ich schreibe jetzt...

'Shazam' and I'm back...

... haven't actually really been anywhere of course, but there are tales to be told nonetheless.

Life, she’s a funny ol' buzzard at times, good/bad, happy/sad, and at other times completely Fargin' complicated.

When all is said and done though, you’ve only got one, so whatever it is “you better make the most of it before the whole shithouse goes up in flames..." as Jim Morrison famously said once, or something like that anyway (never could work out exactly what the hell he was babbling about on that particular album).

So, to be frank, there's been a whole pile of crap going down for moi and generally not very good crap indeed. Was seeing someone for quite a while too, but that ended up in a moderate train wreck as well. *mwah*, so it goes.

I had heartily looked forward to the end of '07 since that year had been, all in all, a bit of technological nightmare (also read: expensive). Sadly, '08 has been having its own catalogue of barndances, as well.

This ain’t the time nor format to get into it, but one sadder recent life-torpedo I will mention, is that someone close to me has developed terminal cancer and is fading pretty fast. Sad stuff indeed and with that in mind, I’m off in a couple of weeks for an emergency flying trip back to New Zealand, to see various folk, friends & members of my own Cavebear clan!

I gotta say, in the carnage that has been life recently, that it has completely pissed me off that I fallen off the bandwagon with this blog. Happily though a couple of recent kindly comments & prompters from friends, has reminded me that there are some folk out there who do ‘actually’ enjoy reading it (must buy them a beer).

Over the months I have kept quasi-hassling myself thinking that I ‘need’ to explain my absence to my own blog, like a tardy schoolboy and that, naturally, adds more obstacles to writing itself.

Naturally, the idiocy of that sentiment is only too clear to me. That 'sentiment' being quite difficult to define i've realised and a jolly good exercise in rhetoric, that Cicero himself would revel in.

In that, I realise I’m subconsciously saying ‘…hassle self to go forth and write in an abstract online diary, explaining to your most enthusiastic, nay regular, reader (which would predictably be yourself - now redefined as the audience), why you have not written ‘as such’ to the audience explaining the extenuating circumstances in the delay of writing to yourself, on behalf of yourself, about yourself… or your life therein’.

Hmmm, Cicero could provide more eloquent prose, but he went to a better school and had more time on his hands.

That cerebral minefield aside, I figured I’d just naturally get the band back together at some right time & place anyway. So, hoo-har, I think it can be said, I’m now officially back in the game (if I use another cliché or idiom in this blog, I’m gonna shoot myself).

So, I’m keen to try and blog a bit over the next couple of months (ideally decades), but I’ll have to play that by ear (right… get the gun).

Actually, it is quite an important time in my life anyway for different reasons, but I shan’t get into that here either. Regular readers of this rather irregular blog, may get the reference if I was to refer to previous dribbles on Kylie Minogue’s birthday, Robert Kennedy being shot, Andy Warhol being stabbed and Helen Keller dying.

Suffice to say, it is a big one and I’m going to be running for it. Literally, as the bell tolls, he says, especially now, with only a few hours to go...

(not from new camera)

All that obtuseness aside, I had to buy a new camera a while ago (my previously beloved digital SLR took an unexpected broadside and was never been the same afterwards). A hassle to cough up the money (or credit card as the case may be), but my replacement camera is a hell of a step up.

I had a Canon 300D and now am the proud owner of a Canon 40D, oft-described as the ‘baby brother’ of the insane, top of the shelf, Canon EOS 1D mk III.

My new little baby has a fantastic lens on it as well, worth about the same as the body itself as it goes, and also runs the same operating system as that which is integrated into the 1D.

Amongst a number of other wicked treats, this all means that the lens is image stabilised and the camera can handle shooting at just under 7 fps (frames per second), and can do that for about 30-40 frames in a row (in the 20^th century that means a standard 24-exposure roll of film gone in a shade under 3 ½ seconds). I hate to be immature, but when you hold down the shutter and it's firing off absolutely tonnes of high quality photos in the blink of an eye (all about 15MB in RAW mode), it is all rather exciting, ducky.

I’ve barely had a chance to use it with all that has been going on, but good old Kiwi land is well identified as my first serious photographic essay. So, some hopefully better-than-crap pictures may grace this blog, or some of my other outlets, soon.

The 2 pictures on this blog here are just from my camera phone, which is a N95, in case you’re wondering … which is a replacement handset (that I had to actually physically pay for) since I lost the other one a while back (and that, in itself, was already a contract replacement for my original one that died when I ‘effectively’ sat on it, with my fat arse *sigh*). Hence the quality of these pictures is a bit ropey.

They both feature from this very weekend where I’d been catching up with some people and was getting home a bit… erm… late. So late in fact, that the sun was already getting into another day. In my defence though, we are at pretty high northern latitudes here in Edinburgh (the same parallel as Moscow as it goes) and with the summer equinox only 3 weeks away, there are a fair few sunlit hours in the average day here, in this global neck of the woods (somewhat making up for the virtual darkness of October thru March, that the Scots get to ‘enjoy’ here annually).

So, that’s it, I’ve said my piece, spent my load, done my bit (right, bullets please) and I’ll sign off now with the stated enthusiasm of being a bit more proactive with this blog in the time to come.

On one last serious note though, there are a number of you out there that I am desperately overdue for e-mailing to. So please accept my apologies for those oversights and the messages will be coming through in their own manner & form, as soon as they can (unless they do actually, finally, start writing themselves, in which case it'll be sooner).

See you on the other side!

Captain Fargon – 2 June 2008

p.s. contrary to what a this blog has implied, I’m pleased to report my that my arse is not fat, except, in this case, in a figurative sense. My heads a bit bald, but my arse is not fat… as I can do something about that.