Tuesday, 10 July 2012
On their minds (2)
With the torturous tooth no longer uppermost in my thoughts after the antibiotics had done their temporary work, I was soon among a different set of local inhabitants, thousands of miles away from those concerned about the Wellington ‘spy car’. So what was on their minds?
Now it was gun laws, taxes on the rich and the so-called ‘trickle down’ effect, whether or not poverty is a prime cause of poor educational results, obesity, the proposed Californian high-speed rail project, healthcare and banning outdoor smoking in public areas, that drove readers to make their views known in the press.
“It’s not guns but people that kill,” stated a staunch supporter of the National Rifle Association after yet another rampage shooting – which sounded bizarre to someone who has always believed that if you haven’t got a gun you can’t shoot anybody. “California has one of the strictest gun laws in the country,” it was averred, yet at the same time it was revealed that semi-automatic weapons are not banned!
Back in Sweden, mercifully not part of the Eurozone, minds are concentrating on the all-too-brief, but intense, summer season despite its exceptionally damp start. Last month was the wettest on record in the Stockholm area and parts of the country are suffering from severe flooding. July is the main holiday month in these parts and we still have faint hopes of better weather to come, though it has yet to make an appearance on the weather maps.
Meanwhile the politicians were gathered last week on the offshore island of Gotland, along with an army of lobbyists, PR consultants, media hordes and many more for the annual jamboree in which most of them are busily employed seeking publicity for themselves or those they represent or aim to promote, while 8.1 per cent of the rest of the work force have no employment at all, with the figure for young people some three times as high.
However, holiday time it is and even my dental problems, after flaring up again for a time, are taking a much-needed rest after being calmed in my trusted tooth-soother’s lie-flat chair.
Friday, 9 March 2012
On their minds
Pumped full of antibiotics and painkilling pills there’s no doubt what has been uppermost on my mind lately – an infected tooth with no respect for international agreements banning the use of torture. To find out what is on the minds of the inhabitants of the world’s most southerly capital city, however, I turn as usual to the letters they write to their newspaper, in this case Wellington’s ‘The Dominion Post’.
On the local level, the Council’s ‘spy car’ has raised the ire of many a motorist. It has been driving around photographing vehicles parked where they shouldn’t. One aggrieved lady took her complaint to court, claiming she had simply moved over to allow the spy car to pass and was so taken aback to find herself being photographed that she started to shake, and couldn’t move off until she had regained her composure. She lost her case.
Rubbish collection is another subject making many reach for pen or keyboard. There is a charge for rubbish bags as well as bins, and the charges are due to rise, along with the fees for a number of other services. Also, there is considerable debate over whether the capital city should follow Auckland’s example and merge all the councils in its urban area to form a single ‘super-city’. More efficient, say some, moving power away from the people, say others.
Nationally, there is much discussion of the Government’s well-advanced plans to sell off 49 per cent of four, highly-profitable, state-owned power companies. Although heralded in the autumn election campaign last year, the move is largely unpopular, to the extent that the unions and certain other organisations are trying to get at least 300,000 registered voters to sign a petition calling for a referendum on the matter. As legislation paving the way for the sell-off has already been introduced in Parliament, it could be as one commentator put it like trying to lock the stable after the horse has bolted.
Also unpopular among a majority is the sale of a block of 16 dairy farms to a Chinese company, with complaints that New Zealand interests have been ignored by the National (Conservative)-led Government under John Key, a former currency trader in London, said not to have hesitated to speculate against the NZ dollar during his time there. The farm sale is now under review.
The Government also plans a number of cost-cutting measures to reduce the budget deficit, including ‘reforms’ to welfare benefits, and cutting a large number of public service jobs, among them 300 from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which, critics claim, could seriously affect the country’s diplomatic representation overseas.
In all, there are a lot of people beginning to feel the pain – without having an infected tooth.
On the local level, the Council’s ‘spy car’ has raised the ire of many a motorist. It has been driving around photographing vehicles parked where they shouldn’t. One aggrieved lady took her complaint to court, claiming she had simply moved over to allow the spy car to pass and was so taken aback to find herself being photographed that she started to shake, and couldn’t move off until she had regained her composure. She lost her case.
