A Colourful Visitor

I was looking in the fridge for the butter.

I looked for a while but I couldn't see it.

Then I moved some potatoes at the bottom of the fridge.

And I found something buttery.

But it wasn't butter.

It was a BUTTERFLY!

That's not normally found in a fridge, is it.

So I have taken it out on a piece of paper.

I let it warm up in the room.

Then I started to think about releasing it.

One of its wings seems not to be working very well, so it was a bit hard to release. When it got warm it started walking across the table towards the light. I'm sure that's a healthy sign but I knew there was a long drop coming up if it fell off the table. I tried letting it out of the window, thinking it might be happier outside even if it was damaged. But the wind was too strong! It's very windy lately.

Then I left it on my doorstep for a while. I thought it might fly away or go to a butterfly-friendly place. I looked again after a while and it was still there! I think it was too cold outside.

So now it is living with me.

I left it some lettuce at first, but it seems that's what the caterpillars eat. Butterflies eat nectar. Or they drink it. They have a long tube that sucks it out of flowers.

So I have been trying to feed the butterfly. It has been given water with honey in it, on the end of a chopstick. I think it got stuck a bit but it's OK now. Honey is rather sticky as Pooh will tell you...

I hope it will get stronger!

Let's see what happens.

Chain of Command

Godowsky was a genius. A self-taught genius - the only kind there is, of course.

He learned how to do anything at all on the piano, and invented some new things too. If you want to have a lesson with Godowsky, try playing any of his music. It has lots of fingerings and helpful comments written in, so it's very instructive as playing music by a great pianist always is. Of particular note are his Studies on the Etudes of Chopin, which, since they are more difficult than Chopin's originals, raise the standard of piano playing in a rather helpful way.

Heinrich Neuhaus was Godowsky's student. There was a great teacher for you. And he was a great player too, though he spent most of his time teaching. You can learn a lot from his book The Art of Piano Playing. What he says seems obvious though, so you have to keep coming back to the book over many years to appreciate its value.

Then Neuhaus had a student called Sviatoslav Richter. He was good too!

Each of these people had their own talent, but it was helped by meeting one of the others. Destiny somehow allows people to look after each other.

Godowsky set off one day to find out how to play the piano, and look what happened!

Richter wasn't really a teacher but look what he did for us. If you can't learn from any of that, there's a problem somewhere!

Thanks very much to those three men, then. Thank you!

Fear

The things you fear are like shadows in the half of the room that you don't want to see. Your half is not in shadow, because you have chosen to look at it. But what's in the other half?

There is a monster under the bed, and one in the wardrobe too. Dark things come out at night and we clothe them in our own fear.

But in the daylight we can see what is there.

The things we fear are everywhere because we don't want to look at them. So when there is darkness - under the bed, in the wardrobe, or somewhere else we are not sure about - our fears appear. Whenever you sense some unknown thing coming towards you (in space or in time), you shape it into the thing you are afraid of.

The only question is, what is really there?

I think the answer has to be, there is something there. Or, there appears to be something there. What though? It's our choice whether we look closely or not.

Let's think of a situation. General fears around this area (where I am now) are: being robbed, being attacked somehow, losing things, or fear of a general disaster (of whatever type is popular in the media at the moment). Let's take fear of non-specific attack or robbery. OK, so you are afraid of that happening. When it is dark you are more afraid. That may be reasonable because there are fewer people around in the dark. However, that's rather the product of the fear of the dark that we talked about before. If it's dark then you put something there. If you can't see what is there, you imagine what could be there.

As uncertainty increases, this hypothetical person we are talking about gets more afraid. He creates more threats as his knowledge decreases. We can see that fear of attack gets worse when we have less information: if it's dark; if the place is unfamiliar; if we are alone.

However! We can do better than that!

Let's forget about the BlockbusterAttackMode way out. This approach says that the more prepared I am for attack, the less I will be affected by it. Look at these people, they learn a million-and-one-ways of defending themselves, nine-and-a-half exotic martial arts, carry six guns, a knife, and a flamethrower. And that's just for looking out of the window! Are they less afraid? No, and I think they are becoming a bit of a threat themselves actually. Yes, they did get more prepared, that's sort of taking a step, but they did not solve the problem.

