Variety and New Skills

 It appears there are yellow watermelons in Taiwan. I've never seen one before, but they taste about the same. The only difference besides colour is that they are slightly less sweet than the pink variety.

A good friend of mine is currently in France with her cast and crew. They are putting on a puppet show in a beautiful theatre in Saint Andres, Champagne. The company is called The Space Behind The Couch and they are not the only ones taking part. There is a festival taking place specifically for puppet plays. The play they are doing is a rendition of the sad, true tale of  Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.

I acquired a copy of the book and, after the short read that it is, I tried my hand at making a paper crane.

This proved successful, so I attempted a large one.

And then a few more.

I began making them in my spare time at work between lessons. I know have about fifty of them, some strewn around my desk while others have been stuffed into a small bag which is spilling out in one of the desk's drawers.

But amateur origami isn't the only thing I have taken up with relish of late. Last weekend my girlfriend raised the level of my sewing from that of attaching wayward buttons to the use of a sewing machine. I have completed my first item - a dice bag.

The material in question is a remnant from an old pillow case, but as tutorial material it worked adequately. My next one shall be made of finer material of my own choosing.

Faithful

During break time at school at the end of this past week two of my students approached me and handed me an invitation at an event. The details of the event were slightly unclear, but I got the impression that there was going to be a concert or show with various people playing music and/or performing short skits. I accepted it and finding myself with free time on the day in question (today) I headed to the address.
Imagine my surprise after arriving at my destination and climbing four flights of stairs to find myself in a kind of Sunday School. It was a Christian gathering, no questions there, with people singing praise and worship songs on stage while the audience - largely children - sang along. The songs were all in Chinese, though I recognised various ones through their melodies. Being an atheist I felt a little out of place. One of the students found me and after a short while I was introduced to his mother and we proceeded to chat until the songs ended.

What happened next was apparently what the invitation was all about. We were presented with a short play involving five actors and aimed at presenting a moral, as you would expect from a religious gathering. This was followed by a ten minute break and then another play, this time with four actors. I only understood bits of the Chinese, but as it was a play and aimed at a young audience I could guess just about everything that was said.

Looking around the room I saw something both alien and very familiar. The alien sense came from me being a foreigner viewing an aspect of a culture which has adopted a foreign religion. The familiar part was seeing a group of people gathered for religious matters. I once followed a religion, back in the day before I began forming my own questions and understanding of reality, and I know the comfort that people get from being dictated to and being relieved of the stress of individual thought.
But there was also something else I noticed. As I could not understand enough of the language, all the talking around me was reduced to white noise and I found myself analysing the situation. What I found compelling was the sense of community created by a group of people coming together to socialise through the medium of a common interest. Though I could fault them for choosing a religion as that medium, I cannot fault them on the joy and excitement they all shared in connecting to one another. It's a bit like gaming, in a way; a group of people getting together to have fun and to play around with some fantasy.

Rooftop Gaming

Nanshijiao, in the south of Taibei City and close to the mountains, is an area home to a wildly popular sport. This sport is non other than racing homing pigeons. It is a highly competitive sport with rivals constantly trying to steal each others prize birds. People sometimes set up nets across treelines during races in order to try and catch birds. Then, if they catch an especially fast flyer, they can ransom it back to the owners for absurd prices. I've been informed that ransoms can be as high as hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

Enter into this calm picture the presence of six bemused foreigners equipped with pencils, paper and enough dice to choke a horse. We ascended to a rooftop flat, though flat may be a generous word. Put simply, it's a box - a box on the ninth floor.

The larger structure is the frame surrounding the stairwell and lift shaft. The "flat" is the smaller square on the right.

This friend doesn't live alone, though. He shares this glorified lookout point with two adorable overgrown-rats.

Unlike most "rats" (tiny dogs) these ones were good natured and I took a shine to them. I believe it was partly to do with them being sweet natured, and heavily influenced by their lack of yapping. I don't recall a single bark all afternoon.

Of course it wasn't long before our minds began drifting to practical matters. Dogs are, after all, tamed animals and many of the other animals we've tamed have been put to use pulling plows or providing us with milk. What could dogs do?

A military application soon presented itself.

Behold, the half-breed chihuahua improvised semi-automatic.

It wasn't long before everyone had gathered. We released the hounds to enjoy an evening of freedom while we brought out the real weapons.

As you can see my weapons have gone native on me.

We set out our things upon one of the tables visible in the picture earlier, gathering around it on bar stools. Playing commenced in the late afternoon, after a lively encounter with the wind which left us chasing paper around the rooftop and requiring us to flank one rather unruly sheet before it could be snagged and returned to a folder.

Rooftop gaming is an experience. Being that high up we were enjoyed the novelty of actually feeling the breeze and welcomed it after the heat. Luckily our day of gaming wasn't as hot as the week prior. But all things come to an end and for us that meant daylight. The sun lowered itself to the horizon and then gleefully sank beyond our reach. It wasn't, however, time for gaming to end.

'n Boer maak a plan. So did we. The host whipped out a lamp at sunset and gaming continued into the night. We eventually packed it up at twenty minutes to midnight.

PS: We found Batman.

