Of course not, I am human. But the techbros at YouTube would have you believe that the “algorithm” can predict what I will watch next. The Algorithm™ has access to my video watching history based on over ten years of data. Ten years of evidence showing which aspects of current affairs I click on. What news programs I watch, which science videos I rewatch and which channels I binge. The boffins at Amazon built an Algorithm™ that takes my increasingly dwindling purchase history from Amazon and suggest items I may want to purchase next. The Algorithm™ exists for me, my personal Jeeves, as I sail on the ocean of information.
The Algorithm™ knows all, sees all, processes all and can tell me all. It automates away the process of discovery, that joy of just stumbling upon something while casually strolling through the aisles of a bookshop, glancing and then skimming it, eventually liking it. The Algorithm™ knows me and can predict my thoughts and facilitate my anticipated actions.
Alas, the algorithm is not me and cannot substitute me. There is some information that another human could glean about my life and preferences via information that the Algorithm™ gathered, but that is surface level at best.
This leads to an interesting thought experiment. If I died tomorrow, could someone live vicariously as me through the Algorithm™? Would that person know me through my algorithmic recommendations?
I think not.
The Algorithm™ knows only what I tell it, what I am unafraid of disclosing. The Algorithm™ does not know my story, my past or my hopes and dreams. It cannot know that I hope to retire and study astronomy, only that I like astronomy now. It cannot know that I dislike techbros, as my copious use of their creations suggests otherwise.
I realise that the next techbro upgrade to the Algorithm™ is AI. An AI crawler will read this post, and this entire blog. It may successfully predict the next word in a list of preferences of E Rebello. But even AI, can it truly know me the way another human can?
Yes, I am an immigrant. I moved to Canada by choice, i.e. I exercised my own free will to move here. No one threatened me, no one coerced me and no one offered me any incentives. The province of PEI actually did offer incentives (tax rebates) but I forgot to apply before I moved there. Bad luck, I suppose.
Anyhow, immigration is a hot topic in 2024. In 2022, Canada’s population grew by a record 1.05 million people, and 96% of that figure was due to international immigration. About 18% of these people are from India [1]. Out of the five largest source countries in this statistic, only one has citizens who are mostly not “brown” – China. This recent influx of brown people caused much hand-wringing, pearl clutching and general consternation in the population of existing Canadians, many of whom are themselves from immigrant families, many with some questionable traditions. But alas, immigrants are only a cause for concern when they are brown or black. This is the standard, fear-mongering, right wing trope these days. The concern-du-jour, if you will.
The aspect that I find most interesting is the general discourse around the quality of immigrants that Canada brings in. Yes, there is a generally declining trend in the quality of college admitees, especially colleges that find themselves in a precarious financial situation. Let us ignore the fact that provinces control funding to colleges and, after years of not funding them well, cry foul when said colleges get creative with “alternative” sources of funding. No, must be those greedy immigrants.
Start with expensive housing. The CBC, no less, runs several articles [2] about how immigrants are responsible for making housing more expensive. Ok, but that assumes that immigrants have money and the means to afford the insane housing prices in Canada, be that renting or buying.
But hold on a minute. Employers are regularly on the record complaining that they cannot fill positions. Esteemed establishments like the Brazilian “coffee” chain, Tim Hortons, cannot find people to run their stores! Oh, the horror! Even RBC claims [3] that immigrant wages lag those of people born in Canada (even as much as 20% [4]) but there is a labour shortage? Alas, the corporate deities are unable to raise wages! That would displease shareholders. We all know that shareholders must not be displeased!
So, are immigrants too poor or too wealthy? Are mainland Chinese people siphoning money illegally from the PRC to Columbie-Britannique? Maybe they work three minimum wage jobs at the same time, live 30 people to a room and save like squirrels? Is that how immigrants can afford houses in Canada’s most expensive real estate market? Certainly, it cannot be wasteful land use, car-centric and tax-inefficient suburbs or rampant NIMBY-ism that artificially constrains housing supply. It must be those bloody, brown immigrants. But wait, are Chinese people brown? Guess not. It’s those damn Punjabis from Andhra Pradesh!