The only problem was the original fear, fear created by the darkness we mentioned at the beginning. Then we were talking about a real darkness (the one under the bed, for example), but it's really the same thing if it is physical or a kind of mental darkness which comes from the unknown.

So given that we are afraid of something, we can see the following. First, we are creating more threats wherever we are unsure about something. We talked of a fear of attack but it can really be anything. There are plenty of uncertainties so there are plenty of fears to choose from!

Have you noticed that now? Whenever there is uncertainty, you turn it into a threat. Yes, I agree, the accident could happen now, your job could disappear this week, that heart attack you've been expecting could have happened five minutes ago. But does it make sense to be on panic alert all the time? OK, statistically there is probably a chance of these things happening. Probably each of them happened to somebody in the world yesterday. But you are not a supercomputer. The human mind is very powerful (or capable of being) but you are not helping matters by using that power to imagine how badly things could go wrong. Getting a scratch that goes septic and you die - chances are 2,987,453 to one. A chance. Yes, every second. Even twice a second! All the same...I don't want to upset your reasoning process, but it may not be your day for misfortune. Sorry, it must just be bad luck, I guess.

First of all, you are seeing your fears when you cannot see clearly. You can solve that by: recognising what you are afraid of, and trying to be objective (learning to see other sides of a situation, not just the one you are used to seeing). Low Grade Panic Alert is rather a vague state so it helps to identify what the perceived threat is. What are you afraid of? Write it down. Ok I think it is slightly less frightening already. Slightly is a good start. Then by learning to "see through other eyes" you can see where you went wrong before. Illusion is the product of isolation. "I'm afraid of..." is already wrong because it starts with "I". You think you are separate and you have your own problems. But you must be connected to someone else in some way. You have seen another person before, right? Right, so you are not really alone. Then who is this "I"? It is the fearing part. The part that does not fear is called "We" or "Us". Learn about it.

Finding ways to attack a problem will never solve it. Because you are afraid of attack, you are always attacking. Don't fight, invite! Your hostility makes hostility outside you. If you welcome the world and its chances of...failure or...success, then you are shining a bit of light on your fear and you will have more chance of seeing what is really there.

What is really there? A few naughty people doing naughty things. But not all the time. They want things the easy way and can't be bothered to put much effort in. And accidents do happen, but not to everbody and not every day, and when they do we have to stop and think how we got into that situation and maybe learn how to avoid it next time. Health problems do occur but not every minute. A system under stress has to release the stress somehow, and the results can seem unpleasant. But symptoms that come out are the product of something called health. If you are worried about your health then you must know why you are worried. Is it something you are doing wrong? If it is then you can change it. Your body is the only one you have and looking after it will help you a lot. Your life is your life and can change this world for the better. Our world is our world, too, though we are supposed to look after it rather than drain it of goodness. These are all good things. The bad things exist but they are not everywhere. They may not even be bad! They are probably just "things" until you decide they are going to be bad.

We should be afraid. There is a lot to be afraid of. But it is not meant to freeze us in our steps before we have started the race. We are not meant to stop climbing before the first peak has come into view. Fear is allied with caution, respect, care, and guides experiment. Each of those ensures the harvest comes in safe next year. They may mean the ship gets into port safe and sound. The eggs all get back from market in one piece. But where do the plans come from? What makes experiment? Total caution would have zero result. Now I have a message for you. You are not the victim of a dice game, neither coldly and without intent, nor maliciously twisting the threads of your fate. You are not the victim. You have the power to imagine danger for a very good reason - because of the power to imagine. Why do you have that power? To stop? To shut the shop and sink the ship, to shatter and fail and founder and grind to a halt? Or to see in your mind's eye what lies behind the hill, what lives on the other side of the world, what breathes where there is no air and swims without water?

What crawls in the morning, stands upright at noon, and crawls again at evening? The answer is man, from baby to adult to old age, but we should rather ask: What asks riddles? Who invents the impossible? The answer is the mind of man but what that really means is something we are still learning. Don't expect to read about it in the newspaper. With these things, it's better to try and find out for yourself. Believe me.

Now you are brave again!

You only got to be brave by admitting that fear exists. Well done. Now do more!

The Language of Music

It's hard to explain impossible things to you.

