Meeting A Blogger! (Incontrato i Blogger Fantastico)

It was very hot, not 'Dallas hot', but incredibly humid. It was the kind of humid which causes sweat to drip from your nose and wonder which it is that you are breathing, air or water. I had just arrived on the train and was making my way across the Italian town with my 60kg of luggage, sun beating down, trying to keep one eye on my outdated GPS in order to keep my wrong turns to a minimum.

Under normal circumstances, this would cause me to run to the nearest air conditioned room and order a cold drink. But, I was very excited that I was on my way to meet a blogger that I've admired for a long time. She has a fantastic eye for design, a respect and deep knowledge of western history, and is a true original in my opinion. You have probably guessed by now that it was Maggie from 'Mosaicology' who I was going to visit.

It probably sounds strange, but I had never met an actual blogger until then, so I was a bit nervous.

Luckily, I arrived early in front of the church agreed upon. Even more luckily, the bar in front of the church had outdoor seating and would sell cold water and wine to me. They never give enough wine in the church. :)

The bells struck the time and there was only one lady with family members meeting the description out there. She was looking around as if waiting for someone, but no, it was not her.

A while after the last echo of the bells were gone, I was relieved to see them appear. I waved them over to the outdoor bar. In a short moment we were all sitting there as old friends, discussing art and design, history, politics, and everything and nothing. They are such precious people to me, and we had only just met in person!

Time flew by as we talked and then sadly it was time for me to catch my next train to the Venice area. But, we have plans to draw up jewelry pieces using rare stones, and I can't wait.

I just returned home a few hours ago after so long on the airplanes, so now I will sleep for a few days...

p.s. - A., grazie per l'auto alla stazione!

Squirrel spirits and the Past (Storia con Scoiattoli)

All of you, gather around the evening fire, and hear the story of 'Pale Face Walks With Stones'. It was a summer ugonawa, oh, I should say 'hot'. It was after many days until the ground cracked and the grass died. The mighty rivers turned dry and the swimming pool was down a good two inches a day.

Well 'Walks with Stones' was outside cleaning up stone pieces of many colors, colors like maize in the harvest, when he looked up and saw annoying squirrel spirit. Squirrel was climbing on the house and then on the fence, and had just previously caused much anger in 'Walks with Stones'. So, he leans down to grab a small stone from a pile of dirt recently displaced from planting a mighty tree. 'Walks with Stones' had the intention of scaring Squirrel Spirit off the damned fence and onto the open front yard plain stretching for blocks as far as the eye could see.

















But he paused before casting the stone at Squirel Spirit. He thought it would be a pity to cast this weird randomly picked up stone at the squirrel. A pity mostly because it had strange markings, and wasn't an actual stone at all. It turns out that 'Walks with Stones' had inadvertently picked up a piece of prehistoric pottery with very linear brush marks, and an inner core more red and ceramic-ish than the outer encrusted face and back.


















Shaking a fist at Squirrel Spirit, he excitedly looked up the archaeology department at the big university on his talking box from Motorola. Then as the call was dialed 'Walks with Stones' looks to the mighty west tree and sees the evil crow spirit (about 100 of them) looking at him. Then he utters a word and they all take flight as the 'dial' button is pressed. 'Walks with Stones' is creeped right the hell out, mostly because in the years living in the Dallas area, he has not had this vision except once before.


Anyhow, I'm sure there will be an update when the scientists at the University of Texas Archaeology field office come back with details.

The News (Notizie)

Hello Blogchums!

What's been going on, you might ask? I reckon a few things, work is always a factor, but there are many moving parts to this 'macchina' called life.

My brother drilled his first oil well, bravo. Production is a little light at around 20 barrels per day, but well done regardless! He's diving that big reef off of Australia at the moment and has plans for many more in the near future.

















My sister *still* hasn't found a job (she's 27 and lives with my mother). But, she makes good vegetarian food and smokes cigarettes more adeptly than most people I know.

As for me, I've been keeping up with my regimen of liking cookies, sculpture, mosaics, macro economics, archaeometry, reading your blogs, encryption, and ancient history. Note my use of the Oxford comma, which is a lifestyle choice much like the proper way of putting the toilet paper in which the end rests over the roll instead of under, the latter probably being the exclusive purview of of dog thieves, insurance salesmen, and Nazis.

This autumn, I'm heading to Italy to take another advanced mosaic class in Ravenna. This is brought on mostly by my desire to make the mosaic centerpiece I have planned outside appear better than stick figures. My enormous white marble deck is progressing slowly because of my other work, but I'd like to think it will be finished some day.

















Also on the to-do list while in Italy is to visit the ancient island of Sardinia. I hope that they have the kind in olive oil and not just mustard or something gross like that. Kidding, everyone knows sardines are exclusively from Norway which is what you purchase in excessive quantity when you go there...













Lately, I've purchased some art by people whose technical abilities I admire. Andjelka in Serbia sold me her eye, well, not her real eye. Just an incredibly well rendered example of how mosaics should be. But now, I am busy fabricating a custom frame for it.


I hope that you all are having a great summer so far!

Keys (Tasti vecchio)

In media and life, I've seen a coincidental confluence in the past few months of keys, both the physical kind that you might open a lock with and more abstract kinds. My brother misplaced his car keys, I generated an encryption keyset for a business client, then took a quick try at decrypting a note (published by the FBI) that was found in a dead guy's pocket (I was not successful, hah). The acting mayor of Dallas got into trouble for giving Michael Vick the 'key to the city' which I cartoonishly imagine as an enormous gilded key with a big 'D' on the end. But, I've never seen it and really think it's probably just a disappointing piece of paper with 'Key advice' on it. I guess there hasn't been anything in the news about Panama or the canal (also having locks). What kind of locks am I forgetting?

