Browser issues.

For years I was a Firefox man. But something occurred a few years ago and it became very clunky, and frankly just a tad weird.
Now I've found this to occur with all other browsers after a while. Opera was good for a while there, but it went off the wall. Then awhile back I moved to Googles Chrome and that seemed to do the job adequately.
Then a few weeks back I noticed that my Facebook Ad feed was showing me content that wasn't dealt with on Facebook leading me to wonder if Chrome was aiding Facebook to target my general searches.
Now I'm well aware that facebook uses their algorithms to target Ad's to those using it, and I'm generally fine with that. Where I'm not fine is with them blundering through my system with the goal of selling me to some local business. 

Rose window of IMMA

The figures in the middle of the window are larger than life sized. Just to give an idea of the scale of the thing.

A classic colonnade at IMMA

 I prefer the B&W.

A Symposium, and a visit to a lovely exhibition

I think the best portraitist in the last 80 years was Lucian Freud. And I think he is so important to the Art world that he outshines his grandfather, Sigmund.
He had a very interesting live. Born in '23 in Berlin and moved to UK in '32 just as the hell inflicted on his co-religionists by the Nazis  was about to start.
The first major art exhibition was just before the end of the WW2 and he never really looked back.

I encountered his work quite some time ago, and it was at the time he was being vilified for presenting what was called fat ugly women. But I felt that his work showed the real, in those people, not just the plastic visage they awarded to the public. There is a bluntness to these works, but without coarseness. To give an idea. Today I saw an eye formed with three strokes of a brush, and another with four. Three strokes and three different colours, side by side, and one eye formed. None of your shading, and forming. None of the straight clean line. Nope, just the brush and the paint.

With the symposium I was hoping for something else. It was titled The Artist and the State. But I took it more to mean the Irish State but it really meant the relationship with how Palestinian, and Aboriginal in Australia, reacted to the Israeli and Federal Oz state and how it reacted to them. Some of it quite quite scary truth be told.

All in all there was about 120 people at the event. More or less filling the great chamber of the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham (IMMA).

This was in front of the reception area. I don't know what or who it is, but I really find it amusing. You see it could be a play on Irish mythology's connection to the Hare, or it could had a Beatrix Potter Brer Rabbit (Brother), or even a Star Wars connection with a I cannot remember who it is but there's a clan of them in there someplace.

Slievenamon today.

 This is a crop of the top one using the golden ratio.

Very unusual New England autumnal colour in Ireland.

Kinda funny

Well, thank God.

It was 17 degrees centigrade here in Tipperary today, and we are mid way through November. 63F. Now 17C isn't that much to write home about in most places in the world, but here it's a pretty good summer's day, if it stayed dry.
But the really good thing is we have a bunch of climate deniers who spend most of their lives in AC leading the US of old A.
These last eight years have been hard. You couldn't really say anything and you ended up using your middle finger crosswise on the furrows on your brow.
Let's face it. Things are getting warmer, and in Ireland frankly we're good viz the sea levels rising. And if we had a bit of heat in the summer we'd be delighted. We would really like to get used to sunburn. But the downside would be all the little gobshites that are off pestering the Spanish would return.
Joking aside. If the governments were really bothered about climate change they would have sponsored the installation of solar panels and local power generation via wind. And what did they do. They put a Tax on us to give to financiers, so they could add an extra 20% on our fuel bills.

But these coming years will be fun I think. And really however you cut it that Gold Joker will bother people outside of the US way more than those inside. Still, my sympathy to those that were bereft by the loss by Clinton.

Oh, a P.S, You have to wonder if the head of the federal police nationale in France came out and played politics in the days before an Poll would now not be sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial, nevermind still sitting behind his desk.     

Tilt-shift

Leonard Norman Cohen, CC GOQ (21 September 1934 – 7 November 2016)

Leonard Norman Cohen. 
Metaphysician,
Poet, 
Writer, 
Singer and Human, 
died on the 7th 

WowZA.

I got up about 4 am just before California tendered its vote having watched until about 1:30. To say I was shocked would be wrong. But I was somewhat surprised at the States that went Red.
I guessed Pennsylvania, Indiana and Michigan would go Red. But I thought Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin would go Blue.

I will say this. It will take a miracle for both parties to get what has occurred here. They blame thick white and poor men on one side. While the other sees the winning by default of an outsider that was pilloried by the grandees of the Republicans as a good win.  

And they're off.

I usually have a good deal of fun with the US presidential election. But this time, no. To my way of thinking Sanders was the only one that wasn't buried in a version of the past, or a conservatism that only depended upon where you took as the starting point. And it seemed from this distance that Sanders was ventilating an idea for a future that took into account those that are being marginalised with the current lot and with answers that reflect something that didn't contain the poison of fascism.

   

One thing !

I have gotten to the point where I just don't care who wins the US Whitehouse. But the one thing that's hacking me off is that the world will be inflicted with this same horseshit in two years time when the whole drama filled circus begins all over again. Gaagh  

A sunset

Traffic

I really like what the lense leaves does to street lamps on a long exposure.

In the moment and a few new ones

No photoshop. Acetate gels over the flash.

Now this is a photoshopped edit.