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Cosmic Africa

I recently saw a wonderful documentary on cable entitled Cosmic Africa. The film was a co-production of Cosmos Studios, Åland Pictures, project originator, Anne Rogers and producer, Carina Rubin. It travels around Africa, focusing on traditional, often ancient, astronomical and cosmological history.

Segments of the film include Nabta Playa, an ancient site discovered in Southern Egypt. The site contains a 12-foot circle of upright stone slabs. The arrangement of the megaliths was discovered to align with the brightest star in our sky, Sirius, and marked where it appeared in the dawn sky on the Winter Solstice. The ancient inhabitants were nomadic cattle herders, and this was near the time of year when the rains returned. The megaliths also marked the Summer Solstice. Calculations on celestrial procession (due to our planet's wobbing axis), show that the sky marked by these stones existed around 6,800 years ago.

Young African astonomer Thebe Medupe narrates the film, which documents his amazing trip through his continent's cosmic cultures and histories. His presentation reveals his deep passion for astonomy and how it has given him a very profound connection to his roots in Africa, the very continent that gave birth to humanity itself.

- Seed Magazine's article on Thebe Medupe
- Great interview with Thebe Medupe in New Scientist
- SAAO - South African Astronomical Observatory's bio on Thebe Medupe
- Mail&Guardian Online's article on the film, Cosmic Africa
- Sunday Times' article on the film, Cosmic Africa

I'm going to get the DVD for this so I can watch it again. It's a remarkable and inspiring piece of work.
- posted by JIMWICh on 2/21/2005 1:56:31 PM

Mr. Memphis 1986 - 2005

Today my valentine will be for my longest close companion. Late this afternoon, my cat, Memphis, passed on. He was 19 years old. He was vigorous and healthy right up until this past Friday when he took ill. I nursed him all weekend, but he was getting weaker and not eating enough. Last night I thought he showed some signs of rallying, but today he wouldn't even touch his water. His eyes looked at me so sadly. He knew that something was very wrong.

I called the vet that I've taken Memphis to for shots and he had an open slot at 3:30pm. It's not far away, so I loaded Memphis up in his carrier and off we went. This was the first time I ever remember him not complaining loudly. He really did not like going to the vet.

The vet looked him over, and suggested that a number of tests be run. He suspected some heart disease, as when he listened to Memphis' heartbeat, he detected a murmur. "A strong 5 on a scale of 1 to 6," he said. I said I suspected that Memphis was having kidney problems, as he'd been drinking a lot of water lately. Much more than usual.

I left him there to be tested. The vet said that the tests should be completed before 6:00pm, and that I could come back and get the results. I was gone less than an hour when he called and said that it probably wasn't necessary to run the additional tests, as they were able to confirm that Memphis had advanced kidney disease. The test produced a numeric result, with 40 to 95 being the normal range. Memphis registered at near 600, which the doctor said was about as bad as he'd ever seen. We discussed the options. The vet said that we may be able to get Memphis past this infection, but that he was now suffering multiple severe problems. At 19, he is the equivalent of a 95-year-old person, and he's had such a wonderful and healthy life, I didn't want to see him suffer anymore. I made the difficult decision that we euthanize him. I feel in my heart that it was the right thing to do.

I went back before 6:00pm and they brought him into a small room and left me to spend some time with him. He was so frail and tired looking, but he looked right at me and rubbed his cheek against my hand. I told him that I was so glad that he'd found me all those years ago.

I told Memphis about all the people that had passed through our lives, and all the people that had loved him. I told him that one of the greatest days of my life occurred one day when I lived in Dallas, Texas. I lived in a very small utility apartment in a big complex just off Park Lane. It was a Saturday morning and I was taking my dirty clothes over to the laundry building, located near the pool. I had no more than come out my door, when I heard the soft, but persistent meows of the tiniest, most sickly kitten I'd ever seen. He couldn`t have been more than a month or so old, and had obviously not eaten in a while. His hair was even looking like some of it had fallen out. He was a very sad sight. I went on down the steps with my laundry, this little kitten following me as best he could. He followed me a few yards before his little legs couldn't keep up in the grass. When I returned he was still there and ran to me, this time meowing even more urgently. I looked down at him, this sad little creature. So alone and with such poor prospects. Most likely abandoned and left to fend for himself. I picked him up and carried him inside where I poured him a bowl of milk. I told him that he could drink his fill and then it was back out on the road. Well, an hour later I found myself at Target buying a litterbox, cat toys, and a scratching post. What was once the tiniest and frailest of kittens grew into an enormous seventeen pound behemoth.

