USA killing the World

Americans should know that the rest of the world knows Nigeria and Venezuela, and Trump and his nazi henchmen are going to be charged for murder. There are now B-52 bombers flying over Venezuela, presumably with intent to blowup fisherman and banana growers. These American pilots are slimeballs and need to be charged for war crimes. Humanity is a disgrace.

The End of Social Media

I no longer receive social media as it is undated and wholly unreliable, including UK and USA press, Facebook, YouTube etc. On the positive side, it shows the billionaires are not going to survive with this drivel. I've also stopped Amazon. Bollocks to all of them.

Al Jazeera News

Thank you so much for providing balanced news in the face of US and UK propaganda and the tide of the weak kneed nazi West. Let us hope we survive it.

Hypersonic Missiles v. Aircraft Carriers

You do have to be foolish to believe an Aircraft Carrier can survive a hypersonic missle. I really do wonder why Iran didn't nail USS Last Century and all its ridiculuous F-35s. Are all Americans and British people stupid and nazi? It is not a great strength.

Floating on a Boat: battery power

People who know about battery power on a boat will tell you the pinnacle of performace is floating the battery charge as often as possible. Often this advice comes from an armchair. It is easy in a marina with shore power but it takes a lot of generated power. For me, for example, everytime the vessel is under main engine, the opportunity to achieve float is immediately afterwards. The alternator is 63Ah, which is twice as much as the Victron charger from the generator. 

For AGM batteries, the charging process is: bulk charging starts at current battery charge state and goes until about 26.5v, absorption goes from 26.5v to 28.4v or so and then the elusive float is when this number suddenly diminishes to around 26.5v. When you switch off the charging, the operating voltage will fall to around 25.6v. The result is 26v is generally considered to be fully charged for AGMs. Most good deep discharge AGMs can go down to 80% depth of discharge (DOD), which is 22 volts. I would not do this. The furtherest DOD I go to is 90%, 24v, which many unusefully consider to be 50% discharged (NOT DOD). Even that is low for me, because the big power consumers of battery power in boats are refrigeration and freezers, which are not always very efficient, and that suddenly takes the volts down below 23.5v, not even considering bilge pumps. I try to maintain a charge of 95 per cent.

Dominica, Portsmouth and Roseau

We anchored in Portsmouth in the North and Mėro halfway down and moored south of Roseau.

My wife thinks it is great. Nothing much happens in Portsmouth; we visited a small waterfall and swam in its pool, had an unnotable and slow lunch before trekking across orange clay and visiting a whimsical chocolate factory. The anchor held. There were a few pubs with dull conversations and advice on nothing much in particular. The highlight is Alexis, the boatman, ch16, for services. The bread was not a highlight either, nor was the jazz festival.

Less happened in Mėro and St. Joseph. There was only one functioning pub with nobody in it where my wife and Will enjoyed their dialogue with the old paint. Good holding in sand and plenty of people in the streets to talk to. Nowhere to eat.

Roseau was more interesting. We ended up with our anchor firmly tied to a steel wreck in Pringle bay before the coastguard kindly fleeced us to successfully lift it. Apparently this work is rarer but more interesting than taking ropes off propellers but less interesting than the even scarcer catching traffickers of various types. We were free by 1600hrs but took two hours to wrestle sufficient cash out of rare reluctant ATMs to pay.

An hour later we were moored by Sea Cat, ch16, at the Anchorage Hotel's moorings,  to be molested by the neighbouring power boat that  we powered off at 2100hrs, with millimeters to spare, requiring subsequent watches all night and moving to another mooring the next day.

Shopping in Roseau is limited, perpetually marred by lack of cash from under powered ATMs. Nature is difficult to monetise to buy your car. Everyone has the same leaves with no market. The most impressive feature for me was the Trafalgar Falls. They are very difficult to photograph, together. There is also at least one hot stream. You'll have to find it. 

It is also reported that geothermal power is going to replace the remaining diesel power and supply surplus to Guadaloupe and Martinique. A good plan to be tested soon. The day was however destroyed by a music cacophany at full volume, full speed and without texture at all that went on until daybreak. Time to move on to Martinique.

