Waiting for the gift of sound and vision

Until late last year I regularly uploaded videos taken with my Sony H-1 to Youtube, to enhance the photographic record of my various travels or of life in London.  However, in December I bought a new D-SLR, and while it’s a super camera, it lacks a video function.  This hasn’t been a problem, but when I started tinkering with Movie Maker on my laptop recently it meant that I had to turn to material shot on my older camera when I was compiling videos. 

The videos I shot on the H-1 tend to be relatively short, because I preferred to retain as much memory card space as possible for still photography, and shooting videos also has a habit of depleting the camera’s batteries much more quickly than conventional photography.  This meant that in compiling my clips, most of the material is still photography, interspersed with a few video clips.  Of course, if you’ve seen my Youtube channel before, you’ve likely watched some or all of the videos before.

The process of using Vista’s Movie Maker was simple – it’s an intuitive timeline-driven interface.  It’s easy to import material to build clips, move the pieces around, and see how the clip will flow.  There are separate timelines for text captions (note to MS: it’d be nice if the formatting options were improved) and the audio soundtrack.

The latter option was particularly entertaining.  It was great fun sorting through my MP3 collection to find tracks that fitted the visual material, both in terms of length and style.  And in case you were wondering, I immediately ruled out ‘New York, New York’ as a cliché too far. 

So, without further ado, here’s my first three attempts at clip editing using Movie Maker, with links to the blog articles I wrote on each trip.  Each clip is about five minutes long.  Sure, they’re not remarkably professional, but I think they’ve turned out fairly well, and if anything makes the process of sitting through my travel photos less tedious then I’m all for it.

Syria – Oct/Nov 2008

A week exploring busy cities, Crusader castles, ancient souks, hill-top citadels, and the fantastic desert ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra

[Syria blog part 1, part 2; music: Gene Krupa & Buddy Rich – Gene’s Blues]

New York – Sept 2007

Everyone’s first visit to New York City is special, and mine was no exception.  There’s so much to cram in and the days go so quickly!  I’d go back in a second.

[New York blog; music: XTC – River of Orchids]

 

Iceland – July 2007

Call me soft, but I went in the summertime.  Iceland can’t be beat for history and scenery, not to mention a dose of the midnight sun.

[Iceland blog; music: Icelandic artist Magga Stina – In / Naturally, from 1998’s An Album on One Little Indian]

Popes and anti-popes

Exact dates are uncertain in early church records, but tradition holds that the first Pope, St Peter, reigned from 41 until his death in Nero’s Rome in 67.  The papacy grew in importance after the co-option of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine in the Edict of Milan in 313, which allowed them to exercise their religion freely. 

In times of weakness the papacy became something of a hot potato, particularly in the 9th and 10th centuries.  Muslims of the Abbasid Caliphate looted Rome in 846 and the church at the time seemed to be awash with corruption.  Following the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire in 962 the papacy was under Germanic domination and frequently changed hands.   

With the rise of the size and scope of the church, the role of Pope became hotly contested.  The first anti-pope – a Pope declared in opposition to the canonically elected Pope – appeared in 251, when Novatianus emerged as a rival to Pope Cornelius (251-53) and the three following Popes.  Thereafter every century until the 13th featured at least one anti-pope, with the 11th and 12th centuries being particularly fractious (seven and 10 anti-popes, respectively).  After a brief respite in the relatively stable 13th century, three anti-popes were declared in each of the 14th and 15th century.  The last anti-pope was Felix V of Savoy, who resigned his claim to the papacy in 1449.

The chart below illustrates the distribution of Popes and anti-popes from the beginnings of the Christian church to the present.  (Notes: the 1st  century consists of 59 years from 41 to 100 AD; some individuals were counted in more than one century if their term of office overlaps centuries; in the 11th century Benedict IX was Pope on three separate occasions, one of which was regarded as an anti-papacy – he is counted for each.  He is the only Pope to have sold the papacy).  

The rise of modern medicine from the 17th century onwards assisted in lengthening the reigns of Popes, in part contributing to the 19th century being the most stable period in the church’s history in terms of its leadership.  The entire century only featured six Popes, in part due to the 31-year reign of Pius IX from 1846 to 1878, which is the longest papal term of office in history.   

The chart below sets out the average term of office of canonically elected Popes in each century.  It illustrates the longevity of the 19th century Popes (average term 16.5 years) and the chaotic environment of the 10th century (average term 4.3 years), in which 23 Popes and 3 anti-popes jostled for the church’s top job. 

References:

Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Chronology of the World, London, 1991.

Mark Hillary Hansen (ed.), Kings, Rulers and Statesmen, New York, 2nd edn., 2005. 

