MarkW

My eldest came back from school with 'barth' a few years ago. My wife and I trained him out of that PDQ! I think of myself as an honorary northerner because I live in Yorkshire, and I consider my mother to be a genuine northerner because she comes from Manchester. However, one of our Geordie staff refers to people from Manchester as 'soft southerners' and daren't say what she thinks of people from Stoke for fear of being slapped in the face with her P45. Mind you, I don't think you'd ever know I was from Stoke if you heard me, thank God - it's one of the most retarded accents on the planet. Even people from Stoke don't think I'm from Stoke: "Y'onner from rind ear, mar mate" as they used to say when I worked with them. Believe it or not there was a 'professional' Elvis impersonator in Stoke, but I can't imagine what the hell that would have sounded like - f*cking hilarious is my guess... American Trilogy (Live in Madison Square Garden version): Oh I wish I were, In the lander cotton, Ode times they onner forgotten, Luke away, luke away, luke away, Dixieland. Sing eat mar mate... forky nell, thar's on thar own son...

Don't take any shit from these f*cking swine, Rae. I hope there is a particularly hot corner of Hell reserved for those who go through life inflicting 'should of' instead of 'should have' on us. The same applies to anyone who thinks 'S' is pronounced 'Sh' ('shtraight', 'shtrange', or as it's Christmas how about 'Chrishtian') or who pronounces Brexit 'Bregzit'. An eternity with Beelzebub and all his hellish instruments of torture is the least they deserve.

I went to the same high school as Lemmy.

I wouldn't worry about it: most of the window-lickers on here are so illiterate they're probably still running their finger under 'If' and trying to sound it out one letter at a time.

Courtesy of my kids:

The Bronica looks nice - wouldn't mind one of those myself! Never had a TLR either, although I came close to having a dalliance with one after watching a Vivian Maier documentary. I do love my 645 though!

Is this another dig at my sesquipedalian tendencies?

F*ck you! And you haven't fixed my f*cking fire, you twat!

Prince Philip could do it: remember when he told that dithering photographer to "Just take the f*cking picture"?

Now some bast*rd has un-voted for me! I had four votes last time I looked and now I've only got three! What do you make of this @XTreme? We both know full well how things go tits up when you give these f*cking degenerates a vote: is there no filtering going on behind the scenes to help them out? I don't think half of them can read, so they're probably clicking @fastbob thinking it says MarkW. That's the only logical explanation I can come up with, because why the f*ck would you vote for someone who posts bike-related stuff on a bike forum? That's pretty much the least you can expect, right? You don't get any of that shit from me - I haven't even got a bike! I'm way out there at the edge, posting quality stuff you just don't get elsewhere: Christmas anal sex anecdotes, Swarfiga sex lube advice, amateur taxidermy, spontaneously combusting lab staff... I mean it - if these worthless bast*rds can't pull their fingers out and show their appreciation for having someone of my stamp on the manor there's going to be a right f*cking to do, I'll tell you. It'll be the flounce to end all flounces!

Ooh, digressions - I like those! An entreaty to be gracious and charitable sounds good, but it diverts us from my fundamental point which is that doing f*ck all to help someone in need still constitutes f*ck all even if it’s being done in a cassock. When I first saw that image I assumed I was looking at a brave chaplain dodging bullets in order to help a wounded soldier. But the reality, as told by the chaplain himself, puts an entirely different complexion on things. He didn’t feel that he was in any real danger, and whatever it was he was doing wasn’t of any genuine utility: at the most critical moment he shook himself loose of the soldiers grip and skedaddled, leaving him alone on the tarmac to await his death. I can imagine the padre saying “My child, I am here to offer you every assistance, short of actual help.”

You didn't abandon your man when you were in a position to help him. Padilla did. That's the difference. I imagine that your actions were motivated by your fundamental humanity, and not a little courage. You would be doing yourself a huge disservice if you suggested that they were in any way a consequence of your faith: actions motivated by the hope of reward or the fear of punishment can't make any claims to morality.

I guess it would perhaps have been a harsh judgement of the padre were it not for the fact that he said he felt perfectly safe to wander the streets giving last rites. If he felt that the Catholicism he shared with the approaching soldiers made him immune from attack, then whether he was under a misapprehension or not the question has to be asked: why did he abandon this man to his fate so readily? He could have done - or at the very least tried to do - something genuinely useful for this man, but he didn't. I often wondered what was going through that soldiers mind when he was in the padre's arms. If he was resigned to his fate and just wanted someone on hand to say the appropriate words when the time came then that is one thing: it's still not useful in any meaningful sense, but at least it would have been better than thinking he had come to save you and discovering that he hadn't as he dumped you on the ground and retreated at the first crack of gunfire. Anyway, these were meant to be photography-related posts rather than ones that stray off on a religious tangent (my fault - sorry). Someone always brings up charity though when you make any criticism of religious organisations, as though it in any way compensates for the harm they do. Hamas and Hezbollah aren't behind the door when it comes to pointing out all their charitable work either...