 

Fruit, Dead on Arrival

This is a cruising boat, but there seems no 10,000+ mile male or female crew members can resist doing anything else other than buying the brightest and prettiest laid out red tomatoes and the brightest yellow bananas in well-supplied shops and markets. These items are called perishables, and they are, fast; and they are legends in the distribution business. If they are a perfect red or yellow, they have no more than half a day before they are too ripe. Tomatoes are soft and bananas get black speckles on the outside and are going brown on the inside. Then I find them wasting space in the rare and expensive atmosphere of a chiller or fridge. Both should be bought green, and not kept in a fridge.

BTW, the other common wasting fruit are the avocado and papaya (pawpaw) both  ripe today and dead tomorrow; and don't ever buy mangoes that are soft to the touch, they have already passed on. 

Music and Insects, the real reasons for Airconditioning

I have airconditioning on my boat, which since 2004 (est.) has not worked. What I found, on purchase, a Climma evaporator in the saloon with the controller missing, some chocolate block and a variable inline engine room fan attached to the radiator with a bit of plywood. The direction of the ducting was incorrect and as a unit it did not work. On further examination, the fan was jury rigged on to the radiator and was actually finished. Dometic offered a replacement evaporator for GBP8,000 last year (2022) at Southampton - Dometic is not an option because they do not provide spares support for their toilets.

Fortunately, I sailed across to Antigua and found A Zero Degrees, who fix airconditioning systems, outside Nelson's Dockyard in a small cyan-coloured office with Anthea, Marlon and Van. Like all of us, I have substantial experience of idiots providing minimal engineering skills to the marine industry at vastly inflated prices and I am suspicious from the beginning of discussions. No, they could not get a replacement evaporator for eight weeks but the price was sensible and for the correct unit, I was flying through UK and they had one in two weeks, but A Zero had the controller board and capacitors, which was a good sign, indicating they really were in the business.

This is a long story so some abbreviation: the compressor needed the hot/cold solenoid valve replaced and the sea water pump replaced for 50/60Hz operation, so it now works (on both). The forward cabin evaporators needed some attention and the control panel was replaced together with a  number of capacitors. All done and fixed. Great job by A Zero, Antigua. Thank you.

But this is not the story. Neither I nor my wife need or want airconditioning, heating is another matter, but it is not even about that. The reason you need airconditioning is two fold. First, in many anchorages and marinas there is a US$200 4,000W amplifier that plays appalling music until two in the morning, and you know it. Second, there can be insects everywhere there is a light source, and you know that too. These are the two main reasons you need airconditioning. Also, you will get your batteries to float for the first time in many months; that you did not anticipate. 

Have a good one! Best,

Terre-de-Bas

I am pleased to announce that The Borderline is an official selection for the SOTAMBE International Film and Arts Festival (SOTAMBE IFAF) to be held in Kitwe in The Copperbelt from 22nd September. I look forward to seeing you there.

ZedPipo: an Introduction

‘You are what you do’, a well-worn phrase that, rightly or wrongly, seeks to encapsulate the identity of an individual within the confines of a profession, job or social role. Capturing identity in a photograph, or indeed a painting, creates a caricature that attempts to summarise an element of a subject. But does it capture their character?

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Postcards from Zambia: A New Photographic Response

Although oppressive times may be becoming scarcer, albeit remaining in living memory, it is time for a change in outlook; there have been developments in the mechanics of photography: a transition from film to digital photography enabling the simple and instantaneous production of images for newspapers, magazines, poster-prints, slideshows and websites, mobile phones, social media or the photograph album; photography is more a media for the masses than ever before.

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Writing Film Scripts 9: Facts of the Matter

Watch lots of films that you like and imitate them. Watch them twice or even three times. Figure out what the films are about and write it down. Look for and note down the inciting incidents and when they happen; find and note the nature of the transitions at end of the first and second acts. Or does it have five acts? Find the midpoint and note the winds of change in story direction. Watching one film once is not watching films. Look for events and observe characters and put them in your film. Do not copy dialogue unless its in the public domain and used as irony, “I’ll be back” famously from Terminator.