And what of the recent spate of hate crimes directed at Canada’s Jewish community? As of March 2024, 56% of reported hate crimes in Toronto were anti-Semitic [5]. Must be those immigrants again, with their backwards mentalities and hate from the motherlands. Never mind the fact that most recent immigrants are not from Muslim-majority countries and most of them are unlikely to have time to engage in hate crimes when they are barely able to afford bread. No, it cannot be that. When Sikhs and Hindus from Punjab arrive in Canada, they see the Jewish cabal and are filled with so much hate that they must destroy synagogues. After all, we know that every time you strike a synagogue with a butter knife, money just falls out!
And inflation? Definitely those brown immigrants bringing in their Rupees from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal and Mauritius. Keep those inflationary rupees back in your homes! Don’t bring them here! Surely, it cannot be corporate greed! Galen W can barely afford fuel for his yacht!
GDP growth too slow? Wages not keeping up with inflation? Immigrants are definitely the problem!
In summary then, the Canadian immigrant is responsible for housing being too expensive, for taking all the minimum wage jobs, for global inflation, for anti-Semitism, for stalling GDP growth, for the lack of houses, for the slow pace of house construction, for the deteriorating quality of produce, for taking all the high-wage jobs and for exacerbating homelessness.
I am proud of these achievements, for I have, somehow, achieved all of them with no conscious effort. They just happen! Poof!
This is why I am delighted to identify as Schrödinger’s immigrant. I exist in a quantum superposition where I work a high-wage job that pays poverty wages that somehow allow me to both distort the housing market and take away jobs from poor Canadian teenagers. I am simultaneously too poor and too wealthy. Too unskilled, and far too skilled. Too passive, but also too aggressive. Too ignorant, but also too cunning.
Yours truly, not realising that I stood directly in front of the camera while it was capturing a long exposure shot of the May 2024 Aurora.One the of most clear aurora shots I have. Edited for clarity. The actual aurora looks nothing like this when seen with the naked eye.The March 2024 total solar eclipse, captured from Brantford, Ontario.
Spring 2024 was an amazing time for celestial events in eastern Canada. First was the total solar eclipse, which tore a path right across the continent. Starting in Mexico, earth’s satellite cast its shadow north, across the land of the Free, escaped deadly violence and then entered Canada. Once there, it slunk across the country along the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence river, before exiting via the Maritime provinces.
My own home was outside the path of totality with the difference being just under 1%. That 1% though, makes all the difference. The sun is so bright that just 1% illuminance makes it bright enough to damage human eyesight. Bunny and I decided to drive to Brantford, about one hour south, placing ourselves firmly in the Moon’s shadow.
We would each head to the rendezvous point from different starting locations, hence needed two cars. Yes, emissions, I know. The ensuing confusion meant we were unable to actually meet and were separated by approximately 500 metres when I finally stopped driving. We were worried about cloud cover because the morning had un ciel nuageux, cloudy. As luck would have it, the clouds cleared well in time for the eclipse. We hit the roads.
Bunny arrived first and discovered, much to her annoyance, that the park she chose was also the chosen viewing spot of a gaggle of other people. This being Amérique du Nord, everyone drives and that meant a full parking lot. I wouldn’t make it before the time of totality, hence the last-minute decision for me to abandon the road and to look up.
And I am eternally grateful that look up I did because the celestial sphere put on a real show. Once the moon totally obscured the sun – a coincidence of identical relative sizes, by the way, not divine intervention – I saw the sun’s corona for only the second time in my life. The first was in Bahrain, in the early 2000s. Wow indeed.
I tried to take a few photos but soon gave up and just took it in. I stared in awe at the magnificence of a rare sight. The atmosphere of a star, hotter than its surface, for reasons that physics is yet to determine.
About two months later, the sun decided to belch up plasma in the direction of the earth. Solar plasma interacting with the earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere excites atoms and makes them emit radiation as visible light. The aurora borealis for me, because I live in the norther hemisphere.
