Author Archive

“…So you admit that you are a dreamer?”

On reflection perhaps this may be a typical reason why some prospective employers simply do not get back to me regarding positions that I feel that I am more than capable of fulfilling.

Yes I am an individual who thinks far beyond what most individuals normally would. A regular individual concerns him or herself with how to be a success in life. By success one would normally refer to getting a 40-hour job, a cool car, a wife (or husband), have kids, make lots of money, etc.

“I suppose its just the way you are…”

Hmm. I appreciate that some people might want to make excuses for what they may perceive as a flaw within myself, but unless I am hopping to and from hospital for tests or surgery, or otherwise severely hampered by circumstances beyond my control then I am not inclined to make excuses for myself.

This is particularly true if I believe that the conceptions upon which they are based are false. I am firmly of the belief that dreamers are not born so but develop to be such. I believe that the dreamer is close of kin to the creator – the person who manifests through art and music and craft and science.

Anybody can be a dreamer.

Dreamers are those who do not necessarily extrapolate from the real to discover that that which is presumed fictional can be achieved, but rather they can begin from the fictional and work with and beyond the accepted knowns to add the non to fiction.

Dreamers are far from useless and it is a commonly-held misconception that we are. It is why it is suggested that we call ourselves ‘visionaries’. A visionary is a person who is close of kin to a dreamer but has a deeper and narrower field of view, focusing upon a single ambition to the exclusion of trivialities that fall by the side. Many self-proclaimed visionaries are in fact closer related to dreamers as they lack the single-mindedness required.

We dreamers can be found in many fields of employment and, sometimes, we leave our imprint. We question the boundaries of the possible, we innovate and have made possible some of the most important as well as the most whimsical contributions that developed societies have enjoyed.

Yes I am a dreamer. Would you like to soar?

In recent weeks, I decided that it would be as good a time as any to work on shedding some kilos. It did take some encouragement from various quarters but I decided to give it a whirl – my way. I would not exactly call myself obese, I consider myself rather proportionate, thank you very much; however I do recognize that I would look and feel a lot better if I were to shed some ballast.

So I took a step back and wondered what could be adjusted. I had a very good idea of what dietary habits were worst hurting my overall chances. My excess intake of bread and cheese products would rank highest, followed closely by my non-aversion to the regular midnight meal. When you lack personal time management goals and commitments, the hands on the clock and the date on the calendar cease to hold much meaning.

Well I made a number of changes but by far one of the most pleasant changes was the agreement to try out light yoghurt. In doing so I was skeptical, expecting a few experiences of forcing down a bitter sour sweet tasting mulch with bits in it, and then moving on to higher calorie foreign imports.

I was expecting Strawberry, lemon or Kiwi and fruit mix. What I actually had looked nothing like a traditional Benna yoghurt other than the cup format. The look had completely changed and the changes weren’t just cosmetic. New flavors popped up. Banana, apple pie, lemon tart, vanilla light; they seemed alien to me and even as I scraped off that layer of yoghurt that generally encrusts the tin foil lid I had a pretty good feeling that I was in for a pleasant surprise.

And I was.

The flavor of the light yoghurt was ‘Apple Pie’ and moments into the first teaspoon I understod why. While it lacked the crunch of apple the yoghurt had an ever so slightly grainy yet smooth biscuit texture to it and the after-taste of apple pie was certainly in there. Moreover the yoghurt lacked the bitterness of old times that I had grown to associate it with. With that small tub I understood what yogurt was ‘supposed’ to be like and it was almost humbling that it all went down for roughly fifty calories. Not bad for live bacteria.

So sure, keep it up Benna, and I do hope you will get around to improving the milk carton packaging for as far as the opening is concerned. Now if you’ll excuse me I have an appointment with some vanilla!

Sometimes in spite of one’s best efforts we come to a point where we are simply taken down by the common cold. I could not tell you if it were the regular or swine variant and neither would I be inclined to care, considering that there is little to set the two apart in lethality and also considering that the swine variant was manufactured and hyped in a diabolical money making spin.

Periods of down-time are best spent indoors, away from society, typing away at a keyboard with a cat slumbering beside you, and copious amounts of soft paper to expel into.

It has produced a bit of a dilemma, as I tend to pay ear to old wives tales on such matters. It is said that you need to feed a cold, and feeding myself would have been problematic from the standpoint of my supposed diet.

A container of mostly fresh chili peppers provided the answer. Simply rinse, cut off the stem section, snip the tip, slice down the middle and scoop out any and all seeds.

Chop it up very finely and add to a mix of scrambled egg before popping it into the microwave. The dairy elements added to the egg mix helps to take the edge off the chili and it turns out rather pleasant. It is just as well that a red chili is about four times as rich in vitamin C as a typical orange.

Avoiding dairy products directly before sleep is also something that I normally believe in, and yet my first clue that I had a cold coming on was within the throat. I guess there are no absolute methods of prevention.

And now here I am typing away, a dysfunctional voice and an annoying tingling, almost ticklish sensation in my lungs. Looks like I need to adjust my medication.

If you have too many mouths to feed and too little food then somebody is going to starve. It is an unpleasant thought but it is also common sense.