But the reason one person writes to another is that there is something he needs to tell that person, something which he thinks the other person doesn't know. The only problem is that when a fact is an unknown fact, it is hard to understand. In fact it may be impossible to understand - it will take a lot of problems and hard work to finally see what it was. Sometimes, indeed, you can't just tell someone the answer they need, because they won't understand without actually discovering the answer for themselves. That's why we have symbols like mazes and spirals. Labyrinths were popular in ancient art. Popularity comes when something resonates with many people, no matter what the intention behind it. In this case, the Labyrinth is a journey you must follow until it is solved - there is not normally a short way through.

The Labyrinth is a part of the ear, too.

When we hear music we can identify patterns. Without them, it would probably be noise. But as long as we can fit the sound to a pattern we feel there is some sense behind it. We keep creating possible patterns to fit to the stimulus, trying to find a match for one or more templates that we have stored, or creating a new one based on the incoming material. So although I said we try to find a fit, really we are creating the pattern that we hear. The sound is what it is, but the pattern is our own. Listen to noise and see how soon you start to hear words. They may not be there as such, but we are looking (listening) for them.

So we may find there is sense at the first hearing of a piece of music. That depends on what experience we have. Whatever the case, we will try and we will find something. But you might end up saying, no, I just couldn't make anything of it. Like the ladies in the Wigmore Hall who laughed at the 'wrong notes' in a Webern piece - which was written in 1899! I was there, you can believe me.

There are "dissonant" cases where the music is too different from the listener's internal templates and antagonism results. Of course, the dissonance is not necessarily a question of some dissonance in the music's harmonic idiom - I was referring to the dissonance between what they are hearing and what they might expect to make sense, or what they have heard before and got used to. But on the whole the music one hears is mostly more or less familiar - you tend to recognise it as music, and more particularly as "our music". Statistically we are more likely to hear music we already recognise, of course - because statistically we will stay in more or less the same place.

Recognition comes then, somewhat or a lot. You can tell there is a loud bit coming up because it starts getting louder. It started quiet so you know it will be quiet for a bit. Or after learning a bit more, you know that if it is quiet, it might stay quiet or might SUDDENLY get loud. You start to learn what the options might be. And if you know a bit about music you might here where the harmony is going. You might recognise the sort of "subject" the composer is thinking of. Of course there is not a subject, it is music not words, but there are associations and special patterns we notice. It might be something clear like the sound of a bird (the cuckoo in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony) or something ambiguous like the sound of water or wind in a Schubert song. It might be a topic like "military" (Chopin Polonaise) or "exotic" (Debussy Pagodas) or "academic" (Handelian fugue in Mozart or Beethoven). Whatever it is, you learn, and then finally you understand. It can take repeated hearings to get there though - although most do not try after the first attempt. And sometimes there is no attempt! (What are the chances of success there I wonder?)

All of these insights come with practise and understanding. Some come with learning and knowledge.

They say that a child's mind is a clear mind. They say a child will see the obvious when everyone else convinces themselves otherwise or trips themselves up in tangles of thought and blind guesses. That's why there is the famous story of The Emperor's New Clothes. Maybe it's funny, I don't know. I'm sure no-one believes it could ever really happen. But that's the shock you get when you realise it's happening all the time. Look at what people are doing around you now. A little or a lot, helping or un-helping, but they are certainly taking a lot of different approaches to the maze of their life. Certainly the mazes are different, but can all the people be right? The child says: I thought you had to get to the centre. (Does that mean it is easier than it seemed?)

Yes, you try to hear some sense in the sound coming in. But we are in luck, because the person who created it all - the composer - put sense in at the beginning. So we are in with a fighting chance!

I am convinced that we can understand music purely by paying attention to what the composer has put in it. That's the approach I took when I wrote about Evryali, and it's how I try to understand music on a daily basis. The significance of this is that it doesn't matter how much you know before you get started. Knowledge came down to us because other people noticed things; that means we can notice them too. But it will take a long time if we try to understand the knowledge AS WELL as the music. That's two jobs, you see. Fortunately I have tried to understand the music, afflicted with only a slight knowledge of the technical processes involved. (That's not a joke, I really don't know much!). That's why I'm here today to tell you where to look.

