Revolving Secret Santa gifts

The other night my wife's workplace had their Christmas meal together, and during the course of the evening (which was held at the home of one of the senior staff) we played a form of Secret Santa which apparently was originated on the TV series, The Office. It's rather complicated to explain but basically the first person whose name is drawn out of a hat goes to the pile of little gifts, picks one, and then draws the next name. 

If the person who's drawn second thinks he or she would like the first person's gift, they're entitled to take it off them (!), or they can go and get a new present from the pile. And then the third person comes into the game, and again can choose someone else's gift or get a new one. It's gets quite complicated once a number of gifts have been opened, because things start to move around the room quite rapidly, especially if they have appeal to more than one person. 

The gift I got didn't have appeal to anyone else, so I wound up with it, and couldn't snaffle anyone else's gift. My wife, on the other hand, managed to get something she wanted from someone else, lost it, got it again and finished up losing it completely before winding up with a jar of tamarillo chutney.

My gift was a box of three little scented candles. Maybe we'll find a use for them sometime, or else we'll put them in someone else's Secret Santa parcel if the occasion arises...

Unlike these Diptyque candles shown in the picture, mine were modest little fellers. The left hand one of the three in the picture is called Feu de Bois or firewood, the one on the right, Figuier, means fig tree. The middle one doesn't appear to have a translation. While the site where these candles are advertised talks about how the company came into existence, it doesn't give any indication as to how the name came about, with its curious spelling, easily mispronounced. However, good old Wikipedia tells us that the word is related to the Greek diptykos, and relates to a painting or sculpture composed of two panels or parts. I'm not sure how that connects to the candles, but I'm sure there's someone out there who'll know.

The Phantom

The phantom power mentioned in a Nady Phantom power supply is a mystery to me...or at least it was until I found a very useful page telling me exactly what phantom power is. Read the page: he does it much better than I could, and manages to make it comprehensible.

For those who don't get around to reading the page, I can tell you that phantom power has nothing to do with the paranormal (although some singing that goes into the mics using phantom power might well be considered abnormal).

That aside, it reminded me of that old comic strip, The Phantom, a character who doesn't seem to have been taken up by Hollywood in its current rash of super heroes. Admittedly The Phantom - or The Ghost Who Walks - didn't seem to have any particular powers - his abilities were mostly fairly easily explained if you thought about it. Perhaps his peculiar power of being able to wander through the jungle in a tight suit and mask without ever getting it torn was something special, but otherwise he was a pretty ordinary bloke, I think.

I thought The Phantom had long since departed the syndicated comics scene, but though his creator, Lee Falk (who first introduced him in 1936) died twenty-one years ago, the series continues. It's been drawn by several artists over the period, though only one other writer, Tony DePaul, seems to have been involved since Lee Falk died.

The Phantom was the first hero to wander around in a skin-tight suit (thus setting a trend for all the later super heroes) and also the first to wear a mask that somehow hid his pupils. This idea of having no visible pupils apparently came from sculptured Greek statues, many of which were eyeless.

When I say that Hollywood hasn't recently worked with The Phantom, that's not to say it never has. There was a successful serial way back in the forties, and there was a feature film in 1996 (starring Billy Zane), which I can't say I remember seeing advertised. A more recent version was to have been filmed, but seems to have gone down the plughole. Sam Worthington was at one time being touted as the lead.

There have been at least three Phantom musicals, two of them originating in Scandinavia, an area of the world with which the Phantom has long had an association through Fantomen, the Swedish version of the character, which dates from 1950, Fantomet in Norway, and Mustanaamio in Finland.

Well, there you go. Plainly The Phantom/Fantomen/Fantomet/Mustanaamio is alive and well, and looking forward to being around much longer than any of his creators. It helps, of course, that us ordinary mortals can't distinguish Phantom number 21 from number 20 and so on.

Disappointed

I've had some great albums from Rattle Records, and I think they do a great job of promoting NZ music, both contemporary classical and jazz.   So one of the things I put on my Christmas present suggestion list was a relatively new album called Flight on Light, with a clarinettist called Manos Achalinotopoulos. You can read a biography of him on clarinet.gr.

Achalinotopoulos is a fantastic clarinettist, and a marvellous musician - there's no doubt about this.  He can get the clarinet to make sounds you couldn't imagine a clarinet making.  And on the album he produces some fantastic improvisatory music.  Achalinotopoulos is backed on the album by a number of NZ musicians, most notably John Psathas.

