Month: January 2012

Water Dragon Red Fig Dreaming

On By cjx07sterIn Dreaming1 Comment

So how would YOU like to wake in fright, with coloured dreams and waiting schemes of small water dragons red ? So how would YOU like to shake in the arm and not be alarmed when holding a spear to slay the red fear ?

I always feel such a mess of a mind at times and this year’s dragon dream was just not to comprehend.  I in a garden green of delightful flowers and you, my dear love were there with a thing in your eye.  I looked into it, you complained ‘why should you look in my eye’.  I said ‘cos there is a dragon in it’.  You said ‘actually there is something there, it’s bugging me a bit’.  I looked close, I could see a green little insect the size of a pin walking around in there.  I steadied my arm and picked up the little thing by it’s wing and plucked it from your eye.  Then I threw it gently into the breeze, whereupon it turned into a flying thing.

Then there was a rustling in the grass under the green leafy border.  There appeared to be a large sinewy root lying on the ground.  Suddenly it moved like a python and I checked carefully blinking against the sunshine.  “Look out” I think I said, ( if only I could be that heroic in real life) ‘there is a snake !’ but as I looked closer, it had scales like a fish, and lizard feet and a head like a crocodile. Coming in from the lake and hiding out under the shade of a pumpkin patch. “It is a snake, no crocodile eating a snake perhaps !” . ‘Never mind’ you said, ‘you must be dreaming’.

The waterfall was there, streaming down from the rocks in kind.  It sounded like a dragon was there just babbling to itself in a constant stream of conversation with the pool.  ‘The dragon must have come from over there’ I said, ‘just from that pool.. there under the waterfall’.

Waking, I turned and looked up, the fig tree had turned red, the color of the dragon, with those same sinewy stupid vestigial legs it carries around with the crocodile head and now there it was camped in a tree.

I crawled out of my sleeping bag in the early morning light and looked up at the fig tree, where moments before a ‘dragon’ was to enliven me.

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Martian Rockets that Fall from Grace to Earth

On By cjx07sterIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

On the day that the Phobos-Grunt rocket fell to earth, and landed somewhere in the south east pacific ocean, I had other things to do other than worry it might land somewhere familiar.  I read numerous press articles, which speculated as to where the remainder might land after re-entry.

One thing I started to take exception to were the continual references to class it as space junk or even a satellite which I felt was not worthy of the effort involved in this adventure.  So I include here a link to the actual russian website which has some great graphics of the machine worth a look. [ Russian Spaceweb ]

You see this was not just an earth-centric satellite.  This was a high powered rocket satellite destined for Mars, and also carrying with it, the Chinese Mars orbiter satellite.  The rocket unfortunately became a terrestial satellite when it failed shortly after blasting off.

I do feel a bit sorry for all the engineers in Russia that apparently worked on tough budgets, and tried for a successful mission, but also China and others who put their trust in the mission as well and now what is left of it lying at the bottom of the largest ocean on our planet, in tatters and sorely wounded.

Note: It turns out that about 71% of the earth’s surface is covered by salt water, which leaves about 29% solid ground. It turns out that 50% of that solid ground is wilderness area with only 2.5% of the population. So we could say that the chance of a large rocket(satellite), falling to earth actually landing anywhere near habitation, and we could see what is left, is about 14% which is about odds 1 to 7.

Not always a safe getaway

On By cjx07sterIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

This news article from the Daily Echo Thieves Pedal Off with Stolen Safe…reminded me of a story from quite a while back, about a safe that didn’t quite get away.

At some time two thieves had broken into the upper floor of the office at a power station and attempted to break into the payroll safe there. Having failed to remember the combination correctly or some other thing, which had got in their way, the thieves decided to steal the safe, not just the payroll.

The safe itself was large, probably a good 200KG in weight.  So the thieves knocked a hole in the double brick upper story office wall with a sledgehammer, and the safe was unceremoniously pushed out and onto the pavement about 15ft below.

