My son Ethan’s comment on seeing the building featured on the US penny: “looks like a jail or something.”
A bit of googling reveals it’s actually the Lincoln Memorial.
Those Doric columns really do give the wrong impression, don’t they? At least, I hope they do.
Sharks are endlessly fascinating, probably mostly because they’re so potentially deadly. But as I realized recently at Sea World San Diego, their mouths are just plain ugly.
Sharks grow their teeth in flat rows – there are always a few rows coming forward to replace lost or old teeth. The front row is the most upright, and the net result is a mouth literally full of needle-sharp teeth.
Teresa and Aidan in one of the many classical viewscapes of San Diego’s amazing Balboa Park.
I continue to be amazed at the forethought and investment of San Diego’s leadership around the turn of the 19th century in creating this park. Thousands of acres. Dozens of major attractions, including museums, art galleries, cultural centres …
Ethan is usually up for anything that’ll draw a laugh. In the cactus garden at San Diego’s amazing Balboa Park.
I had to quickly snap this shot before this disabled sea gull took off, so unfortunately the photo is blurry. With a regrettable lack of sympathy for the poor bird, Gabrielle said “it can only swim in circles!”
On the pier at Santa Barbara, California.
A throw-away shot through a kaleidoscopic spyhole into a Sea World fish tank:
No, we are not staying at a hotel of ill repute …
Wacky tree near the San Gabriel “river” and an oil refinery in L.A.
Disclosure: I photoshopped out some greenery near the top left that I didn’t think added aesthetically to the photograph.
Cruised through the L.A. neighborhood of Brentwood – O.J.’s home – on our way to La Jolla today. Beautiful. Lots of gates.
Leadbetter beach at Santa Barbara …
The Golden Gate bridge, rising out of the famous San Francisco fog …
Ocean Beach just out of San Francisco: glorious in the sun.
OK, so a million people have done this, but I happened to be googling an address lately, and it was close to my parents’ house – where I grew up.
So I decided to virtually fly over and check it out:
There you have it – the house I grew up in. And my Dad’s old white van out front.
Odd, that van. He hasn’t had it for a couple of years. I guess the satellite photos aren’t incredibly up-to-date for New Westminster, BC.
Yesterday Teresa and I were strolling through Vancouver and happened to see a Roche-Bobois store.
Since we both love furniture and design, we went in (even though we had the kids with us). Fortunately the sales staff were friendly and helpful – not always the case in high-end furniture stores when you come in with kids.
I saw a piece that really got me thinking.
It was a side table system that incorporated at least 3 tables, all designed as insubstantial wood cubes that only had edges – no sides – and glass tops. All the tables fit together, and you could take one or more out as you wished. The result was a very complex visual image that would only work in a very simple room. But it could be stunning in that room.
Of course I forgot to take a picture, and the piece is not visible on Roche-Bobois’s website.
The image stayed with me, however, and as I was thinking about it today, I decided that the effect of the piece was to make infrastructure superstructure. This side table system, also from Roche-Bobois, does the same thing, although not to an equivalent degree:
The infrastructure, or usually hidden parts that support the architecture of the furniture, is visible. That transforms the piece, making it all superstructure … all visible components of the table.
That contrasts with design that incorporates both infrastructure and superstructure, like this console:
There are portions of the console – both structural and functional – that you cannot see. Hidden parts are infrastructure. Visible parts – the top and sides – are superstructure. Together, they form a single structure.
And that’s the key to yet another kind of design: where there is no distinction between superstructure and infrastructure. All you have is structure, and all structure is function.
An example is this wall shelving system, also from Roche-Bobois:
Every plane is visible; every angle is structural; every surface is functional. There is only structure.
It’s the beauty of simplicity.
Something old, something new. Snapped this yesterday while strolling around downtown Vancouver.
Yesterday Teresa and I took the kids into downtown Vancouver to the CN Imax theatre for the Deep Sea 3D Imax film. (See the trailer.)
Here’s the obligatory shot of us all (except for Teresa, taking the picture) with our 3-D glasses. (The kids size was so big we had to hold them onto Aidan’s head!)
We all loved it, especially Gabrielle – who has always loved fish.
