Today I once again head to Oz. Watch this space for the usual posts, including hopefully a few experiences that I’ve not done (or seen) before.
Oh and in a few weeks I’ll be going to Japan ‘on the way home’ as well!
Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category
Heading Down Under
Tuesday, May 14th, 2024Confucius Say
Saturday, May 4th, 2024A few years ago I bought a Japanese manga monthly and it came with a sheet of stickers of all 22 members of an idol group. They were postage stamp size, and prime for adding to postcards. But they were also nearly identical, and it seemed a shame to separate them. A plan was hatched.
Rain Of Frogs had been a great success the previous year, but it had been a passive exercise on my brother’s behalf, and I think I needed to step things up a little. I’d had a few ideas in my mind, and the stickers made them all coalesce: I’d send him a puzzle across a series of postcards. Twenty-two, to be precise. And here is what he received:
There’s a message encoded in the cards, and my hope was he could decipher it. Two cards were sent at a time over about a month. There’s a staggering amount of potential combinations in which the cards have been arranged, so I encoded them with hints and icons. The hints themselves were of course received with each card, and the idea was as he got them he could use the hints to work out the correct order and therefore the message.
Some hint examples were:
– “Squirrels are next to cats.” (referring to the cat/squirrel stamps on some cards)
– “I’m in the first five positions.”
– “The colours of the letters are significant.”
– “There is a typo: one O should be a U.” (this was unintentional).
It’s worth mentioning that the nature of the puzzle meant I had to devise a message of precisely 44 letters, which wasn’t at all easy. I didn’t want it to be grammatically strange, or use unfamiliar words, or be the sort of thing that wouldn’t jump out at him after he managed to decode portions of it. In the end I believe I chose something familiar – indeed expected – to make the task easier.
I started sending the cards in early September, and gave him until Thanksgiving to solve it for a prize (which was going to be a second wave of frog/toad cards). He didn’t solve it in time, so I extended the date and provided more hints. Eventually they became explicit to the point of almost giving things away: such as telling him that the colours of letters on adjacent cards matched (which massively reduces the potential combinations) or identifying certain two-card combinations. I issued an ultimate deadline of mid-January (2023). Alas, he failed to solve it.
Could you have solved it? Here’s the answer:
Confucios say Gary Oldman is younger than Gary Numan.
I thought it was easy 🙂
The Circus
Sunday, April 21st, 2024We just got back from a Cirque du Soleil performance at our downtown arena. It was completely free, since Kristin’s work had booked an entire performance for their employees!
As you no doubt know, Cirque du Soleil is a modern circus that has character and story-driven shows and no animals. Tonight’s show was Corteo, about a clown viewing his own funeral. It was comedic and celebratory, and has apparently been performed over 5000 times in 17 years of touring since its debut almost 20 years ago!
That was our view. The arena was split down the middle with the large stage, and the audience sat on either side. When the action began the curtains lifted and it looked like this:
But I’m ahead of myself, since I forgot to mention that thanks to Kristin’s work both parking and food was also free, which means we didn’t have to pay the insane costs for fries and hotdogs ourself!
The performance was wonderful. With live music and singing and every sort of gymnastic event you could imagine it was a fascinating couple of hours.
The round stage rotated, and almost every act included some sort of aerial element. The most impressive for me were the solo artistes, like this ‘aerial silk’ girl (who had phenomenal shoulder/arm muscles!):
Or the freestanding laddersman:
Or the elastic strapmaster, whose body seemed like it was 110% muscle:
In the above photo the stairs you can see in the background are the opposite side of the arena.
Every main act was interspersed with a modern take on a clown show, which were amusing distractions as they set the stage for the next gymnast. Plus, they had pantomime horses:
We also saw trapeze artists, jugglers, diabolo savants, cyr wheel masters and lots of girls swinging from chandeliers. It was a lot of fun 🙂
Thanks Regeneron!
Eggstravaganza 2
Sunday, March 31st, 2024Happy Easter! Yesterday JK and DK visited and we coloured eggs like we’ve done before. Here’s the results…
Just dunking them in the dye (once again made by dissolving dye tablets in a vinegar and water mix) isn’t too exciting, so we first used a marker to create some more interesting designs.
I’m sure I don’t have to identify the above, but Ronald WcDonald, Gudetama and Ultraman all look wonderful on boiled eggs eggs!
A transparent crayon keeps the dye from colouring the egg, which is how the parts are kept white. It’s an imperfect method as you can see in this pic of the finished eggs:
Let’s just assume Ronald has some sort of wasting disease and both Doraemon spent the morning rolling in dirt! I’d say all things considered the ‘basket’ of eggs looks wonderful and probably much more interesting than in many other homes today!
We also tried another unusual method of colouring (again from a kit), which involved making a weird foam (KLS did this, using the included powder mixed with water and a hand mixer), then putting the dye on top and swishing the egg around. It didn’t work anywhere near it claimed to, was horribly messy, and I’m sure there were homes in America today where children created an ungodly mess using this kit!
In case you’re wondering, the K’s will eat the eggs 🙂
Golden Stamp Books
Thursday, March 14th, 2024Some months ago I purchased this for only $3.50 at a local antique store:
This was quite a find, not only because it’s Australian, but because I owned this exact book in my youth!
It’s a picture book of reptiles that came with a sheet of gummed stamps. The lucky owner would separate the stamps and stick them into each entry like they were putting a postage stamp on a postcard. The stamps in my copy have been stuck, but the back cover shows what the unused sheets would have looked like:
And here’s the charming instructions for the reader:
The book is 48 pages long, almost all of which are dedicated to a single animal with a picture and several interesting paragraphs. As a child I would have loved this. All the famous and well-known reptiles are included, like crocodiles, goannas and this old favourite:
But the true wonder of this book is that it also includes many lesser known – and possibly even nigh-unknown – beasts such as the Tryon Gecko, Master’s Snake and the good old Scrub Mullet:
I can vividly remember in the schoolyard, when my lesser-educated peers were yapping on about crocodiles and frilled lizards and I started dropping facts about Curl Snakes, Dtella Geckos and Krefft’s Tortoises! Immediately they recognized a master herpetologist in their midst, and rightly admired me for my knowledge 🙂
This book was first published in 1973, but I would have of course got it years later. I had other titles as well. I don’t remember exactly which ones, but I believe I had at least a sea life one and one about fossils or minerals. A quick search online reveals that many titles in the series were printed well into the 1980s. Here’s a selection:
The Golden Stamp Book series was popular not just in Oz but also in the USA and England, and no doubt other countries as well. Educational, fun, and lovely to look at: these were great books to have when we were kids 🙂