Once again, this is a sight I have seen earlier. In this case, from Finland. That time, though, I lived in Helsinki, a city with lots of light pollution and so wasn’t able to see more than a few faint wisps of green.
This time, the solar storm was much stronger. Southern Ontario has relatively lower levels of light pollution outside the main cities and I live far enough away from Toronto that light pollution isn’t a difficult problem to solve. Southern Ontario, though, has a different problem – cloudy skies. This time, luck was on our side and the clouds – once again – cleared.
And what a sight it was, seeing the aurora dancing overheard. I must remind you that Southern Ontario, the region around the Great Lakes, is at roughly the same latitude as Andorra, Monaco or the south of France. Pretty far south, although the winters would have you believe we live close to the Arctic. The aurora overhead at these latitudes is rare.
I saw green and violet and I saw the aurora shifting with time, often every second. Truly a remarkable sight. My phone captured a vivid green glow. My DSLR camera did the same, however, being largely clueless as to how to operate that camera well, the photos I captured were not great. I forgot to set the aperture correctly. Anyhow, a lesson for another time.
Bunny did not attend this event but I fully recommend it to anyone reading. If you have the chance to see the aurora in person, take it. You will not regret it. Oh, and use you eyes. Leave the cameras be. Do it for the memories, not the Snaptokgram.
In the 1973 film The Exorcist, a certain scene rose to prominence. The possessed girl lays prone on her bed and the demon, in a show of strength, makes her body levitate. The camera angle is from above, looking down, as the poor girl resembles Christ on the cross, arms spread helplessly to her sides. The priests, Karras and Merrin then chant, several times, “The power of Christ compels you”, while gesturing in a chopping motion, as if wielding a divine sword. Eventually, the chants work and the girl succumbs to the force of gravity.
I was raised Catholic and was taught – for some reason – several prayers in Latin. Yes, I, a brown Indian man was convinced by a Sicilian priest, that God, in his divine omniscience, somehow valued a European language over others, that language being Latin. Several Catholics believe this to be true, all while telling themselves that this belief is divine in nature, and in no way connected to the racist tendencies of us mere mortals. Anyhow, at one point in my life, I memorized the Roman Ritual of Exorcism, in Latin. In Latin, this is Exorcismus in Satanam et Angelos Apostaticos. I cannot remember the phrase “The power of Christ compels you” existing anywhere in that ritual. The closest phrase that I can recall is this – in nómine et virtúte Dómini nóstri Jésu. Roughly translated as “in the name and power of our Jesus”. [1]
Where is this going, you might wonder?
Ah, like several Boomers, I too, worry about “The Children”. I too, consider their safety and the messages that modern society sends to their impressionable minds. This is why I watch infernal cartoons such as Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol and Dora the Explorer. I view Paw Patrol as a sinister Canadian platform to convince Americans that the State is singularly evil and that Capitalism solves all problems, divine and corporeal. Guns are needed as are private ambulances. That is a story for another day. Today, we focus on Dora the Explorer.
Dora Marquez is a Latina who embarks on a series of quests while interacting with various talking animals. This is a kid’s show so let’s gloss over the fact that the animals can talk and focus, rather, on the subtext.
Dora’s companion is a monkey with red boots. This is a visual metaphor for the archangel Uriel, often depicted via the colour red [2] and who is the angel of wisdom. Boots, in the world of Dora, often helps the Latina girl on her way and drops pearls of wisdom.
The nemesis of the duo is Swiper, an orange talking fox. The colour is significant. What colour are the fires of hell? Orange. Dora and Boots (the angel Uriel, remember) have a chant that makes Swiper disappear. That chant is “Swiper no swiping” and is repeated three times. You may have made the connection already, but let me spell it out for you. That chant is the children’s equivalent of “The Power of Christ compels you”. In the exorcism chant, the power of Christ compels the demon to release the possessed. Here, “Swiper no swiping” compels the demonic fox to cease his diabolical deeds.