The photograph in question is called ‘Aid from the Padre’ and was taken by Hector Rondon during the El Porteñazo uprising in Venezuela in 1962. Rondon had been pinned down by sniper fire for almost an hour when he saw Navy chaplain Luis Manuel Padilla roaming the streets, giving the last rites to dead and dying soldiers. This image is of him supporting a wounded government soldier as he tries to get to his feet, and a few moments after it was taken the chaplain was driven back by gun fire, and the soldier was killed. As a young teenager what struck me about this photograph was the obvious and chilling fact that it captures someone’s last desperate moments, and that despite the effort with which the solider is clinging to the chaplain – and to life – a few seconds later it was all over; the noise which has drawn the chaplain’s attention is the sound of his imminent and violent death. The photograph won the World Press Photo of the Year award in 1962 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. Padilla was hailed as a hero – something he rejected with all the false modesty of those who believe they are on intimate terms with the creator of the universe. He later said that as a chaplain he knew that the Catholic ‘enemy’ soldiers would neither have shot him nor obeyed any order to do so, and that at no point did he fear for his life. That made me start to look at the photograph rather differently. I wondered why, if he felt so secure, the chaplain had done nothing to try to stop the murder of this man. Nobody ever knows how they will behave under such circumstances of course, but I hoped that if I had been in his position I would have interposed myself to try to stop it, to explain to the advancing enemy that his war was over, and there was nothing more to be gained by killing him. Whatever I may have done, I know myself well enough to know that there is no way I could abandon a fellow human being who was clinging to me like that in his most desperate moments. But Padilla dropped him like a brick the moment he heard the gunfire, scuttled back and left him to be cut to pieces by the bullets. To me the photograph became a metaphor for the false consolation of religion, and the immorality of anyone who could believe that when someone needs genuine help and you are in a position to provide it, that meaningless magic incantations provide any sort of substitute for the most basic aspects of our humanity.

YESTERDAY EVENING I WAS AHEAD IN THE POLLS, BUT OVERNIGHT EXTRA VOTES HAVE BEEN FOUND FOR @fastbob! ONLY FOUR MEMBERS HAVE VOTED FOR ME OUT OF 6,653? GET REAL!!! I HAVE MANY TREMENDOUS, BEAUTIFUL MESSAGES FROM THOUSANDS OF MEMBERS WHO SAY THEY VOTED FOR ME, BUT THEIR VOTES HAVEN’T BEEN COUNTED. SO MUCH CORRUPTION AT THE FAILING MOTORBIKE FORUM. THEY ARE GAMMONS AND PERVERTS. SOME, I ASSUME, ARE GOOD PEOPLE, BUT MOST OF THEM ARE BAD HOMBRES. THIS PHONY POLL IS DESIGNED TO MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A LOSER WHEN I HAVE ALREADY WON BIG LEAGUE!!! I AM WINNING TWICE – I AM ALSO WINNING TOTY AND I’M NOT EVEN ON THE BALLOT. NOBODY WINS AS MUCH AS I DO, BELIEVE ME. NOBODY HAS EVER WON ANYTHING TWICE – MANY PEOPLE TELL ME IT’S LIKE A KIND OF MIRACLE. STOP THE STEAL AND CONTRIBUTE TO MY OFFICIAL ‘ELECTION DEFENCE FUND’. MY PRESS SECRETARY IS NOW GOING TO SAY A FEW WORDS…

If he went for a higher class of hooker they'd probably bring their own charlie...