There’s a great scene right at the beginning as a wave rises in the distance and comes closer and closer to you in 3-D as you sit in your seat, then covers you. Everything turns to black, and then you’re underwater. But the whole movie is beautiful and amazing and incredible.
It was the first 3-D movie for Aidan, who kept trying to touch sea urchins or jellyfish that seemed to be right in front of his face. 3-D, when done well, is amazing.
The only quasi-negative was the narration, by Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. They’re just not quite up to your standard National Geographic film narrator, or Leonard Nimoy, or Morgan Freeman, or Patrick Steward. Kind of stilted and staged, I thought, as did Teresa.
But that’s a quibble. The film is absolutely amazing, and well worth the time and expense.
After the movie, we strolled around Vancouver a little. Saw a triceratops on the street being pulled by a Hummer H3… which we saw later on as well – someone must get paid to drive it around, simply for advertising purposes:
We saw about 5-6 bear sculptures around the city – apparently part of a charity campaign, as they’ll be auctioned off in a few months:
Of course, a family day trip would not be complete without Ethan climbing something and making his mother’s heart race a little …
Teresa and the kids gave me a hockey net for my 34th birthday, last week. It took about half an hour to assemble – not bad – and it’s much better than our old one.
Ethan, Aidan, Gabrielle and I have already put it to several hours of good use!
Ethan’s latest Duplo creation …
And a shot with a slightly better view of Ethan himself …
Ethan’s way too old for Duplo now … but since his younger brother Aidan is into it (and always leaves his toys out) Ethan starts messing around with it from time to time.
On Saturday Teresa and I took the kids to Blue Heron Wetlands (we’ve been there before).
This time we went somewhere a little different – a sandbar along the side of the Sumas river. I started hitting some rocks with a stick that I found on the bar, and Aidan wanted to get into the action.
So I tossed him a couple, and Teresa captured the moment:
It was a beautiful, beautiful day, sunny, warm, and fresh. I guess this actually qualifies as stickball.
For over a decade, Teresa and I (mostly Teresa) survived life dryer-less. That sounds shocking to a lot of people, but we just never bought a dryer.
When we were just starting out, we spent $800 on a Maytag washer, and there wasn’t any cash left over – or at least none that we really wanted to part with – for a dryer. Air-drying’s better anyways, we said.
And over the past few years, what was the point? We couldn’t get a matching one now, after all.
Well, finally Teresa got tired of hanging laundry to dry, and a couple of weeks ago we bought a Frigidaire front-loading washer-dryer set.
But getting the set and getting it set up were two different things.
OK, I guess I have to be the millionth blogger to post on the Islamic cartoon fiasco.
First off, Mark Steyn is more right than wrong in pointing out that always worrying about other people’s sensibilities is a good way to lose all our freedoms. And my good friend Mike Skovgaard echoes his sentiments.
In a sense, Islamic Cartoongate is a good thing.
It shows all us moderate westerners in Europe and North America that if we keep bending over to be sensitive and kind and inoffensive, eventually we bend so far our backs will break.
And our relatively open, free, and safe society will be dead, burnt in fact and just not in effigy at the stake of Muslim fundamentalism.
There are some encouraging signs that spines are actually being sought and found in Western Europe, just when many of us on the other side of the Atlantic wondered if such a thing was possible.
I have to say, I feel a little bit weird about this one, because I’m a Christian. And it often seems to be open season on the symbols of Christianity in our society. Any flakey no-talent artist who needs to generate controversy because he cannot create (good) art, dunks a crucifix in urine or some such idiotic thing.
This is annoying to most Christians. More than annoying, it’s sacrilegious. Grossly irreverent. However, Christians do not feel a need to riot, burn stuff, and kill people when this happens. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” is one of the key teachings of the Bible.
Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.
(It’s worth noting that most Muslims consider the Bible a holy book as well. And that the Bible pre-dates the Koran/Qu’uran by some hundreds of years.)
But even though such behavior is annoying, and worse than annoying, it’s impossible to have a society worthy of the name where anytime anyone does anything offensive to another person we start a jihad to kill the infidel oppressor. As much as I dislike it, I’d rather have the irreverence than the police state that would replace it.
Which, is why, coming back to Cartoongate, while I think the cartoons are not a great idea, and not something I would do, I don’t want to see journalists, companies, countries, politicians, and societies lick fascist boots in response to the fundamentalist backlash.