Eastern Beach

Eastern Beach
Originally uploaded by eT le snap

A lone seagull surveys the sand at Auckland's Eastern Beach, near Howick, 17 October 2009. This was my first visit since my 6th form geography field trip here in 1989 to study coastal geomorphology in the nearby crumbling cliffs. It's a pity Auckland is so huge and unwieldy, but in a way it's pleasant to rediscover long-forgotten corners of it that you've not visited for many years. The only thing I remember about the field trip is that my schoolmates were bemused that my ancient camera produced square pictures (not a Polaroid, though). Nowadays the Esplanade seems to be a popular spot for boyracers to exercise their blowoff valves as they trawl up and down showing off. Perhaps they should stop to admire the view now and then.

Check ignition and may God’s love be with you

Like many young sci-fi fans in the 80s, I lapped up the 1983 film version of The Right Stuff, enjoying its heady mix of gung-ho heroism and fearless space exploration.  The cinematic version of Tom Wolfe’s account of the daring Mercury astronauts chimed nicely with my abiding fascination with space travel.  Not only was I a regular player of a now doubtless highly collectable Gemini space-capsule board game (lost, sadly), but I distinctly recall a primary school teacher’s report card indicating that I would achieve stronger results in my studies if I spent less time thinking about ‘space’.    

With this in mind, I rediscovered that sense of excitement at the thought of space travel when I settled down to watch a DVD copy of the Discovery Channel’s documentary mini-series, When We Left Earth.  The six-part series examines the history of the NASA space programme from its earliest Mercury days, spurred on by JFK’s famous lunar ambition, through the Gemini and Apollo programmes, the Space Shuttle, Hubble, and the International Space Station of today.

The programme makers had superb interview subjects – basically every NASA astronaut of note including the famously reclusive Neil Armstrong appears to provide first-hand accounts of famous events as America learned how to fly in space and send men to the Moon in double-quick time.  So we hear Apollo 16 mission commander John Young relate that it’s easy for him to remember what he was doing the moment he heard that the Space Shuttle programme had been approved by Congress: he was walking on the Moon.  He celebrated the news with this famous leap:

(via NASA Images)

The documentary also features extraordinary film footage from NASA’s own comprehensive archives.  Usually only glimpsed in snippets during TV news bulletins, the wealth of imagery brings home the stark beauty of the darkness of space and the pristine glory of a borderless Earth viewed from orbit.  Extended sequences of lunar landing footage highlight the grand, bleak vistas of the Moon’s surface and the undisguised glee of the 12 men who were privileged to walk on its surface. 

When We Left Earth is definitively NASA’s story rather than a broader review of space exploration.  The publicity-garnering exploits of the Soviet space programme consistently pipped NASA at the post in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and these startling Soviet successes were a huge impetus to their American rivals, but the Soviets receive little coverage in the documentary.  The USSR stole a march on the Americans with shoestring-budget projects and a flexible approach to risk management, and were able to tout a string of propaganda victories that would surely merit their own lavish documentary series:

• the launch of the first artificial satellite (Sputnik, 1957)
• the launch of the first animal in space (the dog Laika, 1957)
• the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin, 1961)
• the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova, 1963)
• the first spacewalk outside a space capsule (Alexei Leonov, 1965)

Sending humans into space atop burning rockets full of highly explosive fuel is an intrinsically dangerous endeavour, and the documentary examines the painstaking efforts of NASA ground support crews to ensure that the astronauts returned to Earth safely.  The buzz-saw haircut of NASA’s stalwart mission controller Gene Kranz gets a lot of screen-time, with his no-nonsense pronouncements on the dramatic events of the Apollo 11 landing and the Apollo 13 near-disaster providing fascinating insights.  But it is the footage of two momentous Space Shuttle missions that ultimately imbues these programmes with a powerful and poignant sense of history unfolding in front of the viewer.

As most people will know, the Space Shuttle programme suffered two catastrophic losses: the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Columbia disaster in 2003.  We have all seen the startling footage of the Challenger breaking up in its ascent phase, with its booster rockets flailing off on random ellipses as the main fuel tank explodes and the shuttle itself is consumed in the blast.  The power of these images to shock is still every bit as potent as in 1986, but the documentary offers a broader picture.  School teacher Christa McAuliffe was aboard Challenger and was to conduct a high-profile class lesson from orbit; the documentary interviews McAuliffe’s ‘alternate’, Barbara Morgan, the astronaut who would have taken McAuliffe’s place on Challenger’s crew if she had been unable to fly for medical or personal reasons.  The sense of loss is enhanced by the mercifully brief snippets of film footage from Cape Canaveral on launch day, where we glimpse Morgan, distraught and clearly mortified at the loss of her friend and colleague.  And to bring the calamity even closer to home, a mere second of contemporary TV footage is all that’s needed to show the dumbstruck grief of McAuliffe’s elderly parents, who were also in the crowd and witnessed the explosion.

The ineluctable sadness of the later Columbia disaster was not only that it was avoidable, but that the loss of the Challenger had not inspired a sufficient culture of vigilance in NASA.  During its launch a hole had been punched in the Shuttle’s crucial under-wing heatshield, which led to the craft burning up on re-entry over the United States en route to its landing in Florida.  All on board were lost.  Columbia had spent a week in orbit working with the International Space Station, but NASA did not curtail its busy programme of space operations to check the underside of the Shuttle for damage before re-entry.  If a check had been made the damage would surely have been noticed and the re-entry aborted. 

