The bodies exhibition in Athens: I went, I saw, I was left ambivalent

So, we went to the famous bodies exhibition, not without some moral qualms, but intending to be looking at the people just as much as the exhibits.

The obviously Asiatic bodies in the exhibition were impressive. Before we start, it should be noted that I am a curious bear and as such, I am aware that under the skin, there are a whole bunch of interesting tissues and organs. I was not there in the exhibition to be told that I have a liver and to wonder at the positioning of said organ. Anyone who has either butchered an animal or prepared an animal for the cooking process will not have been surprised at the large number of stringy tendons or the ubiquity of cartilage or indeed the branching nervous and circulatory systems. I have opened anatomy texts and I have seen butchered vertebrates, thank you very much. What was impressive was the painstaking work which has obviously gone into these exhibits.

The realisation that we humans are also animals and that we look like meat on the inside came to me many years ago. I was not shocked by this. It was, however, interesting to see where the good cuts are on a human cadaver (gluteus and thighs, if you are interested) and it was interesting to see just how indistinguishable a lump of gluteus meat would be from a nice slab of beef on the table. The reactions of the visitors ranged from shock to awkwardness of fathers with young adolescent girls in an exhibition where in every room there was a man with his penis out for all to see. I enjoyed the crowd, I enjoyed seeing that one lady had fainted - overwhelmed no doubt by the realisation that we are as much animals as we are "human".

I did not enjoy one aspect of the exhibition and this was the avoidance of one question. The exhibition covered the how and what and where and when really rather well and graphically - what was missing, of course, was the why... There was no talk about the bilateral symmetry of the body and what it means, there was no talk of the anterioposterior and dorsoventral axiality of the human form, and why these three axes might exist. There was no talk of evolution. In Darwin's bi-centennial year, when you show people that they are animals, vertebrates, made slightly imperfectly, why stop short of going the whole hog and telling them why? Our nervous system laid out on the table is not so different to that of a fish, our tetrapod skeleton is not so perfectly adapted to supporting our bi-pedal body as it could have been... and more obvious than anything else, the crazy positioning of and plumbing for our testes is so patently not designed from scratch and so loudly begging for an explanation in each room, but the testes cry out in vain.

This pandering to the north American audience for whom the literal interpretation of the bible is the only truth took much of the shine off the exhibition. The excision of evolution from the explanation of human anatomy leaves the exhibition more naked than the exhibition's chinamen who were missing their skins. This missed opportunity to teach truth to an audience which has just had its eyes opened to the fact that we are animals no different to the lamb we spitted last week is a great pity. No one preparing the kokoretsi last week could have missed the similarity between the chinaman's heart on display and the lamb's heart on his plate.

Was the visit worth €16 with a camera, video and mobile phone ban? Possibly, possibly not. Should I have gone given the ethical quandary behind the exhibition? Should I have given the €16 to people who have bought cadavers from prisons in countries with shitty human rights records? Perhaps not. But if I hadn’t gone, I would not be able to tell you that I found it incongruous to see that all these convicts had perfect lily-white teeth. Chinese prisons must have pretty good dental programmes for their death-row inmates. Especially when compared to the pedicures / manicures. So, yes, if I had wanted truths, perhaps I should have known that I would not find them at an exhibition where the organiser feels it would be too shocking to keep the original teeth.

Lion diaries on caving blog

I have started transcribing my diaries from my trip to Crete last July. Enjoy!

http://speleostel.blogspot.com/search/label/lion-crete

What I saw in my sleep last night

Possibly influenced by the fact that I had spent the evening with my cousin who is serving in Rhodes, I saw myself walking around Lindos - although I did not know this until about half way through the dream.

Of course it wasn't the real Lindos. I was on an asphalted path, next to a railing, beyond which rose a limestone hill. On the sides of the hill, walls were visible, in my mind, they were norman / frankish era walls, but they did not fit the description as they were essentially massive marble monolithic constructions covered in ionic flutes and egg-and-dart edging. Walking along I was reminded a little of Jackson's Minas Tirith, except everything had the trappings and finishings of the ionic order.