Ha.
Do you see it now? Dora is actually an Exorcist. The show’s title is Dora the Explorer. Explorer and Exorcist both start with the letter E. Boots is the Angel Uriel, sent to assist Dora on her earthly adventures. Swiper is an inner-circle demon of the Earth element and Dora exorcises him through her chants.
Do you see it now? Those crafty Americans are sending subtle messages around the world to impressionable children that they should join the Holy Army of the Catholic Church and should do battle against the legions of Hell.
I hate driving. I hate the act of driving, I hate the thought of driving, I hate everything around driving a motor vehicle on the road for any length of time.
What annoys me is other road users, other human beings, also engaged in the act of guiding a few metric tonnes of metal, plastic and rubber along clearly demarcated routes. The behavior of these other humans annoys me, especially in a place like South West Ontario where there is often no viable alternative to driving if you desire to displace yourself and your belongings from one location in spacetime to another. The lack of options is what annoys me. I view commuting as a chore, albeit a necessary one. I don’t mind driving short distances to a shop, a few times a month. If, on the other hand, I am forced to drive for forty minutes on Ontario’s fearsome Highway 401 (shamefully, home to the busiest stretch of highway in North America), I dread it. I dread the other drivers because you never know who is tired, high, drunk, distracted, clueless, confused, incompetent or some combination of these. That uncertainty is what scares me and is why I find myself concentrating fully on the vehicles around me, watching what they are doing and anticipating what they will do. That’s tiring and all I want to do is to read a book, play video games or just stare out the window at the sky or the world whizzing by.
I recently drove to Ottawa and back and the journey was harrowing. On the way there, I sat in Toronto traffic for two hours. I saw numerous bad drivers and dangerous maneuvers. I do not want my personal insurance profile to change hence I give others a wide berth, often wide enough that a north American lorry can fill the gap. A journey of four and a half hours turned into seven hours. Add to this, the variety and unpredictability of weather around the great lakes and you often have to wonder, who around you is driving on summer tires in the winter and whose tires are almost bald, like Formula 1 tires but out of laziness or poverty, not design.
A car is some amount of freedom, but it comes at a cost. Insurance, tires, maintenance, petrol, the mental load of driving. That’s not freedom.
This is why I love public transit. That is freedom. Everyone in an urban area deserves good, reliable transit. You can go where you want, when you want, subject to schedules, of course. It bothers me that we don’t view public transit as an investment, an investment in freedom that deserves to be protected. On the train, tram, bus or metro, you can see other people. You can not see other people. You can do your own thing, you can watch someone else doing theirs. A train between Toronto and Ottawa does exist, but it isn’t cheap. Prices are comparable to a flight. When your family has four members, driving is cheaper on your pocket but driving has others costs that people don’t account for – the pubic money spent maintaining road infrastructure. Ontario spends around 13 Billion Canadian dollars to maintain road infrastructure. That’s roughly $ 900 per person, per year on just roads or about three dollars a day. People don’t really care about that money because we assume that roads will continue to be available, maintained and useable. Why can’t we assume the train will be there? A reliable bus service?
School systems back in the day recommended a transition of writing implements, from pencils to fountain pens. “Ink pens” was the name in the Indian school system and this sounds odd in hindsight. Ink as opposed to what, given that all pens use ink in some form. My childhood experience with fountain pens was horrible. No one taught me how to use them, how to properly hold them, how to apply the appropriate pressure and how to care for them. In typical Indian school system, it was a command sent down from on high, “Though shalt use a fountain pen henceforth”. And lo, it was so.
