Pig Sty Avenue

A Hasselblad C/M. And colour developing. And home enlarging, (Number One Daughter told me yesterday that she'd bought a load of darkroom equipment, including a good enlarger, from someone who went digital. She's never used it and will pass it on to me). This is the way to go: serious, high quality portraits, indoors with the Hasselblad, outdoors with the Leica. Make the prints, get them framed, put them on the wall or give them to family and friends as presents. Voila! Everything I've ever blogged or even thought about photography has been leading to this conclusion: unique images hanging on a wall. All of the online photo-sharing fandango is so much frivolity.

Woman aircraft worker, Vega Aircraft Corporation, Burbank, Calif. Shown checking electrical assemblies (LOC) , originally uploaded by The Library of Congress . From the Library of Congress photo collection on Flickr. Try getting that colour with a digital sensor. But click on it and read the comments and remember the maxim: If you don't have anything useful to say, shut the fuck up.

I notice that the Albert Kahn account on Flickr has been shut down, which means that this post looks somewhat bereft, (broken links: internet alzheimer's). So here are some other autochromes from Flickr to make up for the loss. And here's a post at a blog called The Blue Lantern, all about the Mademoiselles Mespoulet and Mignon.

Wenger's probably the PL's best whinger . However, one does live in a fucking glass house and shouldn't perhaps throw too many stones...

To all the Avenue's readers. And to the crew of The Antarctic , which has been at anchor in Irvine Bay since Christmas Eve.

, originally uploaded by beebo wallace . In a pub in London.

This was quite something into the early 80s. So far as I know, it dated back to the times of full employment and when most working class men on Tyneside were employed in shipbuilding or other heavy industry. It was a kind of party for men who "balled up", left work at midday, on Christmas Eve. It became institutionalized a bit when working men's clubs started to put on a buffet, a blue comedian and a couple of strippers. Looking back, it was part of an oral culture - you'd never see a sign advertising a ballers' balls. Instead, you'd arrange it with your mates and male relatives a day or two before, and it was always dependent on your being able to get away from work, which in those days depended on the system of the "pass out" and an amenable foreman. I'm not sure about the etymology, or even, frankly, the spelling. It could be bowlers' , I seem to remember some people pronouncing it that way. According to the OED, a baller is one who a...

Just in case I ever get time to do it, here's a free media storage thingummy .

Talking of whinging managers, as we were , here's some of Ms Taylor's deathless reporting tagged onto this article about Michael Owen staying on. "Gareth Southgate, Viduka's former manager at Middlesbrough, was in rather more downbeat mood yesterday when he expressed annoyance towards rival clubs for behaviour aimed at unsettling some of his key players." One senses the start of a whole new collection.

hill's cold tablets , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . The Avenue's virtual fame knows no bounds. I got a request today to use this photo , and naturally I gave it. I don't know how old this tin is, exactly, but Hill's Cold Tablets were part of the sponsorship for The Adventures of Ellery Queen on NBC in the 1940s . So you can imagine one of the characters in Godfather I, say, having them in his topcoat pocket to combat his cold on a freezing New York night. Luca Brasi, perhaps, or would he be too hard to be arsed with Hill's Cold Tablets? There's a thought. And swimming with the fishes, that time of year, would do his cold no good at all. Luca Brasi image from here.

According to Redknapp: "We didn't deserve to get beaten, that's for sure. I couldn't foresee any problems after half-time. I just thought it would be a case of waiting for the goal and taking all three points." Well, you thought wrong, eh? Twat. It's a matter of perspective on discourse. What could have been reported as a famous victory for one side, becomes instead an irritating setback for another. You could read the whole thing from London based AFP bastards here .

Source: http://students.umf.maine.edu/mccormka/public.www/history/frontpage.html

And furthermore... I was crap at football as a kid so I never played it with pleasure, and never learned the technicalities. I still don't get it. What I see on a football pitch is 11 blokes trying to kick a ball into a goal despite 11 other blokes trying to stop them and do the same thing into another goal... I can't ever detect any particular differences in their overall methodology for doing so. It's obviously the case that a manager can make a big difference to a team. But that's surely more to do with his power to select the team, and improve the players' confidence, than in giving them actual strategy and tactics to use on the playing field? Or something? In the end, it's the big drama of it that's got me hooked. If you choose a league to focus on, say the English Premier, you can get to know the characters involved: add up all the players, the managers, owners, pundits, journalists, and your mates who talk about football, and you've got a...

Although I had a Newcastle-mad phase in my mid teens, going to matches home and away, (this was in the era from Wyn Davies to Malcolm McDonald, with Bobby Moncur the captain and Iam McFaul in goal), after I realised that, (a) being with a like minded young woman with both your clothes off is about the best fun you've ever had; and, (b), football does absolutely nothing to enhance your ability to get you involved with a young woman or women in this way, and can also be an aggravating drain on your cash and time, well, I stopped going to matches and eventually rarely watched them on telly. At one time in the early nineties, I seem to recall, braggging that I couldn't name a single player. Nowadays, although I still find it far from better-than-sex, I'm begining to retake an interest. Funny how things happen, I seem to remember that this started during my first spell in Libya in 2004, because all of my students were fascinated by the English Premier League, and dismayed to r...

