This March 10 is the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule – the Chinese had invaded in the early 1950s, of course.
Repression has been particularly savage all year, hence the general cancellation of the more joyful celebrations usually associated with the new year; that in turn, has brought more repression, with one monk setting fire to himself just last week in protest. He was shot before the flames were put out, and is presumed dead, but as far as I know nobody knows what happened to the body – “taken to an undisclosed location”, as they say.
So this year I plan to join the coach going to Canberra for the speeches-and-prayers do, provided I can manage to get up at shortly after 4:00 a.m.!
Yesterday we went to the christening of Zachary, who is Sarah’s father Les’ late wife Cherie’s brother Bob’s son Matthew’s son. Pictures include angelic participants:
key moment:
and keepsake boat with good-luck almonds:
Like most of the pictures here, you can click for a closer look.
Thanks to a series of coincidences we got invited to a free lunch on the Arcadia. (I suppose P&O are still trying to improve their image after the sorry Dianne Brimble story). A tour of the ship followed. I was a barnacle in tow with Sarah who was there as the daughter of her father, Les, who had very fond memories of a trip many years ago with some of the other friends at our table.
The name of the ship was historically important to Australia – I think quite a number of the Ten Pound Poms, for instance, came on an earlier bearer of the name. To be sure there are a lot of people with better reasons to have been there, but that was the luck of the draw. Note the cameras and media presence in the slide show!
Facit: food not at all bad, service excellent. What would those Victorian gentlemen who amused themselves dreaming up plurals call a large assembly of waiters? A canteen?
I’ve been translating a lot about steam and gas turbines over the last few weeks. They are big.
This might compensate for the lack of a picture in yesterday’s karma-rant. There’s little to compare with a view of some rotor blades to perk things up a bit, is there?
Here is a good reason for keeping the containers you got your rice in from the Thai takeaway:
Use them for hunting Huntsmen! I am told that Huntsmen are beneficial, and that their prey is things that you’d be quite glad not to have around – though you might prefer just not to know. They are also not really aggressive, but their bite is said to be fairly painful, and they are quite agile, running freely around the walls and ceilings. That really distracts you when you’re trying to watch telly. Catch and relocate, that’s the motto!
Went to Spotlight the other day. Got some embroidery silk to re-string my mala counters:
But that’s just for the sake of a picture. We also got a make-up mirror – one of those with a magnifying side and a plain side, with a light for the face. Amongst the instructions was:
It’s a couple of months since my 60th bash, but you might find this amusing all the same.
We had (dark) red and (ivory) white flying balloons at the party. There was some helium left. So after everyone had gone, we tried a few things out. That sad old song “Skibbereen” seems particularly moving when performed with a lungful of helium.
After all those years when learning to dance seemed like a great idea to do “sometime“, Sarah and I went to an introductory tango session on Saturday, and are fired up to have lessons at Patio de Tango.
The teacher was really reassuring, and started at the very beginning: first, just stand there. Then progress to shifting your weight back and forth from one foot to the other. Later we progressed to walking forward, using first one foot, then the other! And so on.
At this stage I just want to stress that this is Argentine tango, not ballroom tango (or the “dreaded slow-slow-quick-quick-slow” as it seems to be known).
Let’s face it, if you are going to see in the new year with fireworks, Sydney is the place to do it. This year we were kindly given tickets to a spot in the Botanical Gardens – here was our view as we settled to watch the parakeets, swallows, bats, moon and helicopters as we waited for the show.
For pictures of the fireworks themselves, go to the paper: SMH picture gallery. They were spectacular!
This isn’t the interesting, focussed blog you might have been looking for…
"Pica Pica" is, as I'm sure you knew, the name for the common magpie. It's no more than a collection of bits and pieces I wanted to make available for friends and family. I have other blogs for dharma related material (at DangZang), and a small one for translation at my work site.
At last the catalogue project that I began so long ago has reached a sort of completion. Improvement will always be possible, through more detail and ironing out mistakes. But at least I now know what I’ve got, and will avoid that embarrassing moment when you start reading a wonderful text that you ordered from […]
Happiness is booming: its stock is riding high. In 2012 you will be able, for a mere thousand Australian dollars, to take part in a conference on “Happiness and its causes” in Sydney. Unless, that is, you happen to want to join the additional workshops, which take another 700 dollars or more out of […]