Rubbish collection is another subject making many reach for pen or keyboard. There is a charge for rubbish bags as well as bins, and the charges are due to rise, along with the fees for a number of other services. Also, there is considerable debate over whether the capital city should follow Auckland’s example and merge all the councils in its urban area to form a single ‘super-city’. More efficient, say some, moving power away from the people, say others.
Nationally, there is much discussion of the Government’s well-advanced plans to sell off 49 per cent of four, highly-profitable, state-owned power companies. Although heralded in the autumn election campaign last year, the move is largely unpopular, to the extent that the unions and certain other organisations are trying to get at least 300,000 registered voters to sign a petition calling for a referendum on the matter. As legislation paving the way for the sell-off has already been introduced in Parliament, it could be as one commentator put it like trying to lock the stable after the horse has bolted.
Also unpopular among a majority is the sale of a block of 16 dairy farms to a Chinese company, with complaints that New Zealand interests have been ignored by the National (Conservative)-led Government under John Key, a former currency trader in London, said not to have hesitated to speculate against the NZ dollar during his time there. The farm sale is now under review.
The Government also plans a number of cost-cutting measures to reduce the budget deficit, including ‘reforms’ to welfare benefits, and cutting a large number of public service jobs, among them 300 from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which, critics claim, could seriously affect the country’s diplomatic representation overseas.
In all, there are a lot of people beginning to feel the pain – without having an infected tooth.
Sunday, 19 February 2012
Time travel
My latest time-machine travel (see previous post) took me to New Zealand on the first day of this year. It was December 30 when I boarded the plane in San Francisco, the morning of January 1when it landed in Auckland. New Year’s Eve had vanished. Gone without murmur or mention, let alone festivity. The nearest I came to any celebration was the sight of some bedraggled left-over revellers in Queen Street, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare.
Auckland is the country’s biggest urban area by very far, with about a third of the country’s entire population of some 4.4 million people. But it hasn’t been the seat of government since 1865, when the move was made to the more centrally located Wellington, the world’s most southerly capital city, where I have been for the past month. It is built on and between the steep slopes that surround one of the world’s biggest deep-sea harbours. Look up and you can see innumerable private homes and commercial buildings perched on the steep hillsides, often amid greenery. Very attractive – but for the fact that this is very much an earthquake-risk region with no fewer than four fault lines, one of them running through the city.
The last major quake may have been in the 1850s, but there have been two well above 4 on the Richter scale felt here since I arrived and the next really big bang could come tomorrow, next week, in a month’s time or many decades or scores of years from now. This has been known for a long time, of course, but minds have been sharpened by the Christchurch disaster on February 22 last year, when much of the centre of that city and thousands of homes were destroyed, or have had to be demolished. 185 people were killed, 115 of them in one high-rise building. And most of the devastation remains to be seen. And repaired.
A new report into the ability of Wellington to withstand an earthquake on a similar same scale estimates it would cost the economy 37 billion NZD (tens of billions of anyone’s money), that many important enterprises and the Government itself could be forced to leave, perhaps permanently, though little is said about the potentially devastating human cost. 435 city buildings have been identified as being particularly hazardous. Many are located along important roads so that the few routes into and out of the city could be blocked by rubble.
A map has been published marking in red streets at risk from what are termed ‘earthquake-prone’ buildings, while those 'potentially' at risk are in orange. If I look at the street where I am staying and where I am right now (in a high rise building)... I see it is in the darkest of reds.
Hmm...
Auckland is the country’s biggest urban area by very far, with about a third of the country’s entire population of some 4.4 million people. But it hasn’t been the seat of government since 1865, when the move was made to the more centrally located Wellington, the world’s most southerly capital city, where I have been for the past month. It is built on and between the steep slopes that surround one of the world’s biggest deep-sea harbours. Look up and you can see innumerable private homes and commercial buildings perched on the steep hillsides, often amid greenery. Very attractive – but for the fact that this is very much an earthquake-risk region with no fewer than four fault lines, one of them running through the city.
The last major quake may have been in the 1850s, but there have been two well above 4 on the Richter scale felt here since I arrived and the next really big bang could come tomorrow, next week, in a month’s time or many decades or scores of years from now. This has been known for a long time, of course, but minds have been sharpened by the Christchurch disaster on February 22 last year, when much of the centre of that city and thousands of homes were destroyed, or have had to be demolished. 185 people were killed, 115 of them in one high-rise building. And most of the devastation remains to be seen. And repaired.
