Object | The Daily Post

Posted on 22 April 2016 by SJPONeill

Write a new post in response to today’s one-word prompt: object.

Source: Object | The Daily Post

Draw a picture of a chair by looking at a real chair not a photograph. ~Pre-instruction drawings; Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain; Betty Edwards

I had thought the original task was to draw a picture of any object by looking at it but it was 1999 that I started this so I may be excused for a minor memory lapse. This was the period that I was working closely with Wingnut Films and the Lord of the Rings crew and my uber-latent arty side was being nudged daily. Drawing and screen-writing were the two main areas in which I took an interest up to the day that people started flying planes into buildings…

Being much more comfortable with writing and story-telling, these became my comfort zone and while my interest in drawing remained, my discipline for the exercises waned. I unearthed my drawing pad recently during a clean-out and then, only a week or so, stumbled across the subject of one of those early exercises.

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Wow…seventeen years ago…so much water under the bridge since then…I’m quite keen on restarting this programme…it’s all based on the book so no enrolments or administration necessary just some willpower and motivation…

Today…

This is the original on which the drawing is based. It has some history.

Until July 1989, this chair was occupied by the Officer Commanding, Charlie Company, the First Battalion, the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment, or, in military shorthand, OC C Coy, 1 RNZIR. From this seat, that individual dispensed justice, ‘offered’ guidance to young officers, and oversaw with ruthless scrutiny, the development and training of a hundred or so lean and keen infantry soldiers.

Near the end of 1987, the New Zealand Government decided it was time for its own version of ‘nothing east of Suez’, announcing that the New Zealand force based in Singapore, aka NZFORSEA, would be withdrawn to New Zealand by the end of 1989. This was called OP(eration) KUPE.

The force in Singapore was a legacy of the Commonwealth intervention into Malaya in the 1950s, Borneo in the 1960s and, for Australia and New Zealand, Vietnam. For over three decades, in various incarnations, it had contributed to the secure and stable development of the states of Malaysia and Singapore: rightly or wrongly, the Government felt it was now time to for New Zealand to focus more closely on its immediate South Pacific neighbourhood. Perhaps lost in the political mix, were the second and third order effects of our presence in Singapore, particularly in providing access to prime jungle training areas in Malaysia, and opportunities for young New Zealanders to experience and mature in a foreign culture.

While we didn’t quite get to the stage of pushing helicopters off aircraft carriers – all our helicopters were safely repatriated to serve faithfully for another quarter century…

Still going strong in 2005…finally retired in 2015…

…many items deemed non-essential were fated to remain in Singapore, many destined for the ignominious end of the rubbish fires…

Burning off pre-RTNZ rubbish

When a whisper on the rumour advised that the company office furniture was due to be hauled away to the tip, there was competition to secure anything worth securing for repatriation as personal effects. the only time I have moved faster was when Trevor Sexton chased me down the final leg of the Burnham fitness circuit threatening to do me an impropriety with his pacestick if I didn’t pick up the pace – that was the first and only time I ever broke nine minutes on the required fitness test 2.4km run.

I seized possession of the chair seconds before company clerk, Steve Carrick, burst into the office, much miffed at missing out. I should point out, in all fairness, that, as company clerk, he already had a pretty nice chair in his own office; as a private rifleman, my issued seating was a camouflaged foot-square piece of rubber thermal mat used in the field.

The OC’s chair served me well through various roles and homes in Palmerston North, Linton, Trentham and Wellington…

The chair of power in front of the mighty Amiga 500

…but got misplaced in a house move over a decade ago. It has clearly seen better days but I was rapt to find it clearing out a storage unit last week…an object of days gone by history…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Near and Far

Posted on 8 September 2012 by SJPONeill

WordPress’ take on ‘near and far’ is meant to be about mechanical perspective but perspective is relative…

In 1985, I was also a (very) junior member of the local Territorial Force (TF) company, Alpha Company of the 4th (Otago Southland) Battalion. The larger proportion of our soldiers were all freezing workers from one of the major freezing working around Invercargill and they all had difficulty getting to the TF annual training Camp in January (to align with scarfie school holidays) as that was the peak of the works season. On one of his vists to the deepest South, it was put to Chief of General Staff MAJGEN John Mace that shifting the annual camp to the works offpeak season would be a great enabler for local recruiting. He took up the challenge and stated that if A Coy could put a full company on the ground In October, he’d be good for a company deployment to Singapore…