To take us in what I'm sure is a completely unexpected direction... the Romans made physical keys out of bronze and improved the Egyptian designs by replacing wooden components with metals. Of course, I guess if the Romans made keys out of cotton candy, there wouldn't be much evidence of it now... Keys and locks made in the shops back then were pretty much unique works of art as they didn't have ANSI standards back then.

Here is a photo I took in Arles, France a few years back of keys found in that area.















Also, from Aqueilia Italy, a relief sculpture of a Roman locksmith's grave showing him at work.












The ancients also had the abstract notion of logical keys (and encryption). The historian Suetonius wrote of an ancient shift cypher that Julius Caeser used to encrypt messages. The idea was just to replace an alphabetic letter with another letter farther down the alphabetical sequence. Thousands of years ago, it was good enough to guard important state secrets. Now comically, the acronym for the encryption is 'ROT-n', (rotten, as in 'not good' hehe).

Anyway, puns aside, the best encryption schemes I've seen involve combinations of modulus functions (remainders) which accomplishes compression and encryption at the same time, but for prearranged lengths of data in the overall stream to be encrypted.

If I needed to encrypt something, I'd be too paranoid to use RSABase because it's prime number based, and I think NSA has skeleton key for that (decrypts all).
It's probably best to do your own cryptography from scratch and only share it with those you want to receive your message.

For good reading on keys and locks in ancient times, check out romanlocks.com

A Moment of Silence (Un Momento di Silenzio)

We should all pause for a moment's silence.

Silence in memory of 'Sportsman's Guide, Incorporated' based in St. Paul Minnesota, publisher and purveyor of shooting targets. Decreased revenues from their best selling products will surely cause the bankruptcy of the company.

Sometimes, Insects Decide (Decidere di Insetti)

This past Friday, I had received a shipment of an extraordinarily expensive and rare stone from Rome to use in an art project. It was the legendary 'imperial porphyry' from ancient Egypt. Until locating this sample I was considering using a substitute stone from Trentino Italy, but that one was less brilliant red / purple and the white specks (phenocrysts) were less perfectly white. Since all of my other 'ingredients' were the authentic originals, using the lesser stone seemed like a compromise that shouldn't be made.















In order to make the work look authentic as the 1700 year old original pictured above, I tried to talk myself into breaking the center circle and putting it back together again. But, I kept thinking about the rarity of the stone and how I would be smashing (temporarily) something that costs so much. It was like when you are about to jump off a high-dive platform for the first time and the voice in your head is talking you out of it.

Yesterday afternoon, I carefully drew off the perfect 7" (17cm) circle, I set up my diamond saw outside with a 0.25mm (tiny) blade to avoid material loss of such a precious material. I worked intently, keeping my fingers out of harm's way (the blade is tiny and somewhat flexible since it is so thin).

The wind in Texas has gusted very strongly for the past few days. But despite the wind, about midway through one of the cuts to shape the expensive stone, a yellow jacket wasp bumped up against my leg. I tried to shoo it away with my foot, but it was not having any of that. It kept aggressively buzzing around.


















It flew at my face on a final attack dive bombing run, and I had to concentrate on not losing fingers while this happened. Jumping back, but with hands away from the blade, the stone flew off the saw table and landed on the cement where it broke into three pieces. Satisfied with the mayhem it had created, the wasp flew off happily.

I pieced back together the rare stone pieces and finished shaping the perfect center circle. Sometimes, things work out just fine, don't you know?

Ouch (Mia Cicatrice Non Guariscono Per Sempre)

Recently I was chipping dried mortar off the back of a small mosaic piece so I could reset it somewhere else. The chipping off was going great with a sharp new hammer (recently purchased from the Tabularasa company in Italy).













As I held the piece in my left hand, I struck for about the fifth time, but forgot to take into account that the mortar had a 'rubberized' additive in it. So, it was more of a glancing blow off the piece which allowed the sharp pointy carbide end of the hammer to nestle deeply in my left thumb.

Oh, the words I said when this happened... as much because of my stupid carelessness as for the actual pain. I can take quite a bit of pain, but this was absolutely 'stub 15 toes at one time' excruciating.

After wrapping it in a cold paper towel and applying pressure, the blood finally stopped. Without stiches, I now have a scar that still hurts a bit when I apply pressure in a wrong direction.

Scars can be a good metaphor for what happens in life sometimes. It made me think of a girl I knew when I was in my second year of high school, Lauren. We had been going out for about 4 months which was forever for a high school kid. She was beautiful with long black hair and bright green eyes, and possibly one of the smartest and nicest girls I knew. Summer nights at the waterpark, autumn mornings at band camp (no jokes), with so many common interests it was all perfect.

One November afternoon sitting around the dining table with sunlight streaming in the window, my father told us all that we'd be moving from Dallas to the middle of nowhere (west of Ft. Worth) to help my grandfather drill oil wells. Being a quick lad, I immediately calculated the impact of this catacalysmic event to my situation with Lauren with the lightning like efficiency of at least 100 Commodore 64 computers.

The days which followed were filled with a wistfulness that is hard to describe. As a final gesture, I bought her a jewelry piece the likes of which my 16 year old's allowance savings could just barely manage. It was 20F outside and ice and snow everywhere, but I walked it over to her house located about three miles away as a last Christmas present. All of my extremities were numb, even my soul. I understand why she was sad, but I was surprised to see her mom cry about it.
To this day, that scar still hurts if I move it the wrong way.