Location, location, location.

Find a good place, and she'll shine even brighter.

Triptych

Aida's pictures

Since my daughter Aida been here I have taken every opportunity available to take some pictures, and she loves the camera, so here are some of them shots.

Let it rain

After a sunny Sunday we got a dark rainy Monday, hey hello new week.

RIP MCA

Friday 4th of May, Beastie Boy’s member Adam Yauch known as MCA, died at the age of 47 after finally loosing his battle against cancer.
The Beastie Boys has been one of the bands that have influenced me more during my life, with their mixtures of hip-hop and rock that have also influenced a lot of bands around the world.
To me, just listening to the name of the group it self bring memories from my early twenties, going to my local library only 200 yards from where I was living at the time. Is there where I got my hands on  “Licensed to ill”, I borrowed the album for a week, and fell in love with it.
 Songs like “No sleep till Brooklyn” or the awesome opening “Rhyming & Stealing”, and lets not forget the iconic “Fight for your right” are songs that every time I heard them they make my mind wonder to those days in Spain. The unusual mix of stiles made this album quite revealing for me, with tunes like “Girls“, an almost comical sound about something that boys will always go crazy about, err, girls of course, and “Brass Monkey“, a song about drinking and girls. The origins of “Brass Monkey” are a bit unclear to me, it was a drink produced in America between the 80’s and 90’s, also is a cocktail, 40% Vodka, 40% dark rum, 20% orange juice. It also could be the nick name for 40oz beer (About 1.13 litres).
Later albums from the Beastie Boys where also very good, with loads of good tracks, but none of them have influenced me as much as “Licensed to ill”.
One of the songs from the 1994 album “Ill communication” that I really like was “Sabotage”, and the video was a parody of the 1970’s crime drama TV series, like “Streets of San Francisco”,  “Starsky and Hutch” or “SWAT”.
A later song that was really big and was from their 1998 album “Hello nasty” was “Intergalactic”, a really catchy tune. The video was a parody of Japanese Kaiju films like Godzilla.
With the death of Adam Yauch there will be no more Beastie Boys, actually, no more Beastie Boys on stage, but they will be in our hearts, in our media, and in our life, as much as always.
Beastie Boys forever.

TEOTWAWKI Part 2

One day you will try to get up to go to work but your alarm won’t work, there is a power cut that will last a few hours. Never mind, your mobile phone is fully charged and the alarm that you set for five minutes later will get you up. Turn the light on, but the electricity feed is not back, so you turn your phone light on (If you are lucky enough to have one with light in it) and head to the toilet, is at this point that you realise that the water is not on, it haven’t been on since yesterday, but good job you are prepared for it and your bath is full of clean water and covered with a plastic cover that you engineered last week to stop bugs and dirt from contaminating it. After you done your business in the bathroom and you feel refreshed after a coffee you head to the street in your bicycle. There is a massive fuel shortage, and public transport is very unreliable, and you have to get to your destination in time. While you are about to pedal away, somebody push you from your bicycle, takes your bag and run away. You lie on the floor in pain, you just busted your right knee, and now you must head back home to see what medical supplies you have to at least be able to clean your wounds.
The emergency services are unreliable, because the government is corrupted, and there is not enough money to pay for the equipment needed, and the medical centre is quite a distance, plus the doctors in there are only few and badly paid with badly maintained equipment. The fuel that runs their emergency generators is running low, because the local mafia control the supply, and if there is no money there is no fuel. There is only a fraction of official vehicles available, poor maintained too, some have mechanical problems, and some others will brake down in the middle of an emergency. People will die waiting in vain for help. Some will get help, but won’t be able to get free medication, having to sell their belongings to pawn shops in order to have some sort of life.
Prizes will go up, and stock will run low all over, in every super market, in every shop.
The abandoned houses that we see now scattered around the old villages in the country side, will be full of life again. People leaving the cities going back to rural areas, where they can be self sufficient, where they can live in communities that help each other, growing food from the ground, and slowly going back to the old ways.
This is the world as we know it. From our comfortable sofas where we seat to watch irrelevant things in our televisions, or we lose ourselves in our computers and our gaming machines, wasting time, letting it go bay, becoming stationed and anchored in one spot, as I am right this second while I’m writing this words. All connected to each other some how, without being able to see each other’s faces, and many times not actually knowing the person we are so friendly with at the other end of the connection.
Feeding ourselves from the shelves, without thinking about it, like machines, depending of a system, a network of human effort, growing, cutting, moving, packing, moving again, staking, moving again, and then staking again on selves where we just pick what we feel like.
We lost the connection with mother Earth, mother nature. We getting away from it. We forgot how to do basic things, like hunting for food, or recognizing edible wild foods from poison ones. We need our machines to make machines that will make things for us that we used to do by hand, a knowledge passed from generation to generation now lost. But at least, we conserve our "freedom"

My every day carry.
From left to right:
My wallet. Containing various plasters and antiseptic wipe, blanc paper, a tag with medical information about me, credit cards, drivers license, Spanish identity card and one spare battery for my torch., money.
Mini pen.
LED mini torch.
Lighter ( I don’t smoke, but I need to carry a means of fire)
Swiss army knife with a meter of paracord. (One meter of paracord equals 8 meters of line.)
My watch.
Notepad cover, containing 4 precision screw drivers, a Zebra pen, 2 pencils, eraser, memory stick with various encrypted documentation, a 3”x5” notepad, a lens brush, mini first aid kit, about 5 meters of duct tape.
Phone.
Chewing gums.
Cash.
Buff Original Multi Function head scarf. 

The only thing here I may not carry with me is the notepad cover, it can get too bulky and uncomfortable and if I need a plaster I can get it out from my wallet. The knife is only in the UK, I won’t be able to carry that in Spain, and they wouldn’t let me through security in the airport if I only carry hand luggage.

TEOTWAWNI

Here, while some parts of the UK have a hosepipe ban other parts of Britain are on flood alert. According to the news, this is the wettest April since records begun, and records begun a long long time ago. Last winter was the coldest winter since the 60’s, and the summer was the hottest summer we had here for decades. So, something is really cooking up in the heavens, where they can’t  get it right anymore. I think we already messed up our universal vessel, we gone past the point of no return, and people talks about TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) but this is starting to look quite real, but not as dramatic as the media likes to make us believe by depicting  it in films, books and documentaries that makes people get paranoid , making sales on sporting  goods rise, like knifes and camping gear, increasing the amount of people who own a gun, or two, or three, hell, some people across the pond have bunkers and arsenals, convinced that this is the final chapter of our species, and in order to survive they must protect themselves from an unknown enemy. Zombies? Aliens? Nah, our biggest enemy is ourselves. We already managed to destroy our atmosphere, affecting the way our climate acts. A few weeks ago, in America, they had a series of tornados the make huge damage to their infrastructure and kill dozens of people. All within 24 hours or so.
The end of the world as we know it, it is starting, yes, but not like that. Our world is changing, because we forcing it to change. Is going to be very hard to maintain a civilization like this, but it won’t be our end.
 Our economy is collapsing, we could very well end up changing the way we run things, with people rising against governments like already is happening with the Arab uprising. Our system is about to crash, because of greed from those in power, and I can see places like Greece ending up in some sort of anarchy.
Extreme right wing parties in Europe are becoming more popular, with France being on their presidential elections and a lot of people heading that way, things don’t look to pretty anymore. Are we moving backwards? Some how in Russia Vladimir Putin is in power, and Joseph Stalin’s ghost still influence a lot of the Russian population one way or another. Russian Nashi youth party, a movement that base a lot of the ideas from the old days, mixed with the modern day extremism, again, going back backwards.
I’m afraid that some people is going to be disappointed, because we are not going to be invaded by aliens, nor going to have a zombie apocalypse, and North Korea is not going to start a nuclear war, they can even get a long range missile test to work, ups, I meant the launch of a communications satellite.

China is getting fed up with North Korea’s childish behaviour, and looks like they are coming out of the old regime becoming a modern country that is more interested in producing the biggest industry in the world than going to war with the rest of it by being supportive of North Korea.
Be prepare, yes, have your candles ready, your emergency rations at hand, and your tools clean ready to work. Get a transport method that don’t require oil based fuels, and have your family and friends close. No because is the end of the world, but because our networks will fail more often than we like, because there is not going to be money to maintain them, and people will not give a damn.
Our society is based on a delicate balance that right now is not balanced at all, and that balanced is decided by money. That is really sad, because money calls, it calls more than our basic core principles, honour, freedom, justice and family, those things are sacred, but the people with the power don‘t think on them, they are snakes.