The stock Perceptol's running low, so the time has come for buying chemicals and making up my own developer and fixer. I've already priced up the developer . There's a formula for Kodak F-24 at digital truth : Water, 125F/52C 500 ml Sodium Thiosulfate (Hypo) 240 g Sodium Sulfite (anhydrous) 10 g Sodium Bisulfite (anhydrous) 25 g Cold water to make 1L Which compares with the contents of my Ilford Rapid Fixer as follows: Ammonium thiosulfate Sodium acetate Sodium sulfite Sodium bisulfite So the Ilford differs in that it has Ammonium thiosulfite as opposed to Sodium , and it also contains Sodium acetate. I'm going to seek the advice of the nice people at DIY Black & White afore I commit the numbers on an increasingly beleaguered credit card to the less disinterested people at Retrophotographic . Or something.

Here's an email I got out of the blue yesterday from the DoS at MSU: Hi Garry – you indicated (very emphatically) at the meeting here last month that you didn’t want any more McEnglish teaching in January, and there has been no word to say you’ve changed your mind, so I have removed you from the list. Thanks for all you did and I hope your next job is more to your liking. Best wishes Somehow, removal from a list manages to sound almost as dangerous as being put on one. And then I got another email today from a colleague at MSU who told me that one of the wee cheeses there had said that I didn't want to do any pre-entry teaching at MSU, whereas I thought I'd told him a few weeks ago that I was desperate not to have to go back to McEnglish in the winter term, and would be up for any hours he had to offer me at MSU. So it would seem that I've been, kind of, sacked at McEnglish and told indirectly that I'm not going to find any work at MSU, either. The bastar...

I encountered this word this morning for the first time, reading The Cutting Room (Welsh, 2002, 226), where valuable books were being retained by the dealer, and not destroyed as he'd promised, he regarding them as "legitimate pochle". An online illustrated Scots dictionary gives the meaning here . The OED is less certain, giving it as a variation on packald, which is a bundle, a package, (with the subsidiary meaning, the postal service). Welsh, 2002. The Cutting Room . Canongate. Edinburgh.

Sorted. The problem is now that, in my general state of anxiety I've gotten rolls of film exposed and unexposed all mixed up... What a numpty.

...As a comical cat blogged in October 2005 , which I'm pleased he overcame his paranoia and did because a lot has happened in the intervening 3 and a bit years. Anyway, I've been chatting to Little Gwion this evening, and he told me some interesting stuff about these plants. He was wrong, he says, that you wait for the plants to produce "babies" before you harvest them: he's read up about this and you just wait until they're the right size: ping-pong ball-ish. He bothered to go through this and get some excellent information on growing medium. He confirms what's said on one of those links about plastic v. clay pots: he has two (of seven) plants in clay pots, and the five in plastic are all doing much better. He's looking at a harvest in just over three years time, seven years after planting. So that would mean seven plants after seven years. These things appeal to Little Gwion.

Here's the problem. And here's the advice about repairs in Glasgow . I don't know if I'll get to Glasgow before the year's out now, it being the Christmas Vac and all that. I dusted off the spare FED2, the one with the light leak, but I don't think I can get the necessary paint for the curtains without going into Glasgow, too. Bugger.

n00bs , originally uploaded by 01101001 01100001 01101110 .

beebo wallace and pig sty avenue , originally uploaded by zombizi . That's me and Beebo, in the pub.

evidence. , originally uploaded by °๋§ ợ§ღєηŧ . ...And Zombizi on the left.

I've had a splendid weekend in London. Flew from Glasgow Friday afternoon, and spent the night at the Thistle Barbican, (fifteeen minutes walk from the Barbican, and I'm not sure about the thistle). It was as if the entire Euro-zone had decamped there. I noticed coaches, so clearly some enterprising tour operator(s) have cottoned on to the weak pound as an attraction to a do-your-xmas-shopping-in-oxford-street "holiday" to the French, Italian, Spanish and Irish. Only the last of that list were going for the Full English, I noticed. Perhaps that's why Britons distrust most Europeans: they actually prefer a "continental breakfast". Saturday, I was on an exam-writing training course. I won't say who my newest quasi-employer is, but their head quarters are a simultaneous stone's throw from the Old Bailey, Smithfield and St Bartholomew's Hospital. And there's a lane nearby called Cock Lane there, which once sited a knocking-shop, I wa...

Just when I'd cleaned out the notes to self cupboard, here's another note to self: check out spEak You’re bRanes .

