Traviata!

Wonderful!

Saxons

In the last few weeks, I've been slowly painting my Saxon's and lamenting their imbalance in forces. Saxon's are mostly iron age people and as such would not have a great many armoured warriors. Alas, I have more Saxons wearing mail than without, so my ability to field a realistic Saxon war band is greatly diminished. The only solution is the acquisition of further miniatures as soon as possible! Alas, I shall probably not have much time for painting after the next week as I am both busy at work, and shall have another small moifling puttering about the place!

In anticipation of purchasing more unarmoured warriors and skirmishers in the future, I have divided my current stock into three distinct war bands. Most of these figures will feature in the concluding battle of TDM: chapter six.

Happy Birthday Mo

Today is/was Mozart's 253rd birthday... so here's one of his more famous pieces to celebrate.

Here we go again

Holland has already seen two high profile critics of Islam murdered, another hounded from the country and a fouth arrested. Now we see they have arrested a fifth high profile critic of Islam, essentially for stating an opinion. Oh yeah, things are going just great in Europa!

Farewell Bente

My cousin Bente died this morning, killed in a car accident as she drove to work. She was a few years older than me, and I shall always remember her as I first met her, a beautiful Danish teenager, so vital and smiling. Full of life.
I shall miss her.

Edited to add.

We attended the funeral, Philip and I. Mette stayed at home as she is so pregnant now that movement is becoming difficult. The funeral was hard to bear, but I'm glad I went. My family has been almost rent asunder by conflict in the older generation and its always hard to be with them for any period of time. Fortunately, we cousins, the younger generation have not inherited their ire, so we can sit and talk like decent, even caring human beings. Some of my cousins are odd balls, but for the most part they are funny, caring and nice people whose company I enjoy.

Bente was one of the best though, and as an older cousin, always ready to take initiative and to ensure the drama of our parents never interfered with our gatherings. When ever there was any hint of conflict, Bente would scold the offending party in a way that put every one at ease.

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones

Season one (8 episodes)

This was a Christmas present from Mette's parents and I've now watched all the episodes. The first six episodes follow Indiana Jones as a young boy and are not quite as boisterous as the later episodes. The last two episodes follow Indy as a late teenager, having run away to join the Mexican revolution and then the First World War. Each episode is strangely divided into two separate adventures which makes for an interesting format. I've never seen television presented like that before.

A lot of people have complained over the way George Lucas edited out certain parts of this production. Originally each episode was introduced by the character of Indiana Jones as an old man, looking back over time, and those book ends (as they were called) have been removed. On the whole this doesn't seem to have effected the presentation much, except in the very first episode which ends very abruptly, and I assume that 'old Indy' would have related the conclusion of the adventure in the original format.

Youngest Indy with Tolstoy

I really like this series and I intend to buy the next season as soon as possible. There are 12 DVD's in the box and the extra disks contain a lot of historical documentaries that follow the adventures and explain who the famous people Indiana Jones meets are and Indy meets a lot of famous people. In season one, he's met TE Lawrence, Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit, George Patton, Giocomo Puccini, Howard Carter (who discovered Tutankhamun's tomb), Norman Rockwell, William Butler Yeats, Edgas Degas, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Edward Stratemeyer, Pancho Villa, Thomas Eddison, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Sean O'Casey, Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy, Jiddu Krishnamurti and several leading members of the Theosophic Society. I still haven't seen the historical documentaries. I intend to watch/listen to them as I paint in the future. There's loads to keep my restless mind occupied whilst my fingers get on with painting.

Teenage Indy, the revolutionary

The acting is fairly middle of the road. Nothing brilliant like Harrison Ford alas, and not much to show that the Young Indiana Jones is going to grow up to be the confident character Ford made famous. As a boy Indy is fairly extrovert but adolescence seems to sap his vitality and Sean Patrick Flanery who plays Indy as a young man seems to have been asked to play the character as slightly naive, and much prone to gawping. I think this is a device to allow Indy to meet and be lectured by a long range of famous people, but its a bit weird that having met such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso and Leo Tolstoy in his younger years, Indiana Jones still seems in awe of some of the lesser characters he meets along his way.

Never mind. It works for me.

moif world update

January feels like an endless 7 am. The sun never appears except to shine briefly through the odd crack in the clouds like some celestial search light. All is grey and grimy. The roads look like Siberia, black and shiny wet. Glistening with grit. Sparkling rain drops in the glare of the car lights. Very moody. In Denmark the law states cars must always have their lights on, all day long, regardless of the weather. The red tail lights glow and flash in the haze like pulsing magma.

