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6 Degrees of Separation  -Friendaholic by Elizabeth Day…

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This is a post in the 6 Degrees of Separation run by Kate W. over at books are my favourite and best in which she gives the starting point of a particular book and invites you to take a journey through 6 other books of your choice, all connecting in some way and perhaps ending up back at the beginning…

As will often be the case in this challenge, I have not read this book, a non-fiction exploration of just what it is that makes friendship so important to Elizabeth Day. Ubiquitous as Amazon is, other booksellers are available  so here is part of what the Waterstones’ blurb says about Friendaholic. “Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict tells the story of one woman’s journey to understand why she’s addicted to friendship. […] In Friendaholic, Elizabeth unpacks the significance and evolution of friendship. From exploring her own personal friendships and the distinct importance of each of them in her life, to the unique and powerful insights of others across the globe, Elizabeth asks why there isn’t a language that can express its crucial influence on our world.
From ghosting to frenemies, to social media and communication styles, to the impact of seismic life events, Elizabeth leaves no stone untouched. Friendaholic is the book you buy for the people you love but it’s also the book you read to become a better friend to yourself.”

So everything you wanted to know about friendship but never dared to ask – well hardly because there are as many types of friendship as there are fish in the sea and as a prodigious reader of books growing up in a rather claustrophobic childhood, I suspect that the friendships depicted in books have been a great influence on me so all these books have personal significance for me beyond the mere reading…

Will and Tom by Mathew Plamplin – my first choice-  was a recent read but what drew me to it, was that it concerns two painters well known to me and is set in one of England’s great country house not far from where I now reside – Harewood House. My last year at school was an extra year to resit Geography which I had ambitiously paired with Physics and English A-levels in an attempt to straddle education from Art to Science and Geography, which I wanted to study at university got squeezed in the middle. So now I added Geology and Atr A-levels, and, since my friends had all left and I only had 11 hours timetabled lessons, I was allowed to roam the streets of Oxford, sketching and visiting art galleries and museums. At the Ashmolean Museum, I was allowed to handle and peruse, FIVE boxes of Turner watercolours and for good measure, the staff suggested I compare his work with that of his contemporary and friend – Thomas Girtin. Girtin is as unknown to most people as Turner is famous, and that is in part because he died tragically young, but this book brings their life and friendship not to mention the times and the place. Below is one of Thomas’ paintings.

If I hadn’t used it in last months 6 Degrees, I could now have gone to This Thing of Darkness telling the tale of the Friendship between Charles Darwin and Fitzroy the Captain of the Beagle but instead I choose another voyage of biological discovery and friendship – The Log from the Sea of Cortes by John Steinbeck. I am going to cheat here and give you a Two-fer since this book is inextricably linked to Cannery Row also by Steinbeck in which we meet Doc – in real life – Ed Ricketts a marine biologist who became a great friend and influence on Steinbeck. Steinbeck was fascinated by marine biology and having achieved initial success with The Grapes of Wrath, as Ricketts had done with his seminal Between Pacific Tides, the pair were looking for new inspiration and eventually settled on a specimen collecting trip up the Gulf of California, or Sea of Cortez as it is more poetically titled. The co-authored book as well as the fictionalised Doc in Cannery Row, paint a portrait of close friendship between two men and Steinbeck was devastated when Ricketts was killed on the railway crossing at Monterey…
A recurring comedic theme throughout the log, is the fractious relationship with the outboard motor of their tender “Our Hansen Sea-Cow was not only a living thing but a mean, irritable, contemptible, vengeful, mischievous, hateful living thing…. [it] loved to ride on the back of a boat, trailing its propeller daintily in the water while we rowed… when attacked with a screwdriver [it] fell apart in simulated death… It loved no one, trusted no one, it had no friends.”

On a journey of my own in the 70’s, by Transalpino, I would have passed through Naples, the seaside location of my third linked book the first in Elena Ferrante’s autobiographical trilogy detailing her growing up in a Naples suburb “My Brilliant Friend”. The picture of Lila and Elena and Naples includes memorable characters from their own families to the more sinister family of the Cosa Nostra and we see the roots of later series such as Gommorah. I first watched My Brilliant Friend as a TV drama but I have since acquired the books to read ( since the read experience is so different) and they  are on my Tsundoku (TBR) list…

