking

2008-08-18T08:49:00.001-07:00

Being Prepared Everytime, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There seemed to be lots of images concentrating on the walking itself, or jumping from buildings or benches, but nothing much on the related activities. Here I demonstrate some potential methods for storing essential materials.

Innovation might sound sexy, but it often involves the most prosaic of activities, but by the very application of original thought to anything, it kind of lifts it to a new or fresh level. The result may be easy to copy and quickly become commonplace, but you will always know that it was you who stood at the beginning of the process, giving your though to the world.

029-Unusual Photographs

2008-08-17T05:24:00.001-07:00

Life's a Scream!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Another subject-free day on FGR, it just had to be unusual - but how do you know when you have produced an unusual image? I mean, it might be unusual to you in your terms, but to someone else it might be commonplace.

I having been playing around with the two-teaspoon trick for years to entertain any number of children, but today I decided it was time to take it out, dust it down, and see where we can take it. My wife even let me use her lipstick.

I took around twenty shots to get this one, and only managed to achieve a small part of the potential of the teaspoons, some of the other shots were quite remarkable in the expression they show. You can move the teaspoons to many different positions to give slanted eyes or to have the teaspoons either lying alongside your head or with the handles sticking out sideways.

Again, everything I used today were just typical items one can find around the home.