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Snow Day

Sunday, December 15th, 2013

Yesterday we went shopping and were surprised, as the day got old, to see a heavy snowfall start. As usual we had both ignored the weather forecast.

And when we woke today we found this:

That’s the view looking out of our garage. Surreal isn’t it? That’s about 25 cm of snow, deeper even than the blades of our snow thrower. It was one of the biggest snowfalls we’ve seen since we bought this house.

The timing was fortuitous, since I had to get the snow thrower all ready before my trip in case KLS needed it. Thick as the snow was, it made short work of it.

Many of you are reading this thinking “So what, it’s just snow”. But it’s been a while since I did a ‘snow post’ and I imagine the readers from down under still find the subject a bit exotic 🙂

In less than two weeks I’ll leave this weather behind for sunny Australia. Wouldn’t it be fun if I could bring a snowfall with me?

Posted in Family, Nature | Comments Closed

The Sticker Collection

Sunday, December 8th, 2013

I have in my possession an old, yellowing tupperware container full of stickers. This is a collection of mine that started back when I was a child and continued up until my mid teens. Many (most!) other of my possessions from those days are long, long gone. But the sticker collection remains. For various reasons I was never able to discard it, and it lingered in the back of a closet even up until I left Australia.

It was then passed on to my brother, who himself kept it safe for many years. He ended up bringing it to America with him when he moved here and on my first trip to visit him in San Jose he returned it to me. What a reunion! Soon after it was placed back into deep storage, in our attic to be precise, but the other week I dug it out (if only to remind myself I still had it) and opened it for a look.

And what a trip down memory lane that was!

That’s a shot taken just now, with the stickers all over my desk (and on the drawer to the left) as I was scanning them. There are many hundreds, in all shapes, colours and sizes. I was particular about my collection, and happily took anything that could be ‘stuck’ (and hence was a ‘sticker’) including doubles. I have dozens of certain stickers.

Did I buy them? No, not at all. The very vast majority were free, collected either from trade shows (industry stickers), from shops (marketing stickers), from food or toy packaging (licensed stickers) or from clinics/hospitals/school (safety stickers).

In this lengthy post I’ll give a few examples of the many different stickers, with a focus on the more nostalgic variety. (Because of the way I manipulated the scan files, the sticker images in this post are not to scale.)

I have a great many souvenir stickers, from many classically Australian towns: Nyngan, Trangie, Bourke, Cobar (the copper city of the west!). I doubt I ever visited any of these, which means the stickers were given to me as a souvenir or I swapped them from someone else. The sticker shown on the left above – typical of many of these – includes instructions on the back which basically summarize to: “Stick this on something”! Amusingly, almost all these stickers include sheep in the coat-of-arms. I guess it’s true that sheep are everywhere in Australia 🙂

Radio stickers were commonly distributed in record shops. The idea was to put them on your bumper and possibly win a prize if your license plate was read on the air. I never did this (of course), and instead hoarded the stickers. I have stickers for about a dozen radio stations, including 2NUR, 2KO, JJJ (many varieties) and even a Queensland radio station! Where did I get that?

That’s one of three stickers of which I am even today quite proud of, since that’s for my uncle’s (Peter Sheely) surfboard company. Sheely stickers were one of the few I ever actually stuck on things (schoolbooks mostly) since I could use my contacts to get more 😉

I find the stickers with dates to be quite interesting. The oldest sticker I have seems to be the one advertising the 1977 tennis tournament, and the youngest seems to be from 1988 (when I was 16). Stickers can be educational as well: who knew that in 1979 Australia apparently had an argentine ant infestation? It’s a good thing Inspector Anteater was on the job!

Oh, and what the heck is this:

I doubt we went to this event, especially since I don’t know where Blacktown is. But mysteriously I have not one or two but three different stickers advertising it! That’s a mystery that will never be solved…

Safety stickers, like those above, were given out at school or (more commonly) at free clinics that were held at malls or sometimes libraries. The best way to teach a child safety is to give him a sticker I suppose. In those days I don’t recall people sticking stickers on shops or cars or street signs like some do today, so they seem to have been more commonly used for marketing.

We’ll call the above ‘brainwashing stickers’. I have a lot of these as well, including anti-littering, save-the-animals, save-the-water and (a whole bunch of) religions ‘I love being a christian’ stickers. For children in the 1970s and 1980s, much education was accomplished via the distribution of stickers!