With no more link than that they are also set in Italy and I vastly enjoyed them as a teenager, I now choose the The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovannino Guareschi. A collection of eight books of short stories, only three of which were published in his lifetime,, Guareschi tells of the amusing but touching conflict between A parish priest in a small town in northern Italy’s Po Valley, and the Communist Mayor. You might be forgiven for thinking that the constant strife between these two protagonists (with many conversations with God on the side) describe enemies rather than friends, but what they share and recognise in each other, even if they wouldn’t openly admit it, is that they both strive ceaselessly in their own ways, for the good of the town and if that doesn’t qualify as friendship…

Guareschi was also a cartoonist and illustrated the books with these charming cartoons – Don Camillo talking to God…

I read in some pre-internet article, that a survey had discovered that men, asked about their favourite books, will often quote titles they read as teenagers whilst women will cite their most recent reads. The question was posed, tongue in cheek, as to whether this is because men stop reading after puberty whilst women don’t stop… I will acknowledge that half the books mentioned so far were read in my teenage years and with David Copperfield – read in a wrist wearying hardback (particularly when reading on the pillow) by Charles Dickens. I read a few Dickens books from my parents hardback set and formed an early critical notion of his work as being like a tapestry, all the threads are presented near the beginning, a few are lost along the way and a few new ones introduced, but most make it to the last chapter in which things a re resolved with satisfaction for the good and justice for the bad.
David Copperfield is a partly autobiographical account of Dickens life and it is notable for the friends that save young Copperfield from the worst vicissitudes to which he is subject, Peggotty, Steerforth (initially at school) and Barkis, not to mention the unusual friendship between Aunty Betsy Trotwood and Mr Dick.
The thing about these books read as a teenager, is that they have formative influence on the developing mind and I sometimes wonder whether how much of these characters, especially Steinbeck’s Doc, are not in me…

The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester, is the story not only of the monumental task of creating The Oxford English Dictionary, but of the friendship that developed between the chief editor of the dictionary and it’s most prolific, volunteer contributor. Started seven years after Dickens published David Copperfield, the OED took a new approach to dictionary entries by seeking for examples of usage to accompany definitions of meaning and this required an army of volunteers. James Murray, the Chief Editor appointed by The Philological Society, received tens of thousands of examples from one – William Chester Minor – so many that when the first volume was finally published after eight years gruelling work, Murray invited his volunteers to a party. Surprised not to hear from or see his most prolific volunteer, Murray eventually went to Crowthorne Hospital where he assumed Minor worked, only to discover that he was an inmate in what is now the secure psychiatric hospital Broadmoor. Minor, who had had a colourful life, was suffering from what we would now diagnose as Schizophrenia and had stabbed a man. Murray and Minor became firm friends and eventually, Murray petitioned for Minor’s release since his troubled mind had eventually relaxed.


This true tale of friendship brings us back to Elizabeth Day’s exploration of the nature of friendship and why it is so vital! I hope you have enjoyed the journey through books which feel like old friends to me and which have almost certainly styled my notion of friendship…

Roadtrip Review No. 6 – a self-review…

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Borne up and drawn in
by fast becoming friends’
web of writing prompts

Writing is a unique space for me and increasingly so. My dear departed sister encouraged me to go to a writing group in Sligo, Ireland – a place full of writers and artists and all in the shadow of the poet WB Yeats. Indeed, when I first moved there in 1995, one of my early commissions as a signwriter and, it turns out, a muralist, was to paint a mural of WB Yeats on a new secondhand bookshop – The Winding Stair – named for the title poem of one of Yeats’ books of poetry – you can see me painting it here. I had studied Yeatss at school in English (Literature) which replaces the English (Creative) of earlier school years – why do they do that? I also painted a little but didn’t want to go down the road of fine art because I perceived that artists are so often groomed by galleries encouraging them to produce more of what sells rather than following their own creative wanderings. And so I became a signwriter (painted not computer-cut vinyl) where the creative input is much smaller and constrained by a brief but, I felt, more honest and more sure as a means of making a living. Moving to Ireland gave me a new burst of creative freedom as a signwriter – especially after doing the Yeats mural although some years later, The Winding Stair closed down and the subsequent occupiers of the shop painted over my “masterwork” – a lesson in the zen of attachment to earthly achievement…

Going back to the writing group, it was such a pleasure to rediscover the joy of putting words on the blank canvas of the page – I produced a slim volume of the group’s writings including a CD of the members reading their pieces – and then I discovered blogging… By now it was 2005 and my partner and I moved back to England to see more of our growing grandchildren, and as we waited to complete our stable-to-house conversion, there was no time to make friends in the community and so blogging remained my virtual circle of friendship. I belonged to a blog -site called Mo’time run by an American living in Italy, who created Mo’time as a test bed for ideas for the larger site which was his job. Sadly, the larger site was sold and Mo’time terminated and though we made several attempts to kindle a new space – it was never the same – however I still see quite a few Mo’timers on Facebook.

