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A personal weblog with photographs and comments. Quiet ramblings, quite rambling...
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Australia
Yesterday, 6th August, was Hiroshima Day.
Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea’s two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).
Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.
Link: Isao Hashimoto, who writes about “1945-1998” ©2003/:
This piece of work is a bird’s eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world.
(via Dean Whitbread).
Filed under: Europe • France • United Kingdom • Asia Pac • Australia • Japan • Middle East • Americas • USA • Africa • South Africa • (0) Comments • Permalink • Bookmark or Share •
Flank sent me the picture (above) of the Teppanyaki chef in Sydney “sniffing his armpit”. He took it at the restaurant where he, Lyam and Aaron went on the night of Aaron’s birthday. He wrote:
Well the teppanyaki chef we had was a little restrained. He did a sort of “Tom Cruise” number with the pepper grinder, throwing it over his shoulder and catching it behind his back. He wrote English messages to us upside-down and back-to-front on the grill using the salt pourer (starting with the full stop and progressing to the beginning of the sentence). He was pretty flash on the grill, but other than that did not involve us much. Much like I have seen at other teppanyakis in the past. However the chef at the next table was a little more “in the face” of his diners. One move was to play golf with the raw eggs he was about to cook with. He cracked the eggs a little so that the stood up on end. then used his spatula to hit them into a bowl held by a diner on the other side of the table. This had pretty impressive results. He did this with everyone, and later used the eggs to cook with. He also chopped at food that was being cooked so that it flew into bowls being held up, and also chopped food directly into the mouths of two of the diners. The most adventurous I’ve had in the past is having to catch already filled bowls of food being thrown at you.
Talking about armpits, did you know that the armpit effect distinguishes kin from strangers? Or that being exposed to the smell of a sweaty male armpit can make a woman feel calmer? Or that the armpit smells of elderly women can lift your spirits? Uplifting armpits then.
Tomorrow morning we leave for Disneyland Paris.
Filed under: Asia Pac • Australia • (1) Comments • Permalink • Bookmark or Share •
The above picture is doing the email rounds this week. It looks like it might be an advertisement for a bottle-store.
I had hoped to take a picture of the solitary demonstrator (at the company across the road) with his La Cantine a Denise banner, but he wasn’t there at lunchtime today. Apparently he is Denise’s husband, and is protesting about how she lost her job. The story is a bit vague, but she used to work in the canteen and then she was transferred to another section (or visa versa). Anyway she was then made redundant. He wasn’t there, so I couldn’t ask him for more details. Ash says he hopes Denise got her job back.
Today I was thinking about bluemeanie, whose school play Caberet opened tonight. She seemed in a good space this morning, but I didn’t manage to speak to her this evening. I will hear tomorrow morning how the opening night went.
This evening a group of 10 us went to a restaurant in Strasbourg with a colleague who is visiting from Beijing. It was one of the better restaurants we have been to, called La Pont aux Chats (Cat’s Bridge). The ambiance and decore are decidedly feline. The restaurant is in an old timbered building, and the atmosphere is Alsacian. The portions aren’t - they are small.
Filed under: Asia Pac • Australia • (1) Comments • Permalink • Bookmark or Share •
This is a photo that flank sent me from the France-USA match on 31 Oct 2003. Of course France won that match, which is not much commiseration for losing the wooden spoon award to the All Blacks today. However, at the time of blogging, Michalak is still the highest scoring player of the Rugby World Cup. If Wilkinson lives long enough to score 6 points on Saturday, he will overtake him. Am I the only one to suspect that Jonny is Naas’ illegitimate son? (As I recall there was one).
Tonight I went to see the film La Coleur du Mesonge in Strasbourg starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman and Gary Sinese. It was a good film, and it reminded me of situations in South Africa, including some from my friend Sean’s book, Lost Communities, Living Memories.
To continue the musical theme from yesterday, I found this interesting website. You enter the lyrics of a song, and it will sing it for you, using words “culled” from existing recordings by famous stars. I have been listening to alternative renditions of famous Beatles songs. Let them sing it for you, here.
Filed under: Asia Pac • Australia • (0) Comments • Permalink • Bookmark or Share •
flank took this picture of the Telstra Stadium in Sydney (then known as “Stadium Australia”) on 29 June 2002, the night that Australia narrowly beat France. This stadium is venue for a number of the RWC matches this month and next.
kirsten sent me a mail which suggested that what I need for this RWC is a bit of focus and suggesting that:
Saturday is going to be awesome, get yourself down to a pub to watch. It is the most important pool game of the world cup. Have a getaway planned though if things don’t go our way!! I know what you mean about the easier games but they do provide some lovely running rugby when handling errors don’t get in the way. The games against Samoa will be good and the other pools have some interesting games as well. I am looking forward to watching Australia v Ireland the weekend after next (it is just after the SA v Samoa game).
That “getaway-strategy” sounds a bit ominous. I had referred to the opening pool matches as the “mickey mouse” stage of the RWC, but kirsten has a point. The important action starts this Saturday, although I think the Ireland-Australia match will be a bit once sided - and only really exciting if you are there! Today of course Fiji beat the USA 19-18, and that game was probably exciting, even if it was pretty irrelevant to the tournament as a whole.
The England vs South Africa match that kirsten mentioned kicks off at 20:00 local time, which is 13:00 UK time. Of course, as the match is being played in Perth, SA will have the home crowd advantage.
(kirsten and steve leave for Australia tomorrow). Bon voyage!