Speaking of marketing, I’ve got a good selection of food promotional stickers all showing off the logos and design sense of 197X. I don’t think any advertising exec these days would ever use the word ‘peddler’ in his jingles, do you? The UFO’s sticker – for a type of snack chip product (think flavoured, shaped cheetos) makes me want to eat a bag right now!

Speaking of marketing, I have a few high quality ‘shop window’ vinyl stickers. I have absolutely no idea where I got them from, since we didn’t know anyone that owned a shop. They are all quite massive and don’t fit in the scanner. Here’s a classic:

That sticker has to be 25+ years old now, and I believe Chiko Roll still uses similar marketing today! Seeing this sticker, and posting the image, makes me want to eat a Chiko Roll for the first time in my life. Watch for that event during the Australia trip…

A couple of stickers for long-dead Newcastle restaurants. As a child I used to love going to The Beefeater since it seemed posh and special. I bet viewed through adult eyes it was a bit of a dirty very amateur theme restaurant 🙂

Smash Hits stickers! Yes, I kept everything. I wonder how many other unstuck Icehouse stickers exist in the world today?

On the subject of keeping everything, here are some true gems of the collection:

I’m pretty sure I nicked the above from a clothing store called ‘Best & Less’ when the employee wasn’t looking. I actually have three, in different amounts. It’s obviously designed for a store display, and is about 20 cm long. It’ll be handy if I ever have a sale!

The above somewhat boggles my mind. But hey, it’s a sticker!

The above was designed for a math contest that I entered (and actually won)! At the time I was probably more excited by the $50 prize, but now I’m happy I kept the sticker.

Of course with hundreds of stickers including many that are – let’s face it – borderline garbage, I had to have my favourites. And I did indeed, and they were almost all the licensed stickers. These came from cereal, bread or ice-cream boxes and the nature of their distribution meant I only have a rare few of each. Back in the day these were the creme-d-la-creme of my collection, so be impressed:

The smurf sticker (which is about 4 times the size of the Pac man one) probably came from a BP station and was free with a gas refill. I’d bet the Ms. Pac Man one came from a box of Pac Man ice-creams. Here’s another sticker that clearly came from an ice-cream box:

What a beauty! Looking through my collection photo stickers are very rare, but to have such a nice one from 1979 – and Star Trek no less – surely elevated this guy to highest echelons of my collection! It shared that spot with:

OMG! Nine different painted ewok stickers that were used to promote the Ewok Adventure film (in 1984). It’s a real mystery where these guys came from, but just look at them. This would be a real treasure for ewok collectors…

And then, Star Wars! These stickers are big (about 10 cm tall) and there were a lot of them for all the major characters. I have five different ones, many in duplicate, and am sure I once had many more because I stuck these on schoolbooks as well. Back in those days Star Wars was a mania of mine; I would have prized these. Incidentally I have no idea where they came from. I very much doubt they were food promotions due to their size. Anyone remember?

So what could have possibly exceeded Star Wars to 12-year-old me? Feast your eyes on this trio:

I’m sure we all remember fondly the Power Lords toy/comic line that was introduced by Revell in 1983 to compete against Masters Of The Universe? You don’t? Shame on you! As a kid I got some of the figures, and probably liked them enough, but I loved the stickers that came with them! Raygoth! Gripptogg! Such fantastic names. These stickers are big, colourful and I loved, loved, loved them. They were, quite simply, three of the best four stickers that I owned.

And this was the very best:

Lord in heaven a glitter skull sticker! This was the very pinnacle, the sticker so good it could never be stuck. This was also purchased by me, and I remember exactly where: Angus & Robertson in Garden City. I actually purchased two stickers that day, the other being a similarly glittery striking cobra design. That second sticker is no longer still with me, so I imagine it was stuck somewhere, but the skull is still waiting. This sticker has powerful nostalgic value for me these days, and still is in fantastic condition and tremendously glittery when viewed in the right light.

So where should I stick it?

Posted in Art, Books & Comics, Family, Food, Miscellaneous, Movies, Music, Nature, Otaku, The Unknown, Time, Toys | 4 Comments »

Dam It!

Tuesday, September 24th, 2013

When I was a kid, I loved to dam creeks.

