Sunny Spider

As I was walking around the sunflower yesterday evening, making some pictures before the sun sets, I noticed a strangely positioned bee. When I looked closer, I realized that it is strangely positioned because it is dead and being held by a bright yellow crab spider. You can see it in the yesterday picture, if you look close enough.

So of course I had to go for a macro lens (the one I have built) and make a few close-up pictures. I tried my hand even at filming the fellow and it did not turn out all that bad considering that I do not have monopod (but I should buy one).

I have no idea what those little flies are doing there. Maybe they are insect equivalents of vultures? That spider must be strong and have quick venom to subdue a bee twice its size quick enough to keep a hold on it.

Video is bellow the fold.

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

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Lunar Eclipse 2018

These are my pictures of the event. Unfortunately half the time I did not know what I was doing, half the time I knew that what I am doing is wrong, and half the time I could not even see what I am doing. That gives you one and half of a clueless dork. It was exciting nevertheless and I am happy I could see such a thing. I wanted to witness lunar eclipse ever since I was reading about them in books as a little boy.

I think a few pictures are worth sharing. Here is the first one, taken just after the sky finally cleared and I found the dim moon in the sky. Rest is bellow the fold. The pictures are in chronological order, also the last ones show the Moon emerging from the Earth’s shadow.

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A Sunflower Constelation

Nobody told our sunflower it is supposed to follow the sun with its main flower, and then stop facing east. It did not follow the sun at all and chose to face its main flower north the whole time instead.

And now it has developed a whole head of little suns facing in all possible directions.

There will be some pictures of its inhabitants in due course. That is, if I do not forget. There is a very interesting inhabitant in this picture too.

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

 

Youtube Video: I Smoke Armour

Metatron is not my favourite YouTuber, for some reason he rubs me the wrong way and on occasion he made me cringe when he opened his mouth about feminism (but to be clear, there was no obvious malice there, just cluelessness). But some of his videos are relatively good and I consider this to be one of them. Partly because my sister in law and her family are all heavy smokers who nevertheless looked at me in the past with derision for “wasting” money on books and time on bonsai trees.

Forest Path Statues – Part 2 – Owls

I can attest to an owl being a very good bird to carve out of wood – you need not remove as much material from the stock to get a good likeness and you do not need extra material for beaks and long legs and such like.

There were four statutes with owl theme along the path, and they were all cuteness distilled, especially the one with two of them cuddling atop a tower.

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

Anatomy Atlas Part 17 – Leg Muscles

Legs. We have two of them to carry us around, and their musculature is very complex. This is due to the fact that despite appearances, only one joint – the knee – is (almost) simple flexing joint with one degree of freedom. Hip joints and ankles both have three degrees of freedom and therefore require accordingly complicated musculature to use them.

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

Legs also have the biggest and strongest muscle in the human body – the musculus gluteus maximus. It has to be big and strong, because it is the main source of propulsion, the other muscles being more responsible for keeping balance and maneuvering.

Professor Kos remarked, in a slightly yet not entirely creepy way, how working of this muscle can be minutely observed with ease in modern times due to the fashion of young women wearing tight jeans. I admit that I like to observe the changes in curvature of such working musculus gluteus maximus, and from what I gather not only am I not alone in this, but it is not exclusive to my gender either.

However I am also aware that it is rude to stare at someone’s ass – and from what I gather ignorance of this unfortunately is almost exclusive to my gender, as demonstrated by a respectable elderly professor talking about oggling asses with lecherous grin to a bunch of students half of whom were young women quarter his age.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 14 – Covering the Scabbard

So whilst I am coating the dagger handle, scratching it with 600 grit paper and giving it each day a slight buff with acetone diluted linseed oil, I can continue to work on the scabbard. It will take a few weeks for the linseed oil to harden really properly, so there is no rush. However some of the works shown here were done in parallel with works already shown.

First thing to do is to properly shape the scabbard, leaving only about 1 mm thickness. Because the poplar wood that I have used is extremely soft, I was afraid to cut it for fear of taking away too much material. The most important rule in woodwork is – you can always cut, but you cannot ad. So I did not use chisels or a rasp, just an 80 grit sandpaper on a padded sanding block. My sanding block is a piece of wood with old carpet glued on the faces, and I am spanning on it endless belts that I used for my now dead small belt grinder. A wine cork is an excellent spanning device, allowing for quick change of belts and giving me the option of slack belt as well. When sanding around the throat of the scabbard I took care for the throat always face downward, so no loose grains fall into the scabbard and ruin the blade.