Life of Pi explored

So a little while ago I read this book which I believe was quite popular even before the movie. Of course when the movie came out I went to watch it to compare the two and I must admit Ang Lee does it justice, even if he has to invent some parts of his own.

Though I enjoyed the story I found something wrong with it which I've decided to try and put into words here.

The story is about a young man (old boy) who finds himself on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for about two-thirds of a year. The story is roughly split into three unequal parts. The first part is his life as a boy in India. The second is the largest part which covers his time lost at sea.The last part is very short and briefly covers his arrival back on land and his re-connection with humans.

This is where I am required to put up the mandatory SPOILER WARNING sign to anyone who has not read the book, but still wishes to. For those people - go away and read it first. Get your own opinions before considering other people's.

So Pi is our narrator and his family live in India where they are zookeepers. They decide to emigrate to Canada and so load up some of the animals onto a ship, the Tsimtsum, and sail east. On their way a massive storm sinks the ship and Pi is the only member of his family to escape onto a lifeboat. Here we meet our first peculiarity. Pi claims that the animals were free from their cages, running around the ship.

So Pi ends up on a boat with an injured zebra, an orangutan and a hyena. The hyena kills the zebra and orangutan, before being killed himself by a tiger who happened to be hiding under the tarpaulin in the bottom of the boat. Pi then has to find a way to live with this tiger for the greater part of a year, surviving on rainwater and fishing to supplement the small supply of emergency rations kept in the boat.

This sounds fantastical in and of itself, but it gets even weirder. He then tells us of his adventures at sea, including finding a floating algae island which supported trees and fish-eating meerkats. The also speaks of meeting another traveller, himself in a lifeboat from his own shipwreck floating around in the Pacific Ocean.

When he eventually reaches dry land, the tiger mysteriously disappears, leaving no proof of its existence. Some people find Pi and take him to a hospital where he is later interviewed by two Japanese men who are looking for information on what happened to the Tsimtsum and, learning that it sank, what the causes might have been. After refusing to believe the fantastical story which Pi tells them, he then succumbs to telling them another version of the story.

In this second story there were no animals loose on the ship. Instead the animals on the ship are replaced by people. The hyena is the ship's cook, the orangutan is his mother and the injured zebra is a sailor who broke his leg. The cook convinces the others they have to cut off the sailor's leg to stop gangrene, but then uses its meat to fish with. The sailor ends up dying and the cook keeps fishing with his body parts. He then gets into an argument with Pi's mother and kills her. Pi, unable to deal mentally with the situation flees to the raft (which they made to fish from) only to return later and take revenge. Pi is the tiger.

I would like to expand upon that idea. Pi is traumatised and in order to deal with the situation has to create a split personality, an alter-ego. This is the tiger and the lifeboat - the central site of his pain - becomes its domain, forcing him into exile to escape the horrific memories. 

It is only when he returns to dry land and is freed from the lifeboat that he can dismiss this alternate personality.

The introduction to the book gives us a promise to carry into the story. An old man in a bar (sounds like the opening to a myth) tells a writer that he knows a story that will make him believe in God. The writer then tracks down the narrator of the story in order to get the "firsthand account" of this story. What we find is something else. We do not find that we believe in God, but simply that we want to believe in God for fear of what the alternative means.

We find a lovely fantasy story designed in such a way as to supplant a true story and the true story is so horrible and tragic that we want the fantasy to be true. This, essentially, is the story of religion. Anyone who has spent enough of one's life following a religion will want desperately to hold their faith, even if their beliefs are proven to be illusions.

A Trip South

For the month of may I spent my time escaping the dreaded tropical heat of Taiwan and headed home to South Africa. There my girlfriend and I took a well deserved rest from working with midget drunks children. I would like to begin by saying a word about Cape Town, the capital city of the Western Province. It is an absolutely beautiful place and (provided you ignore the three blocks of flats commonly called the Toilet Rolls) one of the nicest I've been to. It's nothing when compared to Edinburgh, but was a delicate charm perched on the coastline and surrounded by mountains. It is also the only city I know of where the city planners are so useless as to put traffic lights on a roundabout.

The other lovely thing about Cape Town is how much greenery they keep in the city. There's a pathway one can walk down that goes right alongside the Houses of Parliament. On the other side stretches a long, but narrow, park called the Company Gardens. This allows for all sorts of oddities, like geese in front of parliament.

The park also hosts a number of pigeons and squirrels, including one evasive albino squirrel. Luckily I had my camera with me.

  

 

Almost looks like this squirrel is shaking his fists in anger, like a mid-fifties TV villain getting caught by the goodies.

We took one day and, with a couple of friends, decided to travel out of the city to a wine farm for lunch. The countryside surrounding Cape Town is rich with vineyards and many of the wine farms offer lunches, wine-tasting, sightseeing and stalls selling farm produce.

We went to a place called Babylonstoren: Link to their website.

It's a delightful place, nestled in a valley ringed by mountains, and everything served in their lunchroom comes from the farm itself. It's a great setup they have there and I was amused by their menu. They categorised their salads according to colour and were very broad on their interpretation of the word "salad".