A new report into the ability of Wellington to withstand an earthquake on a similar same scale estimates it would cost the economy 37 billion NZD (tens of billions of anyone’s money), that many important enterprises and the Government itself could be forced to leave, perhaps permanently, though little is said about the potentially devastating human cost. 435 city buildings have been identified as being particularly hazardous. Many are located along important roads so that the few routes into and out of the city could be blocked by rubble.
A map has been published marking in red streets at risk from what are termed ‘earthquake-prone’ buildings, while those 'potentially' at risk are in orange. If I look at the street where I am staying and where I am right now (in a high rise building)... I see it is in the darkest of reds.
Hmm...
Tuesday, 14 February 2012
Time And Money
“The twenty-four hour day has come to stay,” wrote Max Beerbohm, who lived from the late 19th to mid-20th century. He wasn’t entirely right.
Fly from New Zealand to California, for example, and you arrive nine hours before you started despite the twelve-hour journey. That makes a forty-five hour day! In the opposite direction, you leave in the evening and arrive two mornings later. Before landing in Auckland you will have experienced the ultimate in lost time, the zero-hour day! People have been known to riot for less.
Yet it has been worse. When the Gregorian Calendar was first introduced in 1582 no fewer than ten days were lost to make up for discrepancies in the Julian system, more than ten days in countries which changed at later dates. Many people were outraged, convinced their lives had been correspondingly shortened. Airline passengers, however, seldom make a fuss.
There are, of course, many lesser examples, not involving the International Date Line or change of calendar. Move from any time zone to another and you lengthen or shorten your day, or your playing time — in the north of Sweden there’s a golf course that straddles the Finnish border, with a one-hour time difference from one side to the other.
Twice a year, with the beginning or end of summer time (or daylight saving), you don’t even have to pack a case or golf bag to get an hour added to, or subtracted from, your day.
Now in theory, the forty-five hour day has much to commend it. I have only to think of all I could do that I never have time for to see its attractions. Having experienced it a number of times, however, I know the result to be disorientation, fatigue and days wasted in trying to recover. So perhaps it’s wisest to stay within Beerbohm’s bounds.
What worries me is that the length of his hours seems to have changed. I swear they are getting shorter and shorter. The days disappear! Weeks flash by. The years roll on at an accelerating pace. I have only to blink and hey presto! — there isn’t a hope of doing a quarter of what I’d intended. I should complain to the police, the Government, the public time-keeper (if there isn’t one, there should be). What we need are daywatchmen! My kingdom for honest, trustworthy, vigilant, time-protecting persons prepared to fight for every minute.
When I think of all my unfinished projects; of those hundreds upon hundreds of slides and negatives that have been waiting in vain to be scanned and join the many thousands of unprocessed digital images on my hard drive; of the dozens of books I’ve been meaning to read but don’t (I go on acquiring them at the same rate regardless); of the films I mean to see but never do; of the concerts and sporting events I don’t get to; of the exhibitions I miss; I can only ask: where does the time go to? WHERE? And the only answer I can come up with is that it is being stolen. From under my very nose!
It isn’t as though I spend countless hours in front of the box. Why, I’m a disgrace to the good statistical name of the Scandinavian nation in which I reside, a traitor who simply doesn’t care. Every respectable home in the country has at the very least one large television set, which, if it is not to hide its head in shame will have a very flat panel and offer the chance to flick through an extraordinary number of channels. Not mine. There was a time when I had no TV at all. And I have never subscribed to any of the cable services or owned a video recorder of any description, seldom watching (free-to-air) programmes once let alone over again.
I must have been a prime suspect for the telecommunications people’s unpaid-licence-detecting brigade. What a hope they had! They could have sat outside my door for ever with that magic contraption of theirs during my total abstinence period without registering the faintest blip or bleep. They did knock once. I’m sure they didn’t believe me when I told them the situation. Mind you, I didn’t dare say I haven’t a mobile phone or car either. You can’t stretch the limits of credibility too far. Neither did I claim to be unemployed. Why, if they depended on me, the likes of Nokia, Sony-Eriksson and all the car makers of this world would go out of business, and then where would we be?
