Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Reader

So I went on holiday to various places around Japan.  Accompanying me were my mother and second cousin, Lyn.  I took an inordinate number of pictures, most of which were utter garbage, but a few were okay.  The best ones will be shown in a later post but for now, we have the general purpose photographs.  These might be blurred, out of focus or generally rubbish, but they're the holiday 'snapshots.'

I'll get around to captioning them at another time (it's pretty late here at the moment).

P.S.  Surgery and the holiday were the reasons for the extended hiatus - both were rather time and or energy consuming.

#EDIT# Captions added!

Pre-operation.  They make you wear these rather fetching leggings to stop thromboses.  I don't know if that's the correct plural but no one's checking.

Post-operation.  The most wicked scar was left over.  Honestly, it's brutal.  The surgeon who cut my hand open was evidently a ham-fisted buffoon because I have no feeling in the lower left quadrant of my hand.  All the better for karate chopping fools on the rugby field.

This is one of my attempts at night photography.  I don't have a tripod yet, so I laid the camera down in the basket of my bicycle, then rode out to a remote (nominally) light-free location.

So in a lot of the big stations there are exceedingly expensive confectioners, usually making tiny, extremely intricate cakes.  This was one of the cake crafters.  I say crafter rather than chef, because they really are extremely delicate.

Another one, a slightly different angle to show the scale they work at.

I managed to get Lyn to go all captain Nemo and try one of the pairs of binoculars.  I think steampunk is in this year, because they did look to be made of brass (or at least an imitation).   Land Ahoy!

I think pink is more mums style to be honest.

A picture of a cat.  Whenever I see a cat, I feel the urge to take a picture.  I don't know why.  It has to be done.  If the cat is borderline rabid, tattered ears and all then it makes for a more interesting picture.  This one was kind of boring.  At least it didn't mind having a big loud camera shoved in its face.

Another important thing to photograph is the homelessness prevalent throughout Tokyo.  In my opinion, many people back home (that would be England) think that poverty within Japan is significantly better than that which exists in London, for example.  The truth is that no matter where you go, everything is the same.  Obviously this guy has clothes, he's probably a drunk (which means he has money for booze) and there are sometimes mobile soup kitchens that roll around, but he's not exactly lucky.  It's not comparable to the congo, but it is comparable to the homeless in London.

The bib represents the death of a child, but I'm not sure why it's been placed on a fox.  The fox has a little one, so it probably is symbolic of something.  I wouldn't care to speculate regarding something this grave (no pun intended).

Yet more homeless.  These pictures follow a chronological order, so we'd apparently passed through a homeless haven.  To be fair we were going through a park, one of the places I've seen the food wagon pass through.

He's been here a while by the looks of things.

This park has thousands of lotus plants in a lake, inhabited by some monstrous koi and pretty big terrapins.  This is a closeup of one of the leaves.  At least, I'm led to believe that this is a lotus leaf.  My horticultural knowledge extends as far as green being generally plant-like.  Although there are also green snakes and frogs, and these tend not to be plants.

On the very first day we saw some traditional Japanese dress.  Overall we were extremely lucky to see so many people dressed up wherever we went.  The first time I came here there were nowhere near as many people wearing yukata or kimono - Tokyo looked like any other big city inhabited by suited drones.  I guess there's been a slight shift towards traditional values with regards to fashion, although my finger is not exactly 'on the pulse,' nor am I on the cutting edge of fashion.  Take my words with a boatload of salt.

So we happened upon the Ueno Summer festival.  We were walking back to the station when we say a large group of performers walking to the road that had been blocked off in preparation.  It turned out to be a fantastic photograph taking opportunity, and I'm really happy with a few of the pictures I managed to get.  As I've said before, the ones on this blog are photo snapshots, they're not super duper artsy pictures (those ones will come at a later date).

Despite being ushered along by a dozen different police officers with megaphones, I managed to stop in front of a performer long enough to peak under his hat.

Everyone was dressed up, even the kids.  No idea what they're supposed to be wearing here.

This guy has the Japanese festival equivalent of a triangle in his hands.  The cool kids have drums strapped to their shoulders and spend their time wailing away with abandon.