I've been at Proremus for two and a half months now, and its a great place. Really interesting and nice people. Whether they can afford to give me a job, or whether I can stay there after January 30th remains to be seen. I have a meeting later this week about it. In the mean time, sitting at my desk with an ancient I-mac (a really awful computer that makes photoshop feel like I'm swimming in porridge) I've been playing about with CS3 Flash, making small animations for web pages. Its not like anything I've really done before (except classical animation at school and with Mette's brother Kristian one time in 2000) but its interesting.

The place itself is an old school so the main room is a cavernous place where silence descends as every one gets on with the job. At first it felt oppressive, but as people loosened up it became more tolerable and now it feels natural. I listen to my play lists on You Tube whilst I work, nodding my head enthusiastically to Static X, the Manic Street Preachers and the only track Oasis ever made that I like.

Freja grows ever larger and she truly is 'the Destroyer' now, wrecking things like some demonic force of nature. She stole a play phone from one of the kids in the kindergarten today and I had to tell her that was wrong. Grappling with a three year olds concept of ownership feels like struggling with a malignant eel. I think she understands, but the way her eyes glide away from mine as she answers doesn't inspire confidence. Fortunately she's a fairly well behaved child, at least that's what the grown ups at the kindergarten told Mette. I see scant evidence of good behaviour when she freaks out in the street because she wants a sausage bun. The way people stare when she does, one would think I was inserting red hot needles under finger nails!

Mette is due in 17 days. If this baby follows the trail blazed by Freja, it may be ten days over due. Poor Mette is suffering though so she is hoping for a few days earlier. We have no plans (and no money) for a third child so with luck she'll not have to endure it again. I have to say, the way the skin stretches so taut in the final weeks does look horribly painful, especially with the fresh stretch marks. I try to cheer her up by telling her she should saviour the sensation as it will never happen again, but that's easy enough for me to say I guess. A part of me loves it though, even though I know she's uncomfortable and often in pain, she nevertheless looks utterly beautiful to me.

We still haven't thought of a name for the little fellow. The problem lies in associations. All the names Mette likes sound awful to me and vice versa, and the names we can agree on are all some what ambiguous. At this rate he's going to end up being called child_02.

Interesting people: Sergey Korolyov

Gagarin and Korolyov

Today is the one hundred and second anniversary of Sergey Korolyov's birth, so its as good a reason as any to salute one of the absolute greatest engineers of the twentieth century. The irony is, Korolyov's fame is eclipsed by his achievements because as chief designer for the Soviet Union's space programme, his identity was a closely guarded state secret during his life time and subsequently most people have no idea who he was. Basically he was the Soviet equivalent of Wernher Von Braun.

Korolyov was born in Ukraine, in 1907 and had a lonely childhood in what we would today call a broken family. His parents separated and he never met his father ever again, being lied to by his mother that his father was dead. he attended school like any other child and showed an aptitude for aviation, eventually studying flight theory and in 1923 he joined the Society of Aviation and Aerial Navigation of Ukraine and the Crimea. Gliders were all the range back then (lots of future rocket engineers were big on gliders as young men) and Korolyov was no exception designing his own glider and training as an aviator. In 1930 he graduated and joined the Tupolev design bureau and became the lead engineer on the TB-3 bomber project.

Korolyov didn't stand out during these early years. The Soviets were churning out engineers to catch up with the other industrial nations and Russia had a great many accomplished engineers already. Things only really began to change when Korolyov joined the Russian Group of Study of Reactive Motion, known by the acronym GIRD, this was Russia's version of Germany's VfR. GIRD (and the VfR) are the hatching grounds for virtually all the great rocket designs of the twentieth century and in close competition these two organisations became a fast moving internal community where idea's and new thinking radically expanded from theory to design.

A modern R7 (green) fitted to a Soyuz space craft (white). 2003.

GIRD eventually became the Jet Propulsion Research Institute, and Korolyov was made Deputy Chief, in charge of cruise missile and rocket assisted glider designs. The latter gives a good indication of how young these fields of engineering were. No one at the time was able to see clearly which idea's would resolve themselves into practical designs, so a lot of effort was spent looking into any unusual idea that came along, such as rocket assisted gliders. This is the reason why I like the 1930's so much. Technology was still an adventure, naive perhaps, but still untainted by pollution, industrial murder and the atomic bomb. The stains of history had yet to appear on the spotless white lab coats. I wonder if any of the engineers of that time had any inkling of the future they were building. Many of the men at GIRD (for I've never yet heard of a female rocket engineer) were idealists who saw the future as bright and wonderful. Like Tsiolkovsy and Zander they dreamed of space flight even whilst Stalin purged the country and sent many of them, including Korolyov, to labour camps in Siberia.

