Five top blog posts

I'm always interested in stats, though that doesn't mean I always use them well, or understand their finer points. 

Blogger obligingly provides stats on a number of things related to my posts, and, out of curiosity today I checked the top blog posts of 'all time' from my blog. They're a real mixed bag, and there seems no rhyme nor reason as to why any of them should have been viewed so often. 

But for the record (because possibly they'll change at some point) here are the top five posts as of the 16th August, 2017. 

Top of the list is the Commonplace post which dates back to 2011, and is a bit of a riff on the word insurance, and the sorts of things that came up when I searched that word on my Evernote. A more random post you'd hardly imagine. Perhaps people search for the word insurance a lot! It's had twice as many views as number two on the list. 

Curiously enough, I hadn't checked this post for a while. I'd thought it related to an entirely different subject... 

Number two is Random thoughts on the Zirka Circus which goes back to 2010. This was a positive review of a small circus that was touring New Zealand at the time, and in fact has been back again at least twice since then. You'd think small circuses wouldn't be very impressive, but in fact they often include considerable talents (and these people really work for their money), and are very enjoyable. But then, I'm a circus fan from way back. Though I must say I miss the performing animals, even if that isn't a very PC thing to say anymore. 

Third on the list is Skinny ties, also from 2011, which seems a most unlikely subject to be viewed Twilight series, Robert Pattinson. It's been amongst the top five since it first appeared, pretty much. I wonder if it has to do with the photo that accompanies it, which may possibly be the actor from the Twilight movie, Robert Pattinson. 

Fourth on the list is Debating Compost, which dates way back to 2007. It's a brief piece arguing that cooked foods go just as well in composts as uncooked. Though someone's concern about this was that it encouraged rats. That's possible. We used to have a cat who dealt successfully with any rats and mice around the place, but when my daughter moved out, she took the cat with her - it did belong to her after all. During the course of the move the cat walked out the door of the new house and vanished for a couple of months. The daft thing was living at the park just down the road and was being occasionally fed by some kind person who eventually took it to the Vet. The cat had been microchipped, so the Vet was able to identify my daughter as the owner. 

And fifth is Fat amplification, the most recent of the bunch, from 2016. It's merely a bit of chat about the joys and woes of amplification of musical instruments, particularly in a church setting. Maybe the problem is widespread!

Circus Quirkus

Yesterday I went to the Circus Quirkus with my daughter, my grandson and one of his friends - courtesy of free tickets from Rotary, who apparently sponsor the shows throughout New Zealand.  Good on them!

A slightly unusual circus in that it was performed in a theatre rather than a tent, but that didn't stop them being a very entertaining group.  There were only ten or eleven performers all up, including the ringmaster, so there was a lot of work for all the cast to do.  The three 'blokes' from Melbourne who did tumbling and acrobatics and slapstick were definitely among the crowd favourites because of their humour as much as anything - certainly humour adds significantly to the entertainment value of circus acts - but they were a very sharp group with great timing, energy and muscle.

Equally the clowning done on the tightrope at the end - by both the woman and the man - raised the bar considerably in what would have otherwise been a straightforward routine.  One or two of the other acts might have benefited from more involvement with the clowning side of the circus.  As we discovered from the two kids we had with us, something that is plainly difficult to an adult (even if it's made to look easy) doesn't necessarily grab children.  The performers may be risking life and limb, but the kids are very blase these days about such feats, because of television, I guess.

Fortunately, this Circus Quirkus group has at least six men who can clown well, and who consequently engage the audience effectively.  A couple of the women also did some clowning, though that wasn't the main aspect of their acts. There's something about clowning that involves, it brings the audience and performer together in a way that serious performance doesn't tend to do so well. 

Oddly, the production chose to put a solo act on as the last one before the interval - a contortionist who finished up her act by shooting an arrow at a balloon.  She held the bow in one foot and the arrow in the other, all the time balancing on one hand on an area only the size of her hand, and being twisted over the top of herself somehow.  Unfortunately she missed the balloon twice - that's the sort of thing you can get away with in a humorous act: in a serious act where it's obvious what she's aiming to do, not doing it is quite a let down (and not just for the audience).  She was a marvellous contortionist, there's no doubt; she had wonderful balance, and considerable grace.  But something was amiss with the bow and arrow part of the act, which was a pity. 

No doubt she'll get it right in other centres.  I'd recommend this circus greatly. 

The photo at the top is of last year's group; only some of them are in the current tour.

Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away

We went to see the movie Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away recently, in 3D.  I haven't had much experienceof the new style 3D, so far, apart from seeing Alice in Wonderland in the format more than a year ago.  That particular movie didn't grab me enough to make me want to feel that I needed to see things in 3D for the sake of it, but we couldn't see Cirque du Soleil conveniently in 2D, so we opted for the only other choice. 

It turned out to be the right decision.  I suspect that some films are made in 3D for the sake of it, and some are planned that way.  Worlds Away gives the impression of being planned for the 3D format, and is all the better for it.  There's a depth to the visuals that allows things to be going on in a number of places at once and still be visible (although this being typically Cirque du Soleil, there are always random happenings going on that you only just catch).  Two or three times a person is caught right at the front of the shot, almost in silhouette, and that didn't seem to work (you wondered if an audience member had just stood up) but otherwise everything has a marvellous clarity. 

The film is a compilation, basically, that tries to be a unity by having a very basic story running through.  However the story is so thin, that it hardly holds the thing together.  A small town girl goes to a circus, sees (only for a moment) a man working at putting up the tent, falls in love with him (apparently), discovers that he's the Airealist in the circus, and distracts him while he's performing. He plunges to the floor, except the floor proves to be sand and gives way beneath him and he vanishes.  She jumps in after him and finds herself.  Well, who knows where she finds herself - perhaps inside the Cirque du Soleil.  Only there are seven separate circuses in this movie (all of them running in Las Vegas at the time the movie was made), and some of their best acts are shown (there are also some rather brief random acts, which don't seem to fit with anything).  The Airealist is captured by some bodies (who knows who) and the girl keeps on searching, until finally they're reunited.  (Who knows how?)

So irrelevant is all this to what you see on the screen that it barely matters.  What matters is the Circus, and the artists, and the design, and the fantastic stage props and machinery, and the costumes, and the utter artistry of these performers.  Yes, I know Cirque du Soleil has become the household name for all that's top class in circuses, so you expect the best, but even so, they are always full of surprises.  The acts performed in and around the huge pool are wonderful; the marvellous superheroes piece on an assortment of trampolines set up like a huge skateboard park are high energy to the max; the 'fight' on the tilted floor between two groups of acrobats on wires is superbly timed, and perhaps only outdone by the other battle on the same floor (this time vertical) in which the acrobats race up and around and down and through a series of poles sticking out of the floor, with nothing to hold them onto to what amounts to a wall; several of them 'die' with horrendous screams by falling off it- who knows what happens to them, any more than the artists who drop into the water from trapezes and other hanging devices early in the piece. 

There's also the exhausting 'boat' that's slung way up in the air and has at least a dozen trapeze artists and strongmen on it: it's constantly on the move, like a giant swing, and the airealists are flung about from either end like rag dolls that suddenly turn out to have muscles and strength once they're back on board again. 

I love circuses - poor little circuses with barely any money to rub together (Circus Aotearoa, for instance) or the noisy Zirka Circus - but I love Cirque du Soleil most of all, even though I've only seen it once live - and that was in very confined quarters as far as the circus was concerned, on the stage of the Regent Theatre.  I've seen a number of presentations of Cirque du Soleil on TV, including documentaries and such.  I just marvel at the attention to detail, the atmosphere, the innovativeness and much more. 

This movie may not do much more than capture some of the best acts on film, but it does it exceptionally well, and that's all I need to say.

Bit of a HitTail catchup

I've been keeping a diary of my time away in Boise, and will be posting some items on the Travel Diary blog in the next few days.   I'm obviously still on Boise time, since instead of sleeping through this morning from exhaustion after some thirty-six hours travelling (broken, but only in a sense, by stopping off at my daughter's place in Auckland for the day) I was wide awake at 4.30 am.

So I thought I might as well do something useful...like blogging!  Firstly I've just checked out the HitTail top four search words for this week: as usual a pretty mixed bunch.  

One item is the meaning or interpretation of Winnie the Pooh .  I certainly have no authorative view on this: the only time I've mentioned it, I think, was in this post, and that's relating to a pseudo interpretation of Winnie's meaning from Frederick Crews' Postmodern Pooh.  Pseudo and humorous, in fact.   Looking back over the number of searches relating to this topic on my HitTail account, it seems that there must be some study being done on this topic in some US University at the moment.   Perhaps some English professor has set the students a tongue-in-cheek task...?  It sounds like something Alan Jacobs might do  - I've just read his book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction - about which there'll be more in another post.

The Mousetrap script turns up as well.   There have been any number of references to Agatha Christie's play, The Mousetrap, in this blog, as this list will attest, but most of these come from Aug/Sept last year, when I was acting in the play.

