Hmmm….my own unique way of looking the world…presumably without scaring small children…contrary to my normal rule of only using my own photos in these challenges, this week I am using a photo that a friend (you know who you are and I’m happy to credit the pic if you want) posted on her Facebook page which enjoying a coffee in an Auckland cafe…
I guess that I didn’t look too closely at it when she posted it and I commented something along the lines of “interesting wall decor” which, of course, she found a little odd (I get a bit of that!) as she thought that she had photographed what was sitting on her table…
Maybe it was the shadows, or the angle, or the fact that I had too much/not enough coffee that morning, but my immediate perception of this image is (current tense!) that it is a wall display of an enlarged magazine, sugar cellar (salt cellar therefore sugar too?) and a cup of coffee (obviously not a real one or all the coffee would run out!), with the late morning sun creating the shadows…
So, yup, my perception of an unusual point of view that wasn’t…
Pat Beath has been a colleague and a mate for many years and I am most happy to support his latest endeavour, a charity walk along the Te Araroa Trail from Cape Reinga at the top of New Zealand’s North Island all the way down to the township of Bluff (where the best oysters come from) at the bottom of the South Island.
It’s an easy 3000 kilometres (well, easy to write anyway) and Pat’s given himself 5 months to complete the walk – for those that are numerically-disadvantaged, that’s an average 20 kilometres a day, every day, for five months…and while it may not sound like a lot, and yes, most of it will be through New Zealand’s unbeatable scenic beauty, it is a serious distance to walk…in case, you didn’t notice, New Zealand has the occasional hill, and then there’s that always inconvenient stretch of water separating the Islands – really, a defining point of islands when you think about it…
A little about the charity that Pat is walking to support…Shineis a national organisation that counters all natures of domestic abuse…providing a range of integrated services to do what works to stop domestic abuse – from answering that first call for help to a free national Helpline to securing victims’ homes; their other services include KIDshine, Safety First (crisis support), Safe House, No Excuses men’s stopping violence programme, training programmes, and more. I don’t think it really needs any explanation beyond that – definitely a cause worth supporting and you can do that right here at Givealittle.
I’ll be following Pat’s odyssey and hope to walk a ways with him as he comes though this part of the country…
…this part of the country…
Pretty much turn left at Owhango and follow the Traverse to the Ed Hillary Centre…as a point of reference, Mt Ruapehu is the big white thing at the bottom of the image, with Mt Doom just to its north, and Owhango is where the track makes a 90 degree turn into the bush……it looks like the track abruptly just ends there under the shadow of Mt Doom but it’s really only a provincial boundary change…
…some more of this part of the country…
…the trail hooks back past Ruapehu to the headwaters of the Whanganui River for a longish paddle down to the town of Wanganui (no ‘h’!) to follow along the west coast into the Manawatu…
Pat’s ambition is to raise $10,000 for Shine but as of Day One (today) he already has almost a grand on the clock and I am sure that will rocket higher as more and more of the green beret-ed community get in behind him…
I was brought up in Oamaru, on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island so I guess that the sea has always been a part of my life in one way or another…this is what Oamaru Harbour looked like around the end of the 80s. In the 60s and early 70s, it had been a busy little coastal port with (small) ships regularly coming in for loads of wool and other produce – my uncle was a truckie at the time and I remember how cool it was that he could park alongside the ship and dump his load of grain directly into its hold…
This is the feature known as Matanaka at the northern end of Waikouaiiti (keep up with the place name pronunciation, you foreigners!!) Beach – we had a bach about a mile inland on the main access road to this end of the beach and used to come here every summer in the 70s and would as often ride horses along it as play in the surf…
Cutting forward to the late 80s – I think that this is the beach at Kuantan on Malaysia’s east coast – we stopped over here for a night during the Great Thailand-Singapore Bike Ride…we arrived in Kuantan mid-afternoon and had a ball body surfing – right up to the point that we got back to out hotel and Dan Flan pointed out the big rip…uh-oh…
I spent some time in Vietnam in the late 90s – this is the famous China Beach. At the time it was still many miles of unspoiled white beach and I have been afraid to go back in case it has been spoiled by commercialisation or industry. I used to sit here all day and read my one English book (on its 6th or 7th go round by this stage) and watch the MiGs and Hips fly in and out from the airbase by Da Nang…every couple of hours, I count count on a couple of local kids dragging a bucket of ice and Coke along the sand to keep me refreshed…
Swimming with dolphins off Akaroa…sometimes it’s a bit or miss as to whether the dolphins will come out to play but that did this day – this is a must-do if you are in Akaroa…
Crossing from Stewart Island back to the South Island – don’t know why I even bothered to invest in breakfast…
Muri Beach in the Cook Islands, during our honeymoon…quite happy to spend the day just paddling around the lagoon…