It had been raining, but now at night it was only a cold drizzle. The thieves got a trolley and loaded the safe onto it. The safe didn’t sustain much damage, but it took some time to load onto their trolley. Finally catching their breath, the two must have then begun to push the trolley over to the car park, some distance from where the safe had landed.

Next morning when the police were called. The view from the broken office wall out over to the car park showed it was apparent that the thieves had ignored the rain, and taken a shortcut across the now muddy field intervening the concrete apron and their truck. They had made a getaway, but the trolley complete with safe, had it’s wheels solidly bogged deep in the field.

---- Appreciate use of the featured photo by M Styne :  CC License : Flickr

The Surrealism of a Folded Tin Guitar

On By cjx07sterIn ArtLeave a comment

Picasso seemed fully aware of the tangential nature of proof in artistic depiction.  Always trying to describe a searing truth in his mind’s most amazing determined eye, the physical working of it was rough, crude, but carried the truth with it, like a sword in the back of a brutish bull in a bullring.  That the matador and horse were almost interchangeable.  That always eyes are on the same side of the face.  That a skull with horns could be well represented by a bike seat and handlebars and rusting mounted on a wall.

All the works of art had been sent her to New South Wales from France and would be on display here till March 2012.  Picasso, simply titled, and people had been queuing up to get in, to see all the special works of the famous painter/sculptor.  You could tell by the conversations in the large lobby where a latest (not by Picasso) all black opus entitled ‘Stephen Hawkings‘ hangs across from two plaster busts regarding the floor where bits of broken white bust lie quietly. In the ticket queue you could overhear that some people had studied Picasso carefully or quickly or not at all.  I had read his biography some years before and forgotten most of it.

Having purchased tickets, we all had to come back at the scheduled time and queue politely in an anteroom with a large screen video showing Picasso doing paintings on glass.  Birds mostly. Quick and true.

Then at the appointed time, we marched across the lobby in double file as though marching through the entry to the bullring and into the first gallery room, one of about a dozen which represented the different phases of his artistic career.

I was in the centre of gallery room number 5 “Brushes with surrealism”, and having seen galleries 1-2-3 and quickly through 4,  was optimistic that I could begin to understand something of the artist. I was standing in the middle of the ‘Bullring’. I was imbued with the art, the deconstruction, the destruction of 3D forms, and its smattering of surreal truth on the walls of the gallery. Truth and Picasso a master at it like a matador, each work of art a conquest, and when finished a death.

There on the outer edge of the Bullring I could see a large guitar like painting.  The sinewy strings aboard the neck of the body of the bull, and I writing notes with a Katana and looking over at the guitar.  I wandered slowly over, past the people like pebbles of crushed stone that made up the field of the ring.  There on the wall was the guitar.  The painting.  I moved closer.. The painting originally white with grey brown and black shades started to develop depth and shadows.  The painting changed as approached.  Gradually the painting of a guitar dissolved into 3 dimensions of painted metal and tin. Looking at it now from 5 feet back, the guitar became folded metal which looked like something from the Australian outback.  Remnant of a roof perhaps, but cut with metal shears and folded by hand to become a painting at 20ft. And with strings added.  The tin now, folded cut metal, an now from the side looking for all the while like a tin gate, all twisted and bent. Yes, from the side it just looked like a bunch of metal folded and painted badly.

I came to see Picasso’s works, I saw many others, in fact all of them twice.  What I saw was that art reflects on life and truth, but in itself cannot be true to that.  I loved how cleverly folded  painted tin on a wall, could at 20 paces look for all the people in the gallery like a painting of a guitar. I could hear the screams of the crowd assembled at the bullfight where the Matador and Horse are conquered by the bull, and his latest wife looking on the comic cubic Picasso who wrestled with tin snips and cut himself no doubt on the tin, trying to make music with a painted folded tin ‘guitar’.