I was lucky since we always seemed to live somewhere near a creek or two. And when I say creek, I don’t mean in the American sense, where raging torrents are sometimes referred to as ‘creeks’. I mean shallow little waterways easily jumped over (at least during the dry season) although big enough to carry the occasional fish or yabby. I loved playing in and around creeks, and many adventures were had.

And there almost always came a time when, for arcane reasons ununderstandable to adults, I had to dam the creek! And this wasn’t once or twice, I did this many times.

Take this one for instance:

That’s our Kahibah house. There was a creek behind it that ran under the road. The main portion of the creek ran off the bottom right of the picture, but behind our house it took a 90 degree turn up and ran more or less parallel to the road. This tributary was small and muddy and fun to play in. Many frogs were caught; many tiny fish were collected. And the high dirt walls were structurally perfect to sustain a dam.

At first these were piddling affairs; just dig out a bit of mud and pile it up, maybe mixing in a few found rocks and a fallen branch or two. The water would build up and eventually wash everything away. This was of course fun, but I could do better. And I did. In time I would learn which types of mud worked better and how to divert the water through a (hand dug) side channel to allow unimpeded construction.

Within a year or two I had veritably obtained my PhD in ‘child creek construction’, and these were the days in which I would ‘bake’ mud bricks in the hot sun using old icecream containers as molds. The bricks would be hardened with grass cuttings and cemented with rich black mud dug from the walls of the creek. Using this technique I once turned this flimsy little creek from something ankle deep to something I could sit in and be up to my neck 🙂

And this wasn’t the only creek:

I wonder if the people living in those houses know there is a creek running underneath their properties? Back in those days (198X), my brother and I and a few of the neighbourhood delinquents took what mother nature had provided and terraformed it into a waterslide. We smoothed the dirt walls with water, built a small dam downstream to create a pool and actually slid down the gently sloping creekbed like we were at Wet & Wild.

Such were the amusements of the proletariat urchins in 1980s suburban Australia.

These dams would last days, sometimes weeks. I recall building rudimentary crenelations atop one, and putting little twigs up their to represent flags atop the castle wall. I’d play in and around them, getting awesomely dirty and muddy, and then we’d run along home and hose each other off before going inside. Sometimes we’d had to pick leeches off as well, since they were common foes. If they’d had enough time to get a good suck going there would be blood when you removed them. I’d occasionally collect these guys as well and keep them in a tank, but I think my parents used to discourage this 🙂

Dam building hit it’s apex probably when I was about 10 or 11 years old. At that time I never saw a creek I didn’t want to dam in some way, even if it was just throwing a dead tree into it. It couldn’t have been an interest of mine only, since sometimes we’d fine dams on creeks obviously build by others. I should have formed a guild.

As with all interests, time caused it to fade, and during my highschool and college years I’m sure the last thing I ever thought about was trundling into the bush and building a muddy creek. And yet…

That’s lovely Valentine, where my then-girlfriend SMC lived. One day we were walking along the lake and came upon a lovely little creek behind a sport field. Amazingly we ended up spending some hours building a decent dam. I guess the spark hadn’t disappeared after all!

Posted in Family, Miscellaneous, Nature, Time | 2 Comments »

The Voyager

Thursday, September 19th, 2013

You may have heard the news: last week NASA confirmed that the probe Voyager 1, launched back on September 5 1977, had left our solar system and is now in interstellar space. Moving at over 60,000 km/hr, it is now headed toward the Great Unknown, and in a decade or two will leave humanity behind.

For such a brave and successful explorer, this future is both appropriate and yet deeply saddening.

That was Voyager before it was launched. For it’s time, it had the most sophisticated computers, detectors, imaging systems and transmitters known. The software was upgradeable, and it even had a 64 kB tape drive on which it could backup data if it was temporarily unable to transmit it home. The primary mission of Voyager, following on from the earlier Pioneer probes, was to explore the outer Solar System, specifically Saturn and Jupiter.

And how it succeeded! 14 months after launch Voyager reached Saturn (the ‘Jovian system’) and began to send back spectacular images like this:

That’s Jupiter with two of it’s moons, Io (left) and Europa. Voyager was about 350,000 kilometers away when this was taken, and this and other images gave us knowledge of Jupiter and it’s moons – such as rings, volcanic activity and the atmospheric winds – that we could never have known without such close-range observation. Voyager spent about 5 months close enough to Jupiter to study it and then continued on toward Saturn.

