The first is written by Christopher Jamison, Abbot of a Benedictine monastery. It covers the eight deadly thoughts (those that lead to the seven deadly sins), and teaches how to remain happy in a world that can be seen as difficult. The second is written by Robert Kiyosaki, a self-made American Millionaire about how to play the financial game and make your money work for you instead of working for money.

What’s the fascinating part?

Well, it’s the fact that both books have almost the same message in a lot of ways. In fact, several times, exactly the same advice was dished out by both books. They talk about greed, anger (at others and yourself), sadness at loss, all sorts. They both see mastery of ones emotions to be absolutely critical to success.

This backs up my theory further that God and money are the same thing – a fictional construct designed to make achievement, debt and credit easier to measure (albeit one has more influence in the external world, and the other in the internal). Indeed Robert Kiyosaki is at pains several times to explain that money doesn’t exist, it’s merely an idea shored up by people who think it does.

Both excellent reads, by the way. Though if you’re going to read either, I might recommend their prequels before you start…

I’ve managed to lose the habit of going for a morning walk, so I’ve picked it up again from today. Walking to work is an excellent way to fire-up the braincells in the morning. It also reminds you that there’s a world out there that’s interesting and fun and has lots of things going on. I don’t think I’ll ever manage enough regularity to have a route named after me.

Anyway… it was pleasant today – I went through the town centre where they were setting up a collectors’ and car-boot kind of sale in the market place. That had my £zero challenge brain going, but with only 67p in liquid assets I didn’t really have enough to buy anything there.

What really made the trip worthwhile was seeing the selection of films available at the cinema.

Film Selection

I’m not sure that someone hasn’t been fiddling with the board in some way.

Yoda, Yesterday

Warning! This blog is a rambling stream of conscience. Go-chūi kudasai!

Computer science and linguistics, the same subject they are. Both, communication of information and instruction do study.

In the old days I did computer science. I’m not talking about engineering or simple programming here, I’m talking science. It was very interesting indeed for an analytical person like me… lots of diagrams of syntax and semantics. I wrote software to check and report on other people’s software code. That sort of thing. Around 1998, I left the world of science and entered the world of commercial development. What a shock! Get it out quick… doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work… bloody customers, bugging us all the time… it’s been a very long time that I sat there thinking “There must be more to life than this”.

Well, in 2008 my wish became true, and I discovered the ‘more to life’ that there was. Sure, the household income has dropped to around 30% of its former glory, but I’m back in control of my customer service, quality control (what are the three Qs? haha!), timescales and so on. If I followed the model of some former employer, I may well take dreadful wedding photos and then charge the clients extra for photoshopping out the fire extinguishers, exit signs and lamp stands sticking out of their heads!

Anyway, what the heck was I even talking about?

Oh yes… a simple phrase came up in my flashcards… “It tastes like chicken”. I couldn’t quite get the Japanese right, but it sure opened a can of worms. The correct Japanese phrase is “toriniku yō na aji ga shimasu”.

“yōda” means “seems like”, with ‘da’ changing to ‘na’ before a noun. But this is where the can of worms comes in. I looked up “yōda”, and to my dismay fell into the intricacies of conjecture and hearsay. I’m sure English is just as difficult, but it’s been a long time (harking back to the computer science days just to keep some sort of thread going in this blog) since I saw a diagram like this:

Aargh!

This comes from the Japan Times’ excellent Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar which, while expensive is absolutely vital to anyone learning Japanese. Seriously!

That diagram doesn’t even get into counter-factual similarity – ie. “this alligator meat tastes like chicken”. Fortunately the text does. So that’s what I’ve been doing this morning before starting work.

And just to get back to yoda… the Japanese language puts the verb last. Just like yoda.

I remember the time when I was looking at Japanese, Finnish, Russian, Old Norse and Irish as languages. Now I’m focussed solely on Japanese until my GCSE is over, then I might do a little Finnish again – especially as Lasse and Virpi bought us a Fingerpori book as a wedding gift.

Guitar

Anyway… the subject is musical instruments. From a young age, I’ve always been a keyboardist – organ first, and since university (where the music society’s music rooms only had pianos) I’ve moved on to the piano. I’ve dabbled with woodwind but not to any great extent until Cropredy last year where I bought a penny whistle. My whistling has actually come on a long way, and more interestingly my previous dependence on dots has gone; the Irish tradition says that everything is passed on aurally, so it’s bad form to use written music. From the whistling, I branched to an Irish flute. Same fingering, different technique, much more air required.

