Timothy - Dog Year

Play

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All play and no work make Jack a dumb boy.  Half work and half play make Jack both.

Boredom

If you can never find yourself in a fun, fulfilling activity, try letting someone else decide where to go and what to do next time.

"It's a Bird, It's a Plane...It is a Plane..."

Thirty years ago on this day (July 28, 1976), the SR-71 reconnaissance airplane set two major world records for a conventional, unassisted manned aircraft: altitude (85,069 ft.) and flight speed over a straight course (2,193 mph).  While the space shuttle may be the fastest aircraft, it requires booster rockets to take off.  A few other aircrafts have reached higher altitudes by "zoom climbs," but not in sustained flight.  The SR-71 was so fast that its typical response to SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) was to simply...accelerate.  During its years of service in the Cold War, until it was retired in 1990 due to "high costs of operation" and replaced by spy satellites, not one plane was shot down.

The SR-71, nicknamed "Blackbird" and covered by a titanium skin, was designed and developed by Lockheed Martin's famous "Skunk Works" team, led by "Kelly" Johnson.  Over the years,  this "Jedi School" of black box (secret) engineering has produced other landmark aircrafts such as the U-2 spy plane and the F-117 Nighthawk stealth plane.  Remarkably, the SR-71 was completely designed using slide rules - no computers!  Yet even in this day of massive parallel processing, its records are still unsurpassed.

Now that's innovation, Microsoft.

Note: see this blog's "Sights and Travels" photo album on the left for pictures of the SR-71 and other cool aircraft.

Ecclesiastes 2006 (a.k.a. 7x24)

Twenty-four hours, seven days a week
The pulse races on, no rest for the weak
The futility, chasing wealth and fame
The more things change, the more they stay the same
A new friend made, then another lost
Springtime showers, then white winter frost.

What once was no is now still no
What once was yes I'll never know
Discharge the battery, disconnect
So to reset, recharge, reconnect
To what, I ask, indeed to what?
What wires remained have all been cut.

Resist gravity, or let things be
How long, I ask, lives the busy bee?
Win the battle, lose the war
Pound the proud chest, what's it for?
Show off your skills, then get paid
Then watch your name slowly fade.

You want to fight, you want a piece
It's really love,  it's really peace
You truly crave, is it not so?
Why make her out to be a foe?
Close to midnight, lift up a prayer
For a new heart, a brand new layer.

Lady in the Water

Score: 7.0 (out of 10)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Distributor: Warner Bros.
MPAA Rating: PG-13

A mirror.  In this film, that's what it took to see the big bad wolves called Scrunts.  It's reminiscent of a classic science experiment, where by having two mirrors face each other, an image placed on one mirror will appear to get smaller and smaller until it's nothing.  Too much reflection can lead to reduction.  And this film has an overabundance of reflection.

Lady in the Water begins with a great deal of promise, a simple, animated opening introducing the basic myth, followed by the gradual introduction to the story's cast of quirky characters.  From there the ride becomes bumpier, as the film becomes mired in dialogs talking about the myth.  There is nothing inherently wrong with stories that have as their theme the power of storytelling itself.  Myst, the bestselling computer game, executed this idea to near perfection with its world of the D'ni, where gifted writers created physical worlds through what they wrote.   In this film, however, it is more like watching a group of people gathering for a role-playing game: there's a healer, a guardian, a guild, etc.   The myth is poorly developed, with the water creature called a "Narf" (Was there someone nearby named Fran?  Would a male Narf be called a Knarf?), and the "Madame Narf" is named Story.  How original.  As the film progresses, the myth only grows thinner.  A potentially fascinating tale of man's close relationship with water turns into trite statements concerning how everyone is connected, the need for the universe to be aligned and personal energy released.  Let's start meditating as yoga class is now in session.

Despite the weak plot, the film receives a higher than average score for Shyamalan's well-paced suspense, continuing the fine tradition from his previous films, and for the brilliant acting by Paul Giamatti as stuttering everyman Cleveland Heep and Bob Balaban as a cynical, straight-faced film critic.  Underutilized is master stage actor Bill Irwin, while overutilized is Shyamalan himself, making much more than a cameo appearance as the unknown writer whose book will inspire a future leader who will save the world.  Shyamalan is not a bad actor, but can we get more narcissistic?

Shyamalan supposedly based Lady in the Water on a bedtime story he made up for his children.  Tolkien originally wrote his book The Hobbit also as a children's story.  That story, of course, became wildly successful and led to his formulating in depth the Middle Earth myth and what some call the best book of the 20th century, The Lord of the Rings.  I'm not holding my breath that anything remotely similar will happen with Shyamalan's fairy tale.

Risk, the Ultimate Payload

Back on July 4, Space Shuttle Discovery, with the most travelled miles and completed missions in the shuttle fleet after Columbia’s tragedy in 2003, launched off as mission STS-121. Countless eyes were set on this flight, both from nervous supporters and longtime critics of the program. Today at 9:14 AM, through heavy clouds, the mission’s success was confirmed by Discovery’s smooth reentry and landing back at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.  STS-121 had gone 3.5 million miles in total (I wouldn't mind having that many frequent flier miles).