Hooray for labels! Going through some notes-to-self. The In Our Time link I posted last week is to a patchy and not up to date Wiki. Even so, it has a lot to recommend it, not least this discussion on the Language Instinct between Pinker and Jonathon Miller. I did some funny notes-t0-self whilst I was coming to the end of my tether in Libya, mind. The World Beach project ? Things which must have once been intriguing, like nowpublic.com , now look almost completely uninteresting. The post and note-to-self about Jackie Brown from January this year give me an interesting dilemma. The song I really liked was Across 110th St., by Bobby Womack. Here it is, with the brilliant opening scene from that movie. But, dig a little deeper, and I find that Across 110th St was itself a movie. Which begs the question, should I buy the soundtrack from the original blaxploitation movie, or from the later blaxploitation tribute ? I suspect I'm going to have to go with the original, on...

Which is forever in the blogsphere. A handful of regular readers, but I've posted several times a week, and usually every day, since late November 2004. And our 4th Wedding Anniversary, too, yesterday. What larks!

She's at anchor . And has been for several weeks now.

Man.

Here's a sort of fan-site , which has an index with transcripts. Haven't time to check it out now, but I'm blogging it as a Note to Self, to check out when this fucking term's over.

It really does grow like a weed . I got two cuttings about six weeks ago. One of them was green, the other more woody. The eBay seller said he had already had them in water a couple of weeks, so they should be ready to grow root within a week or so. Standing in a glass of water on the kitchen windowsill (facing north), they were indeed rooted enough to plant them in perishable cutting pots after a couple of weeks, and the roots were showing through the pots within another two weeks. I potted them on into a 50/50 mixture of multipurpose compost and perlite at the weekend. They are growing at a fast rate, considering they only get eight hours of not-very-good light a day.

I'm looking at writing a combined Inter Cultural Communication and Critical Discourse Analysis 5000 word paper for Mod 5: probably a CDA of the listening materials that go with the IELTS book I'm using at work, with particular reference to the emphasis the materials place on standard English with RP, and the cultural style passed on thereby. Or something. Anyway, here's the start of a reading list culled from some google-scholaring just now. Major et al (2005) looks like a good starting point. Dalton, C. and B. Seidlhofer. 1994a. Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dalton, C. and B. Seidlhofer. 1994b. 'Is pronunciation teaching desirable? Is it feasible?' in T. Sebbage and S. Sebbage (eds.). Proceedings of the 4th International NELLE Conference. Hamburg: NELLE. Davis 2007 'Resistance to L2 pragmatics in the Australian L2 context'. Language Learning 57:4, December 2007, pp. 611–649 Gimson, A.C. 1978. 'Towards an international pronunciation o...

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was ok, I suppose. Herself suggested it may have been serialized as the book which follows Woman's Hour on Radio Four at 10.45 - and that would be about right. The sort of book a man would read if he wanted to appear more interesting to a certain kind of woman. Which I don't. Next, I read a remarkable novel, The Crimson Petal and the White . That made the train fairly speed along - one minute I was in Stevenston, the next in Paisley. Now I'm reading Snow Blind .

looking at an ayrshire sky , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . I've realised that the Soviet lenses just don't do sharp, so I've just got to make the most of not-sharp, probably until I can afford an M and a several hundred quid lens to go with it. This is the Jupiter 8, and of course the Leica IIIf. Fuji Neopan 1600 developed in Perceptol 1+3 using the 20+5+5+5 minute methodology. Many of the shots on the roll are a tad overexposed. Mostly I was at 1/75 or 100 - at f2. So I could go to 1/200 indoors, or even 500 with some daylight through the window.

...pick the pockets of the world! Any brief, self-deluding enthusiasm I felt for Obama was dislodged with the appointment of this Geithner as Treasury Secretary. He'll be a fearless champion for the status quo, which means the maintenance of the power of big money interests in the US and beyond. Move on, nothing to see here...

Should have kept the mouth shut about the escape plans . They were based around exam item-writing, and that's still in the mix, but it won't be enough to pay the bills and put food on the table. The future looks like a dog's breakfast: few hours here, few hours there, some work at home. Which isn't so bad. As any character in The Sopranos would tell you, "a man needs to work". And, although, working at McEnglish is a shite strewn path, at least now I know where and where not to tread. A line from The Music of Time keeps occurring: Nick, Stringham, Templar, Duport, Brent and two girls have gone out for a late night drive in country. The car ends up in a ditch, they can't get it out, "While we were engaged in these labours, rain began to fall again, a steady, soaking downpour." They shelter under a tree and Stringham comments: "For my part, I am now in a perfect condition to be received into one of those oriental religions whose only te...

MP3s: Brilliant.

The Mail online, of all things, published this story . You can find the original paper here , but you'll only get the abstract without an Athens log in.

There was a time, which seems like a former incarnation now, when I was quite adept at this .

According to this , Nazis are few and far between in Scotland. Which is nice.

Google have done some kind of deal with LIFE magazine to put the latter's enormous photo archive online. Here's the story as reported in The Grauniad . And here's a link to what looks, at the moment, like a taster for the main project . Won't let you blog the pics, though.