The first time I noticed something important about music was in a Mozart symphony last year. It wasn't a good performance (maybe that's why I noticed it). The symphony was called "The Jupiter", but I don't think that matters because I don't like the "I know it all" approach to music: Ah, The Jupiter, yes, of course. Beethoven's second Razumovsky Quartet, yes. Opus 106, a masterpiece. It does annoy me rather, you see this is talking about music without mentioning the music. Perhaps it is not talking about the music? I know it's helpful to use labels so we can know what is being discussed, but these are the names on the filing cabinet. They are the names on the files. They are not the contents of the files. Inside are lovely golden sounds without names. Songs without words that sing in my heart.

I forget exactly what it was in that Mozart symphony. I think it was a movement in the harmony. I realised he was doing something really funny, moving somewhere no-one could have predicted. I wondered why no-one was laughing. I think it was because they were hearing "A Mozart symphony" - the one in their heads, perhaps. You don't need Sherlock Holmes to tell you that the best Mozart symphony comes from Mozart, not from us. By some twist of fate, that was actually what I was hearing. Yes, no incompetence on the part of the conductor or players prevented me from hearing what the composer had put into the music. It was all there, and it always is in any piece or performance.

Music is highly cultural, you know. There is a lot to learn about. But as it happens you don't particularly need to learn any of it. If you are responsible and care about the music and why it exists then I think it won't hurt to try learning a bit. But you have to listen first.

I listened, and I am now telling you this:

A master composer knows his job and tries to get better at it.

The best composers didn't stop when they had had enough, or when they thought they were good enough. They continued changing.

In these cases, the golden secret inside centre of the music was what led the creator - it was what they were trying to communicate! In the other cases, the composer got tired and his forms started writing themselves, though there could still be flashes of inspiration. It could never dry up completely (some music leads me to doubt this but it is true)

The secret was called ecstasy. Did the composer want to be a composer, or could he not stop being a composer? "Ecstasy" is a word that means being outside yourself. What is outside? Whatever we don't already know. Other people. Other places. Other ideas. Mistakes. Answers. Genius.

Whatever you think about music, I think we all have to agree there is some kind of vision involved in it. Someone wants to communicate something, and that is their vision. It can be predictable, clichéed, or previously impossible - a surprising thing of brilliance and power. With skill, the vision becomes clearer.

That vision is present in every part of the work, and through the opposition between the parts we can appreciate what it is. (The word for an arrangement of parts is composition)

You won't at first know what a piece of music is saying. It's important to remember that it isn't saying anything. As long as you can say it in words, you are not there. You can talk about it but you have to live it to see it.

With repeated slow careful exposure to music you can learn to feel what it really is. Your mind is not understanding it, your heart is not feeling it, but these senses may be involved.

Remember what I am telling you: it is real. Music is real. There is a real reason for it. It is not something in a book or on a CD, it is something outside you, coming in. Also remember that if you were lost in a labyrinth, you might forget your journey. The outside might seem dark and unfriendly. Think then of what it's like to find the way through the maze. Find the end, and you see you were the one who had gone outside. Really the music is inside. People who don't listen are stuck outside. When we hear it truly, we are all joined up again. Or starting to be.

Primo Levi was in a prison camp. Then he sent us a message through his books so that the world would change. James Clavell was in a prison camp. He did the same. He did a good thing too, because he loved the people who imprisoned him. That is how he was set free. Any others who still hated them were still prisoners, weren't they? And Ronald Searle was in the same camp. He had to carefully hide his drawings while he was there. He sent us messages too.

There is a well-known analogy that life is like a bird flying through a lighted hall. It is light for a moment, then it is dark again. That's silly, because although I can see what it means, I think they are looking at it from the wrong side. Think what the other birds are thinking. Wot is that bird doing stuck inside that dark hall when we are all out here?

I spoke of prisoners because when we are stuck or lost, what we need most is a way out. Sometimes it is all we can do just to survive. There isn't much sign of life outside the prison. But one day a message comes.

To understand the message is all we need to do.

It is not obvious. But it is there. If you can love it, then you are hearing it.

This is the language of music.

