Cam-bo-di-a!

Those of you who have been sliding downhill with me for 9 months or so may recall some of my images from last year’s visit. I leave again on Thursday for 10 days. Again I am going with Gary Tyson’s F8 Photography. These are full-on trips not for the faint of heart. From dawn ’til you drop. And then start again.

I posted a Cambodia album on Google + yesterday. Recognising that many people do not visit G+ I will offer a taste of what it was like last year and of course I hope for more and better this time around.

Stranger on the Shore Dawn The Sweeper The lady approaches

The Would-be Moll

The would-be gangster

 

 

See Emily Play

Siblings

 

When I get back I hope I can show you the joy and character of Cambodia.

 

The Anti-E Campaign

That most insightful of bloggers, Gerard Oosterman, has penned a compelling piece. You get insight yes, but incite too. He wants a revolution. Turn the clock back to the days when people communicated directly with one another. Do away with phones that have no copper wire attached. Reject the new E-goggles. Or should that be E-Googles. I confess I am not entirely sure what the spectacle is all about. It must have passed me by. My vario-focals are challenging enough without being wifi’d.

I have a degree of sympathy with Gerard. The modern world is definitely not for the faint-hearted and technophobic. I have recently bemoaned the car I bought last year. Everything is electronic. Whatever happened to tappets and feeler gauges? Bring bank the crank handle for this old crank.

Am I the only person who never, ever backs up their phone? I only ever did so once – for Mrs. Ha. She lost everything. I have never heard the last of it and I have never been near a back-up button again.

Why is it that one of my laptops allows me to print PDFs quite happily and the other does not? Why is it so damned difficult to update the firmware on my camera? On my new one I have not even managed to discover what version I have installed.

But pause a moment. Would you, as Arty Old Bird Val might ask, wish to return the days of the variety show on the television? Would you prefer a Cathode Ray Tube to a flat screen? Supposing Slade made a come back? Or The Bay City Rollers? Do you really want carbon paper back in your typewriter? Copper wire was always good for one thing. Being nicked. Same as the lead on the church roof. Perhaps we can turn the dial back just a little bit or, to mix horribly my metaphors, stop the pendulum swinging the wrong way too far too fast.

Could we eliminate just the iPad? Let me keep my Kindle at least. Maybe Facebook could be disposed of quietly. But then where is my daily dose of Painted Trillium? Could we revert to the Walkman rather than the iPod. The shortcut might be to send Apple to join its maker, Saint Steve. But what of Google? As a kid we had googlies. If you are not up on your googlies, shame on you. Here, lifted from Wikipedia, is the essence:

While a normal leg break spins from the leg to the off side, away from a right-handed batsman, a googly spins the other way, from off to leg, into a right-handed batsman (and is distinct from anoff break delivery). The bowler achieves this change of spin by bending the wrist sharply from the normal leg break delivery position. When the ball rolls out of the hand (from the side near thelittle finger, as in a normal leg break), it emerges with clockwise spin (from the bowler’s point of view). A googly may also be achieved by bowling the ball as a conventional leg break, but spinning the ball further with the fingers just before it is released.

Do you want to go back to the age when a search engine was the train into town to check if the local library had a reference book on the topic puzzling you? (The answer was always either a) no or b) The book is out. Come back in 4 weeks.) Finishing The Times crossword could take months!! We might be back with Subbuteo instead of Sudoku.

I think the compromise may be that we simply do away with the mobile phone. I vividly recall the first mobile phone in our office. Mobile was something of a misnomer. It was the size and weight of a brick. It came in a leather case. It was then that the infamous phrase was invented “I’m on the train”. Well skewer me sideways, what a useful piece of kit. Now Mrs. Randall could collect Mr. Randall from Platform 4 bang on time even if there were a delay at Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh for points failure. Once the thing shrank to the size of a fag packet and let us all play Tetris during conference calls the world was doomed. Now I can even ask my phone to direct me to the nearest Big Mac. It will speak to me and occasionally it may even get the answer right. Now I have never asked Siri how to get to the Golden Arches because if I want to eat cardboard I’ll chew a chunk off my IKEA study table. But I did ask once whether there was a YSL locally for Mrs. Ha. Fortunately Siri hadn’t a clue.

The only downside would be that I couldn’t see how much my pension fund had lost on a daily basis. Perhaps however that might cheer me up. I am, by the way, the ultimate contrarian indicator. If I buy, SELL!!! If I sell, BUY. I am invariably right but 3 weeks too early. Or late.

Gerard is, as I write, fomenting revolution down under. Of course it may take some time. He has despatched a pigeon to me with the details of where to meet so as not to be late for the start. I am getting rid of my culottes now. If the pigeon survives H5N1 bird flu and does not choke to death as it enters Hong Kong’s air space then I shall be ready. Failing which, I shall wait for the text message. Let’s hope it doesn’t say, “I’m on the train”.

 

Now here’s a funny thing, missus.

Max Miller or The Cheekie Chappie is before all our times but I wonder whether we might find his successor in Ben Bernanke. The Fed Chairman gave a Commencement Speech yesterday and even quoted Yogi Berra.

This is a link to a source for the speech.

The rather dry tagline is Economic Prospects for the Long Run. In this speech Bernanke challenges the broadly pessimistic views that seem to prevail today when discussing the global outlook. He looks back and he looks forward. He says:

“…..the conclusion some have drawn is that the sustainable pace of economic growth and change and the associated improvement in living standards will likely slow further, as our most recent technological revolution, in computers and IT, will not transform our lives as dramatically as previous revolutions have.

Well, that’s sort of depressing. Is it true, then, as baseball player Yogi Berra said, that the future ain’t what it used to be? Nobody really knows; as Berra also astutely observed, it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

His (Bernanke’s not Berra’s) concluding remark is:

“In short, both humanity’s capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.”

Bernanke is not much older than I am. He and I will have seen much of the same in terms of world change. Not all of it good. Some of it definitely bad. At present the world is in an economic mess. It is slowly being worked through but has a long way to run. It is difficult to look around and find somewhere without problems.Yet since 2009 there has been a slow and unrelenting climb of the wall of worry. It has been painful and not pretty. For countries with 40%+ unemployment, especially amongst the younger generations, it is a catastrophe. But the Chairman of the Fed is out there whistling “Always look on the Bright Side of Life”.  And perhaps there is a lesson there for us all.

My life was brightened by an award from Jayde Ashe over at her blog, The Paperbook Blog. Thank you so much, Jayde. Previously I have refused all awards. Or perhaps I have never been given one. I don’t recall.

This is the award:

 

Part of the award process is I have to share seven things about myself. So here goes:

And this is why the award process doesn’t work for me. I have been racking my brain to think of 7 remotely interesting things to share and I can’t even come up with one. So maybe I should borrow a trick from Val at Arty Old Bird. You can ask me questions and I’ll pick seven to answer. How about that? And then I will try to select seven more recipients for the One Lovely Blog Award.

In the meantime I will add The Paperbook Blog to my blogroll because it is very good indeed. Lady P. at Penpusherpen is also going on there as another fine recently-discovered blog. I may try to add Ben Bernanke too but I’m not sure he would be a popular choice. But any man that quotes Yogi Berra can’t be all bad………….

My favourites are:

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” and

“Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”