Portrait of an articulated skeleton on a bentwood chair , originally uploaded by Powerhouse Museum Collection . I know just how he feels.

This roll was with the Jupiter 8, and the extra stop (the Industar goes down to f2.8. the Jupiter to f2) has led me to overexpose a lot of them. I would say that the Jupiter is a wee bit sharper than the Industar, and that extra stop will come in handy. It's very far from pin-sharp, though. I suppose that's going to take an M and a Summicron. It's ok to be going on with. I'll stick with this set up for a while: that's Fuji Neopan 1600, Perceptol 1+3 for 20 mins at 70F, (plus five minutes wash, five minutes fix and five minutes wash - which seems to be working well). I particularly like this photo, though, because it's so difficult to get something lit naturally with a window in the background like that. Not bad, eh?

Well, here goes for another week at Global Education Inc. There are two more weeks of teaching, and another of marking. Bizarrely, we don't get paid for that final week of marking, but, we're now told, we had an extra couple of quid on the hourly rate - which should just about cover it, we're told. There was a meeting with the MSU big cheeses last week. Another shoulder shrugging, nervous laughter affair. We established that there's something called "a zero hours contract" whereby you have a contract, but no guaranteed hours. Which sounds pretty ropey. Unfortunately, that's NOT what we're on, but what we might aspire to. We have no kind of contract at all, we're rented by the hour. It was during the course of this meeting that any shreds of glamour attaching to working for MSU were blown away by the realization that as I push 50, a few months away from getting an MA in TESOL, and with ten years really good experience, I'm still just a T...

For when we've time .

Indeed. League tables are great for solving problems, eh? And if you're some coke-addled wank-brain working at an ISP and your league position's slipping, well, why not boost your employer's rating by taking out a few f and c-word using bloggers? The fuckers. But really it's the use of "out there" by politicians that fascinates me. I must come back to it.

Actually, whilst I've got the bit between my teeth... The contents of my bottle of Ilford Rapid Fixer are: Ammonium thiosulfate Sodium acetate Sodium sulfite Sodium bisulfite Nary a word about proportions, of course, and there's nothing about it on the digitaltruth page, though this on Kodak F-24 fixer gives a clue. Probably better to get the whole lot, developer and fixer chemicals, in one go, save on postage. What larks, eh?

After the disappointment I go with Delta/Pereceptol, I'm looking at the recipes in the Digitaltruth Photo Formulas and Data page . Therein one learns that ID11 is exactly the same as D-76 . That's the recipe for me, anyhow. Next, then, we go to the Silverprint Store Raw Chemicals pages . And here's the shopping list with prices: Metol: 25g: £2.93 Sodium Sulphite (Anhydrous): 2.5kg: £12.41 Hydroquinone: 25g: £1.57 Unfortunately, Silverprint then fall down on the job with no granular Borax. Retrophotographic have it, though, and the rest as follows: Sodium Sulphite: 500g: £3.15 Hydroquinone: 100g: £3.99 Metol: 25g £3.49 Borax 100g £3.69 I'll also need some distilled water from the auto-store shop on Raise Street. Very roughly, overall, that's going to work out at £2 a litre. Not bad, eh? I've got enough fixer to last me ...

delta 3200 and perceptol 2 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . That's The Bairn getting on down whilst watching Strictly Come Dancing - her latest favourite telly programme. I was a bit disappointed to see that all recommendations for developing Delta 3200 in Perceptol suggested stock: I'm trying a once-only regime with this batch, so that's a waste. And the results are good for contrast, bad for grain. If I'd pushed some HP5 in ID11, I would have been quite pleased with this. But as it is... The next roll (in the camera now) is Fuji Neopan 1600. The new element in the mix is that I'm using the Jupiter 8 lens this time.

I'm pulling it back to 1600, and using a stock solution. It's 69F, and I'm giving it 14 mins, agitated 10secs per min. This is based on the Ilford PDF for the film , and the appropriate page on the Massive Dev Chart . I'll try the 5+5+5 rinse+fix+rinse routine again - it seemed to work well last week.

I was perspiring an embarrasing amount at the start of the week. By Wednesday I was aching as if I'd gone 15 rounds with a heavyweight. By Thursday I was horizontal. Bit better now, and I really need to be well enough for work on Monday, because, like many's the worker these days, I'm paid by the hour. At some point I heard on R4 this Daniel Everett talking about the language of the Piraha people. Here's a link to an unpublished paper . Hopefully, I'll have more time an energy for such stuff soon. Training for the exam-writing early next month. EDIT: thanks to anonymous commentator, for this link , which is the paper by Nevins et al (2007) to which Everett is responding. I'll get around to looking at this some time this year, inshallah, plus proper referencing and the backstory.