So it wasn’t a stupid question after all.
So many of us have wanted to go with a digital SLR camera for better quality on fast-action shots, but hated to give up the live LCD preview that we’ve gotten used to.
Now we won’t have to ask why digital SLRs can’t do that anymore. Because they can.
Well, at least one can: the Olympus Evolt 330. This is very, very cool.
It’s not cheap – with a decent lense it’ll run a little north of $1000 … but this will force all the other digital SLR manufacturers to do some quick thinking. And prices will come down a bit.
I’m building another calendar and wanted something annoying out of a picture of my daughter Gabrielle.
Here’s what 30 minutes of photoshopping bought me:
Not too shabby, although far from professional.
As is usually the case, poor composition is the problem; I should never have taken the shot with that buoy in the background.
This happens to be at Steveston beach in Richmond, BC.
Last summer, I spent a day helping my dad refinish his basement. It’s in the house I grew up in; my parents have owned it for almost 40 years.
The house itself is well over a hundred years old. I was born and raised in New Westminster – the oldest city (and former capital city) of British Columbia. And my parents’ house is one of the big old houses of the late 1800s.
Down in the basement, there’s a massive brick central column, meant to catch the ash from the fireplace above, and transfer some of the heat down. The wooden beams that spiral out from it are huge, ancient, and of varying sizes and shapes, locked together with enormous cast-iron plates and screws.
As we were cleaning up the basement, I found an odd, old nail:
I can’t find a ton of information online about square nails, but they’re certainly old. One company claims to have been making them continuously since 1780.
I love old stuff, and I love having even a tiny piece of the house I grew up in.
OK, I’ve done it with my iPod, as have thousands of others.
Why not with my Harmon/Kardon AVR 240? Here’s about a 3-second exposure with the camera on a tripod.
For companies that still don’t get it: aesthetics are important. Aesthetics are important. Aesthetics are important.
At least, if you want anyone to love your product. If you don’t care, if it’s just a utility, if it doesn’t matter to you whether people will get passionate about what you produce, go ahead and make it beige and boring and bland.
But don’t expect your brand or your sales to be any different.
Jeroen is a Tsawwassen painter who also happens to be my brother-in-law.
I snapped this pic of one of his paintings in his house over the Christmas break, but really I’m just posting it here now to test some hacking I’ve been doing in WordPress 2.0’s image uploading capabilities.
[ update 8:18 ]
It works!
Cornelia Rinsche Hartog was born January 2, 1924, in Holland. More than that, I don’t know. Somehow, the city of Rotterdam rings a bell, but I honestly don’t know.
I always knew her as Corrie. Not that I ever called her that, of course. She was my then-girlfriend’s Oma, grandmother. But that’s the name that Rienk, her husband, always used. I can still hear him calling her now.
Old pictures have a way of captivating me. Probably you, too. Black and white. Grainy. Sometimes sepia-toned, always indefinably but unmistakably old.
And always the knowledge, the background bittersweetness, the nostalgia and the mute vague anger that here is a person, here is a human being, a soul at some stage in a life: alive, real, feeling, touching, hoping, dreaming, laughing … whose heart no longer beats. Whose breath is stilled. Who you cannot touch anymore.
A picture is a stolen moment. Stolen from us and … stolen from them.
On April 24, 1996, Corrie died of cancer in Langley Memorial Hospital. As she died, so did her husband Rienk, in a sense. He outlived her by 9 years, but in truth became only a shell of his former self.
I hardly knew her. She served us drinks and snacks, lunch. Asked questions, laughed. Said “yah, yah,” with a shake of the head in the good old-fashioned Dutch immigrant way. Always dressed up: hat, jewelry, shoes. Proper, but not stiff.
Someone – was it her father – made her that toy wheelbarrow. Maybe an uncle. The shovel that rests in it. Look at the thing – cross-bracing, handles. They knew how to make toys back then, toys that didn’t break the day after Sinterklaas. This one was love frozen into wood and metal.
See how blond she is, the prototypical Dutch girl. How artless her arms and fingers fall to her sides. How her white sleeves puck up at the edges. Her square-toed child’s shoes, with little white socks slumping down over the latches.