Nix. Time is being taken away from me, I say. From others too. I think I now understand why so many men shave their heads. They never manage to make it to the barber. W.H.Davies would have understood the situation perfectly:
What is this life if full of care
There is no time to cut your hair?
And time, we are told, is money, which could help explain why my bank balance is in such an unhealthy state. But only in part. On all other counts it should be bursting with well-being and you don’t have to be much of a mathematician to work out why.
Take the price of a packet of cigarettes. Multiply it by two, or three, or four. Multiply that by fifty-two and the answer by the number of years that have elapsed since I would have started smoking if I’d had sufficient talent to learn. Enter the total in the right hand column. Then start on the beer and do the same. All right? Now take wine and spirits. And steaks. Put all the totals beneath each other.
Then add a small down-payment on a modest vehicle plus monthly instalments on same. Don’t forget repairs and maintenance. And fuel. Then take a telly box of anything other than diminutive proportions, and video recorder, or hard-disk system. Include cable TV charges for many years and licence fees for some. And a cell phone - or phones. No self-respecting person sticks with an old model.
Unless you are sleeping in the street, these are just the bare, normal, natural essentials of life in acountry such as Sweden. Without a phone to your ear, or at least in your hand, you are likely to suffer from desperate feelings of loneliness and isolation when travelling on those moving call centres, the Stockholm underground trains. OK, I have a computer, but not the latest and greatest and without it I would have been destitute long ago, so that doesn’t count.
Right. Add it all up. Make additional allowance for a modest, accumulated rate of interest, minus tax. And you see what you get? Well where is it? WHERE IS IT?
There is only one conclusion to be drawn: whoever is stealing my time is making sure he has the means to enjoy it!
Fly from New Zealand to California, for example, and you arrive nine hours before you started despite the twelve-hour journey. That makes a forty-five hour day! In the opposite direction, you leave in the evening and arrive two mornings later. Before landing in Auckland you will have experienced the ultimate in lost time, the zero-hour day! People have been known to riot for less.
Yet it has been worse. When the Gregorian Calendar was first introduced in 1582 no fewer than ten days were lost to make up for discrepancies in the Julian system, more than ten days in countries which changed at later dates. Many people were outraged, convinced their lives had been correspondingly shortened. Airline passengers, however, seldom make a fuss.
There are, of course, many lesser examples, not involving the International Date Line or change of calendar. Move from any time zone to another and you lengthen or shorten your day, or your playing time — in the north of Sweden there’s a golf course that straddles the Finnish border, with a one-hour time difference from one side to the other.
Twice a year, with the beginning or end of summer time (or daylight saving), you don’t even have to pack a case or golf bag to get an hour added to, or subtracted from, your day.
Now in theory, the forty-five hour day has much to commend it. I have only to think of all I could do that I never have time for to see its attractions. Having experienced it a number of times, however, I know the result to be disorientation, fatigue and days wasted in trying to recover. So perhaps it’s wisest to stay within Beerbohm’s bounds.
What worries me is that the length of his hours seems to have changed. I swear they are getting shorter and shorter. The days disappear! Weeks flash by. The years roll on at an accelerating pace. I have only to blink and hey presto! — there isn’t a hope of doing a quarter of what I’d intended. I should complain to the police, the Government, the public time-keeper (if there isn’t one, there should be). What we need are daywatchmen! My kingdom for honest, trustworthy, vigilant, time-protecting persons prepared to fight for every minute.
When I think of all my unfinished projects; of those hundreds upon hundreds of slides and negatives that have been waiting in vain to be scanned and join the many thousands of unprocessed digital images on my hard drive; of the dozens of books I’ve been meaning to read but don’t (I go on acquiring them at the same rate regardless); of the films I mean to see but never do; of the concerts and sporting events I don’t get to; of the exhibitions I miss; I can only ask: where does the time go to? WHERE? And the only answer I can come up with is that it is being stolen. From under my very nose!