I used pens made by a Chinese brand “Hero”, legally Shanghai Hero Pen Company. According to Wikipedia, the pens are regarded as among the best in China and were popular in India during the 90s. The pens had a hooded nib and exposed only the very tip of the nib. I often used too much pressure and made the tines fray up to the point where ink either stopped flowing or sometimes gushed out. I learned through my misbehaving friends that ink would gush out if you angled the nib towards a victim and flicked the pen like a whip. This was a good example of how kids will weaponize the most innocuous items to be assholes. I too was an asshole. Anyhow, I often ended up with palms covered in ink, often wiped hours of writing by spilling water on paper and regularly ruined my white shirts with blue or black stains that would not wash away. The ink I used was made by Camlin and was horrible with the pen I used. I had no idea that pens came in different nib sizes, including fountain pens. I happened to use a fine-tipped pen and the ink clogged the feed and nib. I eventually flipped the nib and wrote with an inverted nib. This was a bad idea with cheap paper because the paper fibres clog the nib. I had no idea what the fibrous accumulations were, and I was loathe to touch the nib because I did not want ink on my fingers as well as palms. Mostly a bad experience.
Eventually, I discovered the convenience of ballpoint pens and switched to those for almost twenty years. I did not take pens too seriously and viewed most pens as the same. I scoffed at pens costing several thousand rupees or tens of dollars. Completely by accident, I purchased a pilot G-Tec from a stationery shop in Halifax, NS. I enjoyed this pen but it is a gel pen and the ink eventually runs out. I did not have a refill nor did I know how to find one so I eventually stopped using it before the refill ran out.
Then I visited Japan.
In the run up to the Japan trip, I scoured YouTube and reddit for must-buy things in Japan and one of these is Japanese stationary, including pens. The YouTube rabbit hole led me to fountain pens, to the American online store Jet Pens and eventually to the Toronto shop Wonder Pens. I was not able to complete my research quest before arriving in Japan and I don’t typically spend large amounts of money on things I may not use. I perused the options available in Japanese stationery stores and bought a few gel pens including refills. No fountain pens though, it seemed too daunting.
Back in Canada, I completed my online reading and visited Wonder Pens in Toronto. The kind folks there recommended I purchase a $35 Pilot Metropolitan and a bottle of Lamy blue ink. That kicked it off for me. The YouTube rabbit hole taught me how to hold a pen, how much pressure to apply and how to get the most out of the pen. I was hooked. I loved the feeling and i loved the fact that I could write more with less hand strain. I did not like the shade of the Lamy blue ink, it was too dark for my liking. I did the logical thing and bought a different bottle, this time from Ferris Wheel Press, a Canadian ink and pen manufacturer. This was from a shop in Brampton called Blesket. While in the shop, I saw these cheap Pilot Preppy fountain pens and bought one on a whim, the 03 nib. I loved this and visited a local art store in Guelph to find a 02 nib. I also bought a pen with red plastic and then decided that red ink was the next purchase. I now had four fountain pens and two bottles of ink!
With more written notes, I needed highlighters so I bought a six-pack from a shop in Cambridge called Phidon Pens. The ecosystem in Canada surprised me and I was delighted to see these shops thriving. Sure, the ink wasn’t cheap and the pens are 4x-5x the cost of the cheapest ballpoint pens but you can’t really put a price on joy, can you? My first Zebra highlighter ran out and I then discovered that Platinum make fountain pen-based highlighters. Ah, now I need highlighter ink so that was the next and most recent purchase, as you can see in the image below. The highlighter search showed me the Parallels pen by Pilot and I happened to find a few at Wyndham Art in Guelph. Of course, I bought the pen.
This entire experience taught me a whole lot about fountain pens but also about writing. You don’t need expensive fountain pens to enjoy them. Most of my fountain pens cost under six Canadian dollars, not exactly pricey. Same with the inks I purchase – they are cheap and come in colours I love! There is a certain joy in discovering new ink colours and seeing how the ink spreads on low quality paper. There is so much to learn – calligraphy, paper quality, pressure, nib styles, ink shades, ink colours, specialty inks and so on.
I encourage you to walk (or drive) to your local stationery store and buy a fountain pen. It is a joy!
