Behind the Iron Curtain part 18 – Periodicals for Children

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

From a child’s perspective, this is one of those things again that the regime got at least mostly right, if not outright right. There were at lest five different magazines specifically for children, with target audiences from 6 to 18 years. Unfortunately most of them do not exist anymore, except one and the last issues I have seen of that one do not hold a candle to what it used to be – too many advertisements, too little real content.

The magazine I am talking about is ABC mladých techniků a přírodovědců (ABC of young technicians and natural scientists). I still have a stack of old issues that I have not thrown away and sometimes I still go through them and occasionally learn a new thing or two.

That particular magazine has a unique format – there are articles about science, technology and nature and occasional story of course and I learned a lot about those things from it. But it also featured two regular features that no other magazine in our country at that time had – paper models and comics.

The paper models are what made the magazine extremely popular and famous, and in my opinion also most useful for a young kid. I know people, even in my family, who sneer at that notion, but the truth is that even today I and I am sure my brother as well are using the skills learned while cutting, measuring and gluing paper models together. And by using I mean getting paid, because making models gives one nimble fingers, teaches patience and trains spatial intelligence. It is a pity that since made from paper, those models were not particularly long-lived so none of them survived until today. They required way to much care and collected way too much dust to be kept in a household with three asthmatics.

The comics were, in my non-humble opinion, much better than whatever nonsense Marvel is peddling. There were no superheroes and no mages. Over the years there were multiple series, and they all excelled in the past in one thing – combining education with entertainment. One series was entirely devoted to Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle. One was about a robot uprising. And one particularly long-lived one was about a group of Pionýrs doing the things that kids do – going to school, going outside, camping, fighting etc.

It was full of covert propaganda of course, but even in retrospect it was mostly not propaganda that I particularly mind. Most of it was about the importance of having useful skills and knowledge, about not being an asshole and taking care of other people as well as yourself. Things that I personally think children should learn as a matter of course wherever they live.

The Worst Horror of Hunger Games

I know I am very behind the curve here, but the phenomenon of Hunger Games has completely missed me, both the books and the movies. I learned about them through social osmosis, probably in comments and articles around FtB, but I never paid it much attention and I never knew what it is about, except a vague feeling that it should be good and that there is some girl shooting a bow.

So because I needed a pause from listening to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Series over and over again, and I also needed a rest, I bought an audio book of the first in the trilogy and listened to it these last few days, whilst trying to get rid of some damn virus trying to cook me in my skin.

The book is an excellent piece of storytelling, there is no doubt about it, I will not be able to resist and I will buy the rest of the trilogy as well. But had I known in advance what it is about, I probably would not have bought it, definitively not now. It shook me to the core. I was, and I still am, absolutely horrified.

That might seem odd, because I have read my share of books of all genres, from horrors to comedies, but I do not remember being moved this much by a book for quite a long time. It was not the deaths what has got to me. It was not the quite excellently portrayed psychology of an individual caught in a string of apparently lose-lose situations. It was not the story, that was pretty straightforward and to someone well read slightly predictable at times. It was the believability of it all what really got me.

There are simply too many parallels to societies like that one portrayed in the book throughout human history and even today.

Of people living in distinct caste-system that is impossible to escape from.

Of entire populations being worked to death and held on the brink of starvation for the benefit of an elite few.

Of totalitarian regimes where everyone is a subject to the whims of the powers that be.

Of people jeering and laughing at the suffering of those they perceive as lesser, as other, as subservient.

And we still are not in the clear. We might be heading towards societies just like that, again. The book might very well be an accurate prediction of a future mere hundred years from now. And that there was no suspense of disbelief needed makes everything in it much worse than it would be in an ordinary horror with magical or inhuman monsters. People can be the worst monsters, it seems to me.

 

Slavic Saturday

OK, I’ll bite. Last week Rob Grigjanis mentioned Antonín Dvořák and he indeed is one of Czech composers whose work is dear to my heart. I particularly like his Slavonic Dances, Opus 46. I was looking for a video that I like and unfortunately the only one that I do cannot be embedded, so you would have to head over to Czech TV Website. I hope it works for out-of state too. Other recordings that I have found on YouTube I did not like – right at the first dance “Furiant” seemed either too fast or too bland.

That I make such judgement is slightly ironic and possibly unfair to the musicians. I do not dance at all and I hate it, particularly polka. Surely everyone knows polka, although not everyone knows that it is originally Czech dance. My experience with it is however rather unpleasant – I was always a bad dancer, but it was seen as somewhat required to take dance lessons in highschool, so I did, being awkward and clumsy all the time despite my best effort. And polka was for me the last straw in this string of tortures – at the end of the lesson my disgruntled dance partner has lifted her skirt and has shown me her feet that were kicked and stomped bloody. That put a final crimp in my (non-existent as it was) desire to dance that dance ever again, since I try not to hurt people on principle.

