We had a Thanksgiving lunch with some folks. Two of my mother’s teachers, a family friend. This was the first such holiday event our family’s had in … years where it’s not a madhouse of relatives, social circle peers and influential Vietnamese community types; it was so laid-back and even a little surreal. The friend, bac Truoc, used to be in .. the ARVN air force, I think. I also seem to recall he’s missing a finger, but I always forget which one, b/c his hands are so small and stumpy. These days, he’s a painter.
[edit: I think I’m confusing him with bac Cuong, who is missing the thumb. I think he was a lt. col. in the ARVN. He’s not an artist.]
He recently saw an exhibit by an artist he knew from Vietnam. Forty years ago, the man had a distinctive style, strong lines, great expression. He was well-known for his work. The recent exhibit of new work was by the same dude.
And he still showed a distinctive style, strong lines, and great expression — the same style he had 40 years ago.
Bac Truoc talked about how we can grow to think we are successful — complacent, I ventured, and he concurred. And if we perceive we are successful, we perceive a lack of impetus to further develop ourselves and our skills. We become a snail, a mollusc that hides in what it has crafted, maintaining but not exploring or pushing boundaries. (VN civilization being traditionally 43% coastal, our idiomatic speech reflects that background.) Duh, right? Stick with what works.
Another consideration is that anyone from the immigrant generation has had to deal with the amber-trapping effect of traumatic upheaval. For many people I’ve known, much of their attitudes and perceptions froze on April 30, 1975. Everything that’s happened since has existed in a hazy fog of getting by — as though perhaps one day my father might wake up and find himself back in his old room with the windows open, his prized stamp collection still on his shelf, his record player crooning out the Righteous Brothers, just as they were when he abruptly left home 32 years ago. To think that you’re just leaving for a little while, that you’ll be back to put away the record in its sleeve, and then not… for three decades. Well, if not that, then what is traumatic?
:/
(Never mind the panic and terror of being on overcrowded boats and ships, risking pirates, starvation, dehydration, trampling, robbery, and arriving in a new country with no language, money, or possessions beyond the clothes on your back and maybe some jewelry stitched into the hem lines.)
And there is nothing terribly wrong with sticking to what works. It has risks (getting left behind by new developments), but has benefits as well (refining and building upon established strengths). Regarding art, plenty of artists have enjoyed commercial success with it.
It just has to be tempered with change, and vice versa. Neither is better, but most of us tend to one side or the other.
So whether one prefers stability or change is a matter of personal philosophy. The fence-straddling approach is to profess faith in dynamic stability — businesses today stress the value of creating and institutionalizing a learning culture, one that emphasizes formal processes of constant improvement and reaction to shifts in customer needs.
Fancy bizspeak, but they’re just words.
What do you believe in?
What works for you?
:/
[Listening to Verso, Reflections album, “Rhymes with Seven” track. Good stuff.]
OK, I’m only feeling awesome for values of it where “awesome” = “bleary”. :P
Wet b/c it’s raining outside. Was raining at 1 a.m., raining at 4 when I got up to take an apparently sympathetic leak (the sound of rain is pretty audible in my room), and still raining now.
Went out to grab some class notes from my car, and figured I’d do a quick little morning kung fu routine in the grass. Whee! Now I’m cold. And wet.
My shoulders were really sore when I woke up, though, and I had a groggy moment of panic — “Oh noes! Delayed injury from my not-so-awesome Friday night flipping out!”
Then, stupid bint that I was, I finally realized it was b/c of the 3×4 sets of behind-the-head pull ups I did in my room yesterday. I know, certain of my muscle groups (where certain = the majority) are wussbags. Including my brain. B/c the brain is a muscle and mine hasn’t gotten enough exercise.
But I heard back yesterday from the exec director of a client organization I had for one of my classes. I recently e-mailed her, asking about where the org was, a year after our group did its research and recommendations on improving volunteer recruitment and mgmt. Preliminary reply indicates that they’ve increased their volunteer base by 52%! That’s something like almost twice what they intended, when we worked with them.
And I found <drum roll> Eli Steenput’s website as a 3- or 4-level deep random web trawl.
Who’s Eli Steenput, you ask?
Well, he’s only one of the cool kids who had a hand in the whole historical armor / WMA research thing back in the early-early ’90s. He once wrote an article about sword fullers. Certain engineering-minded females in Austin who probably don’t normally read my Xanga ramblings would get a kick out of this (nudge nudge, Colsith).
The cross section is similar to an I-beam (if you squish the serifed ends of the I and draw the resultant blobs out into tapering points — voila, fullered sword blade cross-section). And thus, like an I-beam, it is *not* stronger than an unfullered sword of the original weight (before removal of material from the fuller grooves). However, it retains something like 50% of the strength in the direction we most care about (i.e. the cut), while losing 80% of stiffness in the other direction (the flat of the blade) but also 80% of the weight! Well, that’s if you made an I-beam shaped sword. Actual weight loss and stiffness change may vary. See your blacksmith for details.
And it is definitely stronger than an unfullered sword made with the same mass as the fullered blade. A rough eyeball estimate suggests the fullered blade has 8x the stiffness on the direction of the flat (but is still absurdly wimpy compared to the more massive, pre-fullered blade) and 3x the stiffness on the direction of the edge.
It’s a fine distinction, but one that I hear incorrectly made all the time (fullers stiffen the sword). Well, not really incorrectly. It’s incorrect if you grind or cut a fuller. I just realized it’s correct if you forge a blade, then hammer in a fuller, working the blade hot. But since most modern makers cut their fullers, then they’re technically weakening the blade. Hrm.. I should point that out to Steenput and see what he has to say, 9 years after the fact.
Boy, let me tell you, thorny problems like this really keep me up at night. (Not!)
But now you know (and probably don’t care). And knowing’s half the battle, G.I. Joe.
And now I know that Eli’s been teaching dagger plays at HEMAC. Pity he’s out of Belgium and I’m here. At least he’s got an awesome pictorial tutorial on making German kebabs.
Oh, and this is cool, too: Skewers for German schweinhunds.
Finished 6/9 weekend to-do items for school/work yesterday. Just added one, and two can’t be done until Monday now, so I think I’ve earned a fencing practice. Now if only we can pause the rain in the 1-4 p.m. timeslot.
Can’t dally too long, though. Got a 30-slide PowerPoint presentation to rehearse for Monday night — with a 20-min time limit. We’re going to break the sound barrier on this one.
“Look. Data.”
“Oh, more data.”
“Data on your mom.”
“Company-specific data.”
“Fun corporate logos promoting the military-industrial capitalist running pig-dog lackeys of the Western oppressors.”
“Questions?”
Ξ August 4th, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ History, Metalworking |
I’m a bad judge of everything from ages to weights to dating prospects.
So I didn’t dispute David when he estimated my war hat at 8 lbs. We’d established that a gallon of milk is ~8 lbs, and he thought the chapeau de fer to be in the same vicinity.
I said sure, sounds good to me; I’d check it when I got home.
(more…)
…Are no fun. I highly unrecommend. If I ever maul significant amounts of wood again, I am getting a table saw and router. But I am under semi-voluntary vows of poverty, that’s not likely to happen soon.
On the flipside, I smelled pine-fresh all day.
(more…)
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