Taken from the Manhattan Beach Pier in LA on one of my stopover days on a business trip to the US…I catch the tram-bus to Manhattan beach for a donut breakfast and then spend the rest of the day shopping at the malls around El Segundo, my mission being to only have enough US cash left for a chili dinner at LAX before my flight home…I love these piers that let you stand behind but above the surf line and watch the waves roll by…
This is one of those casual posts that just start when I get an angle on a particular image…it started with this:
Two six-year-olds watching cartoons
Kirk and Lily watching cartoons, very old cartoons that, according to the date in credits, were made in 1946…both the girls love them (we have three DVDs worth of them, including a very un-PC take on Superman) and Kirk is pretty keen too…I’m not sure what the attraction is – it’s not that the girls don’t like contemporary cartoons: we put this on at their request because the morning cartoons on TV had degenerated into the daily infomercials, but they’d been happily following those; it’s also not because this is all there is to choose from on the cartoon front in our house: we have a good selection of animated movies. There is just something timeless about Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the rest of the crew that still appeals…it might not be modern art but it is definitely art…
Needless to say…this was very much edible art…now you see it…
We had quite an artie weekend that weekend – the girls had a choice of sponge or chocolate cake for the mandatory ‘helping in the kitchen’ session (like that’s actually a choice!!) and helped Nana create this chocoholic’s dream, although they insisted on the right to do their own decorating…this is Elisabeth applying her finishing touches…
…by Lily, aged 6…
Lily’s our creative girl and she left us this great little self-portrait with Elisabeth, Nana and Poppa…
Does anyone really wonder why we call her ‘Scerri’ sometimes…?
Meanwhile, their youngest aunty was busy dealing to the zombie apocalypse in Rotovegas…a messy job but someone’s gotta do it…and it looks like she’s getting some real job satisfaction from it…
My birthday was actually quite a while ago, but I have been meaning to write this since…partly by way of acknowledgement but also to show what cool people I have in my family…
Many ,many years ago (so long ago that we need to use two manys, and that’s not too many!), I saw an article in Look and Learn about a revolutionary jetplane-submarine that the Americans were developing. This Look and Learn issue was one of a batch that we had acquired at a St Lukes Church jumble sale and dated back into the mid-late 60s.
Just for situational awareness, this is what St Luke’s Church looks like…
It had a couple of drawings of what such a device might look like in action but I never saw anything like them again, until I opened this gift from Carmen…what a score!!!! Who gives a fat rat’s that she bought it in the Op Shop and it probably didn’t even cost a dollar? I like these old annuals anyway but to find one with the ‘sub-plane’ from so long ago…yeah baby!! Coincidentally, I had just finished reading Attack from the Sea, the story of the US Navy’s attempt in the 50s to develop a credible sea-based airborne attack force and so was quite on top of this subject…it’s quite sad that had the sub-plane been scratched on the back of a napkin just a few years earlier, it might have made it at least to the mock-up stage…but I digress…very cool pressie numero uno…
These two are pretty cool and are responsible for me writing this post …they were staying with us for the first week of the school holidays and hadn’t been here for more than half an hour before charging into my study to announce with some concern that ‘ice had turned to stone and I better come quick‘…OK, busted, yes, I had a teeny-weeny Glenfiddich while watching Shout At The Devil the night before and had left the glass on the coffee table…
These are the ‘stone ice’ in question…my parents gave them to me…I’m not sure if it was just a particularly insightful guess or whether I had mentioned at some point how much I hate the ice in my drink melting and diluting it, especially when it is almost finished but these things rock! They only take a few minutes to chill down in the freezer and hold their cold for quite a while, certainly longer than the life expectancy of the average drink…
This is the way cool birthday card made for me by my nephew, Toby in Dunedin…it is so cool that Aunty Carmen grabbed as soon as she saw it and framed it to share with everyone who visits us…
Toby and his younger brother, Arlo, also sent me these two pressies…the first, the Kermit green thingie is a USB port that plugs into the cigarette light of the truck and it is an absolute lifesaver. As many of you will know, I like to listen to Audible talking books when I am driving any sort of distance on my own, including doing laps on the lawnmower. Unfortunately my current MP3 player, a Creative Stone+, only lasts about 8 hours which isn’t enough for some one way trips and definitely not enough endurance for many of the round trips I make…
The sonic rocks are just cool…you can use them for lots of things ranging from the mundane like holding the grocery list on the fridge door to tossing them around and, yes, they do sizzle as well as snap, crackle and pop…I keep them hidden away most of the time because they are just the sort of uber-cool thing someone might think they have a greater need for than me…
And, finally, because I too am a cool member of my family, I gave myself this, a simple but effective paper model that will upsize quite nicely I think…one of the very first carrier-borne torpedo bombers, not so much cool as very very scary trying to get one of these off and back onto a carrier in the immediate Post-WW1 period…
So thanks to all the cool people who made this the coolest birthday….