As I walked down the path with the hill to my right, the hill fell away and the asphalt walkway with the railing were now raised above an open space over to my right where stones had been placed in such a way as to form letters - I could make out no words for a while and then I saw that the heaped stones spelled out the word "Lindenberg", from which I guessed this was Lindos I was looking at, although quite why the Germans would have spelled out the letters in this way, I could not understand.

Turning to my right, I saw a huge classical temple (which had been hidden from view by the hill and "norman" fortifications) with its pediment and pedimental sculpture intact - the order was, again, Ionic.

And there I was, looking at this, and I started framing the scene in my mind's eye and playing a soundtrack over it, thinking how I would work the panning and the reveal from the pedimental statues to the whole temple, thinking about the cuts from scene to scene, etc. And then I started thinking about whether or not Warner Music Group own the rights to the recording of Carl Orf's Catulli Carmina which I intended to use for the video I was planning out.

Then I woke up.

WMG - get out of my frikking head, already.

Cycladic Museum, November 2007

The Cycladic Museum in Athens houses an amazing collection of little statuettes glorifying the pudendum in the way that only prehistoric people could.

Everywhere you look, female figures with breasts and outlined pudenda greet you from behind the well lit and glass-faced displays. The occasional male figurine serves to form a very noticeable exception to the girls-only rule of figuring carving. In all it is a wonderful collection.

The great pity is that everything in the museum is a result of illegal archaeological digging purchased in swiss and American auctions and is therefore devoid of context. Context, of course, is important if you want your archaeological collection to be anything more than a treasure-chest of pretty things. The act of buying such things at auction also serves to create a demand for illegal digs, because the digger knows that there will be interest at auction.

It's easy to attack the morals of the museum of Cycladic art, and in their defense, it should be said that they do a fine job of displaying and explaining everything, unless you are a child or not tall enough to look at the exhibits.

When we went in November 2007, one of the reasons for going was for K to make an evaluation of the kiddie-friendliness of the museum. It didn't score too high.

You can re-live the fun we had by clicking on this video (you may find the intro a little dizzying - it settles after that). Isn't it kind of Warner Music Group not to ask youtube to suspend this particular video? I suppose I am getting better at picking backing tracks that Warner don't own, thereby giving free publicity to artists signed to other labels. Oops WMG, you lose, again!

and the story of how WMG continued to chafe my nuts...

So, the video I uploaded in December 2008 with our trip to Zesta Nera cave in Sidhirokastro has been unceremoniously removed by YouTube who seem totally oblivious to the bad karma they are courting by siding with big business against the little people.


Visitors to the webpage showing the Zesta Nera video are now greeted with the text above: This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG.

When I go t the copyright claim page, I get this message:

my video, may have content from Room "26" by Lalo Schiffrin... well, no shit, yes it does! The music of Lalo Schiffrin is great, moving, moody and still swinging at the same time. Especially that track. So, yes, my creation - my video about our visit to Zesta Nera needed that piece of music to stick it together in the same way that a collage needs sellotape to keep it together. You don't see 3M getting upset at the use of double sided sticking tape every time a collage is made, though do you?

The version of the video embedded in my caving blog is still playing, although no doubt, it too will become a broken link soon.

I am upset, again, at youtube and wmg. The use of the Schiffrin piece is arguably not a violation of copyright and is definitely not bringing me any financial benefit.

Anyway - I'll keep everyone posted on the craziness as it evolves.

WMG, I know you will read this (you read my previous post about you).
Your strategy is wrong, wake up! Don't alienate the fans of the artists you milk.

and the four freedoms

So, like what's the EU all about? Well, some would say, it's all about the four freedoms:
* The free movement of goods;
* The free movement of persons (and citizenship), including free movement of workers, and freedom of establishment;
* The free movement of services;
* The free movement of capital.

