I used to follow hockey. I started following it when I was but a young sprout in 1967 when hockey doubled its size via expansion. They did that expansion by creating what was a 6 team expansion division, which faced off against the older 6 team division when it came to Stanley Cup time. As a result, for years the older division routinely clobbered the expansion division in the Cup playoffs.
Since I didn't have a team, I decided to root for the St Louis Blues, the best of the new expansion teams. My sports heroes were Red Berenson as well as Bob and Barclay Plager, which caused many a confused look among my peers because none of them payed any attention to hockey back then. The early Blues dominated their division, but the Stanley Cup eluded them until 2019.
John F. Peto (1854–1907) was
a painter who was unknown in his day. Early in his career he entered paintings
to the Philadelphia Academy, but in 1899 he moved to the resort town of Island
Heights and his public work as an artist ended. He rented rooms and played
clarinet in a local band to support himself. Occasionally he sold paintings to
tourists. He primarily painted still lifes.
Japanese pirates were call Wakō. While originally entirely Japanese, later they included Chinese, Philipino and other southeast Asians. The video is a good history that covers the growth, spread and the ebb and flow of the Wakō's fortunes (as well as a fight over a slave girl mentioned in passing, a seeming constant of history when it comes to warriors).
Old-timey armies, and for that matter modern ones as well if you consider
civilian contractors, almost always had a cloud of non-combatants that
traveled with them. Cantinières were women attached to an army to provide
canteen services. Camp followers were people, generally women and their
children, who would informally travel with an army. They provided a variety of
services: cooking, laundry, nursing, selling goods, and companionship, both
unpaid and paid.
This is a video of a Korean Daehan Steel plant where scrap metal is salvaged and turned into rebar. They also, oddly enough, grow vegetables at it. The photography is excellent; several shots are quite spectacular. The video is not narrated, but you'll want to turn the captions on. They are informative and amusingly flippant at the same time.
Let me but do my work from day to day,
In field or forest, at the desk or loom,
In roaring market-place or tranquil room;
Let me but find it in my heart to say,
When vagrant wishes beckon me astray,
"This is my work; my blessing, not my doom;
"Of all who live, I am the one by whom
"This work can best be done in the right way."
Then shall I see it not too great, nor small,
To suit my spirit and to prove my powers;
Then shall I cheerful greet the labouring hours,
And cheerful turn, when the long shadows fall
At eventide, to play and love and rest,
Because I know for me my work is best.
We spend ~1/3 of our life in a bed sleeping or... uh... otherwise engaged.
These are paintings of beds: some regular beds, some sick beds, some death
beds, some made beds, some unmade. Enjoy.
Mr. Queen, which is
available on Netflix, is a television show with the premise that a modern-day
Korean male chef is magically transported to a Queen's body in the Joseon era (19th
century). Were it an American show with that premise I would never watch it,
anticipating that it would be awash with endless humorless gender
lessons.
However, it is a Korean show, so the Western gender studies stuff is
nonexistent and instead they just mine the absurd situation for laughs. The
result is a very funny and entertaining show that I highly recommend. In most
of this post, which mainly covers the first episode, I'll try to avoid
spoilers about events later in the show.
The cook, Jang Bong-Hwan, is the head chef at Blue House (Korea's White
House). He's an arrogant, skirt-chasing, alpha male who thinks very highly of
himself. He gets framed for corruption in the Presidential kitchen, and while
being chased by the police, he falls off his balcony into a swimming pool and
bonks his head on the bottom. When he wakes a beautiful woman in flowing robes
swims up and kisses him. He passes out once more.
When he awakes again, he's in an old-fashioned room. He's disoriented, and when he
finds a mirror, he is horrified to discover that he is now a pretty woman. He
decides that he must be dreaming, although he's miffed that he's dreaming he
is the girl instead of being with the girl. Eventually, he figures out things
are too vivid for this to be a dream which throws him into a panic.
He goes into the hallway to find it lined with maids bowing down to him
calling him 'your Royal Highness' which only increases his hysteria. He
blindly runs around with a tail of maids and eunuchs chasing after him until,
as shown in the clip above, he decides that some twisted human trafficking
outfit kidnapped him and gave him a sex change operation. It isn't until the
implication of them all wearing old-timey clothes sinks in that he realizes he
traveled through time as well as ending up in a different body.
He calms down enough to start questioning his maids as to what happened to the
woman whose body he's in. They're puzzled by the fact that he refers to the
Queen as someone other than himself, but by this point they're dialing into
the fact that their Queen appears to be a bit bonkers since she woke up from
her near drowning. He discovers he is in the body of Kim So-yong, the Queen Bi
(the King's fiancé). He also connects the water she almost drowned in to the
water in the swimming pool he fell into, and decides water is the key to
returning to his body.