I love building blocks and I purchased a discount (50%) set from Kinokuniya in New Jersey, Estados Unidos de América earlier this year. This was a four-character set from the space invaders video game. Space Invaders is a 1978 arcade video game developed in Japan and was quite popular in les États-Unis d’Amérique. This is such an old game that it is older than me and is a game I’ve never played, until one hour before writing this blog post. I did play a similar game, Galaxian, also developed in Japan and developed by Namco. I assumed that Galaxian and Space Invaders were the same game but I was clearly wrong.
The set is fairly basic and produces four characters, one each in purple, blue, yellow and green. The four have legs and stand vertically and are flat so can also be laid horizontally. Assembly is fairly simple but the blocks are small and build up from a base layer whose blocks are not joined in any way. I would not recommend following the first step of assembly. Instead, gather the blocks and refer to the next step showing the layer above. Use those blocks to hold the base layer in place. I suspect the designers considered this aspect but there isn’t a neat workaround. The instructions are clear enough and a six year old could complete this set. The blocks are small hence there is a significant choking hazard. Would recommend at the price I paid.
In the video I recorded, you will notice that the quality starts off great and then rapidly deteriorates. I used my Nexus 5 phone to record this video and used the OBS Ninja website. Unfortunately, streaming video to OBS on your computer is a significant task for a ten year old Android device. The battery is old enough that it drains despite being plugged in. I had the phone connected to my laptop during the entire session. I changed the OBS Ninja setting to balance processor power draw and did not see a difference on the phone screen. OBS, though, saw something very different. The video resolution dropped and the end product is so bad it is almost useless. Next time, I will try the maximum resolution setting and see how long my phone lasts.
Another source of confusion for me is framerate. I set up OBS to capture 10 fps – ten frames per second. I’m creating a timelapse video and I don’t need the full 60 or 30 fps in the raw footage. I usually speed up the video by 4x – 6x so 10 fps is good enough. I had no idea what framerate OBS Ninja produces but it appears to be 30 fps, which is a good choice. I learned the hard way that the source framrate and the project framerate in your video editor are not the same. I now use kdenlive as my video editor after our helpful friends at Micro$oft removed the video editor from Window$ 10. Not only did the bean counters at Micro$oft remove the video editor, the replacement is tied behind a windows account login and you cannot use it without a Microsoft account, which I do not have and will not create. If someone at micro$oft is reading this, I hope the bean counters and MBA-types who drove this decision die and are subjected to eternal hellfire in the bowels of whatever the opposite of heaven is in their chosen religious affiliation. I hate windows and I detest this user-hostile design. Not only did I waste time trying to find the windows video editor but I then spent even more time trying to find an alternative that is simple enough. DaVinci Resolve does not work with the intel graphics card on my nine year old laptop and plenty of other recommendations via reddit either had ads or were too complex. On top of all this, I now had to figure out how to use kdenlive, how to edit my videos and how to export. I hate the MBA-types at micro$oft. You will never see another dollar or rupee from me or my family.
Now, on to video. My LG webcam is good enough for this job and I used it to record previous videos. Video quality is quite grainy hence why I used a smartphone camera. With my combination of hardware, there isn’t a neat solution to turn my iPhone into a webcam. I use a 2013 macbook pro and this is too old for Apple’s webcam solution. One day, I will be forced to upgrade my laptop and I will then be able to produce better quality video. In the meantime, I will decide on whether or not I want to continue with this hobby.
I am a bandwagon fan of the English football club Liverpool FC. I watch some matches, I recognise a few players and am moderately emotionally invested in the club’s success. I do not live in the city of Liverpool or in the UK and have visited the place only twice. Why I support this club, I cannot say. Maybe it is an innate tribalism and this was one available choice at the time? That’s the likely explanation.
I recently visited the post-Brexit United Kingdom and made my way to Sport Direct, my favourite shop for cheap sports-themed goods. In the discount bin at the discount store, I found a couple of Premier League building block stadiums, one of which was Anfield – Liverpool’s home stadium.