It is not that I do not have a sense of rhythm, but everyone tells me polka has two and a half step (hence the name půlka(half)-polka), however I simply hear three steps and that daft little half-skip just tangles both my brain and my feet. Not that other dances are much better with their inane jumping and turning and all that nonsense. I do not see the point of dancing, really.

But the music can be beautiful and can move me to tap my feet or nod my head a little. That much I admit.

Having a Snack

Fall is coming near and spiders are starting to gather in the house. I do not mind certain amount of spiders in the house, but the webs have to be cleaned up occasionally. So when there is too much webs (that is, when they start to be easily visible – I do not wait for them to hang so low that I have to wade through them) I collect as many spiders as I can into a glass and carry them outside, and then take a broom to the webs.

Bellow the fold you can see why I tolerate spiders in the house to a certain extent.

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Bougainvillea

Nightjar has submitted absolutely gorgeous Bougainvillea pictures with a short story with a question at the end. To which my answer is YES.

I let Nightjar take from here:

Last week as I looked through the window I saw a lady that lives a few streets away from me pointing her phone at my front door, as if taking a picture. I was confused at first, but then I realised what was likely going on. Our Bougainvillea is putting on quite a show this year, hanging from the balcony and almost completely covering our front door in a ridiculous abundance of pink. In fact, there is no way she was taking a photo of anything else, because everything else is under that pink cover. So later that day, I decided to go out and take a few pictures myself. Now let me ask you, if you were passing by my house and saw this, wouldn’t you be tempted to stop for a few shots too?

©Nighjar, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Anatomy Atlas Part 23 – Circulatory System

We looked at our heart, but not at all the piping connected to it. There is rather a lot of it and this picture shows only a very, very small part.

There will be talk about testicles, read at your peril.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Whilst the air pipes in the lungs are optimized for keeping constant pressure, for veins and arteries this is not the case. Perhaps there is less selective pressure for optimisation, or it is not possible to achieve? I do not know. The truth is however that there are a number of sub-optimal divisions and loops and one of them is so peculiar that once you learn about it, you will not forget it.

Professor Kos explained to us, that one such badly optimised division is at least in part responsible for the fact that one testicle is usually lower than the other, and the one that is lower is usually the left one. When you look at the picture at the right side and follow the vena cava inferior down from the heart past venae hepaticae you will come to a cross junction where from it split two venae renalis. And looking further down you will find out that venae testicularis do not both split of from the vena cava inferior symmetrically, but vena testicularis sinistra splits of from venna renalis at a near right angle. That is bad engineering – right angles mean loss of pressure automatically.

However when looking at the left side, where arteries are depicted, both arteriae testicularis split symmetrically and directly from arteria abdominalis at an angle in the direction of the blood flow.

This means that whilst fresh blood supply for both testicles through arteries is about equal, the outflow via veins is not. That means different blood flow rates through the testicles, leading to their different sizes and also different position. Because testicles regulate their temperature (which has to be lower than body temperature) via positioning, and this way the left testicle has to hang lower in order to keep the same temperature as the right one.

Sometimes It Happens…

… that a real sunset looks so cheesy you would think reality has no style whatsoever. I glanced out of the window before going to bed and I had to try and make some pictures, the sky was unreal.

Pictures straight from the camera, no adjustments, only resized.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.


Mushroom!

Kestrel was mushroom hunting one of her finds turned out to be quite interesting. I will let her take over from here.

©kestrel, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

 

I went on a foray looking for mushrooms and noticed this. It’s a hump in the duff, right in the middle of the photo.

 

It’s hard to see what might be in there! I went around to the other side of this shrump (a hump in the duff where a mushroom is emerging).

 

That looks pretty exciting. I cleared away some of the debris to see better what was in there.

 

Aha! It’s Hypomyces lactifluorum, also called the Lobster Mushroom. It’s so fascinating: this is a parasitic mold attacking another mushroom. The original mushroom is Russula brevipes (Short Stemmed Russula) which although edible, is rather bland and crumbly. H. lactiflulorum attacks and parasitizes it, causing it to become dense and firm. They are often quite large.

Behind the Iron Curtain part 17 – Advertisements

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

For today I had to pick a theme that is really, really short.

And there really is not much to say about this, astounding as it might sound in today’s time. Nowadays commercial advertisements are everywhere – not only on TV and in magazines, but in newspapers, on billboards along the roads, on buildings and, of course, on the internet. And from what I gather, they were very common in the West in the past too, minus the internet.

However behind the Iron Curtain, commercial advertisements were very nearly unknown. The only place I remember ever seeing them was on TV between the programs – but never in the programs. Such a thing as an advertisement in the middle of a movie or a tv-series episode was unheard of.