The third item is Aotearoa Circus NZ, (the correct name is Circus Aotearoa) which I wrote about back in March last year.   Since then a commenter had been to see the Circus, and left me a rather negative note about it.   Certainly the circus was a little threadbare - which I noted at the time - but wasn't lacking in talent.  The person commenting seems to have had a bit of a rough time at this circus: certainly the troupe were rough and ready, in some respects, but I didn't see anyone in the audience the day I attended getting their hair pulled, as apparently happened to this person.

Last but not least we have Chrissy Johnson.  In spite of not having written on this blog for nearly a fortnight, due to being in Boise, Idaho most of that time, here's our old friend - who usually appears under the name of Chrissy Popadics, turning up again.  She's the wife of one of the (former?) football players in the Boise team, and I mentioned her again recently because of the new Boise connection my family now has - my new daughter-in-law comes from there.

Blog stats

Every so often it's worth checking out one of the systems that keeps track of the stats relating to this blog. Here are the top pages with the number of times they've been accessed over the last short period of time....notice the dates the posts were published; the third top one goes back to 2007...Boise also happens to be the place my future daughter-in-law comes from. Wonder if there's a connection?
I'm glad to see that Grimhilda! has made it well up the list, though I'm not sure why she should be behind 'skinny ties' or Frederick Buechner on marriage.
The meaning of Winnie the Pooh is just behind Grimhilda! - curiously enough, the beginning of the Pooh post is a spoof on literary criticism, rather than something serious.
The other item that intrigues me here is the one on the Zirka circus: this has been a popular post since the time it first appeared. Don't ask me why!

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More on the circus - more than the ODT has reported, in fact!

Just one other thought about the post I wrote on the Zirka Circus yesterday. It's a curious thing that there is no programme available for the circus, where you might find out who the artists are, nor is there any information on them on the website. Only the photos in the gallery section. Nothing more.

This seems fairly typical of circuses - at least the ones that travel throughout NZ. The artists are anonymous to the nth degree. And our local paper doesn't even seemed to have reported that the Zirka circus is in town. Very strange.

So I'm doing my little best here to promote it. Go to the Zirka Circus. It's worth your money!

Random thoughts on the Zirka Circus

Went to see the Zirka Circus with some members of my family today. Very noisy, music-wise, but the music itself was good and very suitable for what was going on. Quite a small troupe – I counted around twenty at the end, almost equally men and women. A youngish man and woman took the lead in practically everything; he was on for around twenty minutes solid at the beginning, and she turned up in every one of the women’s acts (except the cycle riding at the end, I think) and often appeared when the two of them came in as a romantic couple – there wasn’t any story as such, although it started off seeming as though there might be.

No ringmaster – they seem to have gone the way of the dodo – and very little vocal stuff from the cast, except to shout ‘Hoi’ or some such when they’d performed a trick. The two clowns (both white, as opposed to an otherwise Asian company) didn’t speak words, but used whistles to ‘speak’ (adding to the general piercing noise when they both got going). There was at least one child in the troupe: a boy who couldn’t have been much more than twelve, if that. He was very small, certainly. He did some remarkable balancing on his right hand – including ‘climbing’ down and up the stairs on it.

Most of the standard (Asian) acts were there: the swinging around on silken material; nine women on a single bike; balancing plates on sticks; swinging those things consisting of two ‘weights’ (for want of a better word) held together by a rope; the women doing the string held on two sticks (one in each hand) thing where they toss a round item with a ridge in it so that it stays on the string; the men on large metal double-sided wheels that they begin by wobbling around at speed and gradually building up until they’re balancing on one edge or such; the main woman doing the balancing on chairs thing where she gradually adds another chair; three women doing juggling with large balls while lying on the backs – and eventually doing it while up above each other; most of the men playing with Mexican style bowler hats and juggling with them (in that way that makes it look as though one of them is always suspended in mid-air), and then of course standing on each other and tossing them around; tumbling through hoops. You can see examples of all these in the gallery on the Zirka website.

Their TV ad is there too - it gives an idea of the energy levels, but is over very quickly (the double-wheel is momentarily visible).

The end of the first half consisted of a double wheel (similar to what I’ve just attempted to describe) held together in the centre by various metal struts, and slung in the air by solid cables. I’m not sure how it all worked, but it was a bit like two of those endless wheels that mice are sometimes given to race around in joined together. One of the white males got in one of them and got the whole thing swinging around so that he would go from floor level right up and around to the ceiling and back down again. The other wheel of course was like a counterbalance to this, and one of the Asian guys got into the other side and began doing daredevil stuff such as going upside down and finally walking on the outside of the wheel as it hit its highest point, slipping through the metal structure in the middle and going up over the other wheel as it reached the peak – then doing juggling while he was up there, and then putting on a blindfold and doing it. That was certainly the most breathtaking act in the circus.