Granados

The composer Granados was born in 1867. He was in America in 1916, and because he was suddenly invited to give a recital for the President, he missed his boat back to Spain. Instead, he took a different boat to England, and then transferred to another one heading for France. But the First World War had started and the ship was torpedoed. Granados jumped from the lifeboat to save his wife but could not and also HE DROWNED!!!!!!!!!

But his music survived.

Believe It!

Instead of looking around desperately trying to think of something to take a picture of, I have lately been working on calming down and believing that I will find a picture if there is one to be had.

I was a bit disheartened because all I had were a few over-exposed squirrels not doing anything, so I sat under a tree to eat my bagel (bagel, smoked salmon, lemon juice, cracked black pepper, you can put butter on the bread or use olive oil). Then after that I looked up and what should I see? Exactly, it was something I thought looked interesting. It was the scene you can see above.

And you know another thing? I'm telling you (and myself) that we should all have faith that the right opportunities will come our way when we need them to. Seeing my picture was evidence of that. But the next thing I saw, it had got a bit darker, and there was the moon! A crescent moon right in front of me. I hadn't even moved my position.

You can see the moon more easily in a large size version of the picture. It's on the left, near the church. Of course, to the naked eye it appeared much bigger, because the eye is sort of the best camera ever and focuses and zooms without us realising it.

I hope you can see there is a lesson to learn from this, wherever and whenever you wish to apply it. Right?

Surf Rescue

Johann Weißmüller was born in Freidorf which at the time was in Austria-Hungary but is now near Timişoara in Romania. Very soon he moved with his family to America. He was a good swimmer and trained hard while he worked as a bell hop at the Plaza Hotel in Chicago. It all worked out very well when he won his first Olympic swimming title in 1924 (Paris). In all, throughout his career he won five Olympic Gold medals and one Bronze, and broke sixty-seven world records. He never lost a race.

And then he became Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.

Johnny Weissmuller was the Tarzan I remember from the films. They were black and white, and had lots of interesting things happening. I remember the Elephants' Graveyard, trains of native bearers carrying the white man's luggage, Cheeta the chimpanzee, giant spiders and their deadly webs, and the strange fauna of the jungle. There was always a dinosaur somewhere in the jungle for some reason. It was a Dimetrodon, I seem to remember. And don't forget that Tarzan could speak to the animals too. "Ungawa!" meant something. "Simba!" meant something too. It is Swahili for Lion and he said it to lions so that makes sense.

Let's go back in time and find out something else.

When Johnny won his first Olympic medal, he beat someone. That person was called Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku and he came from Hawaii. When you hear the phrase "The Big Kahuna", you now know that it originally referred to him.

Duke (named after Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh) had set the world record that Johnny broke in 1922 (that was before they met at the Olympics). He won many medals himself, but is more famous as the inventor of modern surfing. He experimented with many improvements and alterations to surfboard design but his best-remembered board was the one he called his "papa nui". It was 16 feet long and weighed 114 pounds (4.8m, 52 kg). That was the board he was using on the day the big waves came, one of which would take him from surf zone to surf zone in the longest ride of his life. Let's hear him tell about it now.

But the day I caught 'The Big One' was a day when I was not thinking in terms of awing any tourists or kamaainas (old-timers) on Waikiki Beach. It was simply an early morning when mammoth ground swells were rolling in sporadically from the horizon, and I saw that no one was paddling out to try them. Frankly, they were the largest I'd ever seen. The yell of 'The surf is up!' was the understatement of the century.

In fact, it was that rare morning when the word was out that the big 'Bluebirds' were rolling in; this is the name for gigantic waves that sweep in from the horizon on extra-ordinary occasions. Sometimes years elapse with no evidence of them. They are spawned far out at sea and are the result of cataclysms of nature -- either great atmospheric disturbances or subterranean agitation like underwater earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

The danger lay in the proneout or wipeout. Studying the waves made me wonder if any man's body could withstand the unbelievable force of a thirty- to fifty-foot wall of water when it crashes. And, too, could even a top swimmer like myself manage to battle the currents and explosive water that would necessarily accompany the aftermath of such a wave? Well, the answer seemed to be simply -- don't get wiped out!

