Frosty rural Manitoba, Canada
Thank You! for visiting this blog in 2010—more than 113,000 unique visits from 188 countries (traffic was up 66% from the preceding year with over 80% from first-time visitors). And thanks again to all who have contributed ideas, inspiration, suggestions, and comments.
Happy New Year! to friends far and near…
Cheers!
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A simple decision flow-chart… (link to source no longer works).
(Not trying to rob therapists here… just saying).
(go ahead… say it)
Merry Christmas. Fun Festivus. Good Goru. Happy Hanukkah. Kick-ass Kwanza. Jolly Juletid. Mirthful Mummering. Sanguine Saturnalia. Just name your Yule-type… I wish you well.
Peace on earth… and, Cheers!
Overcast Manitoba
Weather was not on our side, so we missed quite the sight in the wee hours of this morning. The total lunar eclipse that began a few hours ago took on a bloody red hue at its peak. Since the moon aligned with the Milky Way’s stars this time around, an enhanced ambience (apparently) made it particularly spectacular. This total lunar eclipse is the first one to occur on the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere in 372 years…
Drat! Missed it, due to persistent cloud-cover… well, maybe next time around. :-| The photo sequence above was taken in Manassas, Virginia, showing the moon in different stages of today’s total lunar eclipse. Source: NPR.
(think of this as your “fortune cookie” for today)
Nothing ventured, nothing gained…
(all one really needs to know, actually… and more)
Hot vs. cold, advancing vs. retiring… find lengthy prose along with explanations aplenty in Chromatography; or, A treatise on colours and pigments: and of their powers in painting by George Field, London, 1841.
Read it for yourself if you’re so inclined… here.
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A lovely Messerschmitt conversion… dashing through the snow.
Chanced across this on Facebook, original source unknown.
(from ‘New at Pentagram’)
Privately commissioned to create a gift for an architect, Daniel Weil created a one-of-a-kind clock that is both simple and complex. Reducing objects to their component parts has long fascinated Weil… this clock is the latest demonstration of his interest in investigating not just how objects look, but how they work.
Constructed in ash and nickel-plated brass and silver, the clock is built of five separate elements. The numbers, both hours and minutes, are inscribed on the face and interior of a 9 3/4-inches diameter ring. The mechanism for setting the time connects with the central mechanism with visible rubber belts. A single AA battery provides power to the clock through visible power strips that are recessed in the assembly’s base. And, befitting the object’s recipient, the housing for the central mechanism takes the form of, literally, a house.
“Objects like clocks are both prosaic and profound,” says Weil. “Prosaic because of their ubiquity in everyday life, profound because of the mysterious nature of time itself. Time can be reduced to hours, minutes and seconds, just as a clock can be reduced to its component parts. This doesn’t explain time, but in a way simply exposes its mysterious essence.”
[ I like clocks. ]
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“It’s better to help people than garden gnomes.”
—Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001)
(growing facial hair for a cause—I could Do this!)
Congratulations to the many friends and colleagues who have been growing an upper-lip-sweater over the course of this past month, as part of the Movember fund-raising initiative (for prostate cancer research). Don’t know how I missed taking part this year (growing hair is one of the things I actually do quite well), but guaranteed… I’ll be pushing out the facial follicles 11 months from now.
Image: thanks to friend Celia Clucas (Joburg, South Africa) for the cheesy snapshot of yours truly sporting a porn-star-type moustache and hamming it up with the likeness of a recently-departed simian colleague—ten years ago, if memory serves.