These guys had taken their costume off, and looked exhausted.  I asked if it was okay to take a picture and they obliged, but instead of just standing there holding the dragons head, they jumped back into their costumes and performed a short dance while I took a ton of pictures.  Thanks!

It's extremely difficult to take pictures of people and make it look natural, everyone throws up peace signs.

We were stationed at the end of the parade street, so all the performers were exhausted by the time they reached us.  There were also a couple of dozen helpers in yellow shirts handing out drinks to everyone, the second they finished.  This made it extremely difficult to get a picture without drinks bottles, or obnoxious yellow shirts everywhere.

For some reason, there was a carnivale section.  Who knows

Japan has surprisingly strong links with Brazil (who would have thought it) so I guess there's an interest in the polar opposite openness South American cultures.

I managed to catch her before she threw the V's.

This is one of the cool dudes with a big old drum.  You can tell how heavy it is, and how hot it was, by his pained expression.  Still smiled though.  Trooper!

I have no idea how this poor woman carried this drum.  It was as big as her and looked quite difficult to maneouvre with.

Everyone likes pictures of cute kids, so here are a couple I took a photo of.

She was the co-ordinator for one of the dance troupes, leading the way with some interesting moves.

She was very good at it, hence why she was chosen to lead, presumably.

So the first hostel we stayed at was a lot of fun.  It was relatively small, so everyone spoke to each other and invited everyone else out.  Alas, I couldn't head out with them.

Note how everything is orange.  Non-colour corrected people!  If I weren't so lazy I'd do that.

Hatchi-bus.  There's a long, boring story about a dog whose owner died.  Everyone loves it here, so that bloody dog is on everything from TV commercials to crisps.

So we went to the park where everyone dresses up on a weekend, and parades around in their Sunday finest.  One of the many screwups of the holiday was that there were only two people there.  Disappointed.

This was the other person.  Terrifying.

The Levels/Lebels/Revels/Rebels (pick one) of Yoyogi park.  Everyone in this contained area dresses up like Elvis and dances around a bit.  It's extremely interesting to watch; for myself it's a purely candid wondering, what on earth are they thinking?

There are a few different groups, each vying for the attentions of the onlookers.

This is one of my favourite pictures of the group - if  only that woman weren't in the background.

So a bit further along are tons of kids doing whatever kind of dancing the cool kids are doing these days.

Whatever that kind of dancing happens to be though, this guy was superb.  Again, I have no idea what constitutes cool, or hip or talented, but he should be a dancer or something.

There were some bongos.  Any picture of bongos taken anywhere in the world is exactly the same as any other picture.

No idea why she was carrying those, but it was a fairly interesting picture!

So that's the first lot of photos.  Ending with a man ferrying his dogs, because you know, dogs don't have legs.

PC died

Using PS3.  Can't access e-mail.  Grrrrr.

The Case of the Hoodwinked Country

Read this.  Then laugh when the poor think that their past giving of gold for the good of the country was for anything other than making the rich richer (helping them avoid huge taxes that would actually make them more than a couple of pc poorer, for example).  Suckers.

Hospital

I was in the hospital until Saturday for an operation on my hand and knee.  The hand is butchered, the knee is sore and swollen, but I'm okay.  In a fun twist on normal working practices, I still have to work, pulling stitches all the way.  As such, I won't be writing on here for a while because these few sentences took an incredibly long time, and a normal post might take weeks.  I'll be back on when I have the stitches out.  Peace.

Hey, Fat Bastards

Sweary.  Bewarey.

I was about to start lunch when I saw this article on the BBC.  'Oh,' I thought, 'this'll be good for a laugh.'

I still haven't eaten my lunch.

The problem isn't that people don't understand.  There's not a human alive in England who would be surprised to find out they're fat because they eat shit all day, and don't exercise.  Just because the BBC trot out the occasional obese moron to comment on how everything in life is just too difficult to understand, how life is too hard, how everything is just impossible.  Oh, life, woe is you.

No one really thinks it's too difficult to understand.  No one really thinks that they have metabolic syndrome, or their genes are at fault, or their hair colour is wrong for dieting.  Deep down no one believes any of that tripe.