Tortured at the Lubyanka prison, Korolyov (who seems to me to have been something of a workaholic) confessed to slowing the work of the research institute, in return for which he was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp. One of the men who had denounced Korolyov was Valentin Glushko who would go on to become one of Korolyov's main rivals, and for the rest of his life, Korolyov bore Glushko a grudge (who can blame him?). Korolyov was convinced at the time that his arrest had been a mistake and he wrote many letters trying to persuade the authorities of his innocence. Eventually this bore fruit for the dreaded NKVD head Lavrenti Beria ordered a retrial and Korolyov received a reduced sentence which allowed him to serve his time in a special science and research camp. Such are the joys of communism.

Korolyov had suffered greatly in Sibera. He'd lost his teeth and his health would never fully recovered. Furthermore, almost every one he'd worked with in the Jet Propulsion Research Institute had been executed or disappeared in Siberia. He returned to work though, designing and building bombers for the war which had broken out after Adolf Hitler invaded Germany. Its another great irony of Korolyov's life that he worked so hard for the people who caused him so much suffering, whilst the people he laboured against would be the catalyst for his greatest triumph, for when the Second World War was winding down, Korolyov was suddenly given the rank of a Colonel and sent to Germany to loot the German V2 rocket programme. Russia had had parity with Germany in rocketry until Stalin had started murdering any people he deemed a threat, and now the Soviet Union was at pains to regain lost ground

Korolyov and his companions recovered a lot of the work undertaken at Pennemünde by Von Braun, but they failed to get the main German scientists, most of whom had prudently surrendered to the USA and been quickly removed from harm, and off to comfortably work for NASA and the US aerospace industry. The Soviets were left with the infrastructure and a lot of second line engineers, but this was more than enough for Korolyov who was finally given the chance to fulfil the GIRD dream and build a genuine space rocket. This he did and an R7 'Semyorka' rocket successfully lifted the tiny Sputnik-1 satellite into orbit on 4th October, 1957.

A lot of historians like to describe Sputnik as beginning the arms race which would characterize the Cold War, but in truth it was Korolyov and the R7 that began the arms race. Whilst the R7 was able to lift Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, its massive payload, far in excess of any previous, or contemporary design meant it was able to carry the Soviet Union's nuclear warheads 8,800 kilometers.

Its a sad legacy for Korolyov. The Soviets used his work for triumphal propaganda whilst denying him any credit. The R7 remains one of the most durable rocket design in history with a number of modern variations, but its use as an ICBM forever taints Korolyov's amazing engineering success.

Sergei Korolyov died on 5th January, 1966 whilst working on the Soviet lunar programme. In 1972, Korolyov's position as chief designer was given to Valentin Glushko, but by then the USA had beaten the Soviets to the moon and the space race was more or less over.

I really hate buses

I had to take a public bus this morning. It was bad enough having to get up at the crack of dawn, after four hours of constant sleep deprivation thanks to the Snoos, but sitting on a bus, starting, stopping, jerking me about as the driver swung the heavy vehicle around small corners and through the early morning traffic, my stomach decided that the first half hour was too much and began to rebel. I haven't thrown up from driving sickness in years, but this morning came close.

I have to go through it all over again tomorrow. Currently I'm on a introduction course to learn about CS4 Flash. This is taking place in a small rural centre on the far side of Skanderborg. It might as well be the far side of Mars for me. The hassle just getting there is horrendous. I survived though, so I guess I can do it again tomorrow. I shall learn from my mistakes however and take a plastic bag with me, just in case.

It was great to come home, all knackered and ready to drop and be greeted with little running feet and a big cry of "Dada!"

In other news, Freja managed to almost destroy the second TV in two weeks today. Fortunately it survived landing on its screen.

Flames

I just discovered this beautiful song today.

It fits the image of Snegurochka in the previous post perfectly!

Artist of the month: Viktor Vasnetsov

I love the above picture. Its called 'Snegurochka' and its by Viktor Vasnetsov. For a long time I saw it in a strange perspective where by the Snow Maiden is looking up into the sky and behind her is a cold icy lake reflecting the stars above. It was only when I realised that the small orange pin pricks of light behind her were the horizon that I realised she is standing on a hill side and staring past me. It was her shadow, and the shadows of the trees that fooled my eye. I'm a bit disappointed now that I see the picture properly for I liked my version better. It gave her a sadder, more isolated feel that better fits her character I think.

Viktor Vasnetsov was a Russian artist, born in 1848, and died in 1926. His work has out lasted him some what and if your well versed in the arts, or are a fan of fantasy art, then you've probably seen one or two of his paintings. His portrait of Ivan the Terrible is quite famous, but its these two paintings I most often come across. Vasnetsov was something of a romantic and many of his paintings reflect the deep sense of Russia's history. He was a seminal artist in the Russian revival and also an excellent draughtsman and as a consequence his work has that old fashioned perspective that lends itself so well to modern escapism.


Initially Vasnetsov wasn't big on historical or mythological themes, but after he'd studied in Paris, he broadened his horizons some what and in the 1870's he wasted his time on paintings no one was interested in. These paintings are today his most popular which just goes to show that its not worth bothering with all that over rated money and success business. Sooner or later the world will catch up.

Later, in 1885 Vasnetsov worked on costumes for Rimsky-Korsakov's opera, 'The Snow Maiden', which is based on the Russian folk lore character of Snegurochka (top image). I don't know why but I love this character (the opera's not bad either, Rimsky-Korsakov being my favourite Russian composer by far). Snegurochka reminds me of several other lonely female figures of northern European folk tales, HC Andersen's Little Mermaid and Tove Janssen's Lady Of The Cold being other examples, where the tale revolves around a lonely arcane figure yearning for an impossible mortality or companionship of humans.


Later in life, Vasnetsov got into more theatrical and costume design, architecture and the construction and management of one of Moscow's foremost gallery's, the Tretyakov He also went on to create the characteristic felt cap of the Russian army Bolsheviks, known as the Budenovka.

Through out his life, Viktor Vasnetsov worked on religious iconography and he was eventually made a noble by Czar Nicholas II. Its difficult to imagine that he was enthusiastic for the communist revolution, but one never can tell. He spent a lot of his own money buying things for Moscow's State Historical Museum though so its not hard to see that he was something of a nostalgic.

Two of his brothers were also artists, one of whom also became quite well known.

Tornado

This is just so cool! As usual the British enthusiasm for steam engines has amazed me yet again. It seems a bunch of die hard enthusiasts have built a fully operational steam locomotive, based on a pre-existing design, but with upgraded features, as such an engine might have had if the British hadn't abandoned steam in the 1960's.





The first steam train built in Britain in almost fifty years!

BBC articles, with additional video 2 3

60163 Tornado is a brand new main line steam locomotive built in Darlington, England. It is the first such locomotive to be built in the United Kingdom since Evening Star, the last steam locomotive built by British Rail, in 1960. Designed and built to meet modern safety and certification standards, Tornado will run on the UK rail network passenger main lines around the country, as well as on mainline connected heritage railways. The locomotive is named after the Panavia Tornado military jet.

The locomotive was built by the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust, a charitable trust founded in 1990, for the purposes of building Tornado, and possibly further locomotives. Tornado was conceived by the Trust not as a replica or a restoration project, but as an evolution of the LNER Peppercorn Class A1 class of locomotives, incorporating likely improvements to the design had steam continued, and changes for cost, safety regulation, manufacturing and operational benefits, while replicating the original design's sound and appearance. As such, being a completely new build original machine, Tornado is considered as the 50th Peppercorn A1, numbered next in the class after the last member built in 1949, 60162 Saint Johnstoun.

The original 49 Peppercorn A1 locomotives were built in Doncaster and Darlington for the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), while Tornado was built in the Trust's Darlington Locomotive Works. The original 49 locomotives were all scrapped by 1966 after a comparatively short 15 year average service life. None of the class survived into preservation, and as such Tornado fills a gap in the classes of restored steam locomotives that used to operate on the East Coast Main Line.

Tornado moved under its own power for the first time in July 2008 at Darlington, and then spent two months at the preserved Great Central Railway double-track tourist railway in Loughborough, where it was tested up to speeds of 60 mph (97 km/h) and operated its first passenger train. Tornado was then moved to the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York, where it completed three test runs on the main line network, up to speeds of 75 mph (121 km/h). Once approved for the mainline, Tornado is due to operate its first main-line passenger train on 31 January 2009, after which it will begin to recoup the estimated £800,000 debt remaining from the project, which cost around £3 million, through hauling various railtours and charters.

With a shorter rake of 11 coaches compared with the original Peppercorn A1's usage, it is expected that Tornado will achieve contemporary mainline operating speeds. Theoretically capable of 100 mph (160 km/h), Tornado will be limited to a top speed of 90 mph (140 km/h), making it the fastest operational steam locomotive on the UK main line. Once on the main line, Tornado is not expected to leave it again until its 10-year fire-tube boiler re-certification is due.

