Andrew Baisley

“ I read this an implemented about 80% of her advice and it was pretty life changing. AMA. ”
– Allison Esposito

Discussion | Link

“Last week I was in a motorcycle accident in Jakarta: I flew off my bike and hit my head on a pole, breaking my neck in 3 places. When I came to, nobody was around and I had to hold my neck firm with my hands and get a taxi to the hospital. Then I was flown here to get medical attention. It’s kind of a freak accident: only 3% of people with this injury survive it.”

“What were you doing in Jakarta?”

“I work there. I’m a spinal rehabilitation therapist.”

“When the Japanese were coming, my husband put me and the boys on a boat to Australia to evacuate. There were two boats leaving that day and we got on the first one. But before departure, I realised one of the boys had left his comfort pillow on the dock, so we went back out to get it. He would be inconsolable without it.

Well we found the pillow but before we could get back to our seats , they announced our boat was leaving. The security officers refused to let us back on even though our things were on board.

‘Don’t worry madam, you can take the next boat. They are both going to the same place.’

So our belongings left without us and we got on the second boat. But not long after leaving the harbour, the first ship was sunk by the Japanese. We survived but were captured and sent to an internment camp in one of the nearby islands.

But my husband didn’t know we had changed ships. He thought we had all been killed.

The camp was a terrible place. Many died and there was not enough food. And I didn’t have milk for my youngest who was still a baby. We gave him rice water but he was poorly.

By luck, after many months in camp, I met a boy who recognised me. He was a Malay lad who my husband used to tutor in English. He was not imprisoned so he got word back to my husband that we were alive. My husband was then able to get us released and we returned to Singapore.

After that, I had to stay at home in order to be safe. Because I am Caucasian, the Japanese said they could take me away to Changi prison for no reason. 'Any time we want, we can come for you.’ So all those years until the end of the war, I never showed my face outside to remind them I existed. And gladly they forgot me.

I have had many blessings. I must thank God for a good husband. I met him when I was 17 and it was love at first sight. My parents did not want me to marry a Chinese boy but eventually they grew to love him the way I did. They came to know what I knew, that he was a wonderful, wonderful man.

How kind God has been to me.”

Doris now has 'more grandchildren and great-grandchildren than I can count!’

She was born in Singapore on 26th January 1918. Happy Birthday Doris

Phrases like “The Dog Days of Summer” and “It’s a Dog-Eat-Dog World Out There” don’t cast being a dog in such a positive light. Judging from these photos, I don’t see a thing wrong with being a doggeh. Now let’s have the waffles and OJ, please.

Sent in by “Annemieke and Bink (who was featured on Cute Overload on Toesday 26th of May this year) from the Netherlands,” as seen on Bored Panda.

This is a house in Bayside (fittingly, the Queens neighborhood that once gave an architecture award to this building). It is, according to the listing, "Newly Custom Built Contemporary With Finest Materials." It is...something. Rather than try to describe it as a whole, we're just going to list some of things in it:

· many white leather couches
· a recording studio
· a bedroom with multicolored recessed lights
· a bedroom (the same bedroom, in fact) with three fur throw rugs
· an elevator
· whatever that foyer is
· probably eight quarries' worth of marble (and granite)
· a seven-by-seven grid of windows that takes up the entire middle third of the facade
· a Dali-esque melting clock

This house is asking $6.5 million, and by god, it should get it.

See more mind-boggling New York mansions:
Mansion Fit for the King of Staten Island Asks $2.65 Million
Century-Old Bronx Mansion With An Indoor Pool Asks $8M
Staten Island Manse with Pool, Granite Floors Asks $1.9M
Sprawling Oceanfront Villa in Brighton Beach Returns for $8M

· Listing: 215-40 27th Avenue [Elliman, via Streeteasy]

Hello stranger.

It feels like forever since we last chatted, but I’m so glad we have a chance to catch up. Hmmm? Whats new?

BOOM.

Landscape.

WE FINALLY DID THIS SHIT.

After years of procrastination, a few false starts and multiple plans, we finally got it together enough to rip out the grass (aka weeds) and put in something low maintenance and much more drought friendly. In case you hadn’t heard, California is basically drying up and turning to dust and is desperate for people to conserve what little water is left. We applied for a residential turf removal rebate through SoCal Water$mart which is a super great program. It was easy to apply and we ended up receiving $2 a square foot to install a California friendly landscape. If you’re in SoCal, do it. Then you’ll enjoy felling superior and judging every neighbor who still has grass while you have a sweet new landscape and a nice check from the government because of it.