Over the years we'd moved several times, including to California. Relationships have come and gone. But through it all he and I were steadfast companions. He`s always been very difficult for others to get close to. But he and I had an unspoken bond. When I was at home, he was never far away. Usually sleeping in one of his favorite spots. Sometimes aloof, but never for long. And as he'd grown older he'd become more and more loving and gentle. His wildness had given way to long, intelligent stares and he always seemed to communicate with his eyes.

The vet returned and administered the syringe of anesthetic. Memphis looked up at me one last time, and his eyes slowly dilated. I held his paw and stroked his cheek and he passed on. I brought him home and buried him in my garden as it rained.

I am very sad, and tonight is going to be a difficult one, but I am happy for Memphis and his wonderful long life. He was my friend. I wish everyone in the world could have the kind of companionship we shared.
- posted by JIMWICh on 2/14/2005 9:04:41 PM

Ferris Wheel Operator

When I was home last, I went digging through some old boxes of things from my childhood that my Mom had saved, including lots and lots of drawings that I'd done. Many were from pre-school through all the grade school years. I photographed a bunch of them, and have put together a small gallery of twenty of these childhood drawings, all from when I was six and seven years old.

Now I grew up on a farm in rural West-Central Missouri, and we only received about two television stations most of the time, so I spent a lot of evenings parked at the kitchen table, drawing. When I wasn't drawing, I was curled up by the furnace with a volume of the Worldbook Encyclopedia. This probably explains why so many of my drawings were obsessed with labeling parts of things, such as this strange combination Halloween Skelleten (sic) / anatomy lesson tableau. Apparently, I was a sort of generalist knowledge geek, from the very get-go.

I loved nature programs, like Jacques Cousteau, National Geographic, and of course, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. We had beavers that built dams on the creek running through one of our farms, so I was very interested in them. Though I'm not exactly sure why the sun, in Beavers, is sporting either goth or ancient Sumerian eye makeup.

Beavers!

It's amusing to look at these now. In second grade I started writing and illustrating little short stories. The ones I've included in this collection, are all in the horror/action genre. One of the stories, The Night Phantom, could be Bulwer-Lytton contender, in that it literally starts out, "People say they see all kinds of wierd (sic) things. But, one dark, driery (sic) night, I saw a shadow." Ahahahaha!

But in these drawings I can also clearly see my future career as a designer taking shape. This Iconic Alphabet is surely my first whack at creating icons, something I came to do much more of later on. I think "G" is for "game" and that the icon is symbolizing the Candy Land board game. "M" is mittens, but two right handed ones evidently. "K" is for knife. "X" is for X-Ray, with a little stick person lying beneath an irradiator. The two I still can't figure out are "I" and "Q". A friend suggested that "I" was for igloo, but I don't think so. There's too much detail that I'm trying to show. My favorite is "S" for surfing! Yes, I've always wanted to be a Californian!

I was also a budding architect and urban planner, having picked up some basics of floorplan drawing and mapping conventions from issues of Perfect Home magazine and other sources.

And though drawings like the tricked-out multipurpose vehicle, the "Supper Dupper Capreace Pewe Poke" indicates that I was more of a feature-creep-loving Product Marketer, than a proper designer, this would soon give way by the age of ten to my true calling: Interaction Designer (my first computer design from 1971).
- posted by JIMWICh on 2/3/2005 2:04:39 AM

Happy Groundhog Day!

Yay! It's one of my favorite days of the year!

Groundhog Day marks the beginning of February, and February always meant one thing to me growing up - Sassafras Tea season.

It begins with digging down into the frozen ground and getting some sassafras roots. I would always go with my dad down to our east farm, where sassafras trees grew alongside the bordering road. Often we'd have to shovel away the snow and then use a sharp spade to get down to the roots. Then chop them out with an axe. We'd gather up a bucketful and bring them back to be washed and scrubbed before they were sawed into four-inch-long sections. Six to nine root sections (depending on size), from .5 to 1 inch in diameter would be placed in an enameled pot, covered with water, and brought to a boil. This is allowed to steep until cold, and then poured off. The roots are rinsed and the process repeated four more times. Then, and only then, do you drink the resulting tea from subsequent boilings.

I understand that sassafras has been banned from sale in grocery stores, and that's a smart thing, since most people probably don't have the proper and necessary folk wisdom to properly prepare it, and could get a nasty dose of alkaloids or something when they brew it up. The traditional method of preparation ameliorates this problem.

The smell, even from the beginning, may be the most glorious quality of this tea. I equate it with February. The old folks said saw it as a necessary yearly tonic. That it "thinned the blood" (which I think is a little along the line of phrases such as "tastes like chicken").

Sassafras makes a beautiful reddish amber tea, and has a wonderful taste in addition to its signature aroma. In years past, my folks used to send me a package of roots this time of year, but now my dad isn't able to get out and chop it anymore.

But I can still smell it.
- posted by JIMWICh on 2/2/2005 11:53:17 AM

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