Then in 2020, on April 1st – I stumbled across the A to ZX Challenge and as the pandemic was taking hold, I plunged in! Each year has been differently themed and I have encountered new fellow writers as well as old friends. This year, however, writing was even more central – my theme was on the etymology of phrases and so was like honey to writing bees and I have joined another writing group – not in the flesh, but by Zoom and our facilitator is also an A to Z-er. What has been different though, is that through the new writing friends I have made (and reviewed here on my Roadtrip) I have encountered a world of other blogging challenges, written, photographic and especially poetry. Since my writing group is prompted by poems and much of what I have written has been (Free) Verse, it was like an alignment of the planets – instead of tailing off into silence after the A to Z finished, I am being tempted and indeed succumbing to all sorts of new challenges as well as writing in my group. I created the picture at the top of this post using Midjourney – another takeaway from this year’s A to Z (thanks to Misky and Vidya) to convey the sense of both support and crazy fear of falling out of control and spending my whole time writing challenge posts! So far I have engaged with Six Degrees of Separation, the Poet’s Pub and Sadje’s WDYS (What Do You See) and in the interests of Life/Work/life balance, I think that may be enough for now – things should be a pleasure and not a pressure… And then there are two novels to get back to, one finished to first draft and the other, a more serious work, with a lot of writing to go! And I used to spend a lot of time keeping abreast of the news! And then there’s the allotment – water and weed it or lose it! And then there is my partner, children and grandchildren not to mention two and a half days at work…

Here’s the thing though, within reason, the more you do, the more you fit in because what goes is the dross, the stuff that didn’t really matter, write poetry not protest seems to be where I am right now…

P. S. I have been told that I am not great at communicating, say, enthusiastic responses, that I may even be on the spectrum, but when I write, even though I may not feel the feelings whilst in the act of writing, be it poetry, prose or fiction, when I read back emotional content, I emote with the best of them, tear up – the works. So I guess writing is my medium of expression…

Roadtrip Review No. 5

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Lady in Read – such a great pun – and it truly reflects Vidya’s approach to her blog – it might be described as Fusion – “Lady in Red” is a western song by Chris de Burgh and it has featured in several films and both Vidya’s avatar and blog banner show her in a red dress but in the content she goes further. For example, in this year’s A to Z (she is a veteran participant), she wrote poems about people and places from India and particularly Karnatka where she grew up. However, Vidya writes prompted by many blogging challenges including NaPoWriMo which was also running in April and rather than do two separate posts, Vidya gives us a mash-up or fusion. so in My Heart Beats for Harihar, her H post, Vidya writes a poem celebrating the town she grew up in as a Sea Shanty – the NaPoWriMo prompt! To have followed Vidya’s A to Z is to take a deep dive into Indian/Karnatka culture but served up with a fusion twist seasoned with a great deal of humour…

Vidya also explored using AI for both images to illustrate some posts and also to generate ideas for post titles and you can read about her assessment of her experiments in her Reflections Post.

Roadtrip Review No. 4

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“Ronel Janse van Vuuren hails from sunny South Africa” says her About page, and her blog is called “Ronel the Mythmaker” subtitled Dark Fantasy Author which has intrigued me ever since I came across her blogs – you see I can’t think of South Africa without thinking of sunshine so strong it bleaches out everything, mind, body and motivation. I have to imagine Ronel in a dark, cold cellar beneath a remote house in order to conceive that anyone could write about fairies and review books from all over the world. because, too, South Africa seems at the end of the Earth, last stop before Antarctica and whilst the internet means that you can wander, virtually wherever you wish to go in the WWW, that is merely rational and I am constantly challenged by these mental disconnects when I visit Ronel’s blog. That’s just my problem, because Ronel can, and does write successful books and blog posts about dark fantasies and this year she is another A to Z participant who double-blogged. On one of her blogs – Ronel the Mythmaker she reviewed books on the theme My A-Z of Book Recommendations and Reviews 2023 (AKA my languishing TBR) in which she shows us, graphically, her to be read pile, followed by a book review of one of them that she has read. What this does, is to let us glimpse into the mind of an author of dark fantasies, which is almost as good as reading her own creations – although I still have to imagine her hiding from the sun in a dark cellar…

Ronel’s other blog was her My A-Z of Faerie 2023: and whilst this guide to all things Faerie is not my preferred area of reading, if I ever want a comprehensive guide to the subject – this is it and I have it bookmarked. I half expect Ronel to vapourise my imaginings and tell me that she writes from under a shady umbrella beside a pool in a city somewhere in S.A….