Carefree school days…late 70s and early 80s…the Cold War chilled…tragedy was Erebus and the death of John Lennon…TV was McPhail and Gadsby, BJ and Bear, and Battlestar Galactica…who knew that the ‘boy gets girl’ ending of Star Wars was going to become a ‘sensitive’ subject for Luke and Leia…petrol was 60 cents a litre (we finally had our heads around this metric stuff) but this actually worked out to about $2/litre in today’s dollars…the nation had its last leader for twenty years…
In the not too distant future…the offshore patrol vessel, HMNZS Otago, slips silently across the moonlit Pacific, her destination, a small island nation experiencing unrest. Her mission, the recovery of an family of expatriate Kiwis being held for ransom…
P148, the offshore patrol vessel, HMNZS Otago
In her hangar, RNZAF and special operations support personnel are assembling a dozen unusual-looking devices, scarcely worth of the title ‘aircraft’. This is the first operational deployment of the Martin ‘jet’ pack – which is not actually a jet at all but two ducted fans able to carry soldier in combat equipment over 100 kilometres – after a period of evaluation and experimentation by the New Zealand Defence Force.
Otago had sailed four days previously, as an option should other alternatives to recover the family fail. Although she could deploy with a RNZAF SH-2(G)I Super Seasprite helicopter, the ‘Sprite was unable to carry a full recovery team and was considered too noisy for the level of stealth and deniability needed for this mission. The reef around the objective rendered it difficult to deploy and recovery a force using small boats. Enter the jetpack…
Although New Zealand had introduced a fleet of all-new military helicopter in the early mid-2010s (twenty-tens? twenty-teens?), the problem it faces is not so much that it does not not have enough of them but that it does not have enough or big enough flight decks to operate them from in the vastness of its South Pacific area of responsibility. One solution to this problem comes from classic Kiwi ingenuity: since 2004, a small company in New Zealand’s South Island has been working on development of a jet pack that would fulfil the promises of 1960s engineers for a personal aviation capability.
After a two year period of evaluation, experimentation and innovation, the partnership between the Martin Aircraft Company and the Defence Force has evolved the Jetpack into a stealthy reliable vehicle that not only meets all expectations for operational and technical airworthiness but which is also able to be operated by soldiers after a short but intense four week training course. The heart of the Jetpack that enables it to be operated by relatively inexperienced (from an aviation perspective) personnel is the New Zealand-designed flight control system. Although the operator can take control of the jetpack when necessary, especially to avoid potential obstacles and other hazards on landing, for the most part of their journey, they are passengers as the Jetpack flies its preprogrammed course under the control of an external remote control station. Full military operator certification is awarded after a three month course conducted at the Central Flying School at RNZAF Ohakea.
Late the previous day, Otago had surveyed the operations landing zone with one of its two RQ-84K UAS and conducted a final daylight reconnaissance over the objective. The data from this mission has been processing into a high resolution 3D dataset that updates the recovery force’s mission planning and rehearsal system – a simulation on some seriously bad steroids; and also allows flight planners to identify and avoid any potential hazards along the ingress and egress routes. As the mission preparation progresses, the two RQ-84s maintain a tag team watch over the landing zone and objective, monitoring any changes that may affect the mission. Powered by a lightweight hydrogen fuel cell, each RQ-84 has an endurance of six hours which provides an on-station period of four hours, with the remaining time for handover between aircraft and the transit from Otago’s over the horizon location.