So lets time travel to those long ago days of 2011-ish to see what the landscape was looking like…

BEFORE

Blah.

Screw you weedy problematic grass. You were the worst and such a pain in the ass to rip out by hand. I never want to look at another action hoe again.

What did things look like during the whole landscaping process? Basically? Horrible.

This is about the only photo I have during the process. It took us about four months to rip out the grass, level the yard and plant the first few tiny plants. Since we were doing this DIY style and only a few sections at a time, for many many months it looked like the crazy random cactus dirt yard and neighbors gave us the stink eye or would bring by a random pity cactus or two. I swore I had a plan! These things take time!

We ended up doing everything ourselves and as low cost as possible, like hand shoveling 15 tons of DG that we would buy and transport in our truck  one half load at a time or grabbing any sizable rock that we saw on the side of the road in a dirt field. FYI – rocks are crazy heavy and those nice big landscape boulders are crazy expensive to buy and get delivered – so the size of the rocks throughout the landscape represent the maximum amount we could physically lift.

Rocks. You bastards.

Overall things stayed terrible looking for the next six months as we added more plants plus our “found” rocks and section by section of a finishing layer of “Palm Springs Gold” decomposed granite (aka DG).

About a year later and here things are.

The plants are still growing and haven’t reached their mature sizes and we’ve been adding a few plants or propagate succulents here and there to start the process of filling things in. We still need to install the walkway from the front door to the street/mailbox, so excuse the random looking empty area in the middle. I’m working on it. You know…this thing is a process?

Well, the above Palo Verde was basically a stick with three leaves when we bought it from a landscape guy for $20. We planned on planting three Desert Museum Palo Verdes to create an overall sparse canopy in front of the house, but turns out its surprisingly hard to find these locally and they would range in price from $60 to over $400. So this scraggly boy grew up and turned out not to be a Desert Museum. Whoops. But we do have two DM’s we found at an out of the way Home Depot which hopefully all will blend in well together.

Hedgehog Agave, found at the most shameful of all places, WalMart, for $6. I love these things and couldn’t find them anywhere else and ended up buying their entire stock of like seven plants. I want more and now they are a ghost who never gets restocked. Gone but not forgotten.

Those before mentioned Desert Museum Palo Verde’s had their first bloom. So pretty.

Get bigger you jerks.

Artichoke Agave, it combines my two favorite things – artichokes and indestructible plants.  It grows soooooo slow, but we randomly found a few at Lowes in the houseplant section for $17. I keep looking for more but they are always pretty pricey when I find them.

Mexican Feather Grass, oh no! People hate it because it is invasive, people love it because it looks amazing and needs very little water or maintenance. I’m on the love side for my local environment and found it actually very difficult to get established. Its so dry and hot here that the little baby grasses we would plant tended to shrivel up into crispy brown tumbleweeds. FYI – Lowes has a great dead plant return policy. We used it liberally.

It’s been about a year and some are still randomly small. I don’t know why since plants are a frustrating mystery. I keep hoping some seedlings might pop up in our neighbors random weed & trash yards, but so far no luck. We can’t even get them to grow little volunteers in our yard. I guess if your climate is less of a hard baked waterless hellhole like mine, these things might be pretty invasive.

Yes, there are so very many Blue Agave’s scattered throughout. We found this local wholesale nursery that the guys at the DG yard told us about, it has no name, its all cash and it has lots of Agaves for $10. I’ve found that these do really well in our terrible soil and horrible climate. They hurt to plant and will give you a poke once in awhile, but they are super low maintenance and now survive on rainwater. One problem is that they make tons of babies. I pull some of the babies off and plant them, some I put in pots, and some I throw into our compost.

Maybe we will make tequila with them some day.

We have more feather grass along the driveway to help soften things up and disguise the ugly fence. Its the one thing the neighbors seem to approve of. Otherwise, everyone seems to disapprove or are pretty weary of all the cactus everywhere. I kind of enjoy threatening looking plants, less random weirdos wander up to the house and kids don’t ride their bikes across our front yard as much as they used to.

So yeah.

We finally did something with the yard.

We also fixed up the side yard, but have a few projects to finish back there that I’ll post about later. It will take some time for things to fill in and we still have to add the steps for the walkway and some more plants, but the landscape is basically installed. I decided to go for a more asymmetric and natural desert scape planting style to balance and soften all the hard geometric lines of the house. We kept the cost way down by doing it ourselves over a longer timeline and sourcing out affordable small plants and materials. We ended up spending about $1500 to landscape over 3000 sq.ft of our property and with the turf removal rebate came out way ahead of covering the cost for the entire project.

