Walking in Surabaya

A Ukrainian fellow takes a walk in the old city district of Surabaya on Java. Good video. There is a festival going on, and as a result a lot of chaos. Noise, shows, people milling about, and lot of cosplay. The people are also very friendly, a lot of them smile at the camera man, wave, and great him.  

At one point a group people taking a picture with a banner called him over to be in the photo. That reminded me of a story from my sailor days. We were on a port visit to Keelung in Taiwan. For a joke somebody called the captain and trolled him by claiming they were planning a race riot that night. That got the wardroom worked up and so they decided they had to do something to head off the mayhem.

I was on duty, so they assigned me to shore patrol with a black guy. I guess us harmoniously being together would snap everybody out of their prejudiced frenzy, or something. Well, we didn't want to do anything -- either get in the midst of a race riot or bother our shipmates at all -- so we basically hid the entire night. 

At one point we were wandering around a hotel and opened a door to their meeting room. To our surprise a Chinese wedding reception was taking place in the room. Embarrassed, we tried to back out, but they were delighted to see us and rushed over to invite us in. They ended up stuffing us with food and drink. Yea, that wasn't exactly part of our shore patrol duties, but we were building rapport with the locals, right? 

At any rate, at one point we ended up flanking the bride and groom as they took wedding pictures with us in them. To this day it amuses me that somewhere in Taiwan there is a wedding photo album with me inside of it. I wonder what stories they tell about that?

 

Artwork of the Huang Qing Zhigong Tu

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The Huang Qing Zhigong Tu is an 18th century Qing Dynasty work that details the various ethnic minorities and foreign tributaries. The Qing Dynasty extracted internal and external tributes, and this work documents the various groups they dealt with. As well as East Asian groups, Europeans were portrayed as also providing tribute and being in effect vassal states. Century of Humiliation, here we come.

The ethnography of the Huang Qing Zhigong Tu was probably influenced by Western ethnographies of the time. Prior to the advent of photography, painted or engraved images were the only way of portraying foreign people and dress. In fact, I wonder how much of a part photography played in modern art's turning away from representation to its more abstract and symbolic nature today. 

The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

Get ready for a panopticonized weekend with Natalia Gullsten.

 

Building a tracked scooter

A fellow named Bob builds a tracked personal vehicle. He calls it sort of a Segway, but it looks like sort of a scooter to me hence my post title. He doesn't show his design drawings, but he does cover his manufacturing methods and the steps he takes. Not everything works the way he envisioned, and so he does a lot of minor changes to get it all to work. The four videos cover the entire process of building, and then riding, the thing.

 

Paintings of fire

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Like waterfalls, fire is hard to paint because its nature is that it is never static, rather it is ever changing. That is the fascination of sitting by a campfire. Still, artists have taken their brushes to it and tried to capture it essence. Below are campfires, hearths, wildfires, house fires, and even a dumpster fire. Enjoy.

Nunca vas a comprender

I'm late today. So, get ready for a tardy weekend with Rita Payés.

 

Building runways

This video discusses the problems and considerations of airport runway design and structure. The difference of the weight, due to fuel, of an airplane taking off and landing had never occurred to me. It is an interesting video.