Life is not a success-only journey...

Believe it or not, it's my daily newspaper horoscope:

LIFE IS NOT A SUCCESS-ONLY JOURNEY AND THE PERSON WHO NEVER FAILS, NEVER TRIPS UP AND NEVER MAKES A MISTAKE IS A PERSON WHO NEVER TRULY LIVED

That's not a horoscope, it's an aphorism. I wuz cheated! But where the devil did it come from? It's a quote, I thought. Who said it?

So, being a talented detective, I googled it.

And while I couldn't learn who said it first, I found it quoted a lot --- in self-help blogs, and advice for the depressed... Which I suppose is no bad thing, at the end of one year and the start of another, with the mysteries of 2014 still to evolve.

But still, it seems an odd kind of day's prediction.  I'm accustomed to being promised great things, including financial windfalls, and not being challenged with Zen-type pronouncements. 

So I kept on looking.  And found out where the Dominion Post get their horoscope column, albeit a day out of date, considering it is New Year's Eve, downunder.

Here it is:

Monday, December 30

 

Saying goodbye to 2013 is all about being thankful for the journey and despite the ups and downs, triumphs and challenges to appreciate the wisdom and experience you've gained along the way. Life is not a success only journey and the person who never fails, never trips up and never makes a mistake is a person who never truly lived. As you look back at the journey that you've been on, paint yourself in as the hero of the tale.

Money

Energy

Love

Mood

Daily Numbers 12, 22, 28, 29, 32, 40

Daily Compatibility Aquarius

2013 Darwin Awards

Presumably named after the author of The Origin of the Species, this award series is supposed to commemorate human stupidity.

And here -- or so I am told -- is the 2013 array of the most cringing examples of the Ascent of Man

I feel as if I have read some before, but they are always good for a laugh ... and that momentary feeling of superiority.

1. When his .38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.

 
2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting machine and after a little shopping around, submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company expecting negligence sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also lost a finger. The chef’s claim was approved.
 
3. A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman had taken the space. Understandably, he shot her.
 
4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.
 
5. An American teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he received the injuries, the lad told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.
 
6. A man walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter, and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer… $15.
 
7. Seems an Arkansas guy wanted some beer pretty badly. He decided that he’d just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head, knocking him unconscious. The liquor store window was made of Plexiglas. The whole event was caught on videotape.
 
8. As a female shopper exited a New York convenience store, a man grabbed her purse and ran. The clerk called 911 immediately, and the woman was able to give them a detailed description of the snatcher. Within minutes, the police apprehended the snatcher. They put him in the car and drove back to the store. The thief was then taken out of the car and told to stand there for a positive ID. To which he replied, “Yes, officer, that’s her. That’s the lady I stole the purse from.”
 
9. The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan at 5 A.M., flashed a gun, and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn’t open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren’t available for breakfast… The frustrated gunman walked away.

10. When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a motor home parked on a Seattle street by sucking on a hose, he got much more than he bargained for. Police arrived at the scene to find a very sick man curled up next to a motor home near spilled sewage. A police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline, but he plugged his siphon hose into the motor home’s sewage tank by mistake. The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges saying that it was the best laugh he’d ever had and the perp had been punished enough!

 

With thanks to Jacqueline Church Simonds

 

Wonderful Wellington

Sent to me by the photographer, Bev Tyler

It's always an eye-opener to see the view you almost take for granted through another person's lens.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

 

It's Santa Day downunder, the painters, the builders, and the scaffolders have gone, the house is looking Quite Decent, and so it's time to relax and wing thoughts to friends

MERRY CHRISTMAS

AND

AN ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL NEW YEAR

Two shopping days to Christmas...

Tempelhof to become grand library

From The Guardian

One of Europe's first city airports, Tempelhof, made history when western allies used it to break the Soviet blockade of West Berlin in 1948. But since its closure in 2008, politicians in the German capital have been unsure what to do with it.

Now the site is set to be transformed from a historic monument to a hub of historic learning: on Wednesday the city senate unveiled two possible designs for a new central library adjacent to the airport's disused landing strip.

If either of the designs is realised, the building will be intended to become a rival to Paris's Pompidou Centre: an architectural "statement building" with 3,200 seats for readers, galleries, event spaces, restaurants and a children's library. The iconic airport will be reborn as a vibrant focal point for the city's notoriously scattered cultural life.

The proposed cultural centre already has high expectations to meet. Berlin's existing central libraries draw 5,000 visitors a day, but culture senator André Schmitz predicts that the new building will attract twice as many – approximately 3.5 million a year, roughly equal to the numbers at the Pompidou Centre, which hosts a viewing platform for tourists in the heart of the French capital.