First Mr Queen runs around dunking his head in every bit of water he can find:
mop buckets, horse troughs, and the like, but that doesn't work. It only
convinces the maids that their Queen has a few more screws loose than they
originally thought. He decides the lake the Queen nearly drowned in is the
key, so he cons his maids into showing him where it is. As soon as he sees a
sign pointing to it he sprints off to do a swan dive into it, only to land in
the mud at the lake's bottom because it had been drained to prevent any more
drownings.
Mr Queen then remembers he's the Queen, so he orders his flunkies to refill
the lake. They tell him they can't, because the orders came from higher up.
So, covered in mud, he sets out to find the King to get water back into the
lake.
When we meet King Cheoljong, he's in a pavilion reading a Korean version of
the Kama Sutra. His eunuch tells the King he has been studying the book for
too long. The King replies that he needs to properly prepare for his most
important duty -- producing an heir. Oh-oh, Bong-Hwan (a.k.a. Mr Queen) may
have another problem besides returning to his body.
The King then sees Mr Queen and calls him over. Mr Queen lifts his skirts and
runs over. Mr Queen barely greets the King, instead he immediately launches
into asking/demanding that the lake be refilled. The King tells Mr Queen that
he can't fill the lake because the draining was ordered by the Grand Queen
Dowager and that he won't, or can't, rescind the order.
As soon as the King first saw the mud-caked Mr Queen he had started holding his
nose from the stench. This only annoys Mr Queen even more, and he ends up
slapping the King to knock his hand off his nose. The palace staff is
horrified. Also, as is the habit of middle school boys worldwide, the King has
disguised his racy book with a fake cover. Mr Queen gets interested in
it and grabs it to look at it. The King grabs it back, and soon Mr Queen and
the King are in a ridiculous pissing match over the book while the
increasingly aghast palace staff looks on. Eventually, after their fight
manages to demolish the book, Mr Queen leaves to sow chaos elsewhere.
The series is a type of Korean historical show called a sageuk, which
frequently feature a lot of palace intrigue and this show is no different. We
soon meet the Grand Queen Dowager, the real power in the palace, and her slimy
brother, who are the main villains. The Royal marriage is for political
purposes, and they're worried that the news of the Mr Queen's current bout of
bizarre behavior will leak out and ruin their plans. So, they move the wedding
up to the next day.
Needless to say, Mr Queen is repulsed and horrified when he hears that news.
To his priority of making it back to his body in the future, he now has to add
not getting noodled by the King in the meanwhile. First Mr Queen tries to tell
the King that he actually isn't the Queen, that he's really a man from the
future. All that accomplishes is Mr Queen getting dragged off to see if the
Court Physician can treat his case of sudden-onset insanity.
The day of the wedding arrives. Mr Queen, who is buried in layers of
ceremonial garb, doesn't know, nor does he care to know, the procedures and
etiquette of a Royal wedding so he just sort of plows through it making a hash
of things in the process. The palace denizens keep getting more bewildered and
alarmed by his strange behavior.
However, he makes it though the wedding and the night of matrimonial bliss is
on the horizon...
Mr Queen's two principal maids preforming their hopeless task of trying to keep their Queen prim and proper
Would I recommend it? Absolutely. It has good production values, music, sets,
costumes, sword fights, and is one of the funniest shows I've seen in a long time. The
character Mr Queen is a supremely self-confident fish out of water who careens
through whatever situation he finds himself in and imagines he is handling it
perfectly. He also, when speaking, mixes in modern Korean expressions and
English loan words so the locals often times have no idea what he is even
talking about. Plus, he tries to flirt with every pretty female he encounters,
although they are always mystified by what he is going on about. His loony
decisions and unhinged behavior are hugely entertaining. The people around him
are always baffled by what he's saying and doing, and their hopelessly
confused reactions are spot on.
I have to give a special hat tip to Shin Hae Sun, the actress who plays Mr Queen/Kim So Yong. She captures the mannerism of
men, the way they walk, sit, talk and their expressions. Added to her excellent acting is a male voice expressing her inner thoughts, so the viewer quickly
accepts that it is a man inside the Queen's body. Shin Hae Sun creates a
memorably silly character in the process. I doubt the comedy would work as
well with another actress cast in the role. She carries the film and steals
nearly every scene she is in.