What are we going to talk about today? Yup - free movement persons. I am a person. The Greek state is denying me the freedom to move. I have had enough of this.

I have a degree from a UK university. This degree allows me to seek jobs for which degrees are required, in the UK and indeed many other places in the world. This degree also allows me to continue studying, to do graduate studies. In the UK.

When I try to move these rights to Greece, to enjoy the benefits of my degree in the country where I was born, I am told by the state that I cannot. That this degree is not recognised and is therefore worthless to me when seeking employment requiring a degree or when trying to enter a postgraduate course. This is the law.

Are my rights being fucked in the arse by the Greek state? I think they are.

Am I going to do something about it? I don't know yet, but I'll keep you all informed. The Socrates of the Krito would sit and take this, but then the laws Socrates dies under in the Krito were not laws created by small and narrow-minded parochial bureaucrats afraid of losing their privileged positions of social authority to better educated people coming with degrees from universities which are actually engaged in teaching and research.

So maybe I will have to fight this.

made you look, made you stare...

Warner Music Group lols aplenty!

Not two hours had passed since I published, and the Warner bloodhounds came sniffing round the blog like flies buzzing round a spray of explosive diarrhea.

CFB

... and Youtube's new copyright policy whereby they kiss the ass of big buisiness to the detriment of the little guy

or how I started looking for an alternative

Youtube are now working with WMG and UMG - Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group - to help the firms reduce lost earnings from uploaded material to which they hold the copyright.

Admirable, huh? Coupled with whatever sizzling hot piece of database management and retrieval software is needed to give youtube almost real-time recognition of music that is the intellectual property of their new bedfellows, it becomes quite a technological feat as well. So bravo to youtube.

Since late last year, I have fallen foul of this new policing-the-net initiative not once, but twice! Once with a track from WMG and once with a track from UMG. In the latter case, the movie stayed on youtube, but can only be downloaded for viewing if you happen to be in one of the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom, United States (not Greece nor Turkey, which is a pity as these are the two main audiences I was aiming at).



The Warner track led to the video being muted, which is unfortunate as not all the audio was owned by Warner and much of the effect if the video was ruined by the lack of audio.



My complaint is that this new policy is stifling my creativity. If it continues I am sure it will kill the youtube community who will only put up with so much before finding another home which won't mind fair use of music tracks on top of otherwise totally home made, not for profit videos. I am not talking about kids uploading music videos (which is an obvious and, in my opinion pointless infringement of copyright), nor indeed about people uploading bits of live performances (for which fair use could, conceivably, be argued) - I am talking about videos where someone has taken the time to sit and edit video and still footage and set this with varying degrees of care and creativity against a tune, which happens to be the intellectual property of someone else.

So here we go: while messrs Bonham, Plant, Page and Jones, have the moral right to their works - and this means that they have a right to control how their creation is used and while Herge has the right to say, "hey, I don't want Tintin portrayed as a drug addict" (whatever), given that the soundtracks to my videos are a small part of the whole, a whole into which a considerable amount of work and creativity has been expended, and given that the end result does not go against the original artists' vision for the piece, I think that youtube should relax a little with the whole copyright business. We are talking about the creators moral right - not the copyright owners paper rights on the piece (which obviously are being to some extent violated).

So back we come - post-google youtube is shitting on the people who built it, while leaping into bed with big business to the detriment of the site's users and (dare I say it) the original creators of the tracks being used as musical backing on the videos in question.

I have spent the best part of last night uploading my video with four different soundtracks to find one which I like which is acceptable to youtube. How annoyed has that made me, youtube? Will I jump ship as soon as an alternative presents itself? What do you reckon?

On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!

My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief,
Are mine alone!

The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze—
A funeral pile!

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share,
But wear the chain.

But ’tis not thus—and ’tis not here—
Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now,
Where glory decks the hero’s bier,
Or binds his brow.

The sword, the banner, and the field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.

Awake! (not Greece—she is awake!)
Awake, my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home!

Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood!—unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.

If thou regret’st thy youth, why live?
The land of honourable death
Is here:—up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!

Seek out—less often sought than found—
A soldier’s grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest.

George Gordon, Lord Byron
Messolonghi, 22 January 1824

On the third day of rioting

There are three things going on here and it is difficult to separate the three, even for those living here.

Prologue: On Saturday night, Alex Grigoropoulos, a 15 year-old boy died as a result of a bullet wound to the chest. The bullet had been fired by a police contractor who should not have been carrying a weapon and was affectionately known as "Rambo" at the station-house on account of his short temper. Depending on which version of the story one reads the kid may have done nothing to provoke the wrath of the "policeman", may have pelted a police car with beer bottles or done anything in between. It is not unlikely that someone in the group of kids spoke indecently to the "policeman". The policeman responded by calling out the words, "This'll show you" before firing his weapon. Depending on who you read, the "policeman" then fired either two or three times. The "policeman" claims to have fired one warning short into the ground and two into the air. Eyewitnesses claim that the "policeman" took aim and fired twice at the 15 year old. The extent to which the use of deadly force is justified (in any of the scenarios which preceded the shooting) is left as an exercise for the reader. The coroner as at 9 December has not determined the angle at which the bullet entered the boy and so there is no way to determine whether it was a direct hit or the result of a ricochet. Obviously, graduates of the blinkered school of autopsies would have trouble pronouncing on such a simple thing as entry wound direction. As a result of the shooting the following happened:

1. On Saturday night, immediately following the shooting: Riots in central Athens started by anarchists / troublemakers using the death of Alex Grigoropoulos as an excuse to burn rubbish bins and throw stones around. This has continued as a theme every night since then and has resulted in banks and other commercial properties to be destroyed, as well as public vehicles (fire-engines, state sector cars, etc).

2. Schools have closed for a few days in mourning and there have been genuine expressions of grief / solidarity with his family. School children have made mainly peaceful marches on public buildings. Some have pelted said public buildings with stones and eggs and stuff, but the school children in general are not troublemakers.

3. Politically motivated groups have been calling on the people to do all sorts of weird things like bring down the government, begin armed class struggle and refuse to serve in the military (amongst others). They are trying to capitalise on the death of Alex for political gain. If I could spell the word demagoguery I might even write it in my blog.

So while the death of Alex Grigoropoulos is a very bad thing, it is being mishandled by everyone. The anarchists (it is only a small number of them) should be crushed - their fight has very little to do with Alex and the politicians should desist from their bickering and sit down to talk about reforming the police force on the one had and protecting the safety and property of your everyday Athenians living and working in the centre of Athens.

So, on with the show.

Alex has 13 friends...

That's what is says on the facebook page with his friends - a bunch of dippy 15 year olds like himself. So, Alex has 13 friends... either that should be 'had' 13 friends, or else, has millions of friends.

The hooded well-known unknowns are planning to burn the town again tonight, but I doubt it is now for Alex. They do it because they like to face off the police and burn property.

There's a whole lot not right here any more. As a former dippy teen who may have been in the wrong place from time to time while growing up, my thoughts go out to his friends and family.

While I disagree with capitalising on everyone's grief and anger by politicising Alex's death - a good hard look should be had at what sort of person is walking the streets of this country carrying and who it is we trust to carry guns. I hope that in the backlash to your death, Alex, the streets will become safer for my as yet unborn child, which will no doubt be just as dippy as I was.

... and the underwater dream

I never got round to completing the write up of this dream. It involved a big chest of treasure as well, I think.

It was a few nights ago now, but very vivid in the colours and the play of light and shadow. We were about 20m down although everything was bright as if we were no deeper than a few feet and the sand was as reflective as that at the beach on Elaphonnesus. I was there with a bunch of people, including Nikos and Kom, not sure why I was there, but I was enjoying it. At some point my bottle came off my back, but caused no distress to my breathing - I just had to hold the bottle so the tubes wouldn't run away.