There was a bit of a magic section in which a woman was put in a box and fiery brands passed through it – then she wasn’t there when they opened it, and then three women climbed out of the top. Even if they do do it with mirrors it was pretty impressive.

The whole thing had heaps of energy, one act sliding into the next with little hiatus. Lots of dry ice to give atmosphere. And several members of the cast selling stuff before the show and during the interval – including the little boy. No star-glamour here!

Photo of the Zirka Circus Tent by Cafe Cecil

Catching up on writing

Over this Easter weekend I've managed to get on and do some more writing for the Triond site, where articles can be left indefinitely, and can keep on getting viewed, and making money. (Peanuts, but it is money.)

I sat down a week or so ago and tried to chart out my writing/composing priorities. Doing an article a week for Triond was one of them. I kind of caught up by writing four articles, a couple of which were rehashes of pieces I'd done before.

So for those with an interest in other things I do, here are the links:

Blowing My Own Trumpet. This is a piece about trying to promote yourself on the Net. Self-referential is the term, I think!

Friends for Life. This one looks at some of the books on my shelves and concludes that some of them make better friends than the real people I know. Hmmm. This was a piece I started some time ago and never did anything more with.

The Delightful Lives at 44 Scotland St. Another 'rehash' - in the best sense. I've taken the four book reviews I've done of the four episodes in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland St series and woven them together into a long overview. It's called recycling.

Support Your Local Circus. This was written new and fresh yesterday after I went to see Weber Brothers' Circus in Mosgiel, one of the outer suburbs of Dunedin. It's a lovely little circus, full of energy and life, with clowns that are genuinely funny, and some wonderful Asian acrobats. And three absolutely crazy motorcyclists racing around and around inside what seems a very tiny metal globe.

Photo by Atelier Teee

Economics and the Circus

Want a good book to read on a plane trip? Freakonomics is the one – well, for me, anyway!
It’s made economics (a subject I’ve despised since I first came across it at an adult commerce class years ago) into something that’s readable, interesting, quirky and even fun. Of course, it took a mind like Steven Levett’s to bring me to that change of view, but that’s fine. Usually I’m prepared to have my mind changed in regard to my opinions – though my wife doesn’t always agree that that’s the case.
Again and again Freakonomics throws up two seemingly unrelated subjects and works out whether they have more in common than you’d think. I don’t suppose Levett actually sat down and said how can I contrast two totally unrelated subjects; there’s a good deal of thought behind his writing. Nevertheless, he manages to ask crazy questions and show that they’re not so crazy after all.
The writing is a symbiosis: Levett can certainly write without the help of Dubner, but it was Dubner who got the book off the ground. Levett is almost too busy to sit down and write a book.
I don’t know that I can pinpoint what it is about the book that intrigues me so much. Maybe it’s just the lateral thinking approach, something I’ve always enjoyed. Applying it to a subject I’ve seldom enjoyed (I’ve regarded economists as being about as reliable as weatherforecasters) has meant I’ve got access into economics, stats, sociology in a way I’d never have considered possible. I’d compare Levett’s free-ranging approach perhaps to the way Le Cirque du Soleil has changed people’s idea of what the word ‘circus’ means.

There's now a Freakonomics blog as well.

Music Capitol!!

I’ve never really heard anything of Branson Missouri, but it turns out to be the Live Music Capitol (their spelling) of the World (their claim). If you want entertainment of the musical kind (light entertainment, that is) this is the place to go. But what appealed to me when I checked out the site for planning your holiday there, was the show advertising the Acrobats of China. When you click on their name on the Branson list, it takes you to the New Shanghai Circus site, where there’s a rather rough-looking video offering selected acts from the circus. The most wonderful and hilarious is one that features two Chinese dragons. Inside these are two acrobats who make these dragons (or are they dogs? I’m not sure) race around, roll, leap on and off a table, and eventually cross a couple of wires. It’s the co-ordination that’s so fabulous: how do they leap up onto things when it requires the person in front to move fractionally ahead of the one behind? It’s an extraordinary thing to see, even though the video looks like it’s been shot from the audience with a hand-held camera! Still it must be legit, since it’s on the circus’ site.
There's a great long list of Branson performers, including one crew called Baldknobbers. Hmm. Baldknobbers? Reminds me of a text my daughter sent us today about a shop called Knobs and Knockers: she thought we might like the name...