At first we watered the plants a few times a week to help get them established, but now, around a year later, we only need to water once a month during the hottest parts of the summer and then not at all during the rest of the year. I’m really happy with how easy everything is to maintain and am looking forward to see how it all will grow out and eventually mature (which is going to take forever).

FYI – cactus grows real slow even if you’re not real patient.

datanews:

NYC’s Key to Clean Water: Upstate Real Estate

1. Rain and snow falling across this land in the Catskills, 70 miles up the Hudson River, supply roughly 90% of New York City’s water.
   
2. Combined, these patches of city-owned property would roughly equal the size of New York City minus Staten Island. NYC is buying even more land to block development and pollution, and to avoid building another filtration plant.
   
3. In addition to city-owned land, half of the watershed is either state owned or privately owned and under forest, farm or conservation plans designed to protect water from pollution.
   
4. That’s a chunk of wilderness the size of a 2100 square-foot 3-bedroom apartment near Union Square. So, in a sense, you do have a yard!
   

Have you ever wondered where NYC’s water comes from?

An OVERLOAD of The Qte. Served right up into your ‘puter via The Intertubes. Kewl and stuff.

(Via The BuzzFeedersons.)

We all know by now The Big J is known for its trend-setting Ways Of The Qte. The latest deal over there is to take your doggeh to the groomer and have ’em crank out a cube-shaped coiff.

Honest.

Natalie W. saw this on MTV.com.

HAPPY FRIDAY

–sean, sideshow

continue reading

The Tisell 40mm Flieger Watch w/ Seagull ST2130 Movement, or, If You’ve Always Wanted a Stowa Flieger But Couldn’t Afford One, Buy This.

Last week I posted a picture of my Eberhard & Co. Traversetolo on this blog. It’s a mechanical pilot’s watch (it has a decorated Unitas 6497 handwinding movement for its innards), though not of the traditional flieger design you see above. But its simple face and luminous arabic numerals place it, to my mind at least, squarely within the category of a pilot’s watch.

In any case, I’ve long loved the look of the flieger watch, and have been on the lookout for a moderately sized one (something with no larger than a 42mm face) for almost a decade. I used to own two, a white-dialed Fortis Flieger, and a black-dialed Archimede that I bought barely used from a fellow WIS right when the company began. Unfortunately, dire financial straits that befell me as a graduate student forced their sale, and they now cost about twice what they did then to procure on the used market. 

The flieger design is originally from WWII, and has an eminently utilitarian aesthetic driven by the need for its wearer–a pilot–to read the watch with a quick glance. Pushing the original flieger’s utility even further were the watches’ giant-sized faces (again, for legibility) and ability to be worn atop a thick shearling bomber jacket–usually achieved with a long riveted leather strap. For this reason, many contemporary fliegers that pay homage to their predecessors come in dial sizes in the 44-47mm range, which is too big for my tastes (I once owned a 47mm Azimuth Flieger and sold it almost immediately). 

The obvious choice (in my book) for a 40mm flieger is one from German watch company Stowa’s line, but their prices are a bit high for me (~$600-800 on the used market), and so you can imagine my joy at finding out that Tisell, a Korean watch company, was selling a very clean looking sterile-dialed 40mm flieger for under $200. As far as I can tell, the major difference aesthetically between the Tisell and Stowa fliegers is that the Stowa has a taller case, and an ‘onion’ shaped crown, rather than the ‘diamond’ shaped crown on the Tisell, which, to be honest, I prefer. Internet watch fora seem to confirm too that the Tisell, unlike other inexpensive-to-moderately-priced fliegers, actually has heat-treated blued hands (as opposed to blue enameled hands) which are much more costly to manufacture. The Tisell also came with a much nicer strap than I was expecting, though it’s shown here on a leather NATO from Panatime. As far as the lume is concerned, I think the Stowa has the Tisell beat. Although Tisell claims to use C1 superluminova, the application of it seems to yield only a moderate luminescence; it lasts throughout the night after about 30 seconds under an LED flashlight, but is not extraordinarily bright. The 40mm Tisell also comes standard with a domed sapphire crystal, a very nice touch at its $180 price point, which includes expedited int’l shipping.

