Category Archives: about me

Memorabilia: The Little Man in the Boxes

In my many moves around the world, I have brought with me a few items that remind me of specific times, places, people, and adventures in my life. This painting is one such.

While we lived in Thailand, my parents acquired some interesting pieces of original and local art, which moved with us and formed a familiar backdrop to our homes from Bangkok to Pittsburgh to Connecticut. We did not take much when we moved to Bangladesh in 1976, most of it went into storage. Sometime while I was attending the University of Texas at Austin, our household goods were moved from storage in Connecticut to my aunt’s property in Texas, where our old dishware may still be languishing in a disused falling-down barn full of rattlesnakes. I later rescued a few items, including the above which had been painted by our family friend Irma, an artist who owned a Scandinavian design shop in Bangkok.

Irma hailed from one of the Nordic countries but had been in Thailand for a while. She lived in a big house with her daughter Hanna, often hosting parties for other expats – wannabe hippies like my parents, and some US military stationed or taking R&R leave from Vietnam in Bangkok.

I never heard whether there was any particular story around this painting or who the man was, but I’ve always been fond of him, sitting there looking so diffident in his blue suit and shiny shoes. He now hangs in my office.

The drab colors in this painting were not typical of Irma’s style. Thai markets in those years sold paper mache animals large and strong enough for a child to sit on, although they were hollow and hence not heavy. There was a slot in the animal’s back so you could use it as a piggy bank (you would have to break it to extract your money). There were elephants, pigs, tigers, etc., painted as close to natural colors as could be achieved with shiny paint, the elephants grey, caparisoned in red and gold, the tigers orange with black stripes.

Irma would turn these animals psychedelic. She gifted us with an elephant painted day-glo yellow, with big pink daisies on its ears and other decorations all over its body. We also had from her a life-sized human figure, painted white? I don’t remember. The elephant plus a pig and a tiger we bought ourselves were mine to play with. (They didn’t survive much beyond the first big move when we left Thailand in 1972.)

The mannequin stood in my parents’ “study”, a room dedicated to getting high in. They had the walls painted flat black, then put up popular posters including the infamous Wally Wood Disney Orgy (NSFW!). That was my first exposure to the classic Disney characters, which may explain my dislike of them. Other posters displayed popular memes of the day:  “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” (later co-opted by a cereal ad) and “War is not good for children and other living things.” I was allowed to stick a trail of day-glo colored dots with footprints on them all across the walls. I loved stickers, still do.

Although the soi (lane) we lived in and the apartment complex next door were largely rented to expats, I didn’t have any friends nearby for most of my five years in Bangkok. Hanna was only two years older than me, so I was always happy to go to Irma’s house to hang out with her while the grownups were getting stoned. Hanna delighted in hiding around corners and jumping out to scare me – she got me every time, and I hated it. The original concept album of “Jesus Christ Superstar” came out in 1970 and was a smash hit with my parents and their crowd. I liked it, too, but I didn’t care much for the song “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, which Hanna therefore sang to me often. Perhaps she wasn’t an ideal friend, but she was one of the few I saw regularly, and I was a lonely child. Outside of school, I spent more of my time around adults than kids.

In 1971, Irma threw a Christmas Eve party for a bunch of expat friends. Below are photos that I took of the event. It’s odd now to remember how everyone smoked so freely (cigarettes as well as joints).

B&W - in the foreground a woman looks down, smiling. She has curly light hair. Beyond her is another woman with dark mid-length hair loose over her shoulders, looking abstracted
B&W - a long table of guests at a Christmas party. Irma with short curly hair wearing a Finnish traditional costume, seated at the end of the table, looks to the camera. Her daughter Hannah stands next to her, hands on hips, apparently berating. Behind Hanna is a Thai man with a glass of something on a tray. Other guests eat and look
B&W Dinner table with various Christmast guests, tinsel streamers and stars hang form the ceiling. A black man at the end of the table with an afro wears sunglasses and has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Another (white) man has a necklace of dark beads and white animal fangs or claws. Irma stands overlooking the table
B&W Christmas dinner with a long table of guests. One man has a mustache and is smoking a cigar
B&W - two men and two women sit on or in front of a sofa. A woman with glasses and a headscarf on is opening a gift. The man in a dark shirt with black and white animal print trousers gazes into the distance, smoking a cigarette or a joint. A man with a mustache curled up at the ends looks the other way. A woman on the floor in a "peasant" dress or blouse looks pensive, cigarette held to her mouth
B&W - a woman sitting on the floor looks at a papier mache bird painted and decorated with beads that has been gifted to her for Christmas. In the foreground a hand holding a cigarette, other people seen from the waist down in the background wearing hippie fashions - one pair of white trousers, one pair of (probably jeans), one "peasant" skirt
The bird here was an Irma original, made of paper mache, brightly painted, and decorated with beads on wires

