The AfterDark

In keeping with the equally young tradition of photographic blog I present you with the latest addition to the urban panoramic series. The picture you’ll see, if you care to look, is a panoramic shot taken by a close friend of mine with his brand new, dear and trusted 10mp4xoz Canon PowerShot A640 which you can see impeccably displayed below. Yes, I too drooled for a long time over it. Alas, “thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s” Canon.

Click the banner for the fullsize download. And remember: patience is a virtue.

Or just settle for the cropped zoom.

Truly a house of worship worthy of the Lord. In stark contrast with the unsightly littered background or the concrete behemoths obscuring the view and ominously bordering into the distance the ubiquitous vibrantly colourful foliage.

To this I humbly add another two urban scenery shots, as per my predilection, and of my own advent that I may retrieve proud authorship of the snaps hence forth.

And…

Also, of course, a genuine and heart felt ‘thank you’ to both imageshack.us and freewebs.com for graciously putting up such numerous and enormous files as are the pictures that constitute this blog permitting flamboyant galleries with no regard for such capricious trifle details as the huge storage space consumed (except for imageshack which enforces an upper limit of 1.5 megabytes for any single image file uploaded) or requesting hosting fees as remuneration.

Cheers.

And enjoy. Albeit selectively.

- Coldplay - Clocks

True to promise, this is what the world looks like on the other side of the polished steel. Quite a pleasantly strident contrast, if I may say so. Of course, the pictures are somewhat old and the foliage is neither as luxuriant nor as green at the moment. But if not for remembrance, then what are frozen images for?

And a little more to the right…

And finally, the great beyond:

Enjoy. I do.

Now I simply must go for a drive, for I fear I will go mad otherwise.

- atb - ecstasy

What can I say? An image is worth a thousand words. As you can see, much cheaper.

For shame, I know…

Barren and destitute:

- Faithless - We Come One (Would it not be madness to fight?)

New mutt on the premises. A mongrel I snatched off the street, from his mother’s litter. The little bugger grew on me awful fast. I don’t really know how old he is. A few weeks, 2 or 3, my best guess.

Plan is I’ll train him into an aggressive and tenacious quadruped landlord to keep our suburban home guarded round the clock. He ain’t really needed to guard the apartment. Trouble is he seems awful wimpy right now so I don’t really know how I’ll go about achieving such a behavioural turn-around. Prestidigitation, perhaps?

Given any choice, he’ll just wiggle his tail and come beg for play, fetch or dodgeball and belly rubs. For starters, one promising occurrence was that he barked and hollered audaciously at a few strays outside the yard. From behind a sturdy, tall fence, grounded fence.

Pics taken in the dark cause I didn’t want to risk waking the fury devil up. Lest he’ll keep me up all night to graciously return the favour. I’ll tell you, that was one soiled little doggy. I think I got a kettle of crud out of his fur when I washed him. It was thoroughly necessary, though. I don’t much fancy walking flee colonies round the house.

Flaming apeshit. Have you ever had a woman go flaming apeshit on your ass? Of course you have, but a mere excuse for indulging in the rhetoric I allowed myself.

It’s enough to put the fear of God in you, I’ll tell you that. Eyes bulging out of sockets and eerily blank while fixating you, face swollen and scarlet, the voice a high pitch shrill of incoherent babble culminating in deafening screams, stuff flying through the air menacingly. Oh yes. Truly a frightful sight to chill you to the bones.

There is little you can say or do, as a man, to quell or allay the imminent tide of rising hysterical paroxysm. It’s a thing wise to behold from a cautious distance as it feeds off itself, kind of like feminism, in a vicious cycle of growing magnitude. And anything you say or do will likely not alleviate anything in the slightest but, to the contrary, only make it worse faster. Well, there is something actually.

Very rarely, calm soothingly toned conveyed reason can sometimes thwart escalations and even defuse the situation, supposing you’ve got enough psychological leverage over the woman to open her up to reason, either in the form of her respect for you or her shame for her own unfairness – rare indeed.