From the shore you could see those high glassy ridges building up in the outer Diamond Head region. The Bluebirds were swarming across the bay in a solid line as far northwest as Honolulu Harbor. They were tall, steep and fast. The closer-in ones crumbled and showed their teeth with a fury that I had never seen before. I wondered if I could even push through the acres of white water to get to the outer area where the buildups were taking place.

...Bushed from the long fight to get seaward, I sat my board and watched the long humps of water peaking into ridges that marched like animated foothills. I let a slew of them lift and drop me with their silent, threatening glide. I could hardly believe that such perpendicular walls of water could be built up like that. The troughs between the swells had the depth of elevator shafts, and I wondered again what it would be like to be buried under tons of water when it curled and detonated. There was something eerie about watching the shimmering backs of the ridges as they passed me and rolled on toward Waikiki.

I let a lot of them careen by, wondering in my own heart if I was passing them up because of their unholy height, or whether I was really waiting for the big, right one. A man begins to doubt himself at a time like that. Then I was suddenly wheeling and turning to catch the towering blue ridge bearing toward me. I was prone and stroking hard at the water with my hands.

Strangely, it was more as though the wave had selected me, rather than I had chosen it. It seemed like a very personal and special wave -- the kind I had seen in my mind's eye during a night of tangled dreaming. There was no backing out on this one; the two of us had something to settle between us. The rioting breakers between me and shore no longer bugged me. There was just this one ridge and myself -- no more. Could I master it? I doubted it, but I was willing to die in the attempt to harness it.

Instinctively I got to my feet when the pitch, slant and speed seemed right. Left foot forward, knees slightly bent, I rode the board down the precipitous slope like a man tobogganing down a glacier. Sliding left along the watery monster's face, I didn't know I was at the beginning of a ride that would become a celebrated and memoried thing. All I knew was that I had come to grips with the tallest, bulkiest, fastest wave I had ever seen. I realized, too, more than ever, that to be trapped under its curling bulk would be the same as letting a factory cave in upon you.

This lethal avalanche of water swept shoreward swiftly and spookily. The board began hissing from the traction as the wave leaned forward with greater and more incredible speed and power. I shifted my weight, cut left at more of an angle and shot into the big Castle Surf which was building and adding to the wave I was on. Spray was spuming up wildly from my rails, and I had never before seen it spout up like that. I rode it for city-long blocks, the wind almost sucking the breath out of me. Diamond Head itself seemed to have come alive and was leaping in at me from the right.

Then I was slamming into Elk's Club Surf, still sliding left, and still fighting for balance, for position, for everything and anything that would keep me upright. The drumming of the water under the board had become a madman's tattoo. Elk's Surf rioted me along, high and steep, until I skidded and slanted through into Public Baths Surf. By then it amounted to three surfs combined into one; big, rumbling and exploding. I was not sure I could make it on this ever-steepening ridge. A curl broke to my right and almost engulfed me, so I swung even farther left, shuffled back a little on the board to keep from pearling (nose-diving).

Left it was; left and more left, with the board veeing a jet of water on both sides and making a snarl that told of speed and stress and thrust. The wind was tugging my hair with frantic hands. Then suddenly it looked as if I might, with more luck, make it into the back of Queen's Surf! The build-up had developed into something approximating what I had heard of tidal waves, and I wondered if it would ever flatten out at all. White water was pounding to my right, so I angled farther from it to avoid its wiping me out and burying me in the sudsy depths.

Borrowing on the Cunha Surf for all it was worth -- and it was worth several hundred yards -- I managed to manipulate the board into the now towering Queen's Surf. One mistake -- just one small one -- could well spill me into the maelstrom to my right. I teetered for some panic-ridden seconds, caught control again, and made it down on that last forward rush, sliding and bouncing through lunatic water. The breaker gave me all the tossing of a bucking bronco. Still luckily erect, I could see the people standing there on the beach, their hands shading their eyes against the sun, and watching me complete this crazy, unbelievable one-and-three-quarter-mile ride.

I made it into the shallows in one last surging flood. A little dazedly I wound up in hip-deep water, where I stepped off and pushed my board shoreward through the bubbly surf. That improbable ride gave me the sense of being an unlickable guy for the moment. I hoisted my board to my hip, locked both arms around it and lugged it up the beach.