The British Library at St Pancras, London, which, unlike Berlin's, requires membership but serves as a legal deposit library for the entire country, receives around 4,000 visitors a day.

Tupaia rediscovered (2)

Book Review from the Bookseller

Book review: Tupaia – The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Polynesian Navigator by Joan Druett

Posted on July 23, 2012 by booksellersnz

This book is in stores now and is a finalist in the New Zealand Post Book Awards.

As remarkable as this sounds, when I first travelled to Australia, at the age of 20, I was taken aback to find that there were a number of James Cook monuments, hotels and the like. And that Joseph Banks was responsible for naming all of their plants too! The problem is that you only know what you know, and what you are taught and exposed to.

In my case, post-colonial views of history that seem to only focus on the New Zealand aspects of the voyages, and have removed, or at the very least diminished, certain key history makers from the stories. Tupaia, a noble Polynesian who encountered Captain James Cook in the Tahiti Islands and set sail with him on his journey south aboard the Endeavour, is one of them.

Joan Druett clearly sees Tupaia as an extraordinary man whom European history books have not served well. She clearly likes and respects her main character and yes, this biography does read at times like a story – a compelling story too. Druett sets the tone for her book early on when writing about Tupaia:

“… he was Tahiti’s highest priest. Then the canoe without an outrigger arrived.”
Immediately Druett had my attention and she held it until the end.

That the Crew of the Endeavour were not the first Europeans to meet Tupaia was probably “lost in translation”. But, in reality, by the time Cook and Banks arrived, Tupaia had already met and traded with another crew of Englishmen, and a French contingent led by Louis De Bouganville.

Regardless of these prior meetings, the meeting of the Endeavour crew on April 11, 1769 was momentous since as Druett puts it “the expectations of all on board had reached a pitch of excitement.” They could never have anticipated that they would sail away with local men on board, who would prove to be crucial for Cook’s navigation of both the South Pacific seas and its people and customs.

You know what happened next – the Endeavour crew sailed south to New Zealand. Tupaia, according to Druett’s meticulous research was a key figure on the boat, but he succumbed to illness before arriving back to England, and was almost forgotten in the public aftermath. Almost.

This engaging book, has made me reflect on the facts of the Cook voyages; reminding me that there were dozens of people either on board, or that the crew encountered on these great voyages of discovery. Tupaia was just one of them – a translator, astronomer, navigator, artist, mapmaker, geographer – one of a number of remarkable men of the time. And this is his story.

Reviewed by Gillian Torckler

Tupaia - The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Polynesian Navigator
By Joan Druett
Random House NZ
9781869793869 (Hardback)
9781869797133 (Paperback)

PS:  Tupaia, The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook's Polynesian Navigator won the general nonfiction section of the New Zealand Post Book Awards in 2012

Six Days to Christmas

The beginning of the finish

You may remember this...

Four intensive weeks later ...

Is that brave, or what?  But it is the last chance to clean those lovely new windows before they are taken out of reach ...

And where is the removed scaffolding?

On our little back deck

While Ron wonders if his carpentry will take the strain...

We shall learn more in the morning, no doubt.

They're stealing our bird!

Wellington (AFP) - In a finding likely to be a bitter blow for many New Zealanders, researchers have found the country's iconic kiwi bird probably descended from an ancestor that flew in from Australia.
Palaeontologist Trevor Worthy of Adelaide's Flinders University said fossilised remains suggested the flightless bird did not evolve from the extinct giant moa, as has long been assumed.

Instead, he said an ancestor of the kiwi dating back 20 million years discovered in the South Island was more closely related to another giant flightless bird, the emu, which is still common in Australia.
Worthy, himself an expatriate New Zealander, said it appeared the fossilised South Island bird and the emu evolved from a common ancestor, which originated in Australia but also spread to New Zealand.

"If, as the DNA suggests, the kiwi is related to the emu, then both shared a common ancestor that could fly," he said.

"It means they were little and volant (able to fly) and that they flew to New Zealand."

Worthy said it was not uncommon for birds to "jump" from Australia to New Zealand, citing the Mallard duck, the little banded dotterel and the cattle egret as three species which regularly fly back and forth.

He said the research, published by the Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution, was not conclusive.

"We need to find wing bones to put the theory beyond all doubt," he said.

New Zealanders have long complained about their trans-Tasman neighbours appropriating everything from champion race horse Phar Lap to actor Russell Crowe, and any Australian claim to the kiwi is likely to intensify the rivalry.