wjb-inthesky-blog-blog - Tumblr blog

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Never apologise for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologise for the truth.

Benjamin Disraeli

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bookmania:

“i like my body when it is with your” by e.e. cummings (by fleurology)

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Reporter: "Do you see yourself as more of a singer or a poet?" Bob Dylan: "Well, I see myself as more of a song and dance man"

Bob Dylan, BBC4 biopic 'Dylan', by Martin Scorsese 

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On current trends, the Arctic will be entirely ice-free in September by about 2016, and will be ice-free year-round by the early 2030s.

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School Fence - Swaziland, 2005

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Click on the above link for a typically succinct, insightful, cutting and unreserved summary of i) the premeditated nature of Osama Bin Laden's assassination in Pakistan, ii) the western imperialist mindset that attempts to paradoxically justify its own acts of international brutality and institutionalised evil via reference to the intrinsic 'otherness' of similar acts, with similarly underlying motives, effectuated (mostly) by non-Americans, and iii) the sweet irony in the statement that "countries 'harbouring terrorists' are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and, as such, should be treated accordingly". 

Noam Chomsky, in my opinion, is a genius. 

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Watering Hole - Swaziland, 2005

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Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

Charles de Gaulle

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Mother and Child - Swaziland, 2005

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Mbabane Roadside - Swaziland, 2005

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Dance - Swaziland, 2005

Packing my bag with a month's worth of study detritus and cycling paraphernalia, I stumbled over a dusty box of photos that I thought had been lost or thrown away years ago. It contained forty or fifty 35mm prints of photos I shot 6 years ago during a small-scale cultural awareness and charitable-relief trip to Swaziland, a landlocked country within the borders of South Africa that has been long ravaged by economic frailty, extreme poverty and a disastrous HIV epidemic. All of the children in this photo are AIDS orphans. 

I'll be uploading more images in the next few days.  

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The memory of this experience will fade and you will eventually die. I'm sorry. I'm so very, very sorry

Jonas Nobel

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Charlestown harbour, low tide. 

Unable to get settled enough to sleep, I decided to take the dog round the harbour for a midnight walk. Its was slightly windy out in the bay tonight, enough to agitate the froth from the breakers but not enough to make me zip up my jacket to keep out the cold.

Usually - with a clear sky - an inky blackness shrouds pretty much everything apart from the ruffled lines of white and grey out on the water, but, tonight, a fine sea mist carried the sodium glow of street lights from up the road past the inner dock and square riggers and towards the outer knuckle.

Curious shades of orange and yellow stained the granite flags and corroded iron relics, shawling the landscape with a modern industrial monochrome that can't have been felt here since the death of Cornish china clay. Darker hues leaked over the walls' edges, skipping off isolated pools of water into shadowed tracts of watermark and sand ripple. What was left of the sea had managed to carve itself an idle, sinuous channel inshore, gravitating round the harbour's inner curve and penetrating the shadows of skewed fishing vessels and rowing boats. A lack of water had bedded them down into the sand. 

I hadn't seen the tide this low in years. It was probably on its way in by now anyway. I called Smuggler out of the basin, and walked home. 

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Its a hazy wednesday afternoon, I've trimmed my beard, had some tea + toast and now I'm about to go for a casual meander towards Bristol's main train station. Destination? Home. Why? To save the future of the UK's democratic system by voting #yestoav. Then, to top it off, I'll hope my say in the local council election will help to throw the Conservatives out of power in Cornwall and onto a roaring funeral pire fuelled, in a slick ironic twist, by their own self-serving, middle-English, hollow, big-societal-public-sector-slashing bullshit. Oh yes, with the amount of out-of-touch political rhetoric that's been bandied around of late in my community, we'll have enough material to keep the embers glowing for a long, long time. 

Music of choice to accompany this eclectic mix of chilled, Bristolian exploration and small-scale statement political of intent? Dr Who by Smerins Anti-Social Club. Naturally.

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If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be in silencing mankind

John Stuart Mill

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Bristol's floating-harbour quayside houses. Shot during my first couple of weeks at university.

There's only a month to go until I finish my (current) foray into the depths of philosophical and linguistic academia, and its starting to dawn on me that - despite the frustratingly irreconcilable ways that my mind has been pulled, stretched, expanded and crushed by various stresses, by self discovery and by all manner of personal challenges - I'd happily forsake my eagerness about crudely storming through finals week for the chance to do it all again, swathed in all-encompassing naivety and mercurial aspirations for the future.   

Before yesterday, when I arrived back in Bristol, I had been restless, anxiously swiping each passing etching of university time from my mind. Granted, this is what should be expected when sat anaesthetised for hour after incongruous hour at an unsympathetic, dimly lit desk in deepest Cornwall. But when reams of perversely demanding assignments and a hazy sierra of oh-so-fine-print revision material imposed themselves upon the situation, the pressure of the 'finals run-in' really began to tell.

Insomnia developed. Confidence plummeted. Everything was demanding, constricted, pressurised. The air even seemed tacky, viscous, impossible to breathe. I needed to get outside, to forget about the degree. For a while, I was convinced that this was exactly what I would end up doing. Last night, though, I experienced a caffeine related epiphany - a caffiphany, if you will - and this cleared my mind.

The rapid consumption of twelve mugs of warm, black, sugary coffee meant a near-hallucinatory shunt towards a clarity. I can't get outside of the degree, because that would mean getting psychologically out of Bristol, of four (mostly awesome) years of debt accumulation, away from new friends, quirky townhouses, crap football teams and feisty protests. I can't ever do this because, skittish worries of pressure and anxiety aside, it has all become part of me. Besides, I don't really want to get outside, to cut myself off. I like my course, I like this city and I like who I have become at university (well, most of the time). So, given the chance, I'd quite happily spend another four years here finding out who I might yet be. 

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jayparkinsonmd:

“A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he says. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”