There were no fish, only arthropods and that struck me as weird - as did the lack of plant material in the sea.

That'll learn me to write up the dreams closer to when they actually happen.

NRH rexit...

NRH regit, he would say. Or perhaps we said it, or wrote it. It stands, whoever said it. NRH taught me Latin - for better or for worse, my first year of Latin - my first formalised taste of the grammar of an inflected language and much more came at his hands.

Of course, he did more than teach Latin - he was headmaster - "Norman Foreman". And he was famously in charge of discipline and corporal punnishment - only a plimsole in my day but stories of earlier generations made the plimsole seem a treat.

Longest serving head master in the UK apparently. Such things don't excite me. What does is that I could translate into and out of Latin at O-Level standard when I was still 12. What does excite me is that I can still hear his voice declining the adjective "Ingens" (which as veryone knows is the model for present participles).

I guess the loss is felt equally because he was a teacher and because he is an influential memory from a bygone time when everything was different.

Anyway - ave atque vale

...and the weekend of the lions (coming soon)

Coming soon: a weekend in Ankara with Lion sculpture on both days. Can you tell where it is yet?

Anatolian hands

...and the beginning of lent

So, the beginning of lent is a strange time. It sits in between Lent and the Carnival straddling as it does the time of plenty with all its bacchic dionysiac hang-overs and the austere and Christian fast which brings us to the greatest holiday in the calendar: Easter.

The dome of the Omorphoklisia church with kite in the background.

It is usual practice for the municipality to provide the "Koulouma" (a word derived from the latin cumulus), the surplus of whatever is left that has to be done with for Lent. It's common for the municipalities to provide food suitable for fasting in open spaces where kites may be flown, for that is our custom.



We decided to visit Veikou Park, belonging to the municipality of Galatsi (a suburb of Athens built by refugees from and named for the Romanian Town of Galaţi), not least because the park is close to a 13th Century church which I have read about and want to visit, but have not had the chance to do so. The view from a distance was brightened up by the large number of kites in the sky all with their happily streaming tails. We parked about a mile from the church and walked up to it, then crossed opposite towards the park where there was all sorts of crazy stuff going on, things being bought and sold and people thronging and whatnot.

We bought our kite from a Roma at the entrance - a fancy schmancy affair in the shape of a bird, with a 3D body. The seller set it up for us leaving me to carry around this huge bird with more than 1m wingspan complete with bits of wooden rod sticking out (I would have had someone's eye out on one of them, but I was being careful).

On our way up the hill, we passed many of the people who are by their presence and nature helping to increase the cultural diversity of Athens. Extended families were sitting and picnicking, some with their women in headscarves, some with their women in saris most with meat on their plates thereby indicating their "otherness". It was quite exciting to be here at the beginning of the breaking of the homogeneity of the Athenian cultural make-up and it was interesting to see the Albanian balloon seller trying to persuade the Kurdish family to buy a balloon for their little girls.


We flew the kite - it soared and took us to the limit of our line - we wanted to have had more line and more time. For all my previous attempts to get kites in the air - this is the first time I can comfortably say that I have flown a kite properly. And I am hooked!

Now it is time to start preparing the messenger and the parafauna for next time!

Oregon Scientifc helmet cams: ATC1000 and ATC2K compared

Once upon a time, what seems now like a long time ago, but isn't, I read about the Oregon Scientific helmet cam on the NSS caving forum. One of the gear-heads mentioned the ATC1000 which was just out at the time and I bought one and played around with it.

About six months later I bought the upgrade model ATC2K. So, seeing as I had promised this to the guys over at forums.caves.org, time for my side by side comparison, here goes:

ATC1000 on the left, with AAA cell, right the ATC2K with AA cell

The ATC2K improves on many of the ATC1000's "problems" for caving. For me, these are waterproofness of casing / behaviour in low light / battery issues / mount. We'll go over these one by one.