Where was I? Oh yes… I’ve often thought about guitars. I had one many years ago, bought from a friend for a whole four pounds. It fell out of tune every six minutes, and (unrelated to the detuning) I never really did anything useful with it.

When a friend, at the weekend, said he was selling a couple of his guitars for a tenner each, I thought that given 15 years of inflation, that’s around the same price, or even cheaper than the last one I bought, so I baggsied one of them. It arrived yesterday (the price first generously becoming ‘free’, then my insisting on it being at least ‘a couple of drinks’). But it’s a full-size classical guitar (probably. I don’t know a whole lot about them). And has steel strings. So after a little tinkle, the fingers on my left hand hurt a lot. But it’s only like my arms ached when I started with the flute – I’m sure my body will get used to it.

I can’t see myself investing much time, to be honest, but it’ll be nice to have a guitar around so that when others visit who can play, there’s one available. I’d like to get some Irish music jams going at some point but my confidence in group music (and performance for that matter) has never been high.

There’s a slight problem with that. Go and look for evidence of contradiction in the bible. You will find website after website of well-researched (read: people who need to get out more) quotes seemingly contradicting each other.

Now consider a poem. A massive poem – the sort of poem that would fill a big thick book. Now have it written by lots of authors. Do you think it might contradict itself in places? Of course it would!

If you look at groups 1 and 5 of the previous post, I think they both need to see the bible (or qoran, or any other religious text) as a meditation rather than a book of facts. Simply reading the bible with a view to seeing what you can learn from it would be preferable to putting in hours of work trying to prove or discredit it.

“And then X spake unto Y saying… ABC, and Y bonked X over the head”.

Oh? I wonder why X said that to Y. And why did Y bonk X over the head? Ah… yes… I remember when I thought about saying ABC to someone, but didn’t. Well, that was a close one, they might have bonked me over the head if I had. Hmm… yes, looking at Y’s point of view in the the story, they would have been justified too. I’d better be extra careful in future if I find myself about to say ABC to someone.

Just a thought.

The next post, coming shortly will be about hats.

Militant Atheists. What should we call them? They go beyond atheism in, what I think, is an unreasonable way. I shall elaborate.

There are several degrees of religious belief, which are simplified beyond measure below:

1. Militant Religious – Following a faith to the exclusion of local laws and science. This is where your creationists lie, taking the (often contradictory) word of the bible as hard fact.
2. Religious – Following a faith, but being open and accepting of other faiths, science, reason and so on.
3. Agnostic – Take or leave.
4. Atheist – Does not believe in a god, but is tolerant of faith.
5. Militant Atheist – Does not believe in a god, and believes that no-one else should believe in a god. Rejects all forms of religious dogma.

It’s probably far more complicated than this, but for now this will do.

What got me thinking is that people often call group 5 “Darwinists”, but that’s not fair on the members of groups 2-4 who also fully accept that evolution has taken place, and that ’science and reason’ are a valuable asset to the world. Group 5 stands against anyone in groups 1-3, but that’s not fair on groups 2 and 3 who may see religious texts and cultures as a valuable asset to the world. Note also that the word “Muslim” often implies group 1, especially in the tabloid press. That is not fair on the group 2/3 Muslims.

Here’s a bold statement which is followed by explanation.

It is unreasonable for anyone with any level of intelligence to claim that god does not exist.

Have you gone mad? No. Substitute the word ‘money’ for ‘god’ and hopefully you’ll begin to understand where I’m coming from.

Even if you do not believe in a ‘Great Architect of the Universe’, you cannot deny that ‘god’ exists as a moral framework. Sure, he was invented by people, but so was money.

“But”, I hear you say, “money is real. You can touch it and feel it.”

I disagree. There are manifestations of money, coins, notes and so on. But look at any big banking and none of the money exists. There is an ethereal cloud of ‘money’ which is pushed around electronically or on paper. So… money is an invisible concept that makes the lives of people more convenient, giving them a set of rules as to how they can interact with each other, and what they’re worth as a result of their endeavours. Is that not, kind of, how god works? Even if you don’t believe that he ‘actually exists’.

Militant Atheism, just as blind communism attempts to rid the world of money and private posessions, seeks to rid the world of that which feeds spiritual needs. This is pretty dangerous. If you take Darwinism to its extreme, that we came about from cells which happened to duplicate and happened to turn into fish and then happened to walk on the ground etc., then there is no point to being here.