Another typical feature of the advertisements that I remember was that they were product-oriented, not brand oriented. Since all brands were state-owned, and all production was centrally planned, there were no brands that would compete to sell the same product. Further the advertisements were so dull, that I only remember a single one – for milk. A glass of milk stood on a table, a man walks up to it, drinks it, and puts the empty glass back to a background of singing chorus “For your beauty and your health. What? Of course milk, milk, milk!”

Where I live we did pick up West German TV, so we knew that things look differently over there, but not knowing German, we did not know how different they are and what lies in store for us. This is one of the rare instances when I think that the “good ol’ times” actually were, you know, good.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 17 – Finale

When I have made my first, very crude, knife some twenty years ago, my friend’s father commented:

Charly, people want it to be handmade, but they do not want it to be immediately apparent that it is handmade.

That advice stuck in my mind so when I have read Feet of Clay from Terry Prattchett much later, following line resonated with me:

The thing looked like the kind of pots Igneous despised, the ones made by people who thought that because it was hand-made it was supposed to look as if was hand-made, and that thumbprints baked in the clay were a sign of integrity.

It is not impossible to get a handmade thing to look just perfect, but it takes great skill and experience and I am not there yet, although I might be heading in the right direction. The pictures hide some of the mistakes and imperfections that were not intended and are apparent – for example the blade is not symmetrical against the handle and the hand guard, so when it is in the scabbard the upper part of the guard sticks out more than the lower, and it is visible. Despite my best efforts the blade got a scratch from a grain that got somehow into the scabbard, and the handle got scratched too in the meantime. Which was inevitable if ever the knife were used, and I do intend to use it at least somehow, to see how it fares.

 

But enough of that, let me present to you the dagger of one of the most kickass characters in fantasy literature known to me, Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, aka the Lion Cub of Cintra, granddaughter of queen  Calanthe Fiona Riannon of Cintra, aka the Lioness of Cintra and daughter of Pavetta Fiona Elen and Emhyr var Emreis, Deithwen Addan yn Carn aep Morvudd the Emperor of Nilfgaard. This is my interpretation of the dagger worn by her as a sidearm in the computer game Witcher 3 – I noticed that dagger right on my first encoutner with her in my gameplay and I immediately wanted to make one. I photographed it on a bobbin lace doily that my mother has just made for her sister’s birthday. Bobbin lace is period/theme appropriate and I think it provides nice contrast and improves the quality content of these pictures by no small amount.

 

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I tried to tie the leather strap as close to how it is done on the in-game model as I could manage. The only significant difference from the game model is the red leather on the scabbard, instead of brown.

 

If you look closely, here you can see that the hand guard does not stick out symmetrically on both sides of the scabbard.

 

Overall length ca. 395 mm, blade ca. 257 mm long, 23 mm wide at the guard, single-edged. Good cutting ability although not as good as a dedicated cutting blade would have. It is still a stabbing weapon.

 

Handle is turned out of maple wood. Rings are allingend perpendicularily to the blade so the shiny lignin spots are symmetricaly with it on both sides of the handle.

 

Rondel has ten hammered grooves giving it a daisy like look. All metal parts are polished to mirror finish and buffed with jeweler’s rouge.

 

Although the handle looks massive, the knife is weighed towards the tip when put on a flat surface. I guess it could be thrown, but I do not intend to try it for fear of the blade breaking.

 

My signature for knives from now on – my initials in Glagolitic script. This is also the writing used in the Witcher games, so it also thematically appropriate.

Slavic Saturday

Today’s snippet is from my home country.

It is a symphonic poem “Vltava” from a series of six such poems in a musical epos “Má Vlast” (My Country) written by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. Vltava is the most known from the six and in my opinion rightly so. It is an astounding piece of music, all the more impressive for the fact that Smetana composed it at a time when he was deaf. So he never actually got to hear it except in his head.

Truth be told I do not much care for most of Bedřich Smetana’s works, because he mostly wrote operas. And I was to one of his opera’s once, in school, and it was boring as hell. The singing, the implausible stories and lack of acting in my opinion destroy the beautiful music. But I did not care much about Má Vlast either at that time, partly because of natural tendency of children to oppose anything that is a part of the curriculum and partly probably because my brain was not mature enough to enjoy this kind of music. Maybe nowadays I could enjoy opera done properly?

This recording has the added dimension of being made in Prague Spring Festival in 1968, a year when Czechoslovak Socialist Republic had also a political Prague Spring,  when its people peacefully stood up to the USSR bully in wanting to determine their own fates and got beaten into submission in return.

And finally, before you can enjoy the music, author’s own words explaining what it means (a rare and very specific occurrence):

The composition describes the run of Vltava, beginning at its both springs, the warm and the cold Vltava, the confluence of both streamlets into one, then Vltava’s flow through woods and meadows, through landscapes where merry feasts are held; in Moon’s night glow veela dance; on the cliffs proud castles and their ruins stand; Vltava foams in St. Johns rapids; flows in a broad stream towards Prague, Vyšehrad shows up, and it ends its majestic flow n the distance in Labe.