This kit is sold in two models – the mini version and the full size one. The mini version has 1,369 pieces and the full-size version has 4,650 pieces. The larger version is more life-like, as you might expect. While in line at Sports Direct, I did not know that the larger version existed. Liverpool’s website sells the larger model for GBP 65, over one hundred Canadian dollarydoos, not a price I was (or am) willing to pay. I don’t love the club that much. I bought the mini set for about GBP 24, a much more palatable price.
I built the stadium model over approximately fifteen hours. The instructions were adequate but did not mention several pitfalls and alignment problems. The blocks themselves are small, much smaller than Lego blocks, and are fiddly to the point where you sometimes require tweezers. The block colours in the instructions are sometimes unclear. There are two shades of grey and one black and the printed colours are washed out, leading to some confusion. The attention to detail required for block placement is also a challenge, especially in a sloped stadium. The specific problem with this kit is the ascending white segments on the stands. Each is a 1 x 3 block with an overlap of 1 x 2 i.e. the blocks stack vertically, offset by one space to create the required staircase. The problem is that the entire stack is supported only at the bottom meaning that pressure anywhere above can split it. This has a tendency to happen often and there are nine such stacks. Annoying, to say the least.
Alignment is a problem when assembling the stadium roof, as you can see in my pictures here. It is fiddly and difficult to get right with the blocks in place. Too much pressure and blocks lower down just shoot off or parts of the structure collapse.
The small size of the blocks also means that some have imperfections from the injection moulding. The kit comes with sufficient spares so this is often not a problem but I did run into a few alignment challenges, again, as you can see on the stadium roof section.
In all, I enjoyed the assembly process and the assembled product looks great. There is a challenge but nothing too great. At the price I paid, I would recommend but cannot recommend this at full price because of the quality control issues.
Overall, 7/10 at the reduced price. 4/10 at full price.
My suggestions:
Look ahead and build stacks where you can. Good examples are the brown/orange stadium pillar sections.
When adding 1×1 blocks to the large, flat sections, look ahead and assemble those sections before attaching to the rest of the structure.
Assemble the white stacks in the stands first. Push each block as far back as it will go on the lower block i.e. aim for maximum length.
Note the alignment issues with the stadium roof girders.View showing the white sections of the stands. These sections are stacked 1×3 blocks with an overlap of 1×2. Note the misaligned (blurred) middle white stack on the left stand.View showing the “LFC” text built from blocks. This is a nice touch and is quite stable because the blocks integrate into the adjacent rows. I enjoyed this part of the finished stadium.
I purchased a wooden puzzle in Japan on a whim. I saw these previously, somewhere on the interwebs and was fascinated – how sturdy are the finished models, how easy is assembly and is it fun? I can now answer all these questions since I built my first, albeit with some difficulty.
The model I purchased was the TG407 wooden airship from Rolife*, something that harkens to the world of the hindenburg and the golden age of exploration. The finished model includes a gondola suspended from a exposed-frame gas envelope. The gondola resembles a horse carriage with its wheels and even has a fan at the rear end. Very aesthetically pleasing.
The annoyance and difficult level of the assembly process depend on your familiarity with woodworking. I have none so I found it very annoying. The individual pieces are on a frame and you press them out. The pieces are held to the frame by little studs and often, these do not separate cleanly, leaving splinters everywhere. The smaller pieces – the round ones, notably – are prone to breaking as you separate them from the frame. Same story with the elongated pieces.
The assembly process is straightforward and the instructions are understandable. The problem is, wood pieces have a large tolerance for flex and dimensional errors. Assembly also requires pushing pieces together and the force sometimes breaks the larger ones. Spares are included but only the smaller pieces. My suggestion is to purchase two identical models if this is your first attempt – things will go wrong.
You often need glue and some pieces must be sanded – a square of sandpaper is included. The trouble is that knowing when to use glue or sandpaper isn’t easy to gauge and the instructions contain no information. A pity.
The finished product is decidedly not sturdy. A misplaced finger can topple or separate the model. A display case is a good idea.
On the whole, the models are enjoyable to assemble and the finished product is pleasing to the eye. The process is slightly messy with wood dust and splinters involved however, this is not aimed at kids so no great problems, just be aware.