molly dining chair , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . That's one of the 1st roll of b&w with the Leica, cropped. I'm really pleased with the look of it. I know it should be the lens that effects the look, the camera's just a box with a shutter, after all. But these with the Leica IIIf and the Industar 61 lens just seem to have a "look" - a 50s feel, almost. It's getting there, anyhow.

leicaiiif 3rd roll 7 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

I've just dev'd a roll of Fuji Neopan 1600 in Perceptol . It's drying the noo . I'm knackered after slaving all day for Globalized Education Inc., and ready for bed now, but I just want to blog a note of the details first. The Perceptol was 1+3, and the Ilford Rapid Fixer 1+4. I gave it 20 mins dev time at 70F. And then 5 mins wash, for which I've got a new method, (rinse under the tap, then drain the tank, pour in 500ml of luke warm soapy water. Agitate. Pour out and then back under the tap 5 mins , and a luke warm rinse towards the end. Same with washing after fixing). The fixing was 5 mins too, so if this works well it's easy to remember as 20+5+5+5. The negs look promising. There was a calamity in the lobby press darkroom - I couldn't get the film onto the roll, and Herself was wanting to put the hall light on, which means light gets through the door, voices were raised and oh my God! I'll have to get a dark bag. And sacrifice ...

"i don't care if your a fictional character created by Mary Shelley, you are still coming with us" , originally uploaded by i didn't mean to go to Stoke . This photo (by i didn't mean to go to Stoke ) gets me thinking: I need to get out more - go places where I can take photos. As it is, I'm stuck in almost all weekend, every weekend. I don't mind so much with studying, but today's its work, marking. I fucking hate this job. Thank God there's only four more weeks of it. The burden of marking, with nearly 80 students, is seriously damaging to a personal life.

Army Club , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Someone's just faved this. I'm sure I've blogged it before, but wtf, I'm feeling nostalgic this morning.

A google vanity blog and news alert for "pig sty avenue" - which has been set up for several months, has twice hooked me this weekend. In the alert that's emailed you see the ref to the search term amongst the text it's been published with. It was quite intriguing, written in lower case with punctuation errors, there's a reference to someone called "stevie" who borrows a tenner from pig sty avenue... Which naturally had me clicking on the link, and there you are on a page selling anti-virus software, with dialog boxes popping up threatening dire extremities if you don't download their software. It appears to be doing a scan of your hard drive. You can't close it, and need to ctr-alt-del and launch the task manager to close Firefox. Almost the same thing happened yesterday, but it must have been a different link I clicked on then, I can't remember, and I got out of it without needing to close Firefox. I copied link location on the google ...

He's Saving Up For a New Guitar... , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Somebody just faved this, and I went to have a look back at it. It was nearly three years ago, which is a lifetime in Flickr and blogging. Did I really see the point in whoring a photo around THREE voting groups? Did I really ever want a DSLR that badly? I wonder how the busker's doing?

Starts here . Keep mum.

Life at SII gets weirder, but my escape plans are well advanced. Whilst I was waiting for the lift the other day, a "teacher" was telling off a student for missing an appointment. His tone was that of a 1960s comprehensive school deputy head. In the staff room, people complain about students who are late, don't pay attention, wtf. Most staff rooms, you talk about wages and last night's telly - actually talking about students or work is considered to be in bad taste, interfering with the staff room's refuge role. And yesterday we received an email with guidelines about marking, which said explicitly we should mark-up cheerful good attendees, and mark-down anyone with attitude. To suggest this is unprofessional, to say the least. To write the suggestion into an email distributed to several people is just downright stupid. I think I've worked out what's going on, though. It's some kind of creeping privatization. This bit has been hived off from M...

Enough . I'm stepping off this bandwagon with immediate effect. Finding myself in agreement with the Daily Mail now feels like the morning after a particularly sordid one-night-stand with a reactionary neighbour after an impromptu party that went wrong. Ugh.

They had a fire alarm yesterday, which is fair enough. But they held it in the tea-break, which is typical. We have to print off and photocopy these portfolios ourselves. I've got nearly a hundred of them to do, 20-odd pages each. I can't find a decent stapler. I asked in the office: they used to have one.

I've got a couple of cuttings from eBay now, and I'm looking at propagating them. This seems to suggest that they root easily enough. And there's a bit more information, here .

Maybe it's just a sign that I'm getting older? Whatever. For the first time in the history of the universe, Pig Sty Avenue is in complete agreement with a Daily Mail headline . Russell Brand is pond life. What's the point in him? I've never seen it. And as for Jonathon Ross, I've never liked the smarmy cunt: in particular, he has the irksome quality, for a radio broadcaster, of pausing (not doubt for the laughter he hears in his head) after making one of his banal remarks. He is around 50, too - it's not as if he can be treated as young and daft. The most amazing aspect is how much these two bastards get paid from our licence fee. Why? What's it all about? There's a credit crunch. Sack them. Let them work in a call centre, see how their intimidating phone calls go down there. The fuckers. Spend the money saved on Radios 3 and 4.

