Time Ticks

Posted on September 9, 2018 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blog, Blogging, Gravity, Space, Thinking, Time, Universe, WritingLeave a comment

PicsArt_1536439451689 It does! I started writing this over 12 hours ago but then the battery on my tablet went flat so I had to wait until now .

Anyway, time does tick by, sometimes I know exactly when the alarm is going to go off, and it does. I can wake up a second before the alarm clock goes off….nothing is clicking or whirring or spinning to give me a cue or a clue. Same with the alarm on our oven, last night I got up from my chair to check it just before it went off.

One explanation is the brain has tiny cells beating regularly giving us a sense of time. There are also electric nodes in your heart that regulate your heartbeat, and your breathing is a regular rhythm allowing you to get just the right amount of air.

But what is time, why do we feel times arrow? Why does a cup fall and then break as it hits the floor? Why isn’t it on the floor then bouncing back up onto the table, reforming from smashed to solid in a second? There is something called entropy, everything breaks down over time. Everything tends towards chaos. The Universe is cooling, as space expands. Astrophysicists speak of the heat death of the universe as everything spreads out and cools towards absolute zero. Galaxies are flying away from each other. If things continue, in many billions or trillions of years, we would have completely black skies, no stars in sight. Our Sun will have cooled to a husk of burnt matter and all the other Stars will fly off away for us. There is something called red shift, as galaxies move away their light shifts towards the red end of the spectrum, the larger the red shift the faster they are moving. There are theories about things called dark energy and dark matter that try to explain this, but I wouldn’t know where to start with that aspect of space time.

Time ticks for everything, although time may not actually exist, it might just be our way of measuring the passing of things happening, but not understanding the universe. But if it is real there may be an advantage of time. The end of the universe or more likely its continuous, infinite existence, will not happen in our time. But a long long long time in the future.

Looking out

Posted on September 8, 2018 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Creative writing, Digital doodle, Drawing on photo, Very short story, Writing2 Comments

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The eye peeps out, looking into the street, one clear square of glass, the rest opaque, hiding the room beyond.

A glimpse of an eye, now gone. The rusting bars of the window still hold firm grip of the blackened glass. No splits or cracks, just that small patch where once there was..a blue eye? Almost missed, only glanced at.

Do I knock on the door next to the window? Or ignore it and walk by. The dilemma is not knowing which to choose. Who (or what ) is in there? It could be a homeless person, a drunk, a security guard. I am alone, walking down an old alley way. No, I dare not chance knocking, I don’t know what the outcome might be. I might come back in daylight. I leave the window and eye behind, walking quickly….

But steps are following me……..

Love, locked shut

Posted on September 7, 2018 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Love, Melancholy, Photography, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

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You shackled my heart,

Love, locked shut,

You closed the gate and threw away the key.

Your love rusted away,

Stopping the blood,

Iron filings instead of red corpuscles…

Bitter cold rain blended with tears,

No love here,

No more love, no more light,

Fastened in and imprisoned,

The dove turned to stone.

Take flight through one tiny gap.

Find new love,

Unbarred.

When cats stare….

Posted on September 7, 2018 Posted in Cat, UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Cat, Photos, Presence, Spooky, Stare6 Comments

Late at night, my cat suddenly stares into the other room, somehow aware of something in there. I look but there is nothing but darkness, no sound, no movement, no figure, nothing except an old armchair.

It doesn’t happen often, but I feel sure my cat is seeing something in another realm that we cannot see. Cats eyes are so accurate, catch every ray of light, every glimmer or speck of movement. Reflecting them back in the dark as shining pools of mother of pearl, glimmering, unblinking.

What does he see? A previous presence? A future me? A distant spectre made visible by random fluctuations in the aether?

Nothing happens, he continues to stare for a few moments more then relaxes and commences washing his paws.

Youdraw pictures

Posted on September 6, 2018 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Black and white, Blogging, Design, Drawing, Pictures, Website, Work, YoudrawLeave a comment

Imagine a website where you can only draw in a small oblong in portrait mode. Imagine you only have a thick and thin black pen and a thick and thin white eraser. Then imagine drawing complicated images with only these tools.

That’s Youdraw, I don’t go on it anymore because my old computer is defunct and my tablet does not let me use a proper stylus pen.

The images above are my drawings, taken from the site and then changed in Photoshop so that I could colour them.