RQ-84 – Kiwi tech – flying now
At 0300, twelve jetpacks stood ready on Otago’s flight deck: one for each of the ten person recovery team and two to carry additional stores. Each soldier completed a final check of their own and their comrades’ equipment…it was time and the ground support crew assisted each to strap into his jetpack, their personal weapons across their chests for ease of access, just in case…at 0320, the hand signal was given for engine start and each soldier, slipped their jetpacks master arm switch to the ‘on’ position, signifying that each was ready for launch. The control station operators authorised the launch and each jetpack first hovered above the deck and on completion of flight systems checks, lifted off into the darkness, the only sound a deep hum that quickly faded into the darkness – reducing the lawnmower-like sound signature of the original Martin jet packs had been on of the major challenges and successes of the Defence Force programme.
The dozen jetpacks hummed through the night a hundred feet over the swell, almost invisible as they flew towards the moon and the island. The ingress route stayed over water for as long as possible before cutting across the reef and the shoreline to the landing zone. Though their night vision goggles, the soldiers could see massive trees, all mapped to within centimetres by the UAS imagery, slipping by to their left and right as the jetpacks dropped to twenty feet and autonomously navigated along an overgrown logging track at 30 knots. Overheard the circling RQ-84 tracked their thermal signatures, confirming the the operators saw on their screen. Approaching the landing zone, the jetpacks slowed to a hover and gently touched down in the clearing selected as the landing zone.
Hitting their quick release connections, each member dismounted their steed and set the flight control to ‘return to base’, sending each jetpack back to Otago; the two cargo jetpacks were unloaded and also RTB’d. as the recovery force moved to its objective, the jetbacks would be refueled on Otago and readied for the extraction phase of the operation.
The recovery force moved swiftly through the low vegetation, the direct thermal feed from the RQ-84 confirming the absence of any people along their – it wasn’t considered likely that they would encounter any thermally-stealthed adversaries on this job. At the perimeter of their objective, each team members took up positions where they could observe the low bungalow and its approaches – they would maintain this observation for the hour before sunrise. Through thermal imagers they could identify one large group that was the two adults and two children that were the object of the recovery, and the individual signatures, two sleeping, two moving around the building, of the criminal elements holding them.
Just before dawn’s first light, advancing in the ‘special ops duck walk’, two teams approached the building, entering it from two directions. The thuds of 40mm less-lethal rounds put down two criminals to be quickly bound and secured; another signified the less-lethal neutralisation of one of the sleepers. The last sat up, pistol in hand, to be greeted by the spitting muzzle of a suppressed carbine – lights out. Secured, the hostages are checked for injuries and escorted from the house to the beachfront extraction area, still tracked by the unmanned aircraft overhead.
A kilometre away, a car roars into life and starts to move towards the extraction area – innocuous or not, this is a threat to the recovery phase: the RQ-84 locks onto the thermal signature of its engine and releases a Smart Dart from under its wingroot. Tracking the engine’s heat and boosted to terminal velocity by a small rocket, the Smart Dart brings the vehicle to a grinding halt as it plunges through the engine block. The driver sits surprised but unhurt behind the wheel.
Smart Dart
As the assault had commenced, Otago had relaunched the jetpacks and now their hum could be heard as they skimmed above the waves on a direct course for the extraction area, landing on the beach. The hostages were strapped into jet packs, the two children flying with soldiers, and launched back to Otago, which was ‘steaming’ at full speed towards the coast to reduce the flight time. The hostages on their way, and with no sign of a response to the raid, the remaining members of the recovery team ‘saddled up’ and launched themselves back to the waiting naval vessel…
All fiction, of course, and all totally implausible, of course, everybody knows that there’s no military application for things like the jetpack or RQ-84, of course…
But these are the types of devices that modern militaries need to start coming to grips with, either for introduction into their own forces or countering them when their adversaries start to employ them…individual air transport is coming – how are you going to deal with it? There only room in the sand for so many heads, you know…small UAS with extended endurance combined with state of the art ISR and kinetic payloads are coming...”Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you..?”
Martin jetpack test flight – more Kiwi tech
Testing the ballistic safety parachute on the jetpack – this activates if for any reason the jetpack becomes unflyable
Please note that these images show the early versions of the jetpack with the shoulder mounted ducted fans. The latest iteration of the design, known as P.12 for Prototype 12, has shifted the fans to a waist position that can be seen in this test flight:
Yep…Coke is evil so they tell us…directly responsible for the decline in Western civilization, the death of Elvis and the cancellation of Firefly…
Proponents of the nanny state would have us believe that it is Coke’s corporate responsibility to save lazy stupid people from themselves, like the dope that OD’d on Coke in Southland, or the dummies that think they have to buy Coke because it is cheaper than milk – good thing the price of petrol keeps going up otherwise they’d be using that same rationale to feed petrol to their kids…
Take out all sugar-sweetened drinks from dairies near schools. Even better, take out everything except water.