I've added the North Channel ShipAIS to the sidebar. Gives the bigger picture.

Says the Anchorage Daily News .

I'd never heard of this plant until today. Here's a link to what has been an academic article (Mayagoitia 1986), but has lost its references - which is a pity because it appears to be essentially a review of the literature. There's another reference to the plant here , (Rodrigues, 2006). And of course you get some real down-and-dirty information at good old Erowid. Sounds intriguing, anyhow, and we need some houseplants. I'm involved in a long running low-level battle with Herself to get rid of these fuck-awful vertical blinds we've got: they look like they belong in an office AND they take up the whole depth of the windowsill when they're open, so no room for houseplants. I like old fashioned nets. Why can't we have old fashioned nets? Eliana Rodrigues; E A Carlini 2006 Plants with possible psychoactive effects used by the Krahô Indians, Brazil Rev. Bras. Psiquiatr . vol.28 no.4 Mayagoitia L, Dias JL, Contreras CM. 1986 Psychopharmacologic analysis o...

We moved here because the mother-in-law is frail and elderly, and needed us down-the-street rather than four hours away. I was very pleased to get five weeks pre-sessional teaching at a Major Scottish University (MSU). I got another week at the end of the pre-sessional as a nominal ESOL teacher to a group of Japanese students; in fact, I mostly supervised them around places like Glasgow School of Art and Stirling Castle. I enjoyed all of this, more or less. And then I was really chuffed to find that there was a thing called (or any rate this is what I'm going to call it) the Strathclyde International Institute. This was not-quite part of the University. It's role was to put international students through a term or two's course which would put them onto being able to join either undergraduate or masters' courses at MSU. The University was responsible for recruiting and paying the part time teachers who formed the bulk of the teaching staff. This ensured SII had ...

A couple of blogs I'd started which have run out of steam, I've just deleted. I had considered resurrecting Sweet Tea and Handshakes but have forgotten the password. So, fuck it, I'm going to blog about the joys of ESOL teaching here, on my only blog.

In 2003, in between teaching jobs, I worked for a couple of weeks recycling rubbish. We'd drive around Newcastle and North Tyneside, two of the younger blokes would run around collecting the boxes full of paper, tins, and plastic, and pass them into me and another bloke in the back of the lorry, where we'd sort the contents, and send them back out. It was really hard work, a long day. Anyhow. The first day, there were three or four of us new starters, and I got talking to one bloke. He told me that he had to do this sort of thing twice a year or so, to keep the dole off his back. He didn't like to work. I was impressed that he was so dedicated to not working that he would manage on £55 a week and a load of hassle. I asked him why he did it. "When I'm at home, I can just please myself." Sure enough, he managed a few days, complained of feeling unwell one morning, and was sent home and told not to return. I can just please myself... I knew what he mea...

That's Alexander in the Iona club, on my last night in Hebburn. I'd taken the Kodak because it had a full roll of HP5 in it that I wanted to use up before I put it on eBay. (I'm boycotting Kodak, remember? And trying to garner some cash into the paypal account to get my first Leitz lens). I like the way this has turned out with the flash. Lots of contrast, the white tee-shirt and nearly black background. Just the postmodern British Weegee look I'm after cultivating. It was HP5, in ID11 at 70F for 6.5 mins. That's the last of my ID11. I've bought a couple of litre bottles of cider, strictly in the interests of using them for solutions of Perceptol and properly diluted Ilford Rapid Fixer. I've probably developed 10 or more rolls of film now, all in ID11. Frankly, I've been rather slap dash about dilutions and times and temperatures and what have you. But it's been working out ok, (which makes me wonder if the rather intense middle aged...

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while. You can't buy The Grauniad without difficulty in Saltcoats, so I read a book on the way to Glasgow, and the paper on the way home. The book is always a novel, because you need to narrative to keep you occupied on a repeated journey. When I started to do this commute back in August, I was reading Trinities by Nick Tosches . I'd got it from a charity shop in Leeds because I was feeling the need for a gangster story to alleviate my Sopranos withdrawal symptoms. I liked the big idea, too: New York mafia wresting control of the heroin trade back from the triads. Lots of it was great stuff for afficianados of the genre: exploding Nigerians, for example. A lot of it was crap: all of the product placement: novels by blokes for blokes, you don't really need to know what designer gear the Godfather's wearing, do you? Then it was Billy Bathgate , which I did blog abou t . Brilliant. It's one of those books, won...

Crunch?

Bloor and Bloor's The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis is what I'm trying to read today, shoring up the notes I got from Leicester. The idea's to get the bigger picture, and, frankly, to learn how to walk-the-walk and to talk-the-talk of CDA. It's useful, but suffers from being a not-quite academic text, and by occasionally confusing ideological commitment with subjectivity and even hyperbole. For example, they refer to EM Forster's broadcasts on the subject of race and the notion of "racial purity, which was a tenet of the Nazi war-machine." (Bloor 2007, 21). No, it wasn't. The Nazi Party had notions of racial purity, and they were passed on to the regime over which they presided, and thence to the armed forces. Banging together those three pejorative evocative nouns (Nazi+War+Machine) paints a vivid picture which would have made Dr Goebbels proud. As comic book guy said, "Your emotion is out of place, here." Anyways. I liked ...