Hmm… Picking my top five photography books won’t be easy, and most of the ones in the shortlist are very unlikely to have much mass appeal! In the mid-1980s I bought a photography book as a Christmas present for my father, and one of the images in it just grabbed and held my attention the moment I saw it. It was pretty much the first time I had properly understood the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words, and at that moment I decided I was going to be a war photographer. I wanted to take pictures that had that sort of impact, and that had something genuinely profound to say about the truly appalling ways humans treat each other. Consequently my book collection is rather heavily weighted towards conflict photography, which by its very nature is disturbing and unsettling - these are definitely not coffee table books! That first hard-hitting photograph eventually came to symbolise something else entirely for me when I researched the background a bit more, and of course started to look at it with the eyes of an adult rather than those of a child. And ultimately I managed to avoid the temptations of heroism, and have spent most of my life in the comparative safety of the lab, fiddling around with anthrax and other such delights. Anyway – neither here nor there. Let’s peruse the less gruesome offerings and see what we can come up with, starting with my most recent acquisition: Gregory Heisler: 50 Portraits I’ve really enjoyed this book. There are some fabulous images here, with his portraits of O.J. Simpson and Yasser Arafat standing as two of the most intriguing to me. Each portrait is accompanied by a description of the session itself and how he approached his subject, together with notes on the techniques he used to get the finished picture. I have been a medium format guy for years but this book has really given me the inspiration to have a go at large format for portraits, so the New Year is almost certain to see our house becoming even more cluttered with camera shit. My wife is thrilled. Saul Leiter: Early Colour The companion book ‘Early Black and White’ is also very good, as is the short documentary film ‘In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter’ which is well worth a watch. He was a very modest man with an incredible eye for composition. Fred Herzog: Modern Colour I have a real soft spot for 1950s and 60s Kodachrome - it’s got a quality that I love. Unfortunately it went the way of many emulsions, falling victim to the leg-jiggling generation’s need for talent-free instant gratification, and as K-14 processing simply can’t compete with the mobile phone when it comes to uploading their latest happy-slapping atrocity to social media it was finally discontinued about ten years ago. This book has some lovely images; not conventionally beautiful perhaps, but they really appeal to my eye. Philip Davies: Panoramas of Lost London (Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change 1870-1945) You always have to be careful with books of very old photographs. One of the few things the pompous self-loathing lesbian pseudo-intellectual Susan Sontag had to say on photography that was even remotely worth reading was that the passage of time eventually makes every photograph interesting: even the most boring and amateurish snapshot taken today will be an interesting artefact in 2120 merely because it shows what life was like 100 years ago. There’s always a danger with such books that the actual images themselves are interesting only for this fact. But this is an exception. It’s a large book of large prints, and many of them are so detailed and capture so much activity that you can spend hours with a magnifying glass, endlessly discovering new things. Horst Faas & Tim Page: Requiem OK, so this is a book on war photography, but it’s an important one in my humble opinion. It is a compilation of photographs from the war in Vietnam and Indochina, taken by the photographers who didn’t make it back. Many of the greats are in there - Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Dickey Chapelle, Gilles Caron, and of course Robert Capa – all in the thick of the action at the front line, and armed with nothing more than a Nikon F and a few rolls of Tri-X. Many of these photographers worked together fairly closely, and their various fates were often intertwined. There’s a shot of Dickey Chapelle receiving the last rites, taken by Henri Huet just after the guy in front of her tripped a boobytrap. Huet was killed a few years later along with Larry Burrows when their helicopter was shot down over Laos. It’s not a book for the faint hearted, but it’s a fascinating one. So that’s my top five (as of today, at any rate: ask me again next week and I’ll probably have changed my mind). Anyone else got any recommendations? I’m always looking for new stuff to add to the collection!

There's really no excuse for this sort of behaviour, because the solution is simple enough: "Yes Operator, there are two of them. It's not the fact that they're currently stealing my bike that concerns me, it's the fact that neither of them are wearing face masks and I don't know if they're in the same support bubble. And you should hear the dreadful things they are saying about non-binary people using ladies toilets..." (Distant sound of several rapidly approaching sirens)

The thing that always strikes me about the doorstep proselytizers is that they are invariably very sketchy on all of the details about the afterlife except for the ones that reinforce their own prejudices. They can't tell you the first thing about what Heaven is like or what there is to do when you get there, but they do know that homosexuals can't get in. Atheists don't usually seem to be too welcome either, although I have often found more flexibility on this issue than on dicky up the chuff: after all, we might simply have been born too stupid to see the light. But then God does seem inordinately preoccupied with our genitalia and what we get up to with them, with whom and in what positions. Strange bloke.

Ooh, I dunno - check this out: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/pineapple_upside-down_22072 You might want to have a paramedic on hand when you eat it - they'll be able to hear your left ventricle slamming shut as you swallow the first mouthful.

Gazco Studio One. Come on @Bender - I've got a MOTY nomination to award here!

The question here today is 'Why does the gas fire work when the glass front is open but not when it's closed?' So far this question has baffled a gas engineer who is now on his fourth visit, his boss who has come with him today to help out, and the technical support folks at Gazco. The obvious explanation was that the flu was blocked, starving the fire of oxygen when the glass is closed, but the flu is clear and a spillage test nearly sucked the match out of his hand. Over previous visits every single component of the fire has been replaced, and it still doesn't work. They've been here since lunchtime today, and at the moment they're talking to an exasperated Gazco technician on the phone who's at his wits end!

That's an oxymoron.