*Rokr, Rolife and Robolife all appear to be different brands from the same Chinese company.
Past Lives is a 2023 romantic drama film focused on the literal past life of a Korean immigrant child in North America. The central plot line is how this child’s parents decide to leave South Korea for Canada, how the protagonist then moves to the USA for professional success, finds it, finds love and in between, reconnects with her childhood sheetheart, disconnects and then is forced to reconnect and examine their relationship.
I will not review the film nor post spoilers. I will take another angle – the angle visible to someone who is themself an immigrant, or a double or triple immigrant depending on how you define it. The movie’s protagonist claims to have immigrated twice, first to Canada and then to the USA. I immigrated from India to Bahrain, then to India, then Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and finally Canada.
These moves taught me some simple truths – home is a state of mind but for some, that is intertwined with a location. Any relationship takes effort – love, friendship, siblings, parents, children. Those are thoughts for another time.
Your name is an integral part of who you are. Not just your name, but the names your friends use. I have one legal name but several nicknames. Some friends know me as Fish. Others as Elda. Others as simply Eldrich. Each has a different connotation in my mind, a different emotion. It is much the same in the film – Na Young becomes Nora. A new name for a new life. One can pretend that your old name ceased to exist, but it doesn’t.
Another is language. Yes, I am fluent in English but I do not speak the same English with everyone. In Canada, I stick to standard English with metaphors borrowed from cricket and football. With my friends from Bombay, I still use English but with a sauce of Hindi and a seasoning of Marathi words. With yet others in Bombay I speak English but end every sentence with “men”, similar to the Caribbean “mahn”. The inflection is also entirely different. What I say, what I mean, the phrasing, the cadence, they all change with language. Even more different is my speech in Hindi where I use English vocabulary as a crutch until I figure out what the Hindi word for encyclopedia is. (it is ज्ञानकोश or gyan-kosh; विश्वकोश or vishwa-kosh according to Collins).
At one point, the character of Nora remarks how marriage is like two trees in the same pot. Their roots intertwine and this leads to conflict. How you deal with that conflict is important.
Another theme in the film is the desire to outgrow your past, to not be bound by it. I too feel this sometimes. You cannot deny your past, it is forever there but it was a moment in time. A moment that has passed, with people who likely changed. You, too, changed.
Then there is ethnicity and how it means different things in the new world versus in the old world. I am Indian. I cannot change that. Lots of people in Canada are ethnically Indian however, they are distinct from me in an important way – they are Indian AND Canadian. Both at the same time. I am not and never will be despite official documents saying otherwise. I am Indian Indian. From India, fresh off the plane, with an Indian accent and many Indian sensibilities. In the new world, cultures are often reduced to the occasional festivity, the odd piece of cultural baggage, the archaic if baseless custom, aromas in a kitchen or restaurant. In the old world, an ethnicity is who you are, your identity, your role in the world. It is how you behave, how you are expected to behave. Your ethnicity is your culture, how you carry yourself, the food you eat, the ingredients you buy, where you live. It is a curiously new-world phenomenon that your ethnicity and nationality can be distinct and different. Separate, compartmentalised, changing with the date. On diwali, you are Punjabi. Canadian on Christmas.
Finally, your past home, your homeland, the motherland. As a first-generation migrant, you never really leave it and it never leaves you. Your relationship to it is different depending on circumstance. Some – like Syrians or Sri Lankans – have a tortured, fractious relationship with the mother country. A civil war, ethnic tensions, decades of dysfunction mean that not much of their lives are left there. A clean break for some, a swift detachment for others. In the other case – such as mine – life in the mother country goes on without you. Those you left behind carry on in peace, living their lives without you and you without them. India is not at war, there is no conflict and a large section of my extended family continue to live there. I visit them occasionally but it is a strained visit. They have changed. India has changed. My recollection of the country, of the city, of my neighbourhood is no longer reality. It was but a moment in time. A past life, maybe?