Another fine performance is Kim Jung Hyun
as King Cheoljong. When first introduced the King comes across as a pompous
dimwit. We'll soon discover that there is more to him than meets the eye; he's
only a puppet King, but like everybody else in the palace he is engaged in
endless scheming. He also always tries to maintain what he supposes is the
proper level of dignity for a King. Since he is usually Mr Queen's straight
man, his blustering over Mr Queen's nonsensical antics works well.
Court Lady Choi, played by Cha Chung Hwa, deserves mention. She's Mr Queen's principal attendant and she's tasked
with maintaining the decorum of the Queen's office. Needless to say,
with Mr Queen that's an impossible task and poor Court Lady Choi has a
slow-motion nervous breakdown as the show progresses.
Jo Hwa Jin, played by Seol In Ah, is the Royal Concubine and the King's girlfriend. In the clip below she is the woman called Uibin (that's her title). She would rather be the Queen herself and is none too happy about the king's betrothal to Mr Queen. Since she's pretty, Mr Queen naturally tries to flirt with her. However, as is the case with all of his flirtees, she has no idea what he is doing. Instead, she thinks his odd behavior is just Mr Queen playing a 4-D chess version of palace politics and replies with veiled threats which pass well over Mr Queen's head.
Royal Chef Man Bok, played by
Kim In Kwon, comes to rue that day he ever met Mr Queen, who takes over his kitchen and torments him endlessly: insulting his cooking,
infesting the kitchen with his maids, and at one point reducing the Royal Chef
to doing nothing more than tending to the fire.
Finally, here's another scene of Mr Queen in action. It shows him at his macho best.
Bohumil Kubišta
(1884-1918) was a Czech painter. He was first influenced by Expressionism, and
later by Cubism. He studied color theory and geometry in artistic layout. He
was very influential in the development of Czech modern art. He died young
from the Spanish Flu.
Somewhere in Africa, the YouTube video doesn't say where, a village woman cooks a meal of mutton curry and cabbage. The meat is steamed with a small amount of water in a pot, and then the spices to make the curry are added. The cabbage is mixed with vegetables. She then mixes some sort of a flour concoction, it isn't bread, rather it is more of a paste.
She cooks it all over an open fire while around her, her kids who are well behaved, and the chickens occupy themselves. They eat it with their hands.
Rudolph Belarski (1900 -
1983) was an American artist who specialized in pulp magazine art. At a young
age he quit school and went to work in coal mines. During that time, he taught
himself art via correspondence courses. Eventually he began painting covers
for various magazines. He did crime, sci-fi and adventure covers. Late in his life he became an instructor for
correspondence schools, completing the circle so to speak.
Rosario is a village in the Cavite province of the Philippines. It is a fishing village, which both catches and processes fish. In the past it had the reputation of being a rough area, with a lot of local gang activity. As you can see in the walk, although there is no overt hostility, there are a fair number if hard looking characters keeping a close eye on the camera man.
The village is very basic looking, with shacks mixed in with simple concrete block buildings. The beach, with the small fishing boats pulled up onto it, is very scenic.
Thomas Benjamin Kennington
(1856-1916) was a British realist painter. As well as portraits, he is
best remembered for his paintings of domestic scenes, with both the well-off
and the poor as subjects. He worked in oils and watercolor.
(Note: this was first posted on November 17, 2009. I'm reposting it today
for the 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.
Summer is upon us, and with it comes heat and the need to cool off. One of the
age-old methods to do that is the handheld paper or bamboo fan. They work well
and can be either plain or decorated (this post is not about their
decorations; a topic for another day). Aside from cooling, wielded in the
right young lady's hands they can also be an effective tool for flirtation. Due
to the prevalence of AC, they are far more common in the east than the
west.
The Shilin Night Market is one of the night markets in Taipei, Taiwan. A night market in an area where streets have been closed off and it is full of food stalls, merchant stands, activities for children and young couples. They are very social places where friends and families can gather to talk, eat, browse, and get some night air.
The markets are very pleasant. I've been to several, including the one pictured above, and always enjoyed myself at them. Then again, aside from my home, Taiwan is probably my favorite spot on the Earth. Many fond memories of the place. Hopefully the CCP will be thwarted from screwing it up like they do everywhere they get their hands on.
Karl Hagemeister
(1848-1933) was a German landscape artist. In the 1880s he spent time in Paris
where he absorbed impressionistic influences. The play of light and form became more
pronounced in his work, and he developed a richer and vibrant color palette. He was
well known and regarded in his day. The German hyper-inflation after WWI
financially ruined him and he retreated to a more private and eventually less
productive phase before his death.