Yep…that’ll work – while most kids are happy to drink out of dodgy puddles because they can, you can lead them to the Pump bottle but you cannot make them drink – and in any case, are these losers saying that, in the bigger picture, water is an environmentally better option? Sure, Spoilt Rotten from Remuera isn’t going to let little Tristan or Flower drink from a public fountain…? the only health benefit of this is that kids will walk a lot further to the closest place that sells what they want. Oh, and who will be compensating the owners of dairies close to schools…?
Expand the successful Sprite initiative in McDonalds by replacing all sugary Coke, Fanta and fruit drinks with zero-kJ versions. For the past five years or so, all Sprite sold in McDonald’s has been Sprite Zero – why not go all the way and make it all drinks? (Although we note that zero-calorie drinks which still taste sweet bring their own set of problems.)
Yep, and as someone else also said on the HFG forum, why should I be penalised when I treat myself to a rare Maccas to have to have chemical lolly water instead of the real deal? And I have been so good this year and have only been to the major food groups twice ALL year…Why should McDs pass up commercial opportunity because nanny statists are too busy to take their kids (assuming, of course, that they actually have been allowed to breed) for regular walks and exercise? Will the nanny statists be raising tax to compensate them as well…?
Stop selling larger ‘single-serve’ bottles of Coke and other drinks. A 600ml bottle is likely to be treated as one serving, no matter how many the label says it serves.
Why? What happens when I want to stock up for a big night in round the barby with mates? Will we be having our rum and cokes out of shot glasses, feeling guilty the whole time because all these midget drink containers are wasting so much more of poor old Mother Earth’s diminishing resources? I could also have a crack at the closure of neighbourhood off-licenses which make it harder to score opportunity RTDs but I think restricting booze sales is probably a good thing…
Or reduce the size of all single-serve drinks – including sports drinks, fruit drinks and iced teas – to 250ml.
Yep…that’ll fly on a hot day…at least you’ll still be able to get a normal size and so healthy milk shake instead – or will be nanny statists be killing of the traditional giraffe cup as well…?
Expand Coke’s stated policy of not marketing to kids under 12, to kids under 18 years.
Yeah, the kids will really listen…those poor little sods whose parents refuse to acknowledge the existence of the major food groups until they are adults, will just getting more thumpings for killing Coke as well – no wonder so many of them become maladjusted serial killers…
So what practical rules should we put in place…?
Well, how about we bring back the walking bus and make parental participation compulsory? Those kids without parents can be allocated one from the benefit pool (and some of them could use the exercise too).
Let’s ban SUVs from going anywhere closer than a mile (like a kilometre but bigger) to schools and kindies – maybe two miles for flat areas to ensure equivalent exercise value (EEV – just made that up but feel free to use it). Tristan or Flower will have to work out how to use those things that dangle beneath their bodies to go the last leg (hint: those things that dangle beneath their bodies).
We could also make it mandatory for all parents that inflict fifteen sports activities on their kids every weekend to actually participate in those activities (beyond sitting on the sidelines, sucking on a latte and abusing the ref) – that we might call leading by example and good parenting and, if mumsy and dadsy are getting involve in exercise and sport, kids might be a little more motivated as well…
Don’t ban your kids from technology like iThings – they will just kill you as you sleep and buy one with your inheritance – but making so rules about using them is a good idea as is being a bit more creative in their use e.g. get kids into geocaching – cans of Coke (decent size ones) might make good prizes…
What should Coke do? What it does best…and stay out of nanny state-led social engineering…it could also give some serious consideration to introducing bulk root beer to the New Zealand domestic market…(just a little personal hobby horse)
So again, good on HFG for introducing some common sense into the debate…not like that Shrieking Harpy nanny statist they had on Breakfast a couple of weeks back – although she was probably the best thing ever for Coke as she made the whole anti-Coke community look like a bunch of screaming looney tunes…
Coke is Evil and obesity is all someone else’s fault
Also noted doing the Facebook rounds this morning is some more anti-Coke propaganda…while I am not Coke’s biggest supporter, I hate these malicious tales distributed as truth…if you’ve seen the one that includes this claim “…the distributors of coke have been using it to clean the engines of their trucks for about 20 years!…” then read Snopes on Coke acid; or the one about eight glasses of water a day, read Snopes on eight glasses of water.And if you are considering posting any of these ‘amazing secrets’ do us all a favour and google Snopes first…!
The World According to Me... 