Without looking at the people clustered around, I walked on, hearing them murmur fine, exciting things which I wanted to remember in days to come. I told myself this was the ride to end all rides. I grinned my thanks to those who stepped close and slapped me on the shoulders, and I smiled to those who told me this was the greatest. I trudged on and on, knowing this would be a shining memory for me that I could take out in years to come, and relive it in all its full glory. This had been it.

I never caught another wave anything like that one. And now with the birthdays piled up on my back, I know I never shall. But they cannot take that memory away from me. It is a golden one that I treasure, and I'm grateful that God gave it to me.

Duke appeared in 13 films in various parts, and in 1925 he used his surfboard to rescue eight men from a capsized fishing boat in heavy weather in Newport Beach, California.

It's nice to know that exciting things happen sometimes. Also that fun can be useful. Playing is not just a waste of time!

Boy

I like this one. By Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Java Earthquake and Tsunami July 2006: Links

Here are some links for more information on the Java Tsunami that happened yesterday.


Help Jogja blog (Bahasa Indonesia/Indonesian)
Indonesia Quake Help Wiki
News bulletins from Indahnesia.com,
Sumerbatikan blog - Hans van den Broek, who lives in Java and is raising funds to help
Indonesia Help
Another blog with local information
Wim and Phillip's site (Nederlands/Dutch)

My Dream Has Come True

All week I have been reading the weather forecast. In the temperature column I was watching the number "24" (Centigrade)...to see if it would, as usual, turn into "4" when the day arrived (or "-4"!).

Before I went to sleep last night, I had only one wish. It was a simple wish. Please let it be sunny tomorrow - was my wish. Yes, readers, that was the only thing I wanted in my whole life, as of last night! Maybe it is a sign that I have become simple-minded. Shouldn't I have been wishing for a million pounds? A fast car? A swimming pool?

So - my dream came true! And, even better than that, I have just checked the weather page and it says it is TWENTY-FIVE DEGREES! So I got at least one degree more than I was offered!

So now everything has come true, what do I ask for from life? What do you give the man who has everytthing? I don't know, I'm quite happy!

Right, now I'm going back outside. See you out there!

Thievery

I've been reading about Stradivarius violins.

They are famous for their sound, but I suppose they are more famous for their value. Of course they have a musical value as great instruments, but because of this they also have a monetary value.

There are up to about 700 Strads around in the world today.

First I read about one of the instruments David Oistrakh (1908-1974) played. He had others but this one is referred to as the "Oistrakh". It was made in 1671.

What did I read next? "Stolen in 1996 and still missing".

Yes, it was stolen and has not come to light.

Read on.

Le Maurien (1714) - stolen in 2002, still missing
Lipinski (1715) - missing since 1962
Colossus (1716) - stolen in 1998, still missing
Davidov-Morini (1727) - stolen in 1995, still missing
Herkules (1732) - this belonged to Ysaÿe, was stolen in 1908 and is still missing
The Ames (1734) and Lamoureux (1735) are still missing

Some thieves know how to steal but do not know how to look after what they steal. Sometimes things go wrong. Other types of accidents can happen too.

Can you believe that very valuable objects can be sold to private collectors, regardless of where they came from, and can be kept hidden?

That's another possibility.

I'm sorry to say that all kinds of things go on in the world, and some of them are not nice.

I'm not just talking about "owners" of stolen property. There are other kinds of illegal hobbies, I would imagine.

There are people alive today who are not nice people. We do not know them, I'm glad to say.

Some people are selfish. And some people are very selfish indeed.

How silly to take things for yourself. Does a fish try to keep its own private water, does an eagle breathe only its own private air? No, they are each free to travel where they can. They share it with many others.

Everything we have on this earth is for us. Not mine, not yours. We can't keep it, we can't just do what we like with it, we don't own it, we have to take care of it all. But it is for us. All of us! Together.

So when you take something and hide it for yourself, you are taking it from...yourself.

It was yours anyway! But you took it and concealed it. And then you couldn't share it with anyone, and that was no fun.

A bit sad.

But we don't have to be sad if we share!

You see? The violins can come out of their cupboards, and be heard. And then we can all hear them, and they will be ours again. Because a human made them. A human just like us. He made them from wood, which was living just like we are now. All part of our world, all knitted together like old clothes. Our world.

Not "me" and "them".

We, us!