Next thing that I have done was to soak the whole surface with hot hide glue, priming it so other materials can be glued on. After the hide glue has dried, I have covered the scabbard with linen, which I have again thoroughly soaked in hot hide glue. I do not know whether this was actually done for scabbards (although from some of the images that Caine has posted it seems plausible), but I know for sure that the technique was known from early medieval times through to the modern times. Covering wood in fabric soaked in hide glue is very effective way to prevent the wood from splitting and twisting. Firstly it adds fibers that are perpendicular to those of the wood, secondly hide glue shrinks significantly as it dries, effectively pressing everything tightly together. This is one area where real hide glue has an irrefutable advantage over any modern glue. After the hide glue has dried up, I have again sanded the whole thing with 180 grit sandpaper to smoothen all knots and irregularities in the fabric.

To remain true to the game, I should use plain vegetable tanned leather, but this is one of the instances where I deliberately choose to stray away from my template and do something differently. For years I have a piece of dashing red leather that I wished to use for this project from the very beginning. It was of very irregular shape, but I was able to cut a piece big enough to cover the whole wooden scabbard from tip to throat. First I have cut a rough rectangle and then I continued to cut away tiny strips here and there until I had a piece that could be wrapped tightly around the scabbard with just about 1 mm space between the edges.
Then I had to make holes for stitching. This is fairly thin leather, so I had to make the holes very close to each other for fine stitching. I have made leather sheaths before, but I have never done this, so I did not know how exactly spaced the holes should be. I reasoned that about two-three times the thickness of the leather space between the holes and from the edge should be about right in order to be able to sew the edges together tightly without the leather ripping.

I could not find my awl, it seems that I have lost it. Luckily I had this super old knife whose blade was almost completely eaten away that could be quickly modified for the task of pokey-holey. About 200 holes. Oh boy.

For sewing I was going to use thick thread that is used for sewing jeans. For thicker leather I would have used thick linen thread, but that was a bit too thick for this job. Other threads we had at home on the other hand were too thin.

Before sewing, I have soaked the leather in lukewarm water (about 37 °C) for an hour so it becomes more stretchy and pliable. And I prepared the thread with the use of the unseemly mixture you see on the picture to the right. That mixture was made by boiling pine resin and beeswax and it was used by medieval shoemakers and saddlers to coat the thread before sewing. What are the advantages of that, you ask? Well it makes the thread bugger to work with as it becomes all sticky and latches onto everything – hair, pants, fingers, itself… Oh sorry, you asked about advantages. The thread does not split or fray during work, it is firmer and sleeker, despite the stickiness. If I coated the thread in advance and let it dry for some time It would not even be tacky, but I forgot about that. And I did not know how much thread I will need – it transpired that about ten times the length of the scabbard is about right.

When the leather was all soaked, I have prepared a small batch of hide glue again and started covering the scabbard. First I have sewn together the tip and about 1 cm of the length. Then I painted that part and the whole face of the scabbard with hide glue and inserted it in the leather pocket and started sewing and adding hide glue all round for each sewn piece. I have used a two-needle technique that I have found on the internet. It has the advantage of pulling the edges together very regularly and equally on both sides, so it does not warp and zig-zag as it could had I used just one thread. I must be honest with you – my needle work leaves a lot to be desired. I was doing my best, but I was losing the holes in this very thin leather and I skipped a few here and there without wanting to. It took me two hours to sew the whole scabbard – about 100 stitches on 27 cm length. My back ached and I was happy when it was over.

Last step was to poke and wrap holes for the straps. For these I have simply cut holes with a scalpel and inserted in the wet leather three skewers. The thread wrapped around will make visible grooves when it all dries up. If I wanted to, at this point I would also stamp and press the leather to decorate it. But I did not want to bite more than I can chew, for this project plain leather will have to do. I also formed the leather around the throat a bit, although I will have to get back at it once more – when it dries, I will have to cut all excess, wet it again with hot hide glue and form it better.

The scabbard is now nearly done, but the most challenging part is yet to come – I want to make metal chape and throating. And that is something I have never done and I will have to be really, really careful to not botch that up. And also think hard about how to do it, before I go cutting, bending, banging and soldering metal pieces together.

More about that next time. In the meantime you can admire my irregular stitches.

Behind the Iron Curtain part 13 – Snitching

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.

In medieval times, every village had to have its idiot. In totalitarian times, every village has its snitch.

