Seamus Heaney at the Flat Lake Festival: A great reading from the ever wonderful Seamus Heaney. An audience rapt, well and truly. View large to see it… it looks like nothing at this scale. It’s also a bit dark, you couldn’t use flash (a few did) but I found a handy piano stage right to swivel on, thank goodness. A few photomerge artifacts remain, forgive me. Oh and I seem to have a stripey theme this summer…— ongoing · On KeyboardsGeeks love misty-eyed reminiscing about the great keyboards of yore, with a rough consensus that the original IBM PC’s clackety high-travel product has never since been surpassed. I sure liked that, but if my tactile memory is right, the latest Apples may be better. ¶
But that consensus is wrong anyhow, the IBM PC keyboards might not have been surpassed since, but they never had quite the feel of the old IBM Selectric typewriters.
I remember in particular when I was working on my college newspaper; our single most valuable asset was an IBM “Justifying Selectric”; you’d bang text into it and it’d buffer it up, a line at a time; when you got to the end of a line it would justify it, let you approve it, and typeset it, justified in a proportional font, onto the galleys.
It was fantastically expensive, thousands and thousands of dollars; this in the early Seventies. Of course, as well as all that magic it was a general-purpose ultra-high-end typewriter and when I needed to crank some work out and got into the flow I could make that thing produce a steady dull roar, running north of 110 words per minute. Like high-precision silk under the fingertips.
I remember one time when it broke and the IBM tech came by, I hung around because I wanted to see how it worked. When he took the cover off I was flabbergasted; the complexity inside was just mind-bending. There were hundreds (at least) of moving parts, some the apparent thickness of a human hair. How the thing ever worked, and how on earth he could repair it when broken, escapes me. It remains the most visually-complex artifact I have ever seen.
Young Buck: Liam at the recent piece of street theatre in our village. He can be still when he wants to be.
Wuthering Heights: Siesta… We went on a camping holiday this year, first holiday in nearly a decade… But it was nice, a quiet spot, came with a big deck and AC… good pools and a disco that Mae loved. What I loved was just doing the bare minimum and inducting our kids in the art of the siesta… You read… and then you drop off for a bit of a nap… and then you wake… maybe… think about a swim…
Do the Hokey Cokey…: and you turn around.. and you know, that’s what it’s all about.
Space Invader: Only spotted him afterwards… I liked the ‘Estamperia’ stamp. But now I love them together.
Post Pizza Happiness: As my Granny would say “Oh, you’re all quiet now…”. Nothing like an excellent pizza and some great ice-cream oudoors on a sunny day somewhere else…
Flower: This little girl went and plucked a flower from a planter and rushed over to put it in her Grandad’s shirt pocket. I love Mediterranean street life. It’s where everyone goes, young and old, all participating together. We seem to have lost that in Northern Europe. A sense of hanging out to meet people. We’ve abandoned that to kids and teens. I suppose the heat might help attract everyone else… that and the decent grub and coffee… And anyway, you got to dig a Grandad in an orange shirt.
Sagrada Familia Front Door: Every where you look, the entire elaborate structure has been carved with tremendous purpose and specifiicity.
Sagrada Familia Entrance: There’s only a few things in this world that have made my jaw drop, and this was certainly one of them. The ambition was staggering.
A horse never flew on one wing…: Don’t start me on how I feel about Crocs. She loves them. She got this horse Day 1 and it was her travelling companion for the entire trip.
O’Rourke’s Banqueting Hall - 2008: This is probably the most important architectural site in my village. The last standing ruin of the castle of Brian O’Rourke, the last King of Breifne, one of the many kingdoms which made up Ireland. My mother is writing a book on the history of the area and I’ve done a few of the photographs for it. This is the best I got of the Banqueting Hall. It’s completely overgrown. The full extent of which is only clear when you see the other image we went and found.