So A Coy put a company ++ on the ground in Tekapo, meeting its side of the deal….lots and lots of adventures that fortnight, I can tell you…

I was also in the last year of my lineman apprenticeship with Telecom and in this phase of my training, I was spending some time with the rigging section that maintain the radio towers scattered around the Southland Plains. Fifty feet is quite near, until you are fifty feet up a tower on a breezy day…then it snowed which was the end of tower-climbing for the day…

This was the day before we staged through Dunedin and flew out to Singapore – 4000 hours (or so it seemed) on a Herc across the red dust of Australia for a one night stopover in Darwin to the sweltering humidity of South East Asia to our home for the next six weeks…Dieppe Barracks, Singapore…

Not that we spent much time there…shake out on the ground and almost immediately off across the Causeway to hit the jungle for Ex PEMBURA RUSA…helicopters…rain…snakes…rain…hornets…rain…more rain…and almost as much fun as there was rain…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Windows

Posted on 6 November 2011 by SJPONeill

Windows is the theme this week for the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge…this is a shot I took from our kitchen window a couple of weeks ago when it looked like spring had finally arrived – then it rained again…I was struck by this little chap’s bright plumage – he’s not something we see that often…and that’s the coollest thing about our windows where we live – we never know what we might see next through them…

I’m on the road at the moment, doing a loop up through Singapore to Europe and back over the next couple of weeks…arrived at our hotel after dark so didn’t have a chance to check out the view til this morning…and was presented with a lovely view of old Singapore…

Had a smooth flight over – is there anything else on Singapore Airlines? – managed to squeeze in four movies:

More giant machines beating each other up…good violent fun – four-engined V-22s (v-44s?) are very cool…

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A lot of fun that doesn’t take itself too seriously – Tem Morrision dies early in the story (always a plus)…

Captain America is ripping good yarn and pretty true to the original ‘Cap’ story as I remember it…

The (at) last Harry Potter movie – kinda anticlimatic after all the hype and build-up to it – the whole ‘Luke, I am your father’ thing has been done before and let’s be honest about it, once it was down, any effect from using it again is largely lost…

Another long haul flight tonight but think I’ll be all nigh-nighs for most of this one…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Sunset

Posted on 2 October 2011 by SJPONeill

I guess the trick in this week’s challenge is to know whether a pic is really sunset or someone slipping in a dodgy sunrise…

But Sunset has another significance for soldiers, more than simply the going down of the sun and the closing of the day but a time to remember those who have gone before and sometimes to also mark the end of an era…here Sunset is a sad but beautiful tune played during Beating the Retreat as the flag is lowered…

This photo was taken on July 20, 1989 at the closing ceremony for the home of the First Battalion, Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment, at Dieppe Barracks in Sembawang, Singapore. The following month, in our own version of East of Suez, the battalion and its supporting force, began its relocation back to New Zealand, ending 32 years of continuous service in South East Asia.

As the battalion marched off that parade ground, a place of so many memories, for the last time, the roll of honour of those who had not gone home was read – a particularly sad moment for many of us as we had lost a number of friends through accidents in that last tour…remembering is particularly poignant here at the moment with the news on Wednesday of the death in combat of a second NZSAS soldier near Kabul…

Michael Yon wrote this on 24 September after a young soldier from his tent in 4-4 Cav was killed…

This whole tent is empty now. Chazray is gone and his buddies must be checking their emails in another tent. There were two more KIAs who were shot and so the internet was blacked out. One was shot in the chest and the other in the stomach. Very saddening. Families have been notified and so the internet is back on. It’s strange to see Chazray on the news and then look over at his empty cot and see his picture taped to the door. The video says he ran over the IED but he actually stepped on it but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he is missed by so many people.

While a soldier can always be replaced – no one is ever indispensable – the gap they leave is a different story altogether…the empty bed space, the position in the Prezzies rugby team, that spot in the bar where they always sat, the spot in family photos where Dad should be…

I didn’t know LCpl Leon Smith who was killed during a pre-emptive operation against insurgents near Kabul last week. I did know Cpl Doug Grant who was killed a few weeks earlier while doing the business against insurgents in Kabul. I remember him as a young soldier, third from the right in the back from of this photo, quiet and professional with the burning desire to learn demonstrated by many young soldiers of that period – when the camp library was shifted to a new building around that time, someone did some analysis of library loan patterns and found that the large proportion of professional military book loaning was done by JNCOs and soldiers, creating more than few ripples in the pond – the sort that so often answer a higher calling and earn the sand beret and winged dagger…in Dougie’s case, going back for a second time…