The first is the more rugged and more waterproof casing. A side by side comparison of the two cameras shows that the older model is far longer than the recent one, but thinner and more cylindrical.

The ATC1000 is rated only splashproof (although mine has survived a brief total dunking) whereas the ATC2K is rated as being waterproof to 3m. The ATC2K also has a shadow guard (peaked front) for reducing flare and has a more rubbery feel than the ATC1000s very plastic look. Both have received their fair share of knocks and scrapes while attached to my helmet, without any problems or malfunctioning. After about 8 months of use (and this is connected to the mount also) the front end of my ATC1000 came off, making it no longer splashproof. I have submerged my ATC2K to about 4 or 5m without problems.

Behaviour in low light, next. The ATC2K is very much better at acquiring an image is low light. I don't know whether this is a CMOS issue, or a result of different hardwired software in the camera. The ATC1000 shoots at 15fps and gives a very smooth image with many tonal ranges. The ATC2K shoots at 30fps and gives a more contrasty (sometimes blocky) image. Whether the trick to achieve the increase in fps also necessitates loss of image quality I am not qualified to say. How this links in to the fact that the ATC2K will give a better balanced image in low light I also don't know. For someone who has not seen the image quality of the ATC1000, the quality of the ATC2K is not noticeably bad. The fact that it will capture an image, when the ATC1000 will not is what is important to me.



Comparison in low light and external conditions



Comparison in street conditions



Comparison in cave conditions


Battery issues: size and lifetime! The ATC1000 takes four AAA cells. The amount of recording I could get out of new alkalines varied from about 45 minutes to 75 minutes depending on the subject and the amount of time the camera was on standby. The lifetime of some otherwise pretty good Ni-MH batteries was not so good, ranging from 30 minutes to no more than 60 minutes. The cost of new batteries per hour recording or the inconvenience of carrying many spares was unsatisfactory. Further, it is almost impossible to change batteries without a pen or a safety pin to release the latch, especially when wearing gloves. The ATC2K takes two AA cells, much cheaper and much easier to find. The battery life was close to two hours for alkalines or well over one hour for Ni-MH rechargeables, meaning that you have to open the back more frequently to change memory card than to change batteries. So with the ATC2K you get many more hours recording for the buck. Another thing is that the battery indicator comes on when you have about 10 or 15 minutes of recording time left, giving plenty of warning. On the ATC1000, it would often come on immediately before the camera died. I am curious what the TFT screen on the back of the ATC5K is going to do to battery life.


Mount issues: The ATC1000 did not have a satisfactory system for mounting the camera on a helmet - the system required leaving the clasp in place on the helmet and sliding the camera in and out, something which may have sped up the detachment of the front cover of the camera. After a few uses like this, I decided on using inner tube rings to keep the camera attached to the helmet, something which worked well enough as long as I jammed a toothpick in there as well to keep the axis parallel to my line of sight. The mount for the ATC2K is much more handy, having a clippy system allowing you to detach the whole camera from the female mount with ease. I have the female part permanently fixed to my helmet and clip the camera into it whenever I want to. It sticks out from the helmet quite a distance but this is easy to get used to. As I wanted to be able to alternate place of mounting between helmet and elsewhere, without having to take off the helmet so as to undo the strap, I wrote to Oregon's customer support about getting more female clippy parts, but I received no response.

Some words about Oregon's customer service: there ain't none. You buy the camera, and that's it. If you want to contact them by e-mail, they'll never answer you. I have sent repeated mails to Oregon about various questions and none have been answered. I once sat in an automated telephone queue for 40 minutes never getting through to the support staff. Oregon are crap - if you buy something, from that moment on you have to come to terms with the fact that you are on your own. This is not the sort of customer services I have come to expect from across the lake. People interested in the ATC3K and ATC5K coming soon, should keep this in mind.


One more thing - after about 11 months of use, my ATC2K developed a patch of dead pixels or something, which was not on the exterior of the camera but which created a dead spot a few pixels in diameter. I have tried to reach Oregon about this as well, but with no joy.

