Pig Sty Avenue

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...

recipes , originally uploaded by klausness .

I picked up my iiif from the Post Office in Saltcoats this morning, from a Swedish eBay seller. It's a wee beauty. Smaller and lighter than I'd expected. Perfect in the hand, actually: the next lens I get will be a 5cm collapsible, so that it can fit easily into a coat pocket. Bit of trouble getting the hang of loading the film, but apart from that the rest of the settings are straightforward enough. Using a FED2 for the last few months makes it all familiar - it's a bit like a dream version of the FED. The really big difference is the diopter, which is magnified. We'll see how fine it works out when the first few rolls are developed but it certainly feels very accurate, detailed. This has not come without difficulty. Herself is of course used to me buying cheap cameras on eBay, and I could have passed this off without difficulty as just another old bit of junk. But moving house has eaten into the current account a bit more than calculated, which entailed a close...

As Newcastle United move seamlessly from tragedy to farce, here's the full uncensored transcript of Joe Kinnear's recent "press conference". (From The Guardian ). JK Which one is Simon Bird [Daily Mirror's north-east football writer]? SB Me. JK You're a cunt. SB Thank you. JK Which one is Hickman [Niall, football writer for the Express]? You are out of order. Absolutely fucking out of order. If you do it again, I am telling you you can fuck off and go to another ground. I will not come and stand for that fucking crap. No fucking way, lies. Fuck, you're saying I turned up and they [Newcastle's players] fucked off. SB No Joe, have you read it, it doesn't actually say that. Have you read it? JK I've fucking read it, I've read it. SB It doesn't say that. Have you read it? JK You are trying to fucking undermine my position already. SB Have you read it, it doesn't say that. I knew you knew they were having a day off. JK Fuck o...

There's also Zappa , and Hendrix . And no comprehensive baby-boomer's collection could be complete without The Beatles , eh?

This is quite interesting. And apparently accurate . I plan to get to Italy someday soon.

That's how I felt when I got started on CDA at the Mitchell yesterday. Module 5 should be a doddle: this is the sort of thing I'd read about in my free time anyway. The Mitch el l is great for quiet study too - quiet but not la-di-da. And all the reference books you'd ever need. I had the lapto p, and I think there's wi-fi there, but yesterday I was happy just to read through the material Leicester had sent me, try to get my head into the basics. I'm already thinking ahead to the assignment though. Two 2500 word p apers are expected, but I can and probably will ask to do a single 5000 word one. And what I'd do is, analysis of political discourse about Cannabis Legalization. This debate has broken out again this morning. Perhaps do a very detailed bit of research onto the use of the phrase "send a message" in connexion with drug policy . As Junior Soprano said: " Take it easy. We're not making a western here!"

So says that much respected man, with a marvelous history of far-sighted truthfulness, George Bush . The people in America can be confident that he's not trying to bullshit them in order to get astronomical sums of money to cover up the greed of his pals in Wall St. I mean, these are really unusual times - normally, US governments take a sink-or-swim attitude to big business, don't they? And most of those Congressmen who voted against this, were, scandalously, merely concerned to save their own arses , and not get kicked out in the approaching elections because of course their electors are banging on their doors demanding that they listen: ordinary people do not want their money being used to bail out fat-necked, charlie-snorting, mega-rich suits. It's a desperate state of affairs - these so-called legislators are actually doing what the people they represent want them to do! How selfish!