The sheer quality of the NASA footage of the Columbia mission before the disastrous re-entry is a testament to the joy the astronauts experienced in their work, but also a sad indictment of the flaws of NASA’s safety policies.  Certainly, NASA’s job is one of the hardest imaginable – balancing the insatiable desire of scientists to learn more about the universe and the questing goal of astronauts to experience the adventure of space flight, with the massive risks of venturing into the inhospitable environs of space using almost absurdly complex vehicles that have, in the words of the old astronaut joke, ‘been built by the lowest bidder’. 

As NASA approaches uncertain times, with the Space Shuttle nearing obsolescence without any suitable replacement planned, When We Left Earth offers a valuable inside account of the US space programme, which at its peak was one of the defining aspects of late 20th century scientific endeavour.  But the programme cannot tell us whether NASA will continue its work in space in its present form as the 21st century progresses, because that is by no means a certainty.

The Wintergarden

The Auckland Domain’s Wintergarden hothouses, located a few hundred metres from the War Memorial Museum, have been a fixture of the city’s botanical attractions for nearly 90 years.  Opened on 12 October 1921 ‘for the benefit and pleasure of the public’, the project was paid for using the surplus funds of the remarkably successful Auckland Exhibition of 1913-14.   A pair of glass hothouses is linked by an outdoor promenade featuring a stylish rectangular lily pond fed by bubbling fountains and fringed by classically-styled statues.  Previously the Wintergarden had languished in a state of disrepair, but since a recent refurbishment it’s regained its rightful place as a much-valued small oasis of calm in the middle of Auckland. 

 

   

Take the ‘A’ train

What with the bus company lockout cancelling most bus services in Auckland on Thursday I decided it would be an excellent opportunity to try taking the train to town.  Not only would it be a good chance to see how reliable and affordable the service was, but there was also the possibility that the city might be afflicted with a relatively small number of school holiday kids from the suburbs spending their parents’ money and generally being annoying.

In contrast to Wellington’s trains, which I use whenever possible, in the past I’ve seldom used Auckland’s rather meagre train network.  The last time I can remember was probably 10 years ago, when I had been dropped off for a meeting in Henderson and decided to take the train back to Newmarket rather than take a long bus ride.  As I’m from Onehunga and still stay there when I’m in Auckland, the train stations along the main trunk line are just too far away for me to use with ease.  Things will be different when the branch line to Onehunga finally reopens in 2011 – I look forward to trying it out – but for the time being taking the train to town isn’t practical.

Still, when there’s no buses you have to make an effort.  Fortunately I was able to get a lift down to the nearest train station, Penrose.  While not particularly rundown, Penrose station isn’t exactly a welcoming place.  Once you’ve descended from the over-track walkways down to the platform you have to bypass the old wooden station building, which is all boarded up now, and walk another 50 metres or so to get to the raised platform that’s currently in use.  There’s a small shelter but it’s pretty exposed to the elements, and the platform isn’t the sort of place you’d want to hang around after dark – it’s in the middle of an industrial zone with almost no people around.  There’s no ticket booth; you buy your ticket on the train.  On the plus side there’s a well-designed timetable and network map explaining how to use the service, and it hadn’t been graffitied yet. 

A couple of southbound trains rattled past, a reminder that Auckland’s still beset with its outdated diesel trains designed to pull freight rather than passenger carriages.  One five-carriage train pulled up with a massive diesel unit at each end, and both engines were roaring as it departed.  No fun living near the train tracks with those monsters going past four times an hour. 

My northbound train to Britomart downtown arrived seven minutes late, which was noticeable but no major inconvenience.  It was at about three quarters capacity, which is impressive given it was midday on a weekday.  A ticket to Britomart (see picture above) only cost $3.80, which is 50c cheaper than the bus, and whereas a bus ride to town would take around 50 minutes from Onehunga, this trip only took 20 minutes. 

The return trip from Britomart was equally efficient, leaving on time and costing only $2.80 because I decided to try getting off one stop early at Ellerslie and walking home from there.  Certainly, it’s a fairly deserted neighbourhood and you have to cross the heaving Great South Road traffic, and ultimately the walk home was impractical at 35 minutes.  But it was an interesting experiment, and I can see why public transport advocates feel frustrated at the limitations of planning and policy around Auckland’s train network.  If only the public transport network was better integrated with feeder buses running to train stations and secure park and ride services for commuters, then it would be much easier to convince more Aucklanders to reduce their reliance on congestion and pollution-creating private car journeys to travel about the city.

(Disclaimer: To anyone from outside New Zealand, a blog post about ‘how I caught a train’ might seem a laughably trivial subject to cover.  But in Auckland the importance of passenger rail links has long been subjugated to the roading imperatives of local and central government, and as a result Auckland has been dominated by cars and motorways for the past 50 years.  Sadly, ‘how I caught a train’ stories are all-too-uncommon in Auckland.