I found it captivating to be able to use the site to draw so many ideas. The shape was better suited to portraiture, but you could fit landscapes in, abstract ideas, botanical images, anything black and white. Some of the artists there could draw incredibly detailed pictures, one person at least built up a huge interconnected picture of 100 images, maybe more.

If you go and have a look at Youdraw.com you can see what is there now. I’m not sure if its still taking images. The plan was to collect 500,000 drawings to publicise the population explosion on Earth.

Hopefully I will go back and draw there again one day.

Surreal canal

Posted on September 5, 2018 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Canal, Design, Filters, Life, Photography, Pottery, Staffordshire, Stoke-on trent, Surreal, WarehouseLeave a comment

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Using the Layout app from Instagram, I created this surreal image using a photo of a local canal with a strange thin building projecting upwards from what appears to be a circular or oval pool, the water was so still it had a lovely reflection on it, and this has added to the final picture.

The building is the edge of an old, derelict, warehouse that stands like a cliff face next to the canal, in the past ware from the pottery would have been transported from the pottery, south and east to the Midlands or north and west to the coast at Liverpool or up to Manchester and beyond. In fact Stoke-on-Trent lies at the heart of the canal system, and was built around the coal, clay and water of this area. Manufacturing of pottery, steel making and coal mining was on a massive scale here. Industrial archaeology will reveal the landscape as an amazing historical treasure trove of creativity. Some of the buildings were lost to demolition and decay, many bottle ovens have gone. The rest have protection orders on them, but are not necessarily being maintained. Warehouses and factories are crumbling. It is sad that history is being lost.

Angel painting

Posted on September 4, 2018September 4, 2018 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Acrylic on canvas, Angel, Art, Blogging, Film, PaintingLeave a comment

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I don’t remember painting this but I have found a post on Facebook where a friend thanks me for it.

I’m glad I did it and I think I must have needed to paint it at the time although I’m not a religious person, but the idea of having a guardian angel does appeal. I’m not sure why I did a rainbow halo on it? I had an angel mirror on the wall in the bedroom for years so this seems really familiar in a dream like way.

I think I’m influenced by a James Stewart film with a character called Clarence, he is an Angel in the film. I can’t remember the name of the movie but James Stewart plays a banker who had been framed by a rich land owner for taking money when it was actually a total mistake. Stewart decides to kill himself and Clarence saves him only to be told by Stewart that he wished he had never been born. There follows a scene where Clarence shows him what the world would be like without him…..I won’t spoil this with the ending in case you have never seen it.

Anyway sometimes we all need an angel even if it is only imagined.

P.S. just remembered the film was called “its a wonderful life”.

summer flavours

Posted on September 3, 2018 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Art, Blogging, Flowers, Fruit, Life, Poetry, Summer, WritingLeave a comment

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Summer and its flavours,

Crisp and crunchy flowers,

Take us through the hours,

of summer bright and light.

Hot and tasty bowers,

Nasturtium flowers are sour,

But sweet plums ripen here

In the shining Sun.

Before the ripe tomatoes,

Before the mellow mists,

Before the damp of Autumn,

Summer gives its gifts.

Sunshine and wild showers

Heat for many hours

Summer cooks its fruit,

Raspberries and pears.

Oranges and almonds

Appear on our tables

Strawberries of fable

Melt with mint and cream.

Plums and pomegranates

Begonias and daisies,

Lobelia and lemons,

Summer coloured sweet.

Now come the dark days,

Shorter every hour

Equinox is coming

Day will turn to night.

Never lose the summer

Keep it in your mind.

Smell and taste its wonders

Soon to burst again.

I love the summer,

I love the light,

I hate the winter,

Brings on dark and night.

Spaceweather

Posted on September 3, 2018September 3, 2018 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Astronomy, Aurora, Blogging, Solar flares, Space weatherLeave a comment

I follow a website called http://spaceweather.com and I just read about a massive solar flare 159 years ago called the Carrington event. The flare caused a huge Coronal Mass Ejection of such force that it caused telegraph stations to be put out of action including telegraph paper catching fire. This all happened in the Victorian era, when electrical gadgets were very primitive.

Reading further apparently these events happen around every 100 years so we are overdue another one, the effect of which could be very serious for our modern electronic world.

There is lots of other information there if you are a nerd like me, including near earth objects that come close to earth (measured in multiples and fractions of the distance between us and the moon), information about comets and meteor showers.

Mallaband-Brown

Tag: Blogging