What is she – four, five? She was tall as an adult; probably tall as a child as well. She looks well-fed, but in just a decade and a half she would live through WWII and know both hunger and sorrow.
She’s already developed a child’s reserve – you can see it in the mouth, the cheeks, the slightly off-kilter stance. Perhaps this was the genesis of the dignity that I saw, 60 years later.
You look at her and you wonder: this girl was involved in the resistance. A brother died fighting the Germans. Her future husband helped the Canadian troops who were liberating the Netherlands. How could she know what was coming?
And after the war: marriage, immigration to Canada. A new life, a new house – many houses – throughout British Columbia. Years slipped into decades. Children – three, a teacher, a doctor, a musician. A community, a church. A home. A life.
And now a memory and a photography.
But more than that. Corrie was a Christian. That’s someone who knows a heavenly father. Someone who trusts a Savior.
And someone we’ll see again – in the fullness of time.
. . .
. . .
PS: We keep a birthday calendar in our house. I saw the scrawled “Oma” with a cross beside it about a week ago, and have been wanting to post something in her memory ever since.
Today was almost unbearable … the stereo equipment that I’ve been waiting for for over 9 years (OK, at least 9 days now) finally arrived at my office in Bellingham in the morning, and I had to wait all day to take it back over the border, get it home, and set it all up:
I did end up going for the Harman Kardon AVR 240, HK’s The Bridge product for my iPod, and the Bose 301 reflecting speakers.
I also picked up HK’s FL 8385 5-disc CD changer for when sound quality is paramount, and those moments when you’ve just bought a new CD and want to toss it in right away. I rip my CDs at 160 kbps, not 128, but the straight CD, especially any new HDCDs, is going to be a little bit better, I think. Besides, Teresa likes putting CDs in more than flipping through the iPod interface with the HK remote.
I haven’t been able to turn up the volume too much, since by the time I got everything hooked up and set up, it was a little after 8:00, and the kids were already in bed, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow …
And I’ll need to buy or build a better enclosure … the speakers do not fit properly, as you can see above, and I need a slightly deeper shelf for the components. The AVR 240 is only 13.8″ deep, but the FL 8385 is a little over 15″ deep, and that’s a bit bigger than this bookcase can really handle.
I can already hear the vast quality improvement from our previous mini system (a Yamaha), and I’m looking forward to hours of future music enjoyment.
. . .
. . .
BTW, I got the AVR (audio-visual receiver) which can do 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 surround sound in a vast variety of modes since this may eventually become our home theatre receiver. But right now it’s only pushing the two Bose speakers in stereo mode. The AVR 240 is 50 watts x 7 channels, but 65 watts when you’re only using the two.
. . .
. . .
Another addendum: I kept searching online for any information about duty/tariff rates for taking stereo equipment or other home electronics back to Canada from the US, and couldn’t find any. Well, finally I phoned, managed to get on the line with someone, and asked.
The answer was that electronics have no special duties – and this turned out to be true at the border. So all I had to pay was GST and PST, just like in Canada. And since I bought all my equipment for a little under $700 Canadian (minus the speakers, they were about $500), I basically got the Bridge and the HK CD-changer for free … since Future Shop had the HK AVR 240 “on sale” for $799 last week, and has it listed at $899 right now. Yikes – can you spell r-i-p o-f-f?
A few days ago we had Christmas dinner for 25: two turkeys, one extra-large ham, a massive pot of applesauce, and much, much more.
It was at my sister Renee and her husband Jeroen’s house. That’s Jeroen at the end of the table(s) …
Jeroen is an artist who has created many beautiful paintings (including the 5′ x 8′ painting in the background of this pic of my iPod).
Here’s one he’s working on right now:
Jeroen has done work in other media as well, including furniture design. Here’s a concrete and steel table he constructed this summer:
One of my favorite pieces in his house is a massive multi-ton stone sculpture by Jeroen’s sister, Lika Mutal:
(Lika is an internationally renowned sculptor.)
… and the Koetsier family gathered for a family photo …
… before heading off for family gift-giving. What a wonderful night!
A very merry Christmas to all our friends and acquaintances, and anyone who happens to see these words, and a wonderful, blessed new year.