J.S. Pailly was a sometime visitor to my blog just as I was to his, and what I found was fascinating so although I dipped in and out, Planet Pailly Where Science Meets Fiction, is bookmarked for me to read all the way through… J.S.Pailly is not a scientist, though he is a Sci-Fi writer and a cartoonist and he chose this year, to write everything you ever wanted to know about the planet Mercury! Now I think you will agree that this is pretty niche and some people might hesitate to visit that niche, but, illustrated by his own cartoons, this is a very readable blog. One of the joys of the A to Z is to pick up on other bloggers via their comments, and one who would clearly have delighted in Mr Pailly’s theme was the author of My Hubble Abode, who is a student of Astrophysics and who started blogging to write free A-level notes for herself and her fellow students but then kept going as she moved up the academic ladder. If astrophysics is not your cup of tea, then she also gives out designs for her Crocheted planets and more. What’s not to like, I also share a passion for (Tunisian) Crochet…

Roadtrip Review No. 3

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Carrie-Anne, in her incomparable Welcome to My Magick Theatre, gave us, not forvthe first time, a tour de force – on the history of both Iranian cities and also pioneering Iranian women – the latter in homage to the current persecution of women in that country. Iran, arguably the cradle of civilisation, has cities that have risen and fallen so many times through history it makes one giddy! And the women Carrie-Anne describes are all fascinating, not least because of the way their stories are told…

As if this Abercadarium was not enough on it’s own – Carrie-Anne did one in her second blog – Onomastics Outside the Box which was on Persian names – a possible goldmine to any expectant parents to be who want to go with something different, more ancient, perhaps, name-wise… any way, Carrie-Anne drove herself to exhaustion as she explains in her TWO Reflections posts here and here! Carrie-Anne’s posts are not to be read from A to Z and certainly not in one sitting – no they are to be savoured, like a fine wine from the cellar, when the occasion demands…

It is late, and I have work in the morning and besides I cannot bring myself to add another review to stand in the shadow of Carrie-Anne and so to bed…

Roadtrip Review No. 2

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Shilpa Gupta chose to write Flash Fiction for her A to Z and here’s the thing about flash fiction, either you enjoy a writer’s offerings or you don’t, you find consistency rather than having to search for the rare nugget, and you keep coming back because, even though the pieces may be personal to the author, the pieces resonate for you… Shilpa delivered on all these things for me. A good example was M for Arithmetic in which a father posters the narrator to practice maths homework but is completely scathing about her exam failures. If you want to see what resonated for me you will have to read the post and find my comment…

Hannelore was interrupted in the middle of April by the sad death of her grandmother who, together with her late grandfather, was the subject of her A to Z and so she bravely presented the last letters in a compendium as part of the process of moving through grieving. The early posts, together with the rest of the month’s journey, deserve our attention.

Anne Nydam is a print artist who specialises in mostly one-colour block prints and for this year’s theme she chose to show us letters from many illustrated Abercadariums to which she brought a wealth of research and commentary. I can only repeat my comment on her Reflections post “Your posts were unique amongst the A to Z Challenge this year and I not only enjoyed them whenever I visited but have bookmarked your site to return to whenever. as I have said before, having been a signwriter and a graphic artist going back to letterpress printing at school – this was right up my street…”

So there you go – a few more of my frequent commenters reviewed – eventually I will get to some of the blogs I didn’t get too in April…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative Artificial Intelligence, Number One…

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AI or Artificial Intelligence, is a hot topic at present with governments weighing up how to invest in the sector, insiders from the industry warning of the potential dangers and the media stoking fears from job losses to the eradication of the human race. During the recent A to Z Challenge 2023, I was highly impressed by the images selected by Misky in her blog IT’S STILL LIFE – A.I. ART & POETRY and decided to investigate the whole subject of AI for myself. I also wanted to know about Generative Text AI because my work demands various forms of word creation and I had heard that this might be one of the first areas to suffer job losses to AI.

