Tag: Sydney

Made in the Shade

 

For the home gardener or professional landscaper who absolutely must work in the sun on a hot day, there are no satisfactory ways to temporarily create sizable shaded areas. Beach umbrellas offer only a small circle of shade, can become dangerous projectiles in the wind, and at any rate are configured for people to sit under, not stand upright under, to gain their protection.

 

A portable canopy, such as may be found at a farmer’s market or a flea market, where it shades a seller’s wares, as well as the seller and any buyer, offers a sizable area of shade but is not as portable as one would like if the need arises to pick it up and move it several times during an afternoon of garden work. Four-legged canopies are also unsuitable on uneven ground, where they are likely to tip even without encouragement from a breeze. Preventing tipping requires the use of sandbags or other weights, and after a few repetitions setting up a so-called portable canopy becomes a real chore.

Guarda-chuvas em Cerveira
Umbrellas overhang a street in Vila Nova de Cerveira, Portugal, as part of an arts festival in August 2013. The original display of umbrellas in this way was in the Portuguese city of Águeda in 2011. Photo by Joseolgon.

Those are two of the more portable, easier to set up options. Other methods of creating shade, such as deploying sail shades, are hardly portable at all. The Labor Day weekend is the traditional end of summer in the United States, yet there is still plenty of hot weather in store for September and even into October. Working in a sunny garden would be more pleasant with the assistance of a device that is easily workable, portable, and gives a sizable amount of shade. What follows are guidelines for the inventor or inventors of such a sorely needed garden companion.

1) In order to be useful, the device should shade an area no less than 100 square feet, and still fold up compactly enough to fit in a small kit bag. It should weigh less than 20 pounds.

2) The device should remain stable on uneven ground and in the wind, though obviously within reason in both cases, and it should do so without the use of heavy weights.

3) One reasonably fit person should be able to erect the device or fold it up within a minute, and it should be easy for that person to move the device from one location to the next, also within a minute.

4) The shading material should be shade cloth with a density ranging from 60 to 80 percent, which allows cooling breezes through, is lighter than a more tightly woven fabric, and remains more stable in the wind.

5) The supports should be strong, light, and corrosion resistant. Use of spikes to anchor the device is inadvisable since shallowly penetrating spikes can be unreliable, and deeply penetrating ones negate portability.

6) Ideally it should cost less than $100, and definitely no more than $200, even though it should be able to take some rough treatment and last a decade or more.

Is that too much to ask? Certainly it may be too late to have the new Shade Giver ready this year, but surely by next year, when summer heat starts seeping in by April or May, some enterprising person will have created a prototype that could become the new Gardener’s Friend. Perhaps instead of a sail it will resemble one of the shells of the Sydney Opera House. Whatever the design of the device, it should bring sweet relief to those who must labor under the hot sun and still not hurt their backs or pocketbooks. In these warming times, asking for the protection provided by shade has become a necessary request.


Sagasiglar01
The Saga Siglar, a replica of a Viking ship, sails near Australia’s Sydney Opera House in September 1985. Photo by Islandmen.

— Izzy

 

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What’s in Your Head?

The Cranberries (6856973494)
Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries performs at the Sydney Entertainment Centre in Australia in March 2012. Photo by Eva Rinaldi.
The title of this post is taken from a line in the 1994 song “Zombie”, written by Dolores O’Riordan and performed by her and her band mates in The Cranberries, namely Noel Hogan, Mike Hogan, and Fergal Lawler, on their album No Need to Argue. She wrote the song in response to news of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing in 1993 that killed two children and injured dozens of bystanders. The zombies of the song are those emotionally hollow, walking dead who will not let go of old political grudges and slights, and persist in their violent ways without concern for whom they harm. The song exerted a large influence in pushing the warring sides in Northern Ireland toward peace. Dolores O’Riordan died unexpectedly Monday at a hotel in London, where she was staying while she worked on a short recording session. She was 46.

The original music video of “Zombie”, which has made an enormous impression around the world since its release in 1994.
The notable thing about Ms. O’Riordan’s singing voice, besides her range, her clear enunciation in an Irish accent, and her use of keening and wailing, was her honest, unaffected vocal presence. There are so many recording tricks available to music producers now that things like a poor, thin voice can be masked with production and electronic effects, and the lyrics can be lost in all of it, though for some songs and performers listeners may not care about that. But while The Cranberries and their producers, notably Stephen Street for the early albums, took advantage of such effects as layering Ms. O’Riordan’s voice with multiple recordings, they never appeared to do so in an effort to disguise a lack of talent, but in the interest of adding depth and harmony to a song. Listening to her sing in settings where no recording gimmicks were available confirms that sense. The tremolo in her voice when she sings parts of “Linger” is all from her and her talent and her capacity for investing emotionally in the lyrics she wrote.

A 2012 visit to the NPR studios showcased the quality of Dolores O’Riordan’s voice and the musicianship of The Cranberries. The set list of five songs from first to last was comprised of “Linger”, “Tomorrow”, “Ode to My Family”, “Zombie”, and “Raining in My Heart”.
Something Else, the last album Dolores O’Riordan and The Cranberries made, was a 2017 collection of some of their hits along with a few new songs, all done acoustically with the accompaniment of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. For almost any other rock band such a presentation might come across as a pretentious, formulaic repackaging done primarily to generate revenue by capitalizing on past success. The Cranberries could get away with it because they were unassuming musicians surprised by their own success, whose sincere desire was to record an album of something genuinely new for themselves and for their fans. The songs they crafted were their own style, despite the pigeonholing common in the music business, where styles are called grunge or pop or folk or rock. They were some of all those things, not wholly invested in any one style. They were who they were (and remain, of course, while three of the four band mates live), young people from working class families in and around Limerick, Ireland, without grand desires to upend the world of music, which they did not do in any event. No matter. They worked steadily at crafting some great music while saying worthwhile things in their tunes, and the Irish songbird Dolores O’Riordan was not just a singer and guitarist and songwriter for the band, but an exemplar for them and us of a true original.
― Techly

 

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