Today I went with children to Luukki lake for swimming, just before it started to rain. But we managed to have a nice time, and the water was rather warm and there was plenty of room on the beach as other people had started leaving due to black clouds approaching from west.
The next few days I'll be very busy, and thus there won't probably be a posting here until later next week. So you then!
(Posting title is from the poem In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke. There was also another line of the poem I could have used in the title: "My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly".)
Saturday, July 21, 2012
In a dark time, the eye begins to see
Friday, July 20, 2012
Illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
Today I decided to have a look at the scenery north of the Ring III road at Vantaa. There are construction sites seemingly all over, so I had some difficulty navigating with the bicycle, but after some detours I found a rather nice route.
I didn't take photographs of the fine country landscape, only the places where I stopped to have a look at the map or to drink water. So, you see here rather "concrete" landscape photographs. In all I rode the bicycle for 35 km, first time this week, and it felt good.
To balance this rather austere set of photographs, I thought to link to something maybe not quite as concrete. I'm not quite sure what to think of this kind of photography, life imitating graffiti: You are not Banksy. At least it is rather different.
Posting title is from the poem In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See... by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I was thinking about Paul Maxims excellent posting "Reason, Standing on its Head" when selecting the title for this posting.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall
Sometimes I got the feeling that the world has gotten much weirder than science fiction. Namely, I ran into a story titled "Physical assault by McDonald's for wearing Digital Eye Glass", telling of Steve Mann, who has digital eye glasses fixed to his head - "permanently attached and does not come off my skull without special tools". McDonald's employees (in Paris, France) assaulted Mann and broke the glasses.
Thinking about a future where each of us might have surgically implanted cameras (not to speak of other stuff) gives me shivers. But I also find loathsome how McDonalds handled the situation. Is there any human being in the corporation?
Today I went picking blueberries with my oldest daughter to the Nuuksio forests, starting from the west side at Siikajärvi. Today was a fine sunny day, it wasn't too hot (about 21 °C) and there was wind which kept the mosquitoes almost completely away, at least in the Nuuksio forests up on the rocky hills where there is space between the trees.
This is also an excellent place for blueberries, which were very tasty and - thanks to the rainy days - rather big. We ate a lot of them in the forest, and also brought some with us to eat this evening.
Picking berries is for me a rather nice experience, there is something almost meditative about it. When I was younger I did quite a lot of picking berries, blueberries and cloudberries especially.
There was one year (maybe it was 1985 when I had started my studies in the university) when I picked a lot of cloudberries. It happened that the price for the berries was rather high, and I sold quite a lot of them. Selling berries you have picked in the forest is tax-free, and so this was rather nice extra income for a student.
I spent hours and hours picking berries, and during that time I got into a strange kind of mental state in which there didn't seem to exist time or thinking as one usually experiences them, one was just picking berries.
(Posting title is from the poem After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost.)
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