Either she holds you in high enough esteem to want to be reassuringly calmed down or you’re merely a proxy, a safety valve for her anger as she can’t dish it out on the person she actually intends at that very moment.

Sometimes it’s really bottled up anger lashing out at the nearest person and you need only point this out to her.

However, it can just as well worsen the situation through being interpreted as a condescending tone in the blurry heat of the moment, just as happened with me, and you can only vouch for your own manly restraint not anyone else’s, especially a woman’s, especially dealing with a man, no matter what she thinks/feels of him. Though it may not occur to her at most times except this one moment of angst and strife, a slapfest cannot be confidently ruled out so keep an appropriate distance.

The most recent instance I’ve personally experienced such an odious spectacle just occurred last week.

I found myself reduced to staring in bewilderment at the woman in question for her enormously disproportionate response to my offence. Personally, I view the situation as me being ever so slightly in the wrong, however far from the objective, unobjectionable truth that may seem. And it so happened that this time the woman in cause was also the woman in charge. I do believe she had quite a deal of remnant tension left over from other issues of hers, personal or business related – whatever, and I unfortunately served as the handy safety release valve.

Thus my employment there promptly ended thereafter, today. First thing in the morning. Obviously consequential, wouldn’t you say?

You are well within your prerogatives to assume some idiotic course of action or idle inaction on my part.

And somewhat correct. As I said, I was, though marginally, in the wrong. Perfectly innocent indulgence in sedentarism on the job, whilst entrusted to be of no need at the particular time. Trivial.

The consequences ensued disproportionately and I don’t really deserve the opprobrium I’m still receiving as I propagated home the news. All for such a trifle offense as endeavouring to play CS:S in the mean hours of idleness, – apparently - safely tucked away in my little maintenance office. Can I help it that I do lasting work?

Where those angels when you need ‘em?

[edit]What is it with wordpress and break lines?

Women skippers.

Women in the navy.

Women captains of military vessels.

Is there no end? What is this world turning into?!

It’s as if some occult, insidious force is purposefully, systematically desecrating everything standing for something worth a damn in this world. You see this everywhere. If you’re willing to watch.

From the family values to naval traditions. In both secular and clerical halfs of social life. Nothing that represents law, morality, tradition, or established code of conduct is safe. Nothing is holy anymore. We may mock anything and everything it seems. We may trample on any tradition, break any law, disregard morality. Infractions of the law have become a study of cost effectiveness and probability.

I am ashamed. Ashamed of the men that would stand for such a thing as serving on a vessel captained by a woman. How could they have idly stood for the fouling of this millennial old maritime custom law? Probably the oldest, most respected and well ingrained tradition that is. How could they sit there and watch as their vessel is dishonoured, in time of peace no less?!

In the very least they should’ve outspoken their opposition to such audacious insult. How could the Admiralty stand for such a disgrace? How could a woman captain ever have been appointed? Collective insanity? Every man lost their spine on the crapper that day, was it?

As a last resort, they should’ve scuttled the ship to save both it and millenniums worth of naval tradition from disavowal. Didn’t they realise what a fetid precedent of desacralisation they were establishing?

Of the ‘c’ in cause, you ask? I reply, what good is there you could possibly expect of such? Merely utterly contemptible yet sadly predictable of women’s selfish devices, attention whoring and idiotic ambitions towards said end.

But I’m comforted by the knowledge that at least I’d've punched the bitch straight in the schnauzer as she set hoof on the plank, hopefully causing the awful hag to plummet straight in the water.

Fuck you, Captain Cunt!

Our navy as well hasn’t eluded the foul tarnishing.

„It’s a job like any otherâ€?, Monica Haisan – first and only female skipper of Romanian Navy vessel.

Strolled here while in search of intriguingly thoughtful intelligent discourse? Look further.

A mere thousand words must suffice today.

Ever perceptive Female, if you’ll look closely you’ll catch a glimpse of a caravan speeding by somewhere down there.

I shall use the meantime granted by this fortuitous reprieve to concoct a worthy monologue for your future delectation.

Regards.