They just don't care.  Fine, I say.  It is an absolutely legitimate response for you to not care.  I don't care about carrots.  Some people are mad about carrots.  I was told every single day during my formative years that carrots were the answer to every problem in life.  I didn't care then, I don't care now.  Fine.  That is an okay response.  Everyone knows the risks of smoking, yet they do it anyway.  Everyone knows the risks of eating your own body weight in fried chicken every day, but they do that too.  Let them do it.  If it gives them momentary happiness, fine.

The problem comes with things like medical expenses.  In certain regards, the tax people pay on cigarettes off-sets the expense of caring for their medical needs.  Lung cancer is expensive, but so are cigarettes.  Theoretically speaking, that extra expense would go towards their care (of course, in reality it just goes towards buying a dozen houses for MP's, and moats to put around them).  Fat people don't pay a tax on their weight, which means they take from the system without giving anything based on their usage.  Health insurance would be a good way of mitigating this; overweight people would pay higher premiums and things would balance out.  This, of course, is too obvious, too easy in fact, to implement, so it will never be done.  (Good luck reading that sentence).

What about class.  As indeterminate as class is these days, the northerners are definitely fatter than the southerners.  This is obvious to all those who go to somewhere like Hull.  It's a mighty fine place, in fact I have a near-infinite amount of time for the place - but it's still mired in poverty.  Fatties abound, I'm afraid.

Now, this raises the possibility of a two tier nation - one based on health rather than income.  It is perfectly possible for those on lower incomes to be healthy, in which case they will have every advantage in life (studies consistently show that healthier people are more likely to be offered jobs, versus equivalent fatties).  Now, this means the naturally sedentary middle class of today will fall by the wayside, and the healthier individuals, the 'go-getters,' as it were, will carry the torch of tomorrow.  So I absolutely advocate the continuing trend of obesity increase.  If you can't be bothered to keep healthy then it's a choice you made, just don't complain when you're judged by the actions you have chosen to take.

Alas, a trick is being missed.  While education is seen as the defacto exit strategy for the poverty stricken, increasingly health should be too.  This is a missed opportunity.

When you involve kids, people seem to think the equation changes.  It really doesn't.  A child depends on its parents for learning, behaviour, interests, values and the like.  If a child is born in Somalia, he/she/it will not have the same values/advantages as one born in Brazil.  If a child is born to a healthy family, it will have an advantage over a child born to a fat family.  If you are going to have a child, give it every advantage you can.  Do not feed it family chicken every day.  Do not bemoan the lack of vegetables in a school dinner, when it goes home and eats chips every day.  It relies on you to raise it; there is no one else.  It is not the governments job, nor a schools, nor a teachers.  It is your responsibility.  If it is fat, it is your fault, parent.  Do something about it.

I guess to summarise I would say this.  I don't care if you're fat.  I don't really care if your children are fat.  I do care if you blame someone other than yourself.  The fact that there are some extremely fit and healthy people around, shows that it's entirely possible to be such, if you just have an iota of self-control.

I do care if you're fat, if I have to harness you up to go climbing though.  That shit is just not on.

#EDIT#  I was just trawling through the fatties on the BBC website making excuses for their obesity (of course no one is blaming someone with physiological conditions, just like no one blames bulimics or anorexics - but that accounts for what, 1% of fatties?) when I found this
quote:

'The fattest people in my town are the Doctors and Nurses in my local Hospital (sic).  Hippocrasy?'

Best.  Line.  Ever.

Are You Kidding Me?

'We don't need you now, but we really need you in July.  We have speaking tests in July.'  Somewhat paraphrased, but continue anyway.  'But you have an operation...'

'Well I'm not going to stop the operation.'

'Oh really, that's good!'

'No wait, I'm not going to stop an operation just so you can make me do speaking tests for a few days.'

'Oh...  That's a shame.'

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I hate my boss.  The person who has appraised my value, and found it (conservatively estimated) worth less than mouldy cabbage.  The person who isn't actually my boss, but who has taken it upon herself to fuss over me, to ensure I loathe her existence.

On the plus side, there are a million things about her that suggest this behaviour is not voluntary - that she is merely reacting to myriad external stimuli.  I can't obfuscate the obvious more than that, but I do so for good reason.  (I don't want to lose my job).

Without a doubt, terrible human beings exist within this universe.

Anyway.