So what's the problem?  My wife and I listened to the album on the way back from Christchurch in January, and I've played it a couple of times since then.  Hearing it in the car we had ample space to listen more carefully than we might here at home where there are always other things going on.   But we were disappointed: Achalinotopoulos is given free range to play in any mood.  Unfortunately, he's chosen, or perhaps is mostly inclined to play, very moody, melancholy, reflective, often quite abstract music. There's little change in mood from one track to the next.  The only one that has a bit more life to it is actually given that life by the backing musicians, who set some pace and rhythm behind Achalinotopoulos.  He, in effect, plays as he does on all the other tracks.  This is not to say that he never plays at speed - he certainly does, but it's all within a fairly monochrome colour palette.  It's like being in a house that's painted in a variety of greys, and everything else - furniture and furnishings - fits into that grey colour scheme.  As some readers will know, we've just painted our house grey, with white tonings, and I realised the other day that our kitchen is grey - with white tonings.  And our bathrooms are both grey.  But the difference is there are plenty of other colours as well, so that the grey doesn't take over. 

For me, the grey takes over on this album, and after three or four tracks you want some red, or green, or yellow. 

Miscellaneous

Alan Jacobs, who tweets a good deal on all sorts of things, and probably should be getting on with his real writing more often, sent a wonderful Tweet during the early days of the Soccer World Cup:

This ball might as well be an Elgin Marble, so incapable are the Greeks of retaining possession of it.

I only remembered about this because I've been keeping a list of various items I want to use at some point in the blog, or elsewhere. They're a pretty random bunch, and it's hard to think how I'd place Jacobs' line otherwise than by just plunking it down on the page.

Here's something totally different, relating to the number of bags that are lost annually by air companies. (By the way, if you travel a lot and want to prevent hair loss from stress, don't read the following!)

Apparently 25 million items of luggage are misplaced globally each year, or one bag per 100 passenger. Pretty scary. We've only ever had one bag go astray, and that was between Dunedin and Wellington last year. We stayed in Wgtn for a couple of days, but the bag still didn't manage to get there. Finally we carried onto Napier, our next destination, and somehow or other (since Air NZ didn't know we were going there) the bag managed to get there ahead of us!

So when do bags go missing? Here are the stats:

- Transfer baggage mishandling (52 per cent)

- Failure to load (16 per cent)

- Passenger bag switch/security/ticketing error (13 per cent)

- Loading/offloading (7 per cent)

- Airport/customs/weather/space-weight restriction (6 per cent)

- Arrival station mishandling (3 per cent)

- Tagging errors (3 per cent)

It's those transfers that are the big problem. I watched a bunch of guys throwing (yup, that's how it's done) bags onto a trolley while waiting for my plane to move onto the next destination a few weeks ago. None of the bags were checked in terms of whether they should have been taken off the plane or not. In fact, the guys didn't look at the labels at all. No wonder things go astray.

C S Lewis on seeing the world through other men's eyes

I'm grateful for Christianity at the Movies' e-letter for alerting me to the following quote, in which C S Lewis basically follows through on Paul's comments about being a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to the Greeks (my rough paraphrase), and shows that the arts can help us understand (but not necessarily agree with) the mind that doesn't have a Christian worldview.
In his book, An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis writes, "We therefore delight to enter into other men's beliefs ... even though we think them untrue. And into their passions, though we think them depraved ... And also into their imaginations, though they lack all realism of content."

[Lewis is writing mostly in the context of reading books and poetry, but his thoughts on criticism apply just as well to film—or any art form, for that matter. He continues:] "This must not be understood as if I were making the literature of power once more into a department which existed to gratify our rational curiosity about other people's psychology. It is not a question of knowing (in that sense) at all. It is connaître not savoir; it is erleben; we become these other selves. Not only nor chiefly in order to see what they are like but in order to see what they see, to occupy, for a while, their seat in the great theatre, to use their spectacles and be made free of whatever insights, joys, terrors, wonders, or merriment those spectacles reveal ...

"This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. ... Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors." [Or, I might add, movie directors.] "We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less of a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. ... In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."

Drumming with Gareth Farr

In yet another attempt to improve my familiarity with New Zealand music, I’m listening to what is now a relatively old CD of Gareth Farr’s music.
Phew! There's an awful lot of noisy drumming. It might be fun for the percussion department, but I bet the strings and wind nearby find it all a bit too much for their ears.
Not that I dislike the music. Farr shares with John Psathas (another NZ composer whose music I like) the ability to write music with huge energy. It’s probably exhausting to play, but it certainly is invigorating, like taking a swim in the Southern ocean (especially around St Clair or St Kilda on a less than warm day). Perhaps this is an aspect of New Zealand music that imprints it with the flavour of the country. Compare it to the relatively lifeless stuff that our so-called most famous composer, Douglas Lilburn, produced (before he went off in the haywire world of electronic music). Some of his stuff gets moving, but for the most part it’s pretty tame. Okay, I don’t like Douglas Lilburn’s music. That’s it. I ain’t gonna apologize no more!
I remember being in the Milford Art Gallery here in Dunedin a long time ago, and expressing a similar opinion about the work of an artist which was on display. With considerable sense, the owner Stephen said, You don’t have to like everything, just because it’s there. In fact, he was even rude about that other icon of NZ art: Colin McCahon. I won’t say what he said, but it rather confirmed some of my feelings about that bloke too.

The photo, in case there's any confusion, is of John Psathas, courtesy of the Arts Foundation site.