At the moment I snapped these photos, it was very hard to remember that I was in the midst of Canada’s third largest metro. In fact, Stanley Park is apparently the among the largest urban parks on the continent. It’s visited by around eight million people a year, although its thousand or so acres didn’t feel at all crowded. Read the Stanley’s history here, after you give this summer a last, lingering look.
Ten years on, it’s still hard to get my head around the events of 9/11. Watching the news from the other side of the world, my initial thought was this has to be some sort of mistake, a misguided ‘war of the worlds’ type scenario. But sadly, it wasn’t. The unthinkable had happened – planes hijacked by terrorists had flown into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. In those moments life as we knew it changed forever.
Nothing will bring back the Twin Towers or the security we felt prior to 9/11. But, thanks to augmented reality technology, native New Yorker Brian August has found a way to put the WTC Twin Towers back in the picture.
August’s 110 Stories App works within a 40 mile radius of the former Twin Towers site. Using radar, the App determines the direction the smartphone needs to be pointed. By complying with the directions, the user sees not only an image of their immediate skyline but also a pencil-like drawing of the Twin Towers.
After taking a picture, the user is encouraged to upload the image or images to the 110 Stories website to share with the world with the hope of creating a repository of memories about the World Trade Center.
While the augmented reality component of the App is only of use for those in New York City, anyone around the world can access the pictures and stories and share in the memories via the 110 Stories website.
Eventually Brian August hopes to complement the cyberspace version of 110 Stories with public art installations featuring tower outlines placed in 110 prime viewing spots in the tri-state area from which one used easily see the iconic towers.
Part big band, part jazz combo, part folk, part orchestra: The Unusual Suspects are just that: unusual. They make music with harp, piano, saxophone, trumpet, bagpipes, uillean pipes, percussion, accordion, and loads and loads of fiddles. It is a music which connects traditional Scottish music with cutting edge jazz to forge a musical path that’s equally engaging to to listeners of both styles.
There are sure hands at the helm of this, as well as an often changing cast of Scotland’s best musicians in the ranks playing the music. Corrina Hewat and Dave Milligan have backgrounds in both jazz and traditional music — he plays piano, she plays the harp and sings — and about a dozen years back they had an idea for a larger canvass for folk music, a folk orchestra, if you will. Though working with a band of more than twenty people who live all over Scotland and each of whom has other career musical commitments hasn’t proved the easiest road, yet it has been one everybody involved has wanted to make happen, in good part because the music is so exciting, and because they love playing together and challenging themselves with it.
The Unusual Suspects have released their second album, which is called Big Like This. On it you’ll find an impassioned version of Both Sides the Tweed, a song with roots in Scotland’s politics which has been reworked and adapted over the centuries and really doesn’t require any knowledge of Scotland or politics to be completly drawn into. There is The Lorient Suite, an expanded jazz folk melding that Hewatt and Milligan composed when the band was invited to play at the Lorient Celtique Festival in France, and there’s the Scottish traditional song Fine Floo’ers, which stays true to tradition while being done in a way you’ve likely not heard it before. There’s a fine instrumental set that sets a tune from adventurous Scottish piper Gordon Duncan with piece from Cape Breton composer John Morris Rankin which flows in to a traditional piece called St. Kilda’s Wedding, all to fine effect. There are more tunes from Hewatt and Milligan in the program, and they are not the only composers on the band as tunes from fiddlers Eilidh Shaw and Anna Massie nd piper Calum MacCrimmon are on the program as well.
Take a listen and a look — this is just over a minute long but gives a great taste of what the Unusal Suspects are like:
This is a floppy disk. It lives in a museum in a former salt mine in Kansas.
The Kansas Underground Salt Museum in Hutchinson is a strange and wonderful below-ground amalgam of how a former salt mine worked plus exhibits that take advantage of the low humidity, steady cool temperatures and below-ground protection from tornadoes and other threats to archival items.
There are Hollywood costumes down there, underground vaults full of important papers and this little tech exhibit of floppy disks. One of my friends held up my then-cellphone next to the floppy, to show its size.
The gray thing hanging off my phone is a Japanese charm of the big gray cat-creature from My Neighbor Totoro. Nowadays, my Android phone doesn’t have a place for such decorations.
The phone was supposed to show how far we’d come from floppies, but now it, too, is outdated.
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Driving down the gravel drive toward Te Mania and Richmond Plains, two boutique organic wineries I had decided to visit while on a weekend getaway to Nelson, the last thing I expected (or even wanted) to see was a rugby ball.
After all, rugby is mostly commonly associated with beer and I was at a winery.
But there it was in all its glory – a huge rugby ball weaved out of recently pruned grapevines. Standing 4 meters tall and 6 meters round, you’d have to be blind to miss it.
Turns out with the start of the World Rugby Cup in Auckland only days away, even wineries have succumbed to rugby fever.
The giant rugby ball is the centerpiece of New Zealand’s first grapevine sculpture exhibition featuring the works of local artists who have creatively twisted, curved and bended the vines into works of art.
Normally, pruned grapevines are mulched but this year the vineyard staff decided to have some fun and get creative with the vines. In partnership with the Nelson Arts Council and local artists, the idea of a grapevine sculpture exhibition was born.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Besides the giant rugby ball, and it’s smaller twin inside the tasting rooms, there is a wonderful collection of grapevine sculptures on display.