This is one of a sequence that I took with this roll to check that the shutter speeds were working correctly, and to get more information into my head so that I begin to do the iso/shutter/f-stop/available-light algorithm in my head; (hereinafter, "The Algorithm"). leica iiif shutter test 25th sec , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . This one's a 25th of a second, and there's no camera shake, (I think there's a tiny bit of fuzziness at speeds 15th, 10th and half, and a lot at B, about 2 seconds). It means I can get away with 1/25 (and two deep breaths) which would surely be more than enough in even dim light at 1600, f2 or even f2.8. This was at 400 iso, f2.8, full spectrum light.

inevitable self-portrait-in-a-mirror , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . You've got to take a few of these, when you get a new camera - especially if it's a Leica. Did I not mention that I have a Leica now? Oh yes, a Leica. It won't change me or anything, and I won't become a Leica-snob. Not me, oh no...

The consensus seems to be, we're going to have a recession. One feels now that it will come about, even if it has been a self fulfilling prophecy, another one of the Invisible Hand's mysterious interventions in history. The likelihood is that unemployment will get much worse. If you're over forty you can remember high unemployment in the 80s under Thatcher. It wasn't much fun, I can tell you. Lots of nastiness comes to the surface. Racism, for example, with mutters of "coming here and taking our jobs". The new Immigration Minister and accomplished arse-kisser Phil Woolas has decided to stay ahead of the game by linking unemployment and immigration at this early stage. How does a cunt like that get a job like that? I mean, you wouldn't leave a child in charge of a paint factory would you? And give him a box of matches to play with?

One of the sad aspects about admiring older styles of photography, and coming to this appreciation only recently, is that I'm often unaware of famous photographers until I read their obituaries. William Claxton , for example, who died this week aged 80 , and who was best known (I now learn) for photos of jazz musicians and film stars. He had that wonderful ability to improvise the situation and the light. When I was reading about him in The Guardian and looking at his photos - bearing in mind they were taken in the late 50s - I did wonder if he'd been using a Leica. And so it would seem. That's him in the mirror in the photo here of Dietrich. You can't really see it in this wee jpeg, but the from bigger version of the same picture in this morning's printed Guardian, I'm pretty sure that's a iiif he's holding. So, we have the technology... Now I just need to be in the environs of someone with Marlene's bone structure, smoking a cigarette. ...

Further to yesterday's post, (which sprang from a thread in the DIY group on Flickr), a kind person called Stan160 gave me the link to Silverprint which is just about bloody brilliant. You get half a kilo of Sodium sulphite (anhydrous) , for example, for £3.10, which, my brief glances at the digital truth photo recipes suggests is enough, with much smaller amounts of other chemicals, to make up 5 litres of developer. Splendid. And much more fun than hunting around Glasgow for a bottle of bloody Retinol, which is what I've been doing. So, I've got a litre of Perceptol to mix up, and when that's done, I'm going to go DIY all the way.

This could make for all kinds of fun.

I've just finished editing yesterday's post, going through the University of Leicester's notes on this, and searching through Google Scholar/Athens. There's obviously a lot of reading to be done. The Kumaravadivelu article is actually one of several in a special issue of TESOL Quarterly, all of which was available online, so I'll probably start with that - it'll give me a good ESOL grounding in the subject, because I'm liable to fly off far away from teaching English with this. The reason being, frankly, the ESOL aspects have become the least interesting ones. Teaching is InH , studying Discourse is H . (Puzzling over why I find teaching to be InH , is H . Strange, eh?) Which is perhaps why it took me so long to deal with the Second Language Acquisition module , and why it became such a chore. It came back the other day, "Good, 64%" a "mixed assignment". I was praised for my honesty in admitting the research didn't reveal any...

It's a right laugh, this stuff. I could happily spend a lot of money on books: (unfortunately, I've gotten into a shift from monthly salary v hourly-paid month-in-arrears situation, which means we're for auld-clathes-and-porridge until the end of November). For now, though, I've got some articles to print off and get me started: Baxter, J. (2002a) A juggling act: a feminist post-structuralist analysis of girls’ and boys’ talk in the secondary classroom. Gender and Education, 14, pp. 5–19. Baxter, J. (2002b). Competing discourses in the classroom: A Post-structuralist discourse analysis of girls’ and boys’ speech in public contexts . Discourse & Society, 13(6), 827–842. Baxter, J. (2002c) Jokers in the Pack: why boys are more adept than girls at speaking in public . Language & Education , 16, 2, pp. 81-96 Cole, M. (2003) Might it be in the practice that it fails to succeed? A Marxist critique of claims for postmodernism and poststructuralism as forces for...