Ours was a man in his fifties, whose common nickname was “Dědek bonzák” (Grampa Snitch). Of course nobody told this to his face, but everybody knew him and the nickname applies to him even now, twenty years after the regime changed.

I have only once seen him in “action” during one of our craft classes. For these we went out of school to a designated workshop where we would learn some basic knowledge about the use of tools – saws, files, drills etc. The room had a window that opened not in the street, but on a roof. And one day some of the more rowdy boys (the classes were gender segregated btw.) riled up each other until they dared to venture out on the roof when the teacher left the class for a moment to fetch some materials. They were seen from a nearby building by none other than Grampa Snitch, who a few minutes later barged in the class and screeched to the teacher about the miscreants. He actually pointed his finger on one of the boys, his own nephew, and screamed, “That is him, he is one of them, he was there on the roof!”.

After the class some of us expressed incredulity about how he so publicly ratted on his own nephew. We all could understand if the gave him a clip behind the ear later on and/or told his parents, but publicly accusing your own nephew? Unconscionable. His nephew summed it up in one simple phrase “He is just such an asshole.”.

I do not know whether it was malice that drove him, or overzealous adherence to rules. I do not think it was the latter though, because snitching has markedly some visible benefits to him.

There was in the country a longstanding tradition to burn old grass on the meadows and gardens in the spring. Stupid, damaging and dangerous tradition, which was therefore outlawed. Yet every spring Grampa Snitch could be seen burning the grass in his garden and on the meadow behind it. publicly, in broad daylight, and he was never fined. Yet had anyone else dared to break the law within his eyesight in even the minutest of minor ways, to this day his instinct is to call the police.

Everybody is guilty, we have already established that. Especially when the laws of the land are such, that they are impossible to not break, when even completely innocent remarks can be misconstrued as crimes against humanity. And in a system where everybody is guilty, there will be those who use the system to their advantage. Setting scores and disputes this way becomes second nature to some, and there will always be those who will not see it improper to let someone incarcerate for treason just because their dog barked all night.

There is also a flip side to this coin. With trivial or completely illegitimate grievances being commonly leveled amongst people, being a snitch was seen as the height of indecency. Which has of course made it difficult to officially address legitimate grievances as well. And there were people who used this to their advantage too. In the eyes of some it was seen as equally as bad to report someone who has a built a barbecue pit a few cm bigger than the law allows as it was to report that someone assaulted you. Literally.

As a sickly kid who had high marks I was of course bullied at school. The leader of the group of bullies eventually devised a type of torture that was life threatening – holding my nose and mouth tight shut until I started to turn blue in the face, and then watch the highly amusing confusion resulting from my oxygen deprivation. One day my mother managed to get this out of me, I do not know how she did it because I feared to tell anyone, but she did. She went berserk, told off the parents of the bullies and complained to school master. The bullies were held after school and they got some punishment at home too. But, you guessed it, the leader of the bullies felt that it was me who wronged him and when going home from the detention he shouted at me across the town square “You snitch!”. He did not dare to lay his hands on me again¹- and stick and stones can break your bones… and words can really hurt too..

It was only much later in life when I realised that all this is us (the populace) versus them (the officials) mentality that is common in prisons. And that is what it was – prison mentality. For we were in prison, really and truly – the Iron Curtain was just that, a barrier for keeping people in, not out.

1 – Bullying scars for life. He never realized that what he did to me was wrong, never had an epiphany and never apologized, yet when we grew up to be adults he thought we were “friends from school”. I never shook his hand when we met and when he died in a car crash a few years ago, I did not feel sorry in the least.

Anatomy Atlas Part 16 – Feet Muscles

Feet. Some may find them pretty, or even alluring. Not me. Whilst hands are true marvels of what evolution can achieve, our feet are very far removed from being such. Their ad-hoc nature is all too apparent.

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

Humans are plantigrade, as are many tree-dwelling creatures and only a few land-dwellers (like bears). That means our heels  touch the ground and not only the tips of the fingers. Most land dwellers are digitigrade, that is they walk on their fingers or their tips. That has the advantage of allowing for greater speed – and indeed even humans resort to moving on their toes when speed is the priority.

Professor Kos emphasised that although “plantigrade” means “touching the ground with the whole sole” this is not in fact true. Our feet do not touch the ground with the whole sole , not as such. There are only three points that bear weight – the heel, the big joint at the base of the big toe and the joint at the base of the fourth toe. That is why we are able to stand on one foot – it still provides three points of contact for stability.

And just as it is with the hand, most of the muscles that actually move the feet are not in the feet, but on the calf.