This tile design was designed by Midjourney 5 with a prompt of no more than Passion Flower –tile. It lines up perfectly on every edge, a task which is difficult to do by hand…
Using a third-party software, you can turn Midjourney’s tile into wallpaper and appreciate the seamless matching of edges.

But first, a little thought about where I understand us to be right now. There is Soft AI (think Alexa) and then there is the dreaded Hard AI (think Terminator). Soft AI is already in use all around us, Grammarly, Predictive Text on your smartphone, Alexa, Google and other search engines but the reason people are not running around screaming “The terminators are coming!” as a result of all this Soft AI action, is because the intelligence quotient of this sort of AI is pretty low. For example, say to your “smart” speaker Alexa “Alexa! Tell me a joke!” and Alexa will oblige with a joke of variable humour, but then say “Alexa! Tell me another!” and Alexa will not know what you want – unless you specify “joke” in which case you could leave the “another” out since it is irrelevant to Alexa that she has just told you a joke. This means that Alexa is hardly conducting a conversation. On the other hand, she can sort through literally millions of bits of data to find and play you the song you want to hear. So this sort of AI is doing exactly what we want -conducting the repetitive, boring, difficult (because of the magnitude of data) tasks which we none of us really enjoy doing, or given the scale of data today, could even do! I was reading how when the sea-change brought about in Accountancy when computers could sit on every desk and more particularly, when those computers could run spreadsheets, there were fears of mass redundancies in accounting firms. And so there were at the clerk level of the business, but on the other hand, amongst the higher level accountants, jobs boomed like never before, because the things they could do with spreadsheets, the new things they could offer their clients had been undreamable before – so let us take the tales of mass unemployment with a pinch of salt – after all, I wouldn’t mind betting that some of the accounting clerks were able to upgrade their skills and move up the ladder with the help of a computer…

Above is an example of a tricky task for any graphic designer to do manually – to design a seamless tile repeat and I will come back to this particular task in the future, but to say that this task was accomplished in under sixty seconds, is for now simply amazing!

Text AI

So first of all, I want to look at my first encounter with ChatGPT which was developed by OpenAI and which they describe as a Large Language Model Generative pre-trained transformer Chatbot. What that means is that an AI computer programme has been fed a huge amount of written material, novels, adverts, and non-fiction from the World Wide Web and not only does the AI have access to all this material, but it can stitch information together according to very clever algorithms to write “original” material. So I thought I would test it out by asking it to write a piece about one of the more colourful phrases from my recent A to Z Challenge – phrases we mostly know the meaning of but have forgotten the origins of. First, here is my explanation:

“Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – you may be beginning to see the “lost in translation” aspect of sayings overheard from sailors by landsmen in which case, you will not be surprised to learn that this expression has nothing to do with statues of simians cast in brass losing their genitalia!

A “monkey” on a wooden ship, especially a warship, was a (usually) wooden tray with rounded depressions in which cannon balls were stacked in preparation for the battle – the last thing you wanted was heavy cannon balls rolling around the deck of a pitching deck – let alone a “loose cannon” – so cannons were secured (against recoil on firing) by strong ropes and cannon balls were kept on a monkey. I said that monkeys were usually made of wood, but admirals or very lucky captains, who had made a lot of money from their share of “prizes” (captured ships, evaluated and paid for by the Navy) – were allowed to prettify their ships with gold leaf, dress their crews in custom, fancy uniforms, and purchase brass monkeys rather than the standard issue wooden ones. Now here’s the thing, a monkey was carefully designed so that you could pile the cannon balls up in a pyramid to maximise your supply of cannon balls in as small a space as possible but the thermal coefficient of expansion of brass (the monkey) and iron (the cannon balls) is different – the brass monkey shrinks more than iron in very cold conditions. Now, the carefully spaced second and subsequent layers of the pyramid are too big for their positions and can roll off the monkey hence “Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – Simples! Not!