The shuttle program is already set to end in 2010, but before then, an aggressive schedule of 15 more launches is planned, mainly to complete the construction of the ISS (International Space Station), the largest engineering and scientific project in history. The shuttle itself has been dubbed “the most complex machine ever built,” with more than 2.5 million parts and 230 miles of wire. Every successful flight is miracle, with the staggering number of risks involved. In a culture accustomed to winning, Americans don’t like to see almost $200 billion being spent on a program that’s already produced two failed missions and the loss of 14 lives. The death rate currently stands at almost 2% for space shuttle astronauts. The money can and should be diverted to solving more “practical” problems on earth, critics maintain, not wasted on maintaining spacecrafts based on late-70s technology.

Without the STS and ISS programs, however, how will mankind ever find out the feasibility of living in space? I’m not saying that NASA can’t put more effort into re-evaluating, restructuring, or streamlining these programs, but until better solutions are implemented, the space shuttle is what we’ve got, folks. As for the risks, they’re unavoidable to some degree. It’s not like they can create a perfect simulation of the space environment here on earth. On computer networks, you can create test and staging environments that are exact duplicates of the live/production environment – not so with space, and with the enormity and cost of these missions, one gets only so many shots at running in the “live” space environment.

“No pain, no gain” goes the old saying. One can easily substitute risk for pain here. Discernment and wisdom are always needed, but anything worth doing is worth risking loss of other things, even life itself (conversely, it is not true that risking loss of life means that the thing was worth doing).  In other words, one usually has to first pay for risk before risk pays off.  Hence, you can’t smell the rose until you get closer to its thorns. You can’t know whether the girl will go out with you unless you ask, despite a sense that she and all her friends and relatives are against you. The number one regret among senior citizens is always, “Wish I had taken more risks…” I doubt the astronauts who returned home today, or the three still on the ISS, will ever feel compelled to say that.

Another Feather in Columbus' Cap

Cool - Money magazine's latest top ten list of best big cities to live in the U.S. has Columbus, Ohio at #8, the only city from the Midwest and the third largest city listed (after NYC and San Diego).  Something's going right in this "cowtown"...

He Saw the Light

(Stop reading right now if the only Rembrandt you know is a toothpaste brand - if so, you need to broaden your cultural horizons, big time.)

Today marks the 400th birthday of one of history's most celebrated painters: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669).  Few artists can match this Dutch artist's prolific output of over 600 paintings, 300 etchings, and 2000 drawings.  A whole group of art historians and other experts, the Rembrandt Research Project, was formed just to study and determine which artworks were genuinely done by Rembrandt instead of his peers or students.

Like Dostoevsky, whom novelist Andre Gide said wrote like Rembrandt painted, Rembrandt did not exactly lead a model life to emulate.  After years of marital bliss and financial prosperity with his wife Saskia, her death brought mounting debts that eventually resulted in bankruptcy.  There is some debate over whether this was caused by his extravagant lifestyle (he loved buying and collecting) or a more general economic downturn that affected all artists in the country at the time.  In addition, the post-Saskia years were spent living with a mistress, Hendrickje Stoffels, whom he never married but with whom he fathered two children, a situation that did not sit well with the local Reformed church council.

It can be argued that had there not been such a dearth of great Protestant painters in history, Rembrandt wouldn't have been as famous.  Maybe, maybe not.  In any case, his talent cannot be denied.  He was prolific not only in number of artworks produced, but in his wide range of subject matter.  Well-known are his history paintings, which include scenes from history, the Bible, and mythology, but he is also recognized for his portraits- group (The Night Watch, 1642), single (Jan Six, 1654), and self.   The self-portraits provide interesting snapshots on how he viewed himself throughout his life - youth, aristocrat, old clown.  Regardless of what Rembrandt's deepest religious beliefs were, which are difficult at best to ascertain, his works reveal a person clearly sensitive to the smallest details of the people and world around him.  He was not one who shied away from drawing old women using the toilet.

The word most often used to describe Rembrandt's painting and etching style is chiaroscuro.  His version of light and dark contrast was, however, a significant departure from the harsh theater spotlight-like tenebrism of his predecessor Caravaggio or the smoky sfumato of the even earlier da Vinci .  Rembrandt, especially in later paintings, employed soft outlines and lights that seem more to emanate (glow) from the figures than from an outside source.  Like Michelangelo and Titian, his compositional arrangements and subject matters became more introspective in his last works, exchanging Baroque drama (The Blinding of Samson, 1636) for tranquility (The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1668).  Finally, his "strokes," either in paint or pen, demonstrate a high level of spontaneity and controlled energy, not an easy task with representational art.

He was no saint.  But let's continue to celebrate Rembrandt, if only for how he taught us to look at everything in a different light.  That, after all, is the mark of the great artists.

Silence

It's usually what you don't say or do more than what you do say or do that hurts those who love you.

Peril of Solitude

Living alone is now a health hazard!

Not much I can say about such research, except

"BRING IT ON"

Life or death, nothing really matters anyway these days.  I'd much rather be alone than with exclusionary people who are spatially close but emotionally and intellectually uninterested in anyone but themselves and their inner circles.

On a related note, I dedicate to a special someone who helped shape this bitter attitude (you know who you are) the following song :  Kelly Clarkson's "Walk Away"

WALK AWAY (Kelly Clarkson)

Video Code provided by VideoCodeZone.Com

What a great song, especially for one living alone.  And no, I've not lost my health, mental or otherwise.