Robot Claw – Page 426 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

The Met

May 25, 2014

That’s a view of the city from Central Park. We were on our way to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is one of the worlds foremost art museums. I’d never been, and KLS couldn’t remember ever being, and after today we can hardly believe it took us so long!

That’s a Van Gogh, one of a roomful, itself a single room in the modern French section which included many paintings from all the masters. It was mind boggling, and you could spend half a day here alone! But this was only a tiny part of the museums collection of two million items.

They have Asian art, including an entire calligraphy section:

American art including many Tiffany windows:

An incredible collection of arms and armour:

A massive Egyptian section including an entire temple (‘The Temple of Dendur’) that was transported from Egypt and is now displayed in a massive hall:

They have ancient roman sculpture (SO much of it!):

Collections of antique furniture:

Ancient Indian art:

And more, and more, and so much more. We spent five hours at the Met, and maybe saw 25% of the collection. You could spend many days here if you wanted to see everything!

Oh and the cafeteria was quite good!

As I said yesterday, the city is crazy popular this weekend and The Met was no exception. Amongst this crowd of art appreciators was an actual artist:

He was very good!

So what were our favourites? We were both big fans of the hyper-realistic oil paintings, such as this one by Jean Leon Gerome that was painted over 150 years ago:

The paintings are displayed in a way that let’s you get very close to them. In the piece above, we just couldn’t see brush strokes. It was a work of mind-boggling talent!

I also very much liked the decorative armour, including this piece that would look right at home on the pages of the manga Berserk:

But my absolute favourite was this piece, named Springtime:

I liked this so much I bought a poster of it and will frame it. The face of the girl stole my heart 😉

The Met is incredible. Go see it; you won’t be disappointed!

NYC Streets

May 24, 2014

We’re in NYC. We walked and walked and walked today. And shopped. It’s super busy here and we saw many things…

Such as those flowers at a street market near the Flat Iron building. Not far from here KLS ate a shrimp burger from a food stand:

We saw the Statue of Liberty:

And then I ate a sandwich:

We bought many items, mostly for people other than us! KLS did however find a Japanese bead store and went crazy (she’s into jewelry making now). She’ll be back before we leave I’m sure.

The first half of the day was sunny and warm. Around 4, the rain came in and fell heavily. All of a sudden, the streets were full of umbrellas:

Our hotel is fancy. We paid a bit more for a view, and we’re on the 21st floor. Amusingly, the view included the hotel we usually stay in:

I bet that’s going to look good when the sun goes down!

Tomorrow we’ve got some cultural activities planned. Stay tuned 😉

Another Lego Crane

May 21, 2014

Over the last week, I assembled this Lego kit:

As far as these kits go, this one is seriously lacking originality, being almost identical in design and construction to other cranes I have made before.

As it turns out my familiarity with the basic design would almost be my downfall! This kit has 108 pages of assembly instructions, with over 250 individual steps. And on the 19th page, less than 20% into the construction, I made an error. This isn’t the end of the world – everyone makes mistakes with complex Lego kits here and there. But this tiny mistake became massive indeed since I didn’t notice it until over 70 pages later!

Here it is:

See that circled piece? We’ll call than an ‘eleven-er’. It should have been 2 tabs shorter, a ‘nine-er’. But it’s so embedded into the construction of the crane that removal at this point would require essentially dismantling 50% of the build and redoing it – losing many hours of work. What was I to do? I was so close to the finish at this point that my options were few, and I really, really didn’t want to dismantle and start again. So I had a brainwave:

Can’t see the fix can you? The curved piece on the side of the crane is attached using the 9 piece that I should have used 70 pages earlier. I had to attach it differently (the original instructions required the 11 piece and it was attached at the bottom not at the top as I did). But it’s very clean and it’s only visible in profile that there is an error:

Notice how on the left side the side panel is not flush with the body of the crane? Not perfect perhaps, but good enough 🙂

Here’s the final product compared to a very large animal so you can see how big it is:

It’s a very nice kit. The crane can be raised and lowered, and the claw at the end opens and closes using a fascinating mechanism. The kit can also be fitted with the technic motor and be battery driven, but my motor is still in my other crane so I didn’t do that. All things considered this is a great kit and while derivative of the other cranes I’m glad I own it 🙂