Satori
It’s New Year’s Eve, although it’s very early in the morning.
At the end of one year and the beginning of a new we often think of new year’s resolutions: things we will do better, things we will start, things we will stop. I’m thinking of something to start, and I’m going to call it “now-ness.”
I am horrible at living now. At enjoying today, experiencing the present.
I have always lived in the future tense. Working towards something. Looking forward to a coming state. Dreaming of a better tomorrow.
Enough!
I want to live now. I want to love now. I want to see now. I want to touch now. I want to speak now. I want to work now. I want to create now. I want to serve now. I want to learn now. I want to live now. I want to be now.
God has blessed me with a wonderful wife. Three absolutely amazing children. An intriguing job. A home and vehicles. A strong and close family. Super coworkers, and too many more things to count.
It’s time to change.
Resolved: Today before tomorrow.
Resolved: People before things.
Resolved: Mission before margin.
Christmas dinner for 25
A few days ago we had Christmas dinner for 25: two turkeys, one extra-large ham, a massive pot of applesauce, and much, much more.
It was at my sister Renee and her husband Jeroen’s house. That’s Jeroen at the end of the table(s) …
Jeroen is an artist who has created many beautiful paintings (including the 5′ x 8′ painting in the background of this pic of my iPod).
Here’s one he’s working on right now:
Jeroen has done work in other media as well, including furniture design. Here’s a concrete and steel table he constructed this summer:
One of my favorite pieces in his house is a massive multi-ton stone sculpture by Jeroen’s sister, Lika Mutal:
(Lika is an internationally renowned sculptor.)
Panasonic Plasma
Teresa and I took our sons Ethan and Aidan to Science World yesterday after some furniture shopping in Yaletown.
One thing that caught my eye was an amazing plasma display. I’ve been looking a little at large flatscreen TVs lately. I almost certainly won’t get one this year, but it’s always fun to look.
But I haven’t seen anything in stores that approached this screen’s clarity. Most, if not all of the LCD and Plasma and LCD projection TVs I’ve seen in stores have numerous “marching ants” imperfections around words onscreen, or around other sharply delineated objects.
Not this screen - it was amazingly clean and clear.
I couldn’t see the manufacturer’s name - it was hidden by a protective enclosure - but could see the model number on the back. Thanks to the wonders of Google, I now know the product type (TH50PHD5UY), and that it’s available for a little more than $2500 US.
‘Twas the night before Christmas
… and the Koetsier family gathered for a family photo …
… before heading off for family gift-giving. What a wonderful night!
A very merry Christmas to all our friends and acquaintances, and anyone who happens to see these words, and a wonderful, blessed new year.
Finally, an optical illusion that works
Oddly, very few optical illusions actually work, at least for me. Perhaps my eyes are different than others - or maybe my brain is wired up a little differently.
However, here’s one that I saw the other day that actually does.
Opening wine with a hammer
It’s not too often you see someone opening a bottle of wine with a hammer.
However, that’s precisely what I had to do on Tuesday this week. We had a pizza lunch at our Langley, BC office to celebrate Christmas, and someone had a bottle of wine.
The first corkscrew just broke as we tried to pull the cork out. The second - a small portable model, just separated. The handle pulled out and the metal screw part stayed embedded, with the first one, in the cork.
Desperate measures were called for. Not finding a pair of pliers in the office toolbox, I used a hammer to bend the exposed metal part of the corkscrew, and then grabbed it in the claw and, over the course of about 2 minutes, pulled out the cork.
Having gone to such extreme lengths for a glass (read: styrofoam cup) of wine, we had to capture the moment for posterity. Here’s Rastin re-creating the scenario:
The results of the process, perhaps less than salubrious for some:
Eye of fly
A screenpic from an amazing photoset on Flicker:
Next up: toe of newt …
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(BTW, here’s one of my insect shots. Not nearly as close-up, or as quality.)
There and back again
I recently had the oddest experience - picking up a book and reading it, and having the strangest sensation that it was very similar to another book that I was very familiar with.
The book was There and back again, by Pat Murphy, and the book it is similar to is The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien, of course.
Murphy’s taken the historical/mythical feeling Hobbit and transformed it into a science fiction story. Gandalf is a mysterious half cyborg woman. The dwarves are also female, and are all clones. Odd, that.
I admit I was taken in with it at first, and enjoying it, but frankly, There and back again falls short, way short, of Tolkien’s masterpiece.
It’s far shorter, to start with, as Murphy seemingly does not have the patience to develop his characters through plot and conversation. And it’s very definitely not readable as a children’s story, with various more or less nasty cyberpunk-type elements thrown in - for spice, I presume.
I’d like to say nice try, but I’m not sure that even that faint praise is deserved.
The Desert Rats
Last week I finished Eighth Army, by Robin Neillands.
It’s a history of the “British” Eighth Army, which fought most famously in northern Africa during WWII, and then in the Italian campaign with the US 5th Army.
The Desert Rats, as they referred to themeselves, consisted of British, Aussi, Kiwi, Canadian, Indian, and even some Polish units. Successful in the extreme in the early months of the desert war against the Italians, they retreated for almost a year before the better-equipped and better-led German Afrika Korps, General Erwin Rommel’s (the Desert Fox) most-famous command.
Only after Bernard Law Montgomery (Monty) was sent to lead the Eighth and gave the Rommel his first serious defeat at El Alamein did the tides of the WWII turn, and he lead them from victory to victory (mostly) through Africa, until they joined up with the Americans who landed in Morroco and Algeria in Operation Torch.
(My wife’s grandfather was with those Americans in Torch.)
The Eighth Army finished out the war after another two years of battle clearing the Germans out of Sicily and Italy, and a nasty, bloody business it was. But they will always be known as the Desert Rats for their African campaigns.
I enjoyed the book, particularly because the author went to great pains to let the men speak - it’s a rare few pages that don’t have at least one lengthy quote from veterans of the Eighth.
Phaeton phantasmagorical
Saw this on Boingboing just a few minutes ago: a photo tour of Volkswagen’s Phaeton factory in Dresden, Germany.
Unbelievable. This is no factory, it’s a work of engineering and aesthetic art. I’d work in it any day.
Glass, steel, laminated wood flooring: it’s a modernist dream factory made real.
. . .
. . .
Of course, I think the car is a gas guzzling brute, even if it is somewhat better than a lot of SUVs, and incredibly, amazingly, wonderfully beautiful. However, it can be purchased in a much more efficient V6 turbo diesel TDi version.
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Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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