Now here is ChatGPT’s first attempt:
“The expression “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” is a well-known phrase that means that it is extremely cold outside. Although it is a common phrase, its origin and accuracy are often disputed.
One theory suggests that the phrase originates from the age of sailing ships when cannonballs were stored on the deck of the ship in a brass frame called a “monkey.” The frame consisted of several round holes where the cannonballs were stacked. During cold weather, the brass frame would contract more quickly than the iron cannonballs, causing them to fall out of the frame. Hence, the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”
However, there is little historical evidence to support this theory. The phrase “brass monkey” itself is not found in any nautical dictionaries or records, and the idea that brass contracts more quickly than iron is also questionable.
Another theory is that the phrase originated from a Victorian-era pub game called “brass monkey,” which involved placing brass balls on a tray and attempting to knock them off with a ball bearing. The game was typically played in cold weather, and if the temperature dropped low enough, the brass balls could freeze to the tray, making it impossible to play. Hence, the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” may have originated from this game.
However, like the previous theory, there is little concrete evidence to support this theory.
Overall, the origin of the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” remains uncertain. It is likely that the phrase has evolved over time, and its origins may be lost to history.”

So what do we think of this? Well firstly, the “the idea that brass contracts more quickly than iron is also questionable ” is simply not true – science tells us that brass both expands and contracts more than iron – so there is a lie right there! Secondly, Chat GPT says that there is no evidence of the phrase in “nautical dictionaries or records. Whether or not such dictionaries even exist, there are plenty of references to this particular phrase and it’s origin in many places on the web and in literature – I first heard of it in the books of Patrick O’Brien who spent much of his life carrying out research for his books in the Admiralty records and I would trust him implicitly. You have to find as many references as you can when researching a subject like this. There are, of course, always people who will dispute the origins of various phrases and so perhaps ChatGPT gave undue credence to these doubters. Still, then ChatGPT goes even further and completely fabricates an alternative theory! The idea of a “Victorian -era pub game called ‘brass monkey’…'” does not show up in any search of the internet whatsoever, so ChatGPT has not only dissed the correct explanation, but suggested a completely fictitious alternative – all done with a convincingly authoritative tone. Luckily, there is a Regenerate button and on dressing this, without any refining the prompt or critiquing the first result, ChatGPT came clean and produced a correct version of the explanation:
“The expression “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” is a colloquial phrase used to describe extremely cold weather.
There are a few different theories about the origin of this expression, but the most widely accepted one is that it comes from the era of sailing ships.
In the days of sail, cannons were an important part of a ship’s armament. The cannonballs were made of iron and were stored on deck in piles or pyramids. To prevent them from rolling around in rough seas, the cannonballs were often stacked on a flat brass plate called a monkey.
When the temperature dropped below freezing, the brass monkey would contract more than the iron cannonballs, causing them to fall off. Hence, it was said to be “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”
However, it’s worth noting that there is no definitive proof for this theory, and other explanations have been proposed as well. Nonetheless, the phrase has become a part of English language and culture, and it is still used today to describe extremely cold weather.”

The second iteration is both factually more correct and more concise, but for a first encounter with ChatGPT to throw up such a blatant fabrication is worrying. It suggests that however miraculous the task of researching and collating this story might be, it definitely needs checking by a human being because otherwise, another false news item might find its way onto the Internet and go echoing around and around… Just such a story of defamation by a ChatGPT “news” story, happened to an Australian Mayor who rather than being portrayed as the whistleblower he actually was, he was reported to have gone to jail for corruption – he is suing ChatGPT‘s developers, OpenAI.

Not that I am fishing for compliments but what do you think of my explanation of the phrase compared to ChatGPT’s? After all, you might think I was too verbose and ChatGPT more concise…

Image AI

So far, I have only tried out the Midjourney bot (short for Robot, which I discussed in my “R” post in April) but I will be trying and comparing them and reporting back to you Dear Reader, but for now, I just want to share some images that I have created which were successful, although sometimes after several attempts to refine the prompts – more of that next time…

Each submission or message to the Midjourney Bot, produces not one, but four variations for you to choose from. You may then ask for an enlargement of one (see below) or to take one as a starting point for variation and another four will be developed. The prompt for this group was “flower_fairies_playing_amongst_blackberry_stems_and_fruit”
Here is the enlargement of the top left image.

I then decided to turn this into a tiled image (below).

The prompt for this image was “Village_beside_lake_style_of_Charles_Rennie_Mackintosh_pallette knife_oil_painting. I think the syntax should have been “in the style of” so I’m not sure that this owes much to Mackintosh but it is great – I think…

So we (if you want to come along with me) are on our way to investigating AI – so far Text AI dodgy, and ImageAI – amazing!