It took almost a year and a half more to get to the next planet, but once Voyager arrive it once again astonished everyone back here at home with not only its scientific discoveries (including details of the surfaces of the many moons and complex structures of the rings) but also photos like this one that has become famous:

This angle is not observable from Earth, and obviously it is impossible to image Saturn with this resolution from here (or even Earth orbit). Were it not for Voyager, we simply wouldn’t have had an image as beautiful as this.

After Saturn, in November 1980, Voyager’s primary mission was ended, a little over three years after it had begun. That was 33 years ago.

But Voyager didn’t stop! Unlike Cassini (which is even now orbiting Saturn and at the end of it’s mission in four years will crash into the planet), Voyager continued along a trajectory which would take it to the very edges of our Solar system. It was still powered and scientists at NASA continued to use the instruments for experiments related to the composition of space and the influence of the Sun at long distances, but Voyager continued moving further and further away from home.

in February 1990 Voyager took its last – and perhaps most famous – photograph, shortly thereafter dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’:

See that tiny bright spot about halfway down the brown stripe on the right side? That’s where you are now; that’s Earth. This is Voyager looking home 13 years after it had left. This is the farthest-ever photo taken of Earth, taken from a distance of 6.5 billion kilometers. Shortly afterwards Voyagers cameras were shut down; the software uninstalled, and the computers back here on Earth used to interpret the images mothballed.

I wonder if any camera will ever photograph this planet from a distance greater than this photo?

And so Voyager continued, moving into the farthest reaches of our Solar System. In 1998 it passed Pioneer 10 (which had been launched 5 years before Voyager) and became the farthest man-made object from our planet. And yet it continued onward, and continues still.

It was confirmed recently by NASA that Voyager has now entered interstellar space, which means it had left our solar system (the area of space subject to the solar winds of our sun). It has been traveling for over 36 years now, and still continues to send data back to Earth. Voyager is now 18.7 trillion miles from Earth, and its messages take 17 hours to arrive. While some of the instruments have ceased to function, Voyager still has enough power to take measurements of the composition of deep space and send that data back to Earth. However in about a decade the instruments will be powered down, and in about 20 years Voyager will be out of our range. At that point, it will truly be gone.

One aspect of Voyager that made the probe famous from the very start was the Golden Record:

This disc is bolted to the craft, and contains images and sounds from Earth. This was intended as a sort of introduction to the people that created the probe, intended to be decoded by any intelligent race that may one day recover Voyager. The record is attached to the side of the craft and is protected against collisions with space dust by an aluminium case. It is presumed the record will be viable for over a billion years.

The contents of this disc are hopeful and wonderful and inspired. This ‘message in a golden bottle’ is not a plea for help; it is a plea for friends. Greetings in 55 languages (and ‘whale sounds’) are included, ranging from the very simply “Hello” (in Hebrew) to the poetic “Greetings to our friends in the stars. May time bring us together” (in Arabic). There is hardly enough information in these brief recordings to decode any meaning, but the intent is beautiful.

Additional sounds include those of nature (frogs and rain), industry (trains) and humanity (heartbeats, laughing). 90 minutes of music are also on the disc, including my dad’s favourite, Beethoven. Many images are also included, of all manner of topics including people, animals, science, nature and space exploration itself. I particularly like that the Sydney Opera House is on the disc.

As a child I used to wonder a lot about who would find this disc. I would have assumed that they would be able to play it and decode the images and sounds, and that one day they may find their way to the planet on which it was recorded. However the simple truth is that such a possibility – even if the aliens exist – is almost nonexistent.

Voyager is headed into deep space, on a mission with a duration that will make the 18 months between Jupiter and Saturn seem like a walk in the park. Voyager isn’t headed toward any particular star, much less the closest, and therefore it is difficult to predict where it will end up.

The distances in space are vast – so big as to be beyond human understanding. NASA says in about 40,000 years Voyager will be in the vicinity of the star Gleiss, which has an unusual elliptical orbit and will then be, at a distance of 3.6 light years, the closest star to Earth. But Voyager will (at best), be only about 1.6 light years from Gleiss. If it continues at its current speed, that means at best Voyager will only get within 28000 years of Gleiss. NASA is throwing us some hope with their statement: the truth is Voyager will continue for a very, very, long time before it actually ends up anywhere, if it even does at all.

