Pig Sty Avenue

For your comment on the post which mentioned those bastards who manage Kodak . It's always good to get a real life bit of solidarity. I thought I'd see what the bastards were up to, and got this on google news, which is a marvellous example of the horror of globalized capitalist discourse. Which chimed in with some thinking and reading I'm doing as the Mod5 assignment undergoes some last minute reorientation. In particular, I encountered from Gray (2002) (you can't get the article online, here are articles that cite it). And there I came across the PARSNIP concept, which really I should have read about before. It's the ELT publishers rough and ready guide to what can't go into commercial texts: no Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex, Narcotics, -Isms or Pork. What else is there? Gray, J. (2002). The global coursebook in English language teaching. In D. Block & D. Cameron (Eds.), Globalization and language teaching (pp. 151-167). New York: Routledge.

I'd forgotten about Voigtlanders. And I was taking an interest back in July . I really loved using that Kodak 66 , and only got rid of it in protest against Kodak's current business practices . Folders are great fun. A lot depends on the exact nature of the enlarger I'm getting from Number 1 daughter. Can it do 6x6 or even 6x9? We shall see...

I know it's daft. My Kodak 66 was made in the early 60s, and it's a very nice camera, from a simpler age. But Kodak is an avowed friedmanite greed beast now , and the name makes my hackles rise. Or maybe it's not so daft. The subtext of getting away from a DSLR and into old Russian rangefinders and odd cameras that you'll find on eBay or in a charity shop is an anti-capitalist one. You buy a bottom of the range DSLR and you're in danger of being sucked in. I was, nearly: fantasizing about getting something reassuringly expensive . There'll always be something in development by The Company, more megapixels, more functions... And you've paid good money for the glass you can use, so they've got you by the pocket, perhaps for life. But you buy an old camera, and the capitalist has been and gone, he's not making anything out of this one. (Well, paypal make a buck or two. And if you buy it in a charity shop, you're fueling the NGO gravy-trai...

Put into the same tank as a roll of Kodak [spits] , any self-respecting roll of Ilford is going to self-destruct. Obviously .

I planned to develop a roll of film this evening, Kodak Tmax 100, ironically . But I also wanted to roast a chicken. A neighbour at The Bungalows has gone on holiday and left her kitten in collective care. Our IT bloke shouldered most of the responsibility, but the kitten wanted nothing to do with him once it smelt the roasting chicken, and decided my place was the place to be... I tried showing it the door but it set up such a racket, that I had to let it in. So that was my siesta postponed. It was like having a child about the place: amusing but hard work. I hadn't realised there was so many loose things about the place for a small cat to chase. And then it sat on my lap and sucked at my tee shirt. Anyway, once the chicken was out of the oven it went into overdrive meowing until I gave it some, whereupon it ate only the white meat and promptly buggered off, no thankyous, no kiss-my-arse, nothing. That's a cat for you. Meanwhile, I put my bottles of developer and fix...

The choice and advice can seem bewildering. But it's made simpler now that Kodak have ruled themselves out of my list of choices . Sack a load of people, accumulate a huge pile of cash, and then announce price increases? Fuck off.