For their flieger model, Tisell uses a Chinese-made Seagull ST-2130 movement (with nice blued screws and a decorated rotor), which is basically a clone of the workhorse Swiss ETA 2824-2 found in the Stowa fliegers, as well as many other watches (including the Fortis and Archimede fliegers I used to own). A cool article can be found here comparing the ETA and Seagull movements, as well as another Chinese clone, the Peacock SL3000. Though a clean example of an ST-2130 ought to be as dependable as an ETA 2824-2, the quality-control on Seagull movements can be all over the place. One thing that drew me to Tisell was second-hand information via online watch fora that they inspect each movement before assembling their watches in Korea. I can’t verify the truth of those claims, but so far my watch is running about +/- 10 seconds/day, which is totally reasonable for an automatic watch, and it is certainly beautiful to look at through the exhibition case back. 

Right now the Tisell website is only selling 43mm and 44mm versions of the flieger, but I believe they will have the 40mm version on their website soon. I found a thread on reddit that said you could message Tisell via their ebay account to inquire about the 40mm version, which I did, and was able to procure mine that way. If you’re interested, perhaps you’ll have the same luck as I did in this regard. In any case, I just wanted to post about this watch because I think it’s a great deal for a hard-to-find size and style of watch. 

wood-is-good:

myidealhome: [travel tuesday] stunning Aescher Hotel in Switzerland 

My much-beloved Eberhard & Co. Traversetolo. More to come on pilot’s watches, why I like them so much, and my recent purchase of a moderately sized flieger.

peterfromtexas:

First (Fully) Warm-blooded Fish Found

by Stephanie Pappas

The car-tire-size opah is striking enough thanks to its rotund, silver body. But now, researchers have discovered something surprising about this deep-sea dweller: It’s got warm blood.

That makes the opah (Lampris guttatus) the first warm-blooded fish every discovered. Most fish are exotherms, meaning they require heat from the environment to stay toasty. The opah, as an endotherm, keeps its own temperature elevated even as it dives to chilly depths of 1,300 feet (396 meters) in temperate and tropical oceans around the world.

“Increased temperature speeds up physiological processes within the body,” study leader Nicholas Wegner, a biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California, told Live Science. “As a result, the muscles can contract faster, the temporal resolution of the eye is increased, and neurological transmissions are sped up. This results in faster swimming speeds, better vision and faster response times.”…

(read more: Live Science)

photograph by NOAA Fisheries, SW Fisheries Science Center

The Best Friends Animal Society in Salt Lake City (also an L.A. location) has taken in 500+ kittens in the last two months, and they need homes!

“Sometimes you have to go Cute to raise awareness about an important issue. We’re thrilled the campaign is getting so much attention and hope that we’re inspiring people to take action,” said Eric Rayvid of BFAS in an email to Cute Overload.

“If you’re looking for a new pet, we urge you to adopt.”

“If you can’t take a new pet into your home, volunteer at your local humane society.”

“If you don’t have the time, donations are always needed to take care of homeless pets in your area.”

“At Best Friends Animal Society, we really believe that together we can Save Them All!” [Bravo. -Ed.]

(ABC News.com with thanks to Brianna V.)

At Google's I/O Keynote earlier, the ubiquitous tech company is making itself even more present in our lives, by offering free unlimited photo storage with Google Photos. The only limits on this service are that photos are capped at 16 MP and videos at 1080P. If the photos you store happen to be larger than these parameters, Google will compress them for you without compromising visual quality. The app also offers auto-backup from its iOS and Android apps, so you never have to worry about syncing your photos or even paying for the storage. Comparatively, Apple's iCloud costs a whopping $240 USD a year for a terabyte of storage, while Dropbox costs $100 USD, and Microsoft OneDrive at $84 USD (check out the handy price comparison list below). But not only is storage important, but photos offer a wealth of information if tools are available to analyze them -- which Google has available. Google's technologies will be able to determine the who, what, where and when of the photos you store, which allows for plenty of implications. For example, it can dictate what ads to personalize to your liking, location ID to predict what you might search for, or even suggest who to share your photos with. Google Photo's Assistant feature also helps edit and curate your photos, automatically adjusting overexposure and turning burst photos into GIFs. While offering the service and storage for free only tempts users to buy into Google's ever-expanding family of apps that will inevitably complement every aspect of our lives, Google Photos really is perfect for the casual photographer, whose photos can now be saved forever, for free. Check out Google Photos here, which is automatically available to anyone with a Google account.

Read more at Hypebeast.com