And will it be found? In about 20 years Voyager will ‘die’; it’s power supply will shut down and it will stop transmitting. Think of the transmitter as a beacon. By then it will be too far for us to detect it, but presumably someone else closer than us might. But once the beacon is off, the finding such a tiny piece of metal in the impossibly vast expanse of space will become almost impossible. This is not a challenge that can be overcome by more and more sophisticated detection equipment; the inability to find Voyager will be due to simple laws of physics. Without any beacon to guide a potential discovery, Voyager will only be intercepted if it is literally stumbled upon.

The likelihood is that this will never happen, and Voyager will continue forever, alone and unfound, until one day perhaps it is captured by the gravitational field of an unknown sun billions of years from home.

Spare a thought for this little guy. He’s further than any human will ever be. He’s seen things no human will ever see. He will survive every person on this planet and very likely every person that will ever live on this planet. He may even survive this planet itself, when it is absorbed into our ever-growing sun billions of years from now. If that day ever arrives, the only history that we ever existed will be the remaining space probes, and Voyager will likely remain the farthest one that we ever sent into the Great Unknown.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Nature, Tech, The Unknown, Time | 4 Comments »

In The Fight Between 2 Geezers And Montreal… The Sun Wins!

Thursday, August 8th, 2013

Today, after a very early start, we took the subway to the 1976 Olympics location. Although the stadium and other venues are still there, our destination was the Biodome, which is a sort of indoor zoo.

That’s Jim with one of the locals.

The Biodome contains 4 ‘biomes’, which are separate habitats that represent three parts of Canada and… well the fourth is tropical rainforest! Each is very large and has controlled temperature and a variety of animals and plants to see. It’s very impressive.

Here are shots from the rainforest section:

And the Canadian wilderness section (can you see the beaver swimming?):

And the Canadian Atlantic coast:

That’s a sturgeon Jim is admiring. The massive tank (which has surface viewing as well) is full of them. Me; I’m pointing to an evil fish. Don’t believe me…?

Maybe he has a good heart?

The final section was arctic, which meant the animals (birds) were behind glass in their cooled enclosures. The penguins were particularly popular with the visitors:

All in all, the Biodome is a very impressive place to spend a couple of hours, and you should visit if you’re in town.

The ~~lovely filly~~ concierge at our hotel had recommended the botanical gardens to me yesterday, and since it was a hop and a skip from the Biidome we hopped (and skipped) over.

The entry cost included the intriguing ‘Insectarium’ and it was this that we visited first.

What a surprise! This was an amazing collection of insects (most dead, but many alive) from all over the world sorted by family of colour or habitat or diet etc., etc. There were thousands to admire, and the presentation was as good as any I have seen.

(Yes, that’s my hand!)

Perhaps the highlight was an ingenious display of leaf cutter ants, crafted in such a way as to give guests the chance to watch them harvest and then carry leave pieces to their nests:

Awesome stuff! In my opinion, the insectarium alone made the ticket worthwhile, and we hasn’t even really entered the gardens themselves…

Anyway the Gardens are where it’s at here in Montreal right now, because of a topiary art installation. You know what that is: sculpture from plants. They can draw big crowds for this stuff?

I’m going to cut right to the chase:

The ‘Tree of Birds’! 16 feet high, 18 feet wide, dozens of tonnes and 56 birds all made with plants (over an aluminium frame, of course).

It was – and I’m not a big fan of this word – amazing!

But wait…..

Look at her! Gaia, The Earth Mother, rising 5 meters tall, deer in one hand and a waterfall in the other, all made of plants. It was awesome.

All told there were over 50 of these sculptures, ranging from ‘better than anything I could ever do’ to ‘difficult to believe it’s even possible’. Here’s a few more examples:

I was a particular fan of the orangutan, which very effectively used a type of brown grass for the fur. Needless to say, this exhibit (and the gardens overall) was absolutely worth seeing.

Did you see the bright sun in those photos? Well it saw us, especially the fact we had no sunscreen on since when we left the hotel rain was forecast.

My plan to stave off the inevitable sunburn by applying sunscreen after hours in the hot sun seems to have failed. In the afternoon we went for a walk around Old Montreal, but clearly by that point we had been ruined by a mixture of sunstroke and dehydration, and if it wasn’t for the (no joke!) over 2 hours of post carding and blogging I may have fallen asleep at 8:30 like Jim did 🙂

Posted in Animals, Family, Food, Garden, Miscellaneous, Nature, Pets, Trip | 2 Comments »

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