We are the Pilgrims, Master…We shall go always a little further…It may be beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow…Across that angry or glimmering sea…

Sunset can mean so much more than the simple disappearance of a ball of burning hydrogen and helium…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Water

Posted on 29 May 2011 by SJPONeill

I’m sure there’s a road here somewhere…

The Great Thailand-Singapore Bike Ride…it’s 1988…some of the lads from Charlie Company, the First Battalion, the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment take up the challenge to ride from the Malaysia-Thailand border back to their base at Dieppe Barracks, Singapore…why? Because they could…Day 1 of the ride was also Day 1 of the eastern monsoon and from there life became interesting…

Kota Bahru, like most of the region, flooded out but most took it in their stride…

…and after many adventures, the final destination was reached…

The final leg…coming onto the Causeway…

This week’s WordPress Photo Challenge...and an interesting exercise in hearts and minds as we worked our way down the east coast staying on beaches and in small kampongs each night…much as I would have liked to have been riding, someone had to take the photos…plus I didn’t have a bike anyway…and I was just back from six weeks in the States…and it looked like hard work…these really were the good ‘old’ days…

Almost famous…

Posted on 10 October 2009 by SJPONeill

…excusing a bit of a time lag from unwinding the rubber band back to NZ over the last few days hence the silence…I was quite flattered to open up Cheeseburger on Monday to find one of my comments re the Birmoverse starring on the front page as it were. Certainly led to an interesting dialogue – people should check out the various discussions re what’s next in the Birmoverse and maybe even contribute if they have anything meaningful to say…while I’m interested in a 50s/60s sequel to the Axis of Time trilogy, I’m way more interested in a 21C prequel that explores the modern Birmoverse (less the wormhole device) – this would be a great tool (shades of self-interest!) to explore possibilities for where our version of this century might go…

Am now safely back at home (thank you very much to Singapore Airlines – truly a great way to fly!!) having enjoyed another brief stopover in Singapore which I largely slept through despite being booked into the Crowne Plaza Changi which is right by the main runway (ask me how I know that the last flight into Changi is at 0230 and the first out at 0600!!!. The beauty of Singapore though is that the light rail system can get you pretty well anywhere in an hour or so absolutely max so I still got to spend a good 4-5 hours in town hopping from one airconned enclave to the next. I very much enjoyed renewing my acquaintance with Miniature Hobbies (03-380) in Marina Square – so fun fun to explore an unfamiliar top-class model shop and of course I managed to make a couple of acquisitions that I’ll probably never build: the Academy I-19 sub is very nice, more so for only $20 and comes with some very nice etch work; and the Trumpeter B-4 203mm gun is one of those big chunky ‘I was built in a tractor factory‘ bits of Soviet kit.

The Singapore Air entertainment programme for October was a bit weak – I was expecting Up, GI Joe and G-Force at least but had to make do with Transformers II which didn’t rock and I watched first movie straight after just to confirm that it wasn’t just a teeny screen issue…even though I was awake the whole Singapore-Auckland leg, all I watched was the canned TV episodes because there was nothing in the movies that appealed in the slightest…I did enjoy the first Doctor Who special from Season IV and have to wonder what is going to happen between the Doctor and Lady Christina who is just way too hot to be written out so early in the season…as I was watching Doctor Who of which I have always been a fan since it stopped scaring me witless in the late 60s, It struck me that the whole idea of the Tardis drifting aimlessly lost in space and time may have been inspired by a BBC writer who got caught up in the Oxford Ring Road space-time discontinuum (no, obviously, I’m still NOT over it yet!!)…

Just doing a final peruse of the blogs before I sign off…yes it is 0158 which just shows how screwed up my body clock is from the rubber band…anyway here’s a commentary on the Coming Anarchy about the US and China buddying up in Afghanistan – when you step back from currently-held models, it sounds sensible and when you get down to it, China has a pretty good track record for countering insurgencies as well – just not according to our book, speaking of which, David Kilcullen’s visit to Wellington on 1 Oct, from all reports, went exceptionally well and I hope to get a more detailed backbrief in a few days…

And making a good point for possibly the wrong reasons, The Strategist has mention of what is probably the best chance of success for Afghanistan ( as opposed to every other man and his dog who are trampling around the place)…good old COIN principle #1 Compromise IS Good!