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The Zambians (3): Image and Realpolitik

Milk collection in Choma

The image itself

There are hardly any iconic pictures in public circulation and only a few in public exhibitions; so, now let us look at the rest of the world’s photographs and why they may be important. The saying is there are no new photographs: the blind woman or man, the people in the underground, signs, and others; they have all been taken by famous photographers of the past. If you take a picture of a blind person, it will be compared with Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, Gary Winogrand, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and others. This of course is irony by default - it has been done before - in its most unintellectual form.

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Writing Film Scripts 8: Read On

So now that you have written lots of scenes, you will notice there are distinct sequences, elements of story that combine to make the full story. Each Act is likely to be one or more sequences that are spaced by time and fade in from black and fade out to black. Tarantino uses these as Brechtian breaks. Have you discovered distanciation yet? Each element is a ‘Short’ film and can be written as such in the script, but there is no explicit formatting for sequences in writing scripts so I use colour coding in scene views/index cards or, in Final Draft, Format > Element Settings > General to start a new page with its own capitalised and underlined italics title for sequences or acts.
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Postcards from Zambia: Globalism, technology and social change

Despite the Polaroid camera being sufficiently developed to take positive colour photographs in 1964, the world’s press recorded Kenneth Kaunda taking Zambia to independence in October that year in black and white. Although this is where the Zambian colonial project ended for Britian, it is where the globalisation project started, a positive feature of a changing world for some, the domination of the Third World by the First World for others (Ashcroft, 101). 
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The Zambians (2): Events in Photography

Photo-mechanical reproduction

The arguments of whether a photograph is truthful, or whether it is art, really pale into insignificance when what really mattered for the development of photography was the capacity for mass reproduction; that is photographs being used in newspapers and magazines with the development of half-tone printing in 1880, which is part of the electro-chemical-mechanical means of printing photographs by printing press still used today. The unfortunate truth of demand for imagery in publications, however, is that few photographs are used and not necessarily fully consumed at that. Alternatively, photographers often print one to ten enlarged prints for sale, claiming to destroy the (digital) negative to increase the value of their photographs. This conflicts with the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s recognition of one of photography’s greatest assets in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

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Postcards from Zambia: Mass Tools (3)

In the 1920s and 30s, democracy and media reproduction emerged together, and photography and cinema were key mass media tools. In 1925, Ernest Leitz Optische Werke in Germany released Oscar Barnak’s lightweight 35mm still camera, called the Leica I, which used standard cinematic film but with a frame size of 36 x 24mm. With Dr Max Berek’s lens on the Leica, quick and quality photography became easier for newspapers and amateurs, and created opportunities for photojournalists like Henri Cartier-Bresson (Jeffrey, 243).

Bicycle Store in Mwachisopola.

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Writing Film Scripts 7: Filling it Out

Often, I do not have nearly enough to start at this stage, but I switch the left-hand pane to Page, so that I can start writing the script. I am not able to plan the whole screenplay as some people can, so I just start writing, nearly always from the beginning, which I am pleased to be good at! Not everyone can; in fact, most cannot. For those of you with starting difficulties, start wherever you can, anywhere in the script. Just CTRL-2 and type in the scene heading, whether it is EXT. or INT., the rough LOCATION, and whether is it DAY or NIGHT.

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The Zambians (1): Reality and Art

This is the second book on Zambia by Peter Langmead in which he continues to argue that the preservation of the nation’s social history is more important for Zambians and for global heritage than the persistence of Western post-modern indecisiveness about whether documentary photography is important or to be trusted.

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Damyna the Musical: A Brief Outline

A tranquil African village is thrown into turmoil when Damyna, a poor abandoned girl, becomes torn between her love for the boy she grew up with and the handsome, suave stranger who strides into her life. Damyna is brought up by a kindly ‘aunt’ who has paid off her father’s moneylender to secure the girl’s freedom. She grows into a young woman knowing that the aunt’s son, Por Phiri, is not her brother, contrary to his believe that they are siblings. Read more