OMG I’ve found Irma. she’s still in Bangkok (or was in 2017).

2023 Diary: January – June

January: Mitchell began high school (which, in Australia, starts with year 7).

February: I quit Intel and retired in a state of severe burnout. It was nonetheless a busy year.

Sydney World Pride Parade – Feb 23

Royal Easter Show – Apr 10

Japan – April

Nezu Shrine Azaleas

Japanese Food

Osaka Castle Grounds

Shopping

Miscellaneous Sights

Street Scenes

Toilets

Japan does bathrooms better than anywhere else, including public toilets.

Singapore – June

We went to Singapore (first time for both of us) because Brendan was co-chairing a SREcon, but we took some extra time to sightsee and get together with friends and fellow alumni of Woodstock School.

Botanic Garden

Asian Civilizations Museum

Mandai

Buddha Tooth Temple

Food

Singapore Street Scenes

Gardens by the Bay

I also took a cooking class with Food Playground, which was a lot of fun. Here’s me looking quite professional:

Memorabilia: Steiff Ibex

As part of my childhood love of animals (stuffed and real), I somehow became aware of Steiff, the German manufacturer of iconic stuffed toys and inventors of the original Teddy bear. They sold a huge range of animals of all sizes and species, most of them about as realistic-looking as it was possible for a plush toy to be. We once visited the equally iconic toy store FAO Schwartz in New York, which sold a vast collection of Steiff toys, including giraffes and elephants that towered over me, and tigers I could probably ride on. I yearned to own a Steiff animal.

They cost hundreds to thousands of dollars even 50 years ago. I couldn’t imagine what kind of family could afford such expensive toys, but we certainly couldn’t. I saved up my allowance and, on a future trip to one of Pittsburgh’s fancier toy stores, was able to buy this little guy. I vaguely recall that it cost $12? This was about 1972, so we’re talking $90 in today’s terms, an amount I would now hesitate to spend on a stuffed toy.

I felt him to be so precious that I never played with him much, nor even gave him a name. Poor little chap, he was not part of my busy community of toys. But he has stayed with me all these years.

My Lego Builds

I do buy and build Lego kits, but I most enjoy creating my own builds, which nowadays tend to be recreations of architecture that exists in the world.

Below I’ll share galleries of my work, sometimes with inspiration photos (some builds are entirely out of my own head).

Latest: Sydney Victorian Terrace house

Freestyle Builds

Indian Architecture

Jantr Mantr

Photos of the original Jantr Mantr(s)

Queenslander-ish

Colorful Houses

Italian Cathedral

“Ascot”

Why I don’t want the AstraZeneca vaccine

Update Aug 16, 2021: If I were still unvaccinated today (or even weeks ago), I would of course have a completely different view of the risk: the risk of me getting COVID is now much higher, and hugely outweighs the risk of blood clots. Risk is always relative.


First, let’s get a few possible misconceptions out of the way:

I’m not an anti-vaxxer

I already got my flu shot, as I do every year. I have been vaccinated frequently throughout my life, having lived in many “exotic” countries when you had to travel with a vaccination record to show you weren’t carrying yellow fever, typhoid, etc. I raised my daughter in Italy, where kids cannot go to school without being fully vaccinated. I had no problem with this, in fact I considered it a favor when we were reminded to get her childhood vaccines on time and it was easy to do so with the family GP. Her entire school was once given Hepatitis B vaccines without parents even being informed. I had no problem with that, either. I am grateful that vaccines exist and have even gotten better over time.

Continue reading Why I don’t want the AstraZeneca vaccine