The hope of religion gives us all a point to being here, and even if you don’t believe in a god, I think it would be very foolish to remove that hope. The opposite, taken to extreme, would lead to complete anarchy where, for example, murder is acceptable because the person you’re murdering is only a bunch of cells that came together by chance (or the product thereof).

The militant atheists explain “how” we are here, but not “why”. Even if you don’t think there is a “why”, I believe it is necessary to have one.

I’ll go into the creationists and their view next time! Lucky you!

1. The fact that a primary school has banned pupils from sending valentine’s cards due to the possibility of ‘rejection trauma’.

or

2. The fact that today’s instant media can turn a tiny little incident in a corner of Somerset into a national scandal?

Now I find myself wearing them regularly.

A quote from Joe McNally’s excellent book The Moment it Clicks:

A professor I had in college used to tell me that if someone won’t listen to what you have to say because you’re not wearing a tie, then put on a tie, ’cause what you have to say is more important than not wearing a tie. He was right.

I’m inclined to agree.

The good bits:

I was given an impromptu day off at 9:30.
I went for a lovely bike ride.
I went to see my mum and stepdad for a cup of tea at 10am.
I had a lovely phone call from my favourite lady in the world.
I realised how special that lady is.
I saw some lovely friends.
I realised how lovely and caring those friends are.
I had a phone call from Birmingham saying the wedding rings are ready.
I picked up those wedding rings. They’re fantastic!
I have time to visit the gym each morning and get fit and healthy.
I have time to find good ingredients and cook exquisite food.
The world has become my oyster… I can do anything I like.

The downside:

I don’t have a job.

Worse than that:

The TEABAGS RAN OUT! I could NEARLY DIE!

Well, it’s been a tough year. But I’ve heard of at least a couple of people who went on the same day who still haven’t found anything. I pretty much saw that coming, looking at the position I was in, specialist employer, a little behind the times in some technical respects (in my position, anyway), my age – I’m not exactly using a zimmer frame, but I’m no young bright graduate either.

I think it was day 2 of my redundancy when another of the chaps invited me to lunch and I turned him down… “I have things to do today”. I think that was the day I built the first incarnation of my website (which was not very good), got some business cards ordered (their backs are now used for shopping lists because they’re not very good) and that sort of thing. I can’t imagine waking up in the morning with nothing to do. And I count phoning useless agencies as ‘nothing to do’ because you may as well sit with your feet up and a cold beer than phone agencies I’ve found.

But I didn’t need agencies because they weren’t going to find me a job, I was going to make a job.

Sure, I stayed on the books, went to a couple of interviews (failed one probably because I sat in the interview technical test thinking ‘why the flipping blip would I want to do this with my time?’) and another nominally because my ex-boss’s’sboss-type-person was, I quote, ‘reluctant to give a reference’. Oh and another because I was completely unsuitable before I even turned up (but electronic bladder scanning is not the most glamorous job in the world). So with nothing turning up, the photography ramped up.

To begin with, I felt like a fraud. Seriously. I joined the BIPP and went to their meetings and felt like I shouldn’t be there. I wasn’t a professional photographer – I hadn’t even done any commissioned work. But I stuck with it. I am not going to pretend the year has been easy – it has been a living nightmare at times – but it has had hope and reward in roughly equal measure.

Through the BIPP mentoring programme, I have specialised, focussed and educated myself. Here’s the first portfolio panel I presented them with in February this year (it’s very small, but you get the idea – online display of photos isn’t my strong point har har!):

Comments were generally good. There were photos my mentor didn’t like, but could offer constructive advice to improve. The most important thing is that he said I had an eye, could ’see the light’ and had potential.

But I still felt like a fraud.

The last panel I submitted for mentoring (in July) appears below. The creativity has dropped a little, but I realised I was running before I’d learnt to walk in a straight line. What is present is consistency. Correct exposures every time. Composition of groups and so on. When the creativity is allowed back, built on this foundation, I believe there will be some really high quality work coming up…

Even that looks out-dated to me now. I’ve done so much since July that’s better! I must get my new panel together and hopefully qualify with it in the next round of assessments!

So anyway… tough year, major shock on the day, best thing that ever happened to me. And the support from my most lovely lady who trusted me while being absolutely scared stiff of what was going on (my estimation – scaredness level may go up or down) has been crucial. Thanks H, you’re a star! And friends and family, you’re all stars, too!

Anyone who has one of my ‘early’ signed prints would do well to look after it carefully. Just in case…