Miscellaneous « Robot Claw

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Book of Kells

Sunday, May 31st, 2015

It’s early as hell here right now, since our original ferry (for today) was canceled due to weather and we’ve had to change our plans to catch the earliest one! Hooray for only five hours of sleep 🙂

That’s our tour guide for the walking tour of Trinity College in Dublin. We went yesterday to see the Book of Kells, which is a legendary old illuminated bible. The college is ancient and impressive and has a room like this in its library:

Here’s a shot of Florence enjoying the tour:

Dublin was busy and it was cold! I saw this topical sticker on a postbox:

Later in the afternoon we went to the town of Leixslip for their festival…

Here was my dinner:

And yes I had a beer…

…or rather a shandy from a ladies glass 🙂

Sorry for the abbreviated post, but we’re in a hurry to get ready for the ferry!

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Air, Land & Sea

Tuesday, May 26th, 2015

In a couple of days I’m heading off for my first European trip of the summer. Here’s the approximate route:

At a rough estimate, before I get home, I will have taken 8 train trips, 4 flights and 1 ferry crossing. There will be a lot of travel to fit so many destinations in such a short trip but I know it’ll be worth it.

I’ll spend the first half of the trip (Ireland and the UK) with Florence, and the second half (in France) with Sue and her daughter. As usual, I’m planning on casting myself in the ‘wise and seasoned but still ruggedly handsome ex-pat Australian supertasting world traveler‘ role. This will hopefully serve me well in France, where I know none of the local tongue! 😉

Of course I’ll be blogging as usual. Several of you have expressed particular interest in this trip, so I’ll strive to make the posts entertaining.

See you in Ireland!

Posted in Blog, Family, Miscellaneous, Trip | Comments Closed

Capy Day

Sunday, May 24th, 2015

We recently learned of an animal park about an hours drive from here and yesterday went to check it out.

This is a family run animal park over about 100 acres with many types of animal on display and a safari ride. How did we never know it existed?

Unlike almost every other park/zoo I’ve been to, you can buy food (ryvita biscuits actually) and feed virtually every single animal. Since most of them are ‘horsey things’ and happily chow down on the biscuits, this means you can get quite close to most of the beasts on display. We gave food to deer, llama, alpaca, goats, giraffes, kangaroos (!), zebra, monkeys and even a wolf!

And these guys…

The capybara family! We knew they had capybara before we visited but were surprised by the fact they had a whole family in such a large enclosure. Mum and dad and the three babies were incredibly adorable and we spent a great while admiring them. To her delight, KLS was actually able to entice the placid mother over for a snack:

Here’s her charming face up close:

The safari ride was a highlight. Although not particularly long, it was very well done (especially the narration) and since we went on the first one of the day the animals were all active and very interested in us:

The camel in the first shot is apparently one of the four biggest in the US, standing almost 9 feet in height! The safari had camels (one and two humps), bison, rhea, goats, pigs, ostriches, several types of antelope and probably a few other things I am forgetting. There were quite a few newborn babies and many eggs in nests. Apparently breeding came early this year due to the unseasonably warm weather we had a few weeks ago.

There were some weird elements to the park. Displays such as the above are common in some of these family run attractions here in the US, and this one was part of a ‘western village’ that included similar things like this…

And this…

It was all weird and creepy, and very, very dated. The mystery is we couldn’t quite work out when it had been built or why it still existed (although to be honest, the many kids there yesterday seemed to love it all). The age of the park in general we couldn’t determine, and there doesn’t seem to be any history online including on their own site. Had I know this yesterday, I would have asked someone.

I was surprised they had giraffes. The enclosure was a bit grim, but it opened out onto the safari so I assume they let them wander around when not on display. As with many of the animals, they happily accepted a ryvita biscuit (or ten) from us:

It’s not a massive park, and it took us about 3 hours to see everything they had (and feed almost all of them!). We enjoyed the place quite a bit and are glad we went.

Posted in Animals, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

The Fabulous Owlbear

Friday, May 22nd, 2015

First, read this post Adam did on his blog.

I’ve found a similar example. Here is the owlbear (an owl-bear hybrid monster) as illustrated in the first ever AD&D Monster Manual from 1978:

I have a copy of this book. It’s the 6th printing, from 1980, and was owned by KLS long before I met her. The owlbear in this version of the monster manual looks like this:

Fabulous isn’t it! It’s the only monster in the book that has been coloured in, but we can only dream she had done more as a child 🙂

Speaking of the owlbear… what’s this picture?

Interesting isn’t it? A few years ago it was revealed that some of the unusual monsters in AD&D were based on plastic toys. You can read the full story here (with more wonderful pictures). Based on the toy, and the supposition (which seems reasonable) that the toys were bootleg Ultraman monster toys, it’s obvious the owlbear is nothing more than… a kappa!

The kappa is a japanese water spirit which has a very rich mythology. Here’s an illustration done by Hokusai (famous for his The Great Wave Off Kanagawa) in the early 1800’s:

You can see the resemblance to the toy.

So what of the Ultraman connection? Japanese sentai shows often base their monsters on mythology, and it’s almost certain there is an early Kappa-based foe in one of the first few Ultraman series. I did a search and could only find one before 1978, a kappa-influenced alien named Tepeto in an episode of Ultraseven from 1967:

Not very owlbear-like is he?

So my guess is the original kappa designs (such as Hokusai’s) influenced the chinese toy which influenced the owlbear in AD&D.

What of the owlbear today? Here’s the latest illustration:

A bit literal isn’t it?

Posted in Animals, Art, Books & Comics, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, The Unknown, Toys | Comments Closed

Birthday Cards

Wednesday, May 20th, 2015

The other day I received a box of (belated) birthday gifts from my brother! Amongst other items, the box contained these:

With a big grin on my face I opened them all just now. Here’s what I found inside…

The Desert Shield cards (1991) chronicle the leading to the Iraq War of the early 90s. As you can see they are a tedious collection of military vehicle photos interspersed with publicity stills of ‘celebrities’ of the era. This is one of those sets that I am astonished has an audience.

I’ve never seen Rocky IV, but from the surprisingly detailed card backs I’m guessing it’s about a Russian boxer (Drago) who defeats an aging US champion (Apollo Creed) and is in turn defeated by Rocky. The cards are ho-hum, but I got a good sticker for AW!

That’s the entire contents of one of the E.T. sticker packs from ’82. It’s one of those album sets, but imagine how disappointed you’d be had you bought one pack and got these five! I wager had I not said, you’d be hard pressed to guess the movie they were from!

All I’m going to say about the above is it’ll look great on AW’s dresser 😉

The oldest cards are from Alien (1979) which makes the included gum 36 years old. Naturally I had to taste it…

It was strangely bitter, and incredibly hard, like a piece of plastic. It hasn’t aged well.

The cards themselves were decent (the usual promo shots) and as with many sets of the era the backs formed a puzzle. Strangely it had nothing to do with Alien: