Lovesick Blues

Get ready for a jilted weekend with Isto.

 

Plan properly to avoid unforseen complications

Lupino Lane from Be My King
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Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.
― Julia Child ―

 

Fishing boats

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It is the summer, and a lot of people want to get out on a boat and get a hook wet. So here are some paintings of fishing boats, both personal and commercial, from hither and yon in both space and time.

Rum & Coca-Cola

Get ready for a shore leave weekend with Enji's Sisters.

 

A road trip in Laos

This is a bit of a different 'walking in cities' video. An Australian expat, at least I'm guessing his accent is Australian, is driving through the interior of Laos to his home with his wife and adopted daughter. He seems quite affable and at ease as a resident of Laos. I have no idea what he does to make a living. 

The video starts with them on the road, passing villages and encountering a lot of trucks. Eventually they stop in the small city of Phou Khoun where they intend to spend the night. He shows us their room in the guest house, and later they go out to eat in a local restaurant and to visit old friends where he hears some sad news.   

 

People working

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These are paintings of people working. I tried to weed out communist propaganda, child labor, labor movement and other types of purely political works. Of course, I also weed out AI generated art when I find it. 

I'm Going Home

Get ready for a domiciled weekend with Joey Weissgerber.

 

More than they bargained for

Cobalt-60 is a radioactive material used in hospital radiotherapy machines. Due to its half-life it eventually weakens and needs to be replaced. However, even the less radioactive cobalt-60 that remains is still extremely dangerous. It needs to be transported in a shielded container to a storage facility that can safely handle it.

In 2013 such material was being transported from a hospital in Tiajuana to a storge facility in central Mexico. When the drivers stopped at a gas station some armed men hijacked the truck and the container with the cobalt-60. There was fear at the time that it would be used for a dirty bomb, but the hijackers were simply after the truck and had no idea what its cargo was. They, after exposing themselves to a high dose of radiation, discarded the cobalt pellets in a field. 

The above video discusses that incident, and details the steps taken to find and recover the cobalt-60 pellets.

 

Preston Dickinson's paintings

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Preston Dickinson was an early 20th century artist who belonged to the Modernist school. He moved extensively, living at times in New York, Paris, Quebec, Nebraska and Spain. Although he had a good reputation in his day, he suffered from money problems, poor health and alcoholism. He died at the age of 41 after a bout of pneumonia in Spain.

Preston Dickinson

Kilimanjaro

Get ready for a 'whatever-the-heck-this-is' weekend

with Javed Ali and Chinmay.

 

Riding to heaven on the backs of turtles

 (Note: this was first posted on November 17, 2009. I'm reposting it today for yesterday's anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing)

A few years ago I happened to visited Hiroshima on August 7th, one day after the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city.

When you get off the streetcar from the train station the first thing you see is the ruin of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The atomic bomb detonated almost directly overhead of the building. With its few still standing walls, and its dome stripped and leaving only its framework, it is the iconic ruin of Hiroshima.

When you stand at that building, if you turn in a circle you realize your standing in a bowl surrounded by hills. Most of the rest of the buildings in that bowl were reduced to rubble by the bomb blast and resulting fires.

When they cleared the rubble they set aside several blocks of the old city as the Peace Memorial Park. You walk south along the river to get to the entrance to the monuments. At the entrance card tables are set up where there are petitions for peace that can be signed. You can buy peace t-shirts and listen to folk musicians strumming guitars and singing about peace. It is a fitting sentiment for this place.

The most visited monument is the Children's Monument for Peace. A young girl named Sadako Sasaki contracted leukemia after the bombing. As she sickened in the hospital she remembered an old Japanese saying that if one folds a thousand paper cranes one is granted a wish. She spent the rest of her short life folding paper cranes, but died before she reached one thousand. The Children's Monument for Peace was built in her memory, and in memory of all the children who died from the bombing. It is covered with paper cranes that school children have folded and sent to the park.

As touching as he Children's monument was, I most wanted to see a different monument. The monument pictured with this post. The Monument in Memory of the Korean Victims of the A-bomb.

There were tens of thousands of Koreans in the city when it was bombed. Most were forced laborers who had been brought to the city, housed in barracks and worked in the munitions plants of Hiroshima. Some 40,000 were killed, and a another 30,000 injured in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the Koreans in Hiroshima were from Hapcheon, South Korea, and so sadly two cities ended up bearing the brunt of the attack (Atomic bomb survivors in South Korea still feel the wounds).

The Korean Monument was built in 1970 by South Koreans living in Japan and sited across the river and outside of the Peace Park. The Japanese authorities would not allow it to be placed in the Peace Park. It took until 1999 for permission to be granted to move it onto the Park's grounds.

As I stood in front of that Monument I could not help but reflect that all the paper cranes in the world would not have helped the dead honored by this memorial. That the peace petitions, while a fine sentiment, were no more substantial than Chamberlain's umbrella.

The Germans dressed prisoners up in Polish uniforms and shot them to justify their invasion that started the wider war in Europe. The Japanese used bayonets to stage their low-tech version of Hiroshima in Shangai as they spread ever deeper into China. The allies pounded cities with high explosives and incendiaries from the air. All across the globe men died in combat and civilians died behind the fronts. 

A few days after Hiroshima's destruction Nagasaki was bombed. Hirohito then taped his surrender speech. That night a cadre of Japanese officers ransacked the palace seeking to destroy the recording and postpone Japan's surrender. How do paper cranes and petitions solve that sort of madness?

In the end, to me at least, this small place in the Park was less about the bomb and more about Korean farmers taken from their villages and used as forced labor. A life spent at the whim of masters. Another tragedy of the war. 

My family and I were the only people at the monument when we visited it. The insciption on it reads, "Souls of the dead ride to heaven on the backs of turtles." At its base are small stones with Korean characters painted on them (pictured). The guidebook said you should leave a gift for the slain worker's ghosts. All I had were a couple of cigarettes. I supposed the ghosts might like to relax with a smoke and so I left them. It was all that I could do.
 

 

Test firing a homemade rifle

In this video the gunsmith and YouTuber AK Custom test fires his latest project. It doesn't go well for him, failing when a full charge is fired. This post, highlighting a failure, isn't really fair to him. At his channel you can see a lot of the successful guns he's built.

 

Paintings of cooks

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Generally, if you're going to eat somebody needs to cook the food first. These are painting of cooks, both domestic and commercial, in action. Enjoy.

Fever

Get ready for a duplexing weekend with Irvin Sax & Jazz Ensemble with Curipaya.