Roadtrip Review No.1

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This is a review of blogs who participated in the A to Z Challenge 2023 starting with those who were frequent flyers in my Comments…

Misky over on IT’S STILL LIFE, has been posting poems accompanied by AI-generated images for the A to Z. Not only has she inspired me in my return to poetry writing, but since AI is a hot topic now, the incredible images in her posts have caused me to begin my own evaluative exploration of AI – and may I say how generous Misky has been in giving me pointers as to where to begin! Having tried creating some pictures myself, using the Midjourney bot on Discord, I still cannot begin to imagine how the AI creates the pictures. I can however, imagine the processes of Misky, the poet and I urge you to go and read and look… I should add that Misky is a multiple poster, she offers a Twiglet Writing Prompt as well as participating in many other peoples’ prompt series.

An image generated by Midjourney to the prompt “a community of bloggers around the world sharing their post“

D B McNichol is a seriously productive writer of at least 32 novels on Goodreads alone and whose perspicacity was demonstrated by the fact that she gave up the whole of April to the A to Z Challenge! Having pre-prepared all of her posts in advance, she was then free to spend at least four hours a day reading other people’s blogs 35-40 0f them, and commenting on them! Her own posts were lists of Small Delights, Simple Pleasures and Significant Pleasures which challenged the reader to consider and add their own favourites. Donna had retired from a career in IT before she even started writing books and if the effort she has demonstrated on the A to Z is anything to go by, it’s no wonder she has become a successful author – Kudos!

Deborah Weber is an old friend from the A to Z Challenge and each year she has written compelling Abercadariums of great subjects – and this year she wrote from a list of obscure colour names. Not only were the posts fascinating in themselves, but Deborah wrote in a free-association way (which she talks about in her Reflections post) rather than the more usual linear delivery. To my mind, this is not only the most preferable way of writing or talking (see my post on Alastair Cooke) but the essence of why we read blogs. A blog is not a textbook and Deborah with her free association gets my vote every time! I should say that as a sometime signwriter, specialist decorator and artist, Colours are right up my street anyway…

Sadje in her Keep it Alive blog, is another multiple-strand post-er of ideas and challenges, and although her domain name says “life after 50 for women” – her challenges and advice as well as her readers, are for and of both sexes. You only have to look at her use of Categories in the banner at the top of her site to see the variety of subjects tackled by Sadje… For her theme this year, Sadje posed a series of (challenging) questions designed to stimulate her readers to do more with mind, body and spirit – use it or lose it might be her motto…

Josna in Tell me Another (story) does just that – she shares stories about a recent visit home to India from the States where she now lives. Visits home are always a poignant mix of reminiscence and comparison with the person we are now and the place where we now reside and Josna does not disappoint. You will be transported to the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of Josna’s India as well as her more personal thoughts…

Lady Lee Manilla has been someone who once followed, has been the most prodigious presence in my Jetpack (WordPress) feed! Another multiple post-er, every day, Lady Lee has shared her poems, her photos and her life with her 1,438 followers of whom I am obviously just a recent addition! Her enthusiasm for poetry – her own and others – and the warmth of her sharing, have endeared Lady Lee to me…

I will be continuing these reviews because there are many left to describe but I have been working for three hours now and my stomach is demanding breakfast…

Another iteration (you always get four) from Midjourney to the prompt “a community of bloggers around the world sharing their post” – weird and wonderful…

Reflections on the A to Z Challenge 2023

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The A to Z Challenge or the April month of madness as I usually think of it, has been a little less mad for me this year – I had about 12 posts ready ahead of time and managed to stay ahead until the letter X when I pantsed it but also wrote Y and Z ahead of the last days – a sprint to the finish!

I wrote about 16,600 words up to today, not including comments both replying to those who kindly visited, and I try never to leave any comment un-replied to! But then there are the visits back which sometimes elicited quite long comments on my part – because I hate just visiting back as an excuse to leave my blog post link – and in any case there were some very interesting posts that richly deserved a fulsome comment!

But what really marks my experience of each and every year of my four years of participating in the challenge, is the friends that either re-connect or, in the case of this year, the entirely new group of friends that have returned regularly throughout the month. Perhaps the nature of my theme attracts different people, perhaps the posts by those visiting, elicited more visits from me. The WordPress App was replaced by Jetpack and I soon found myself subscribed to a list of bloggers who participate in multiple challenges simultaneously and so, as well as the A to Z posts, I found my notifications full of poems, photographs and excitingly, some AI generated images. There is so much talk at present about AI that I have decided to try and keep the momentum of blog posting going, with a personal evaluative exploration of AI for both text and image creation at the end of which I hope to be able to express an informed opinion about whether we are likely to be under the thumb of AI or released from tedious labours…

I will be reviewing some of the wonderful bloggers I have met this year in my Roadtrip reviews so I hope you will stop by for that – I don’t know about you, but there is nobody whose every post I managed to visit and definitely some I want to fill in the gaps with!