Tornado at Wikipedia

Another old favourite...

If I have weaknesses
Don't let them blind me
Or camouflage all I am wary of
I could be sailing in seizures of laughter
Or crawling out from under the heel of love
Do my prayers remain unanswered
Like a beggar at your sleeve
Olodumare is smiling in heaven
Smiling in heaven I do believe

Reach in the darkness
A reach in the dark
Reach in the darkness
A reach in the dark
To overcome an obstacle or an enemy
To glide away from the razor or a knife
To overcome an obstacle or an enemy
To dominate the impossible in your life

Always a stranger when strange isnt fashionable
And fashion is rich people waving at the door
Or its a dealer in drugs or in passion
Lies of a nature we've heard before
Do my prayers remain unanswered
Like a begger at your sleeve
Babalu-aye spins on his crutches
Says leave if you want
If you want to leave

A few more tracks from the same album:
Can't run but.
Further to fly.
The cool, cool river.

Consequences

Denmark. 2009.

Two Israeli's were shot by 'a Dane' in Odense, thats the BBC headline anyway, they kept his ethnic identity off the headline as if to suggest some one other than a Palestinian had gone on a shooting rampage. The head Rabbi of Denmark suggested the Imams of the Islamic Faith Society make a public statement against such violence in Denmark but the Islamic Faith Society, never shy of publically speaking out against Islamophobia in Denmark, declined to make any comment. A silence that speaks for itself.

Here are some of 'the Dane's' hooded friends expressing their opinion on the matter on TV2's national news. Its in Danish, but for those of you unfortunate to not be fluent in our beautiful language, here is a brief translation of what the nice man says...

"He is one of the first ones in Demark who has shown a big... a big... a great... a great...
Well, you should have seen the great party we threw over this yesterday. I really hope every one supports him."

He is one of the first? One of the first what?

The guy with the glasses concludes saying he doesn't agree with what the man did, but he understands. Well, I do too. Its not hard to understand. This so called 'Dane' shot two defenceless people simply because they were Israeli's, and he did it in the middle of a Danish shopping mall. Its not hard to understand, nor is the politician's apparent disinterest nor the tacit acceptance of the Danish Muslim population that shooting Israeli's is something worth celebrating.

Austria. 1938.

edited to add.

I read this today and I can sense the truth in it. If this issue isn't dealt with by Europe's media and political leadership, then I believe we are heading for very bad times.

It is hard to believe that while Shoah victims and holocaust survivors still walk among us, that we would witness an evil so severe and grotesque that it would make the rhetoric of the Third Reich look mild.
Yes, the Nazis killed millions -- that was the obvious monstrous result of their campaign.
We have not yet witnessed the "final solution" of Islamic jihad -- but there are incontrovertible facts that are blinding. The Nazis hid their crimes. The Nazis pretended to be doing one thing while subversively carrying out its "extermination" of Jews, gypsies, "undesirables", etc. They engaged in rhetoric and obfuscation.

This time is different. The Muslims are not engaging in rhetoric. They are not pretending. They want the Jews dead and they exult in their wild screams of blood lust. Such joy, such happiness at their Jew hating chants from a joyless people.
The Germans went to war, conquered countries and with the help of those weak governments and people annihilated the Jews. The Holocaust was a German initiative subsequently carried out by every nation the Nazis conquered in Europe, with the exception of Denmark.
It's not a national initiative this time. It's global........... a wave of evil has washed over this earth like a veritable tsunami and it has colored everything.

I expect this barbarity and Jew hatred from the Arab/Islamic world. It's what they do and what they have always done.

But what was the lesson that Europe learned after the holocaust? It was not that evil is bad and that they behaved like monsters, but, as Caroline Glick said in our interview, that " rather that everything was caused by nationalism and therefore what we really need to do is have a European Union that will obviate our need for nationalism so that we can become this transnational gobbletygook and we'll all get together and therefore we won't have another Auschwitz". But really the lesson the Europeans should have been is that "we were evil and we have to be good. And that is the lesson we have to learn and and we have to be able and willing to make moral distinctions and stand up for the good and fight evil and that is something the Europeans refuse to do."

Once again Europe chooses to embrace madness and evil as its central unifying characteristic. And this time England is leading the way.

I believe good will triumph over such overwhelming odds and numbers. I know it in my bones, but one has to look at the global landscape and say, at what cost? LINK.

This flyer was distributed today on the main square of Copenhagen.