...and the alcohol induced blackout

So, I have spent part of this morning, still nursing a dodgy stomach and a slightly groggy head, reading such gems as: "subjects are capable of participating even in salient, emotionally charged events-as well as more mundane events-that they later cannot remember" and "far from losing consciousness, the literature suggests that it is possible for individuals to experience blackouts while appearing only moderately intoxicated to the outside world". Tell me about it.

The last time this happened was back in the mid nineties, at that famous boatie dinner where they served a carrot soup for starters and then no one (apart from RVM) remembers anything at all. It is not good waking up and not knowing how you got home, how you got those bruises, what you did and what you said. Especially if the last time this happened, you were told that you had kicked a fellow from the vet school in the face (hi, Rachel).

So, I figured out for myself that some time between 3:18 and 3:24, I blacked out. I have photographs I recall at 3:18 and photographs I appear in but do not remember being taken from 3:24 onwards. On one level, it feels like I had a chance to get things out off my chest, that lack of alcohol would have inhibited. On another, it is scary to think that my own memories of everything I have been told that I said and did are gone forever and cannot come back.

Apparently, when the blood alcohol content hits an upper limit the capability of the brain to form long term memories fails, because the alcohol interferes with the transfer of messages from the short term to the long term memory. It's like its being relayed to a tapedeck with no tape in there.

It is all just a blank and this is scary. When the guards are down, we open the way to the monsters from the Id to come rampaging through to the real world. It seems they did to some extent.

Well, I remain groggy and confused. While my first two blackouts were five years apart, the second and third were more than ten years apart. I hope the next one will be so far in the future that it won't happen.

Woo!

... and the tale of the broken thermometer

So, K's been 'fluey for about ten days now, probably due to more than one cold or 'flu bug. I have managed to remain uninfected so far, which is just as well, as I have not had a jab for two years.

I received a text message one evening - "I have broken the thermometer"

Great - there's me thinking that the house will be flooded with hyper poisonous mercury fumes and what-not. In the event, there were no fumes and no little silvery liquid blobs zooming around my floor like the T-1000. There was however a small bubble of mercury rolling up and down the plastic case in which the broken thermometer was sitting.

No probs, I think, I'll take it to the chemists next door and ask them to dispose of the thing safely and I'll buy a new electronic thermometer while I am there.

Hello, I say to the nice chemist as I walk in, I'd like to buy a thermometer and to leave you this broken one so you can dispose of it with your other hazardous waste.

- Blank stares.

There is no provision for disposing of mercury thermometers safely, I am told.

So it all goes to the landfill?

- Nods

And the baby seals? I ask pleadingly…

- Shakes.

So it seems that there is nothing to be done but let the broken thermometer go the landfill, potentially be played with by the gipsy children, end up in the ground water and the food chain in general, and finish up in the baby seals or worse still in the cute fluffy polar bear cubs.

I resolved at that point to write to the municipality, something I have not yet done, but, believe me, I will do it. Apparently, there is no provision for safe disposal of medicinal sharps, either.

I love living in the Alabama of the European Union.

Paris day 1

So I am feeding the addiction to the online world even on my holidays. This is a French keyboard, and of course the French have to be different and have to have some of the keys in slightly diffreent places. Please excuse any stray wierd letters that may creep in.

Today we started from the base near the Place Gambetta and went into the centre of town to the Sainte Chapelle chapel, advertised as a rather fine bit of Gothic architecture in the centre of town, and surrounded by the buildings which replaced the halls in which Julian the Apostate once ruled. Other parts of the itinerary included the St. Severin, St. Julien, Museum of the Middle Ages and more.

I will have time to write more some other day, with photos. Kiddy bedtime dictates I now shut down.

Cephalothorax agogo!

While making the kiln, I took some photos of the three little visitors who had come to watch me build my kiln. I have never seen any these little guys in life before (I have seen many dead ones) so this was quite exciting.