As to my own writing experience, the posts certainly developed a life of their own, demanding much more research and crafting than I imagined as I built a list of possible phrases. But that work seemed to have pleased judging by the latter day comments which makes it worthwhile. There were only two posts that received no comments and one of those “X” manages to illustrate a Roman pagan festival with a pop video from Meghan Traynor of which I am quite proud, so if you missed it… Admittedly, by X and Y, I think everyone is suffering a little blog-fatigue!
There was also the great article from Wikipedia on Cant Languages from which all about four letters were furnished with languages…

Did I have a favourite – well I could only narrow it down to four – M, N, Q and R…

So there we are and Roadtrip here we come…

A – The Apple of my Eye, Academic – Contranyms…

B – The Bitter End, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Brass monkeys, Butcher’s Bill, – Sailors’ terms

C – Cockney, Cant, Chip on your shoulder, Codswallop – Just weird…

D – In Deep Water (Out of your Depth), Dead in the water, Doozy!

Early Hours – flowers, Early Doors, and The Elephant in the Room…

 Flash in the pan, Full of Beans – False Flag –  Historical Anachronisms and who might be a Friend of Dorothy…

G – Greenlit, Get someone’s goat – Get there with the olives -Spanish at end of meal –Surviving historical anachronisms

H – He hath eaten me out of house and home – Shakespeare…

 I – In the doldrums, Idler, In the Offing.

J – Jiggered – Euphemisms

K – Kick the Bucket, bucket list, Know the ropes…

L – The Two Meanings of LOL, Lady Godiva and Use Your Head – more Rhyming Slang and Text Abbreviations…

M – Mad as a Hatter, – Job related

N – Nutty Slack a tale of nudity, naturism and coal – oh and town planning – Nail Your Colours to the Mast…

O – Offshore (rules are out of jurisdiction)

P – Pony Up, Pipe Dreams, Pig in a Poke and Letting the Cat out of the Bag.

Q – Queen of Hearts – Quisling – Figures from History – Eponyms…

R – Robot – robota – Czech for forced labour – “Foreign” words appropriated – Rule of Thumb…

S –See a man about a dog, Spill the Beans, Strike while the Iron is hot, Steal one’s thunder, Swinging the Lead,  Shake a leg…

T – Three Sheets to the Wind, Truffle out, Tarnation, Tits up – break a leg. On Tenterhooks…

U – Under the Weather, – Upper case / Lower case, – Umble pie…

V – V-sign/ Victory V

W – Wednesday, Friday etc.- Linguistic hangovers – Walk the Chalk, Winging it –Whistlestop Tour…

Xmas Tree, Extras, EXpelliarmus – Made up languages…

Y.-. Yard of Tripe –Rhyming Slang – Yard of Clay – You may think so but I couldn’t possibly say – phrases from plays – ads – Does what it says on the tin…

Z – Zounds –Bloody – Gor Blimey – Lordy – Abbreviations for religious purposes…

Z – Zounds –Bloody – Gor Blimey – Lordy – Abbreviations for religious purposes…

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Back in “J” for jiggered, we encountered modifying a word slightly to make it more socially acceptable and today with Zounds! We have an expression that may have changed through running the words together rather than deliberately disguising them Zounds is short for “God’s wounds” and similarly Blimey or Cor Blimey is for “God Blind Me” both of which are taking the Lord’s name in vain – not even recognised in current usage as swear words let alone as having a religious significance! Even Lordy is taking the Lord’s name in vain… Bloody – a very common swear word is short for the blood of Christ and is compounded in one of my mother’s favourite expressions of frustration “Hells Bells and Buckets of Blood!” which after our trip to Australia in 1968, where they use bloody with gay abandon, became “Hells Bells and Buckets of Bloody Blood!”

The Wikipedia article on Cant Languages became a feature of this year’s A to Z theme ever since writing about Cockney rhyming slang and I hope you have clicked through to a few. There is one language listed for Z but there is no article on it…

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So there you have it, another year of A to Z letters completed – but there will be a Reflections post and I will start the Road trip by reviewing this year’s frequent flyers in my comment sections for which I thank you all and I hope you enjoyed it!