At the same time it is presently thought that the proper management of land resources would easily feed the World’s populations and in my view this is take our eyes off the ball. The world human population is growing and it is only a matter of time before the natural Earth is unable to sustain those increasing mouths.

Even if we could sustain steadily growing populations why on Earth would we? The World’s resources are finite and all we would achieve with a maxed-out population would be a miserable existence of global scarcity where there are no rich and poor nations because we would all be poor with a very tiny elite running the show. Until, that is, the masses below usurp them in protest and ruin the delicate balance in a fashion not too dissimilar to when the Africans kicked the British out and ransacked the food producing resources.

By the time such events come to pass the world populations would be living in such destitute poverty that getting their hands on the day’s ration would be all that would be important to them. Proper educational systems would falter and degenerate. Most people would be out of work on welfare rations and a few would thank their lucky stars that they have work and can watch television reports of grown men batting balls around a patch of grassy land unnaturally stored within an oversized basement.

The intelligence of individuals would diminish from generation to generation, ever more concerned with claiming food, stealing and reproducing in secret as archaic but necessary bans on child-bearing are put in force by a scanty overbearing governing structure struggling to retain control, choking upon the fruits of predecessors’ corruption.

Diseases would run rampant and claim hundreds of thousands of lives per epidemic. So regular would these be that the few remaining astute minds might begin to suspect a deliberate human origin to them. However it would be in vain as new citizens are born at a faster rate than the population can be sabotaged.

This is the future that we all are heading to if we do not begin to take the issue of over population seriously now rather than sooner. It has happened before around the Mediterranean in ages gone past. There is no reason why it cannot happen again and the writing is on the wall with species being hunted close to extinction to satisfy our wants for food.

Yes this is a pessimistic interpretation of our future prospects. Do we want to learn too little too late? Do you?

For the past few days I’ve been sparing moments to think about personal mobility. As an individual of practically no engineering background this has unfortunately not been quite as easy a process as I had hoped. In fact as of writing it remains at the conceptual stage, as may be seen.

Yes I have set my sights upon the prospect of designing and perhaps constructing a four-wheeled personal-scale mode of transport. I remain highly skeptical of my odds of completion – but hey at least it is something worth trying for.

I’ve decided to take a bit of a systems analysis approach to the project starting from the conceptual design phase and working my way back to defining the problem. That tends to be the flow of things when you respond to what you perceive as a nagging want or need.

So the problem that I seek to solve is that of getting myself from point A to point B in as efficient, convenient, practical and economical a fashion as possible. Oh yes. And I would like the resulting vehicle to be very light, compactable and thus portable.

Yes, portable. A vehicle that can stop a driver outside a workplace, be folded up in under a minute and carried indoors in a zip-bag. At this early stage I know that a lot of design questions may need revisiting.

I would say that it doesn’t take awfully much to annoy me. As somewhat of a perfectionist I take a moody disposition towards flaws and inconveniences, particularly where the ingredient of unfairness or incompetence is tossed in.

While I would say that I am one of my own harshest critics, I would also say that collective entities such as institutions bear a significant degree of the brunt of my scathing perspective also.

It was no different this morning as I negotiated the mish-mesh of streets in the heart of Paceville. Even though I’ve done it hundreds of times before, the disappointment and eventual frustration of being unable to find a legal parking space is a special kind of feeling that often tests the boundaries of that which I would call rage.

Circling in and out and about and in again, multiple passes, varying route, extending my search area further and further outwards as the second hand ticks down the minutes to the hour of appointment. All being told it took around fifty minutes to finally settle for a parking space fifteen minutes walk away from the intended destination. The brisk walk down and up the valley slopes long choked by urbanization was, by comparison, a relief.

It turned out to be worth my while however as even though I did arrive minutes late that which followed was for the most part a positive experience. Perhaps the end of an era of (official) idleness is upon me.

This would conclude this chapter of seeking that has spanned many months. While I would have said that I am frankly surprised that the search was not concluded long earlier, I cannot truly say that I am. After all, the national unemployment figures were up 2,597 persons to a total of 7,680 persons unemployed (link).

In the weeks prior to my post two evenings ago I wasn’t exactly feeling very inspired. I feared that I had lost my touch and this is one of the reasons that it took me so long to get back in the game. I have a tiny secret that I should probably share with you all.

I have little idea exactly what I am going to be blogging about.

That did actually bother me a very short while ago, but I have decided to place some trust in my tendency ‘not’ to run out of ideas, or things to say.

A former reader did ask me whether I would be writing about politics this time around. I may write about politics but it is not my intention to let politics rule my writings.

I will take things one day at a time.

In the meantime my thoughts are drifting to a field that I last recall interesting me some nine years ago – and that field is cycle design. No, I do not speak of the gasoline or even the two wheeled types that dominate the western markets. I am more interested in working on a four wheeled variant powered by foot and volt.

Unsurprisingly I have already received a rather negative response but adversity is something that I have come to expect in fields unorthodox or novel. I have a few ideas and while it is rare that I see them run the gauntlet from fantasy to realization, you just never know.

No I won’t be placing any bets.