Commedia all'italiana , originally uploaded by aroid . Click on the photo to see what Aroid says about this film. I'm blogging this as a reminder that I should buy it one day.

Put a cash cow on a diet .

After a frustrating half hour in the bank trying to get new plastic, (what happens is, you go in and the person there rings a call centre on your behalf, and they get told contradictory bollocks, just as you would be if you rang the call centre yourself; they have to ring back and try to be polite whilst someone on the other end talks more gibberish, and eventually sends for a manager fluent in gibberish, and, oh my God...!) Anyway, after this, one of the many incidents in life which bruise the soul, I went to catch the Subway back up to the West End and chewed it over. The best mental approach to dealing with the vicissitudes of the job I did at Leeds in July as a summer school centre manager was to imagine it as a PC game, not unlike Caesar III, say: Your mission is to manage a summer school full of unruly Italian teenagers and their psychotic teachers... And so when a teacher phoned in sick or myalgia was breaking out amongst the kids or the activities leader was showing advanced...

I've put a roll of Fuji 800 Superia through the Leica to see how it goes. The results are spoilt more than somewhat by, I think, an incredible dirty scanner. However, they do show that the rangefinder is pretty accurate, pretty close up. (This is as it was taken, just the tiniest auto-tweak in PS). Mind you, her face is out of focus - I think perhaps I focused the rangefinder on her left shoulder, as he area of highest contrast in poor light. Goes to show, you need to be sure what you want in the field if it's got a fairly narrow depth. I put a scabby roll of Kodak through it tonight to test all of the shutter speeds. I'll get it dev'd just to check them, and as part of my aperture + film/shutter speed intuition training. And now it's loaded with a roll of Fuji Neopan 1600, which should complete the trial period. Thereafter, I've got several rolls of Ilford Delta at various speeds, and litre of Perceptol still unmade-up. What larks!

...etc." You can't have three Meltdown Mondays in succession, surely. A meltdown is a one-off, isn't it? And anyway, what happens? These bastards get too much Champagne and charlie at the weekend, stumble into their stock exchanges feeling flakey and depressed, and say, "Fuck it. Sell, sell, sell!" Mind you, this all proves the neo-liberal adage, whenever increased spending is needed for education or health and they say, "throwing money at the problem won't help." Been proved fucking right with this bail out, eh?

...if we get to draw away .

This might constitute the background notes for Asterisked Assignment 11. Or maybe not, (see below). I'm looking at an article from The Independent from last Friday. "The Big Question: Is it time the world forgot about cannabis in its war against drugs?" (McCarthy 2008). The Social Practice construct (per Fairclough) is that the possession, transmission, and cultivation of cannabis are all illegal activities in the UK and throughout most countries of the world. The circumstances of its historical illegality are singular, (Kendell). The discourse practice of the McCarthy text is a background of mind-changes from The Independent newspaper. In 2007, (Owen) the newspaper apologized for its position, ten years earlier, of advocating the legalization of the drug. This change of mind mirrored the behaviour of the British government, which downgraded the drug from category B to category C, (which, in practical terms, meant that a possessor of the drug could not be arrested...

Bulk film loaders are dead cheap on eBay . And 100ft of HP5, say, is going for £37. (If 36 exposures are about 5ft, that's just over thirty bob a roll). Hmm...

I notice that the fastest setting on the iiif's film speed dial, (which is only there as a reminder, there are no automatic settings to be affected), is 125 ASA, the slowest is 6. So film must have been overall much slower back in the 1950s. This is perhaps why slow shutter speeds have their own wee dial. And why the tripod socket is almost directly below the shutter button - which is so obvious a place for it to be, when you think about it. Also, the tight fit in one's hand if you're not using a tripod, will make shake less likely at slow speeds. The bottom line is, with, say Fuji Neopan 1600, you've got a whole load of scope in low light. I'm using up odds and sods of colour film out of the fridge, just around the house, to take into Snappy Snaps on Monday morning, see if it's all been working. And then I'll start on black and white DIY through the week.

The difference between tragedy and farce, of course, is that the latter is usually funny. So I suppose the only way for a Newcastle fan to avoid climbing into the airing cupboard and curling into a foetal ball, is to have a laugh. Now Kinnear finds the press "sickening" , which is surprising, as he's done so much to keep them on board. And it gets even crazier . In fastening onto Barton as a potential saviour, he begins to look like one socially inadequate twat finding he has a lot in common with another socially inadequate twat. Calling a journalist "a cunt", and hitting people at work or during a night out are just examples of the same sort of behaviour. We've no doubt all wanted to get vocative with the C word - especially at work. And have fantasized about sticking one on an annoying bastard. But most of us have a safety barrier between thought and deed. Even Paulie Walnuts, right, would regard such behaviour as unprofessional and unacceptable. In...