It isn’t as though I spend countless hours in front of the box. Why, I’m a disgrace to the good statistical name of the Scandinavian nation in which I reside, a traitor who simply doesn’t care. Every respectable home in the country has at the very least one large television set, which, if it is not to hide its head in shame will have a very flat panel and offer the chance to flick through an extraordinary number of channels. Not mine. There was a time when I had no TV at all. And I have never subscribed to any of the cable services or owned a video recorder of any description, seldom watching (free-to-air) programmes once let alone over again.
I must have been a prime suspect for the telecommunications people’s unpaid-licence-detecting brigade. What a hope they had! They could have sat outside my door for ever with that magic contraption of theirs during my total abstinence period without registering the faintest blip or bleep. They did knock once. I’m sure they didn’t believe me when I told them the situation. Mind you, I didn’t dare say I haven’t a mobile phone or car either. You can’t stretch the limits of credibility too far. Neither did I claim to be unemployed. Why, if they depended on me, the likes of Nokia, Sony-Eriksson and all the car makers of this world would go out of business, and then where would we be?
Nix. Time is being taken away from me, I say. From others too. I think I now understand why so many men shave their heads. They never manage to make it to the barber. W.H.Davies would have understood the situation perfectly:
What is this life if full of care
There is no time to cut your hair?
And time, we are told, is money, which could help explain why my bank balance is in such an unhealthy state. But only in part. On all other counts it should be bursting with well-being and you don’t have to be much of a mathematician to work out why.
Take the price of a packet of cigarettes. Multiply it by two, or three, or four. Multiply that by fifty-two and the answer by the number of years that have elapsed since I would have started smoking if I’d had sufficient talent to learn. Enter the total in the right hand column. Then start on the beer and do the same. All right? Now take wine and spirits. And steaks. Put all the totals beneath each other.
Then add a small down-payment on a modest vehicle plus monthly instalments on same. Don’t forget repairs and maintenance. And fuel. Then take a telly box of anything other than diminutive proportions, and video recorder, or hard-disk system. Include cable TV charges for many years and licence fees for some. And a cell phone - or phones. No self-respecting person sticks with an old model.
Unless you are sleeping in the street, these are just the bare, normal, natural essentials of life in acountry such as Sweden. Without a phone to your ear, or at least in your hand, you are likely to suffer from desperate feelings of loneliness and isolation when travelling on those moving call centres, the Stockholm underground trains. OK, I have a computer, but not the latest and greatest and without it I would have been destitute long ago, so that doesn’t count.
Right. Add it all up. Make additional allowance for a modest, accumulated rate of interest, minus tax. And you see what you get? Well where is it? WHERE IS IT?
There is only one conclusion to be drawn: whoever is stealing my time is making sure he has the means to enjoy it!
Friday, 10 February 2012
Camera Lies
It never was true that the camera can’t lie. Apart from standard elementary methods that could be used to distort, such as special filters, studio lighting effects, printing paper with different degrees of contrast, shading or ‘burning in’ in the darkroom etc., there have always been more advanced levels of manipulation, including retouching negatives or prints after they were made. In the digital age, however, image manipulation has been taken to new heights.
Moreover, whereas in the past such things were not openly bragged about except perhaps in the specialist press, nowadays it is trumpeted from the rooftops. Software developers brag about the ability of their products to add or remove people, objects, wrinkles, birthmarks, other human or inanimate blemishes or shadows, and to improve or change colouring, turn colour into black-and-white and heaven knows what else.
I was sharply reminded of all this in December at the Landscape Photographer of the Year Exhibition in London. There were indeed several striking scenes on display, but there was also an all-pervading air of unreality. And by each exhibit was a little card unashamedly revealing how it had been created: the colours saturated, this part treated one way, that part another, and more revealing to those still unfamiliar with the ways of the digital imaging world, how many different shots had been ‘stitched’ together to create the finished work. At least one photographer claimed to have used twelve! I would have changed the name of the exhibition to Landscape Manipulator of the Year.
Oh for the great Cartier Bresson, who would not allow the slightest crop to his photographs let alone any form of manipulation. He portrayed life as he and his camera saw it. Unadulterated.
www.binnyandbelloe.weebly.com
Moreover, whereas in the past such things were not openly bragged about except perhaps in the specialist press, nowadays it is trumpeted from the rooftops. Software developers brag about the ability of their products to add or remove people, objects, wrinkles, birthmarks, other human or inanimate blemishes or shadows, and to improve or change colouring, turn colour into black-and-white and heaven knows what else.