The green salad was the closest to normal. It had a slice of melon with gratings of apple on it, and a savory pastry which contained spinach.

The yellow salad was more like a vegetable dish accompanying a main meal. It had bits of pumpkin and butternut, segments of tangerine and a smattering of gooseberries.

The third salad, the one I chose, was the red salad. It consisted of thin slices of beetroot and pink guava over which was scattered roasted nuts, granadilla seeds and a few edible flowers. There was also some salmon and plain yogurt.

My girlfriend and I at lunch. We were playing with the camera filters and ended up being caught in a halo of shimmering light.

After lunch we spent some time wandering about the farm in what turned out was their vegetable garden. We spotted virtually everything that went into our lunch (salads, main courses and desserts) including some very large, black, speckled chickens. The scenery was delightful and the sun high, though it was a tad on the chilly side with a wind blowing. I didn't care. Frankly, I was loving the cold weather.

Some of the outbuildings, including stables for donkeys, and a pigeon loft in the building on the right, in the foreground.

The edge of the garden section of the farm and the building in which we had lunch.

Nectarine Alpine blossoms.

Part of the garden with mountains in the distance.

Part of the garden where both vegetables and fruit are grown.

Me out in the garden.

My oldest friend.

Us being ourselves.

My girlfriend's oldest friend.

Looking For Group

For those of you who have no idea what I'm referring to, follow this link and prepare for a wonderful comic. The only thing I have against it is what I have against most of modern culture - the way women are dressed and represented. Other than that, it tells a wonderful tale full of quirky comments and both mimicry and mockery of the gaming culture in particular, and the general culture at large.

Looking For Group is a free online comic which is written by Ryan Sohmer and illustrated by Lar Desouea. It began back in 2006 and became so popular that they began planning for a movie. Keeping with its style, they wanted it to be comical, witty and to contain musical numbers, like a parody of traditional Disney-esque children's movies. One music video was released which can be found here on youtube.com.

They hoped to have a movie, at least in production by 2008. That didn't happen for various reasons, but they have since revised their plans and are working toward it again. No one appears to want to make their movie (at least not without taking control away from Ryan and Lar) so they've embarked upon producing the movie themselves.
They began a Kickstarter project to raise US$14,000 in order to complete their second musical number for the movie - the first step in getting the movie back on track. They called upon their fans and their fans replied with over US$130,000.
[Details: are here.]

The Kickstarter project has ended and my rewards for loyalty have arrived. I'd like to show them off.

First there's the thank you card for backing them:

 

Then there's a T-shirt that I couldn't say no to:

Then there's the reward I chose. The comic is not only free online, but it can also be purchased in beautifully coloured volumes. Every four or so volumes they also release as a hardback book. I have mine, and now await the releasing of the next four-volume hardback book:

  

Lastly, just to show off, I'd like to show the plushy that I had custom made for me by a company in South Africa.

[Detail: here or you can look up Plushie Heaven on Facebook]

GATSBY

It's time Baz Luhrmann retired.

For starters, 3D is a complete waste on a movie like this. Nothing about a period piece of this nature calls for 3D, but then 3D has always been a bad idea. It's a gimmick, like overly-applied makeup, and just as hideous to behold.

That aside, this movie completely fails to deliver. Its highlighting failures are the choices in music and the general feel of the movie. Nothing, really nothing, gives justification for modern hip-hop and rap (produced by Jay-Z and some people who can't spell bullets) to be used instead of jazz in a period piece set in the 1920s.

The party scenes in the movie are pretentious. Rather that showing a setting of elegant parties which - though a touch avant garde - still maintain a level of class and decency, Mr Luhrmann replaces them with a blend of ridiculous extravagance and crudity which is becoming typical of him. The same nonsense can be seen in his other movies, Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge. In both of those he also used contemporary music and, though they were terrible, at least with Romeo & Juliet the modern music fit with the contemporary setting.

The set pieces of a Baz Luhrmann film are easily spotted: At least one completely over-the-top party in which lewdness is the order of the day, one unnecessary scene of lovemaking (which is completely unwarranted in a movie based in The Great Gatsby), shots which alternate between speeding up and slowing down, and a terrible dependency on C.G.I.

By contrast the acting of Leonardo DiCaprio was surprisingly good. He was the highlight of the show.
Tobey Maguire playing Nick Carraway was a mistake. He does not fit the role at all. What's more, Luhrmann's decision to replace his narrative with a discussion between him and a psychologist was painful to watch, and very odd as we see that he is actually living with his psychologist by the end of the movie.
Daisy was inaccurate as she appeared more contested and a stronger character. She defies her role (as in the book) of a frivolous and immoral character, which is the core tragedy of Gatsby's love for and faith in her.

Baz Luhrmann's name up in glittering diamante-esque lighting is all one needs to know about this movie. Luhrmann wants to make a name for himself as the man who does fabulous movies filled with cabarets, exorbitant party scenes, and a daring contemporary soundtrack. What he ends up with is a pile of rubbish that disrespects its source material. If Luhrmann really wants to direct something of this nature, then he can bloody well find a new story, rather than torture an existing one. Either of the older movies (1974 and 2000) would prove a much better watch.