I took a few pictures of a violinist at the weekend (#aside# a fat old man just walked past sucking his teeth to get some lodged food out of there, jesus that's disgusting).  Some of them are exceptional if I do say so myself.  I showed my friends and they were, at best, nonplussed.  I'm therefore keen to re-evaluate my previous statement and qualify it by saying I think they're awesome.

There's a question I've always wanted to know the answer to.  I want to give out pictures as presents.  A big print is always a magnificent thing to behold, but I particularly enjoy shooting people (hehehe) which produces prints that don't really lend themselves to presents.  People don't want pictures of people they don't know in their homes.  Is there a point at which you just say, screw it, and send them off anyway?  Or do you try to take some pictures of landscapes?  I don't really know the answer.  I'm not particularly afraid of one of my pictures ending up in the attic; never to see daylight again - therefore I might send the people pics and cross my fingers.

Without further bluster, here they are.  Bear in mind (okay, a little more bluster) that I really love a couple of these.  You can try to guess which ones, but I've already been told that my favourite is actually the wrong choice, so you may feel differently; a legitimate response to photography.

They're in no particular order.  If I may take a moment of your time, I want to talk about noise.  The higher the sensitivity you select, the more noise you get.  Now, shooting at night usually requires a flash (the pictures are quite bright, but it was deceptively dark) especially when it was as dark as it was.  Now, noise is generally considered bad, so you want to select as low an ISO as possible to eliminate it.  To do that, you use a tripod or a flash.  These are two surefire ways of minimising noise and getting sharp images.  Another is to use a big wide, fast lens.  A 50mm lens is good for street photography because it mimics the equivalent focal length of the eye (is it the focal length?  I can't remember) so you get 'nice,' looking images.  They also go to f 1.4, or sometimes lower.  My current lens is f 4, which means it lets in many times less light that the f 1.4 (it should be noted that a lot of prime lenses go to 1.4, not just the 50mm, I just mention that one because it's the kind of lens I want).  Less light requires a higher ISO which means more noise.  These pictures would have been far better quality if I'd had an f 1.4 of some kind.

Having just said all that, one of the key reasons why I love these pictures is because they're raw (he he he, camera pun).  I set the camera to do no noise reduction, instead opting to do it on the computer should I choose.  I ended up not doing that because it doesn't feel quite the same.  The image quality is undoubtedly improved, but you lose the feeling of it being at night, a spontaneous shoot that just kind of happened.

This guy actually stood still long enough to get a (relatively) good image.  I tried to get him to do one of those 'cool,' poses the musicians in Japan like, but he was embarrassed.  I say cool advisedly, because they actually look like massive cocks.  He probably made the right decision.

Interestingly, this is the favourite of one of my friends.  Rules are meant to be broken, thirds be damned.  I don't know why she looks so intense in this picture, because she was smiling pretty much the whole time.

Spoiler alert, this is my favourite one.

 I took about a hundred pictures of the pair because I was terrified of how high the ISO was (6400!!) setting itself, and how fast she was moving.  The camera refused to go above 1/60 of a second (not fast enough), which meant that I was certain they'd be a completely blurred mess.  It turned out they were all completely blurred messes, but there are a few that turned out to be nicely blurred messes.  I think at least.  I had a quick check of the first few, found that they were images of ghosts, not people - then proceeded to max everything in the hope that it would work out.  Once you've got the settings as good as possible, just roll with it.

The pair posed afterwards.  Like I said, I tried to get them to act cool, but they were too embarrassed.

This one would have been my favourite if it were a fraction sharper.  This is a classic example of an almost picture.  One that is nearly what you want it to be.  Needless to say, I've thousands of these.

I just liked the trails of white in this one.  It looks like hair blowing in the wind, or something.  I don't know.

So those are my pictures.  It was a lot of fun, and she was a great performer.  The music was superb, and she kept looking into the camera (a lot of people don't like that, but I really enjoy the draw of having the subject looking directly at you, the viewer).

Of course it helps that she was a beauty, but great talent often transcends such factors.  At least that's what I'm told.

I need to do some colour correction to get them right, but as they stand, I'm extremely pleased.

Shoot me down, internet!

P.S.  Over 20,000 views.  Woop!  (Ten thousand are my refreshing the page, but hey, who cares).