I was sharply reminded of all this in December at the Landscape Photographer of the Year Exhibition in London. There were indeed several striking scenes on display, but there was also an all-pervading air of unreality. And by each exhibit was a little card unashamedly revealing how it had been created: the colours saturated, this part treated one way, that part another, and more revealing to those still unfamiliar with the ways of the digital imaging world, how many different shots had been ‘stitched’ together to create the finished work. At least one photographer claimed to have used twelve! I would have changed the name of the exhibition to Landscape Manipulator of the Year.
Oh for the great Cartier Bresson, who would not allow the slightest crop to his photographs let alone any form of manipulation. He portrayed life as he and his camera saw it. Unadulterated.
www.binnyandbelloe.weebly.com
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Names
There are those who do not know and those who do not care. Amelia Bloomer’s parents could hardly have been aware that her surname would be given to an item of women’s underwear, nor Charles Cunningham Boycott’s family that he and they would ever after be associated with a refusal to have anything to do with something or other. There are many more examples of such surnames. Those of Samuel A. Maverick, Jean Martinet, Samuel Plimsoll and Etienne de Silhouette are but a few.
What is more difficult to understand is why people would consciously want to inflict first names on their offspring that could make them figures of fun. Yet somewhere in Britain there are parents with the surname Dwyer who decided to call their child Barb; a Mr and Mrs Case chose Justin for their son; the Cades have a little one called Barry; and the Turner family have an infant called Paige (doubtless hoping he will turn into a best-selling author.)
In Sweden, at least, such names would almost certainly not be allowed. The legislation clearly states that a forename may not be such that it can be perceived as offensive or can lead to unpleasantness for the person bearing it.
The above parents and those of Stan Still, Mary Christmas and Chris Cross in the UK, and Bill Board and Carrie Oakey in the US, please note.
What is more difficult to understand is why people would consciously want to inflict first names on their offspring that could make them figures of fun. Yet somewhere in Britain there are parents with the surname Dwyer who decided to call their child Barb; a Mr and Mrs Case chose Justin for their son; the Cades have a little one called Barry; and the Turner family have an infant called Paige (doubtless hoping he will turn into a best-selling author.)
In Sweden, at least, such names would almost certainly not be allowed. The legislation clearly states that a forename may not be such that it can be perceived as offensive or can lead to unpleasantness for the person bearing it.
The above parents and those of Stan Still, Mary Christmas and Chris Cross in the UK, and Bill Board and Carrie Oakey in the US, please note.
Monday, 23 January 2012
Toys 'R' Noise
There was a time when toys were modest, unassuming, well-behaved objects that went quietly about their business, amusing or teaching new skills to young minds and hands, with little disturbance to anyone else. Not so any more. Now they are a loud-mouthed lot clamouring for attention, incessantly buzzing or whirring or mechanically speaking, singing, sounding sirens, beating their drum in a bid to outdo each other and create maximum disturbance to those for whom they are not intended. And that is to say nothing of the ‘games’ that are no longer played face to face with other children, but staring at a screen, with all the action and sound effects provided.
Such are the reflections of someone who once again has taken part in two Yuletide festivities on consecutive days, the first on the 24th December, the second one day later, both occasions replete with a plethora of parcels and packages for the young ones (four kids on the first occasion, five on the second), all the Xmas-wrapped battery-charged gifts just waiting for the moment to stand revealed and release their pent-up energies after being piled for days under a rapidly drying evergreen cut down long before its prime.
Oh for the silent playthings of old! And for a strict limit on the number of gadgets and games showered on children who hardly know which to turn to first. And who have no idea how privileged they are.
Such are the reflections of someone who once again has taken part in two Yuletide festivities on consecutive days, the first on the 24th December, the second one day later, both occasions replete with a plethora of parcels and packages for the young ones (four kids on the first occasion, five on the second), all the Xmas-wrapped battery-charged gifts just waiting for the moment to stand revealed and release their pent-up energies after being piled for days under a rapidly drying evergreen cut down long before its prime.
Oh for the silent playthings of old! And for a strict limit on the number of gadgets and games showered on children who hardly know which to turn to first. And who have no idea how privileged they are.
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