Amazon Studios has a new 34,000-square-foot virtual production stage in Culver City. Well, maybe not new. It’s the historic Stage 15, built in 1940 was once home to movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Robocop”.
Like other projects that have traded the problems of green screens for much better filming alternatives, Stage 15 has been revamped with a wall of more than 3,000 LED panels and motion capture cameras that re-create the outside world indoors. It allow actors to interact with the environment rather than pretend in front of a green screen.
Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom. After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.” “Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he was saying to them. Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.
Luke 2:41-52
I wanted to share a recent reflection during some Lexio divina (divine reading in which we read; meditate; pray; contemplate).
This reading comes up early in the gospels, and is also the 5th joyful mystery of the rosary. In many meditations, I found myself drawn to how hard it was for His parents. Can you imagine the fear when by the end of the first day they realized Jesus wasn’t in the party and they needed to turn around? Then perhaps on the end of the second day when they were likely asking everyone they passed, not finding Him, then needing to end their second night without any luck? Those must have been terribly frightening and restless nights. Then the third day when they finally found Him – perhaps when they had exhausted the obvious places in Jerusalem and went to the Temple to pray for help. We can imagine all the feelings and fear they had when looking for Jesus – many of the same fears, struggles, and disappointments we sometimes get while trying to find God in our own lives – only to find him in prayer/sacraments when we come to our wits end and stop relying only on ourselves.
We can also focus spiritually on this as a prefiguring of Jesus’ three days in the tomb. Or perhaps as a mirror of our journey through Lent in which we search for Jesus in our lives during Lent/his 3 days in the tomb, only to find him at the resurrection at Easter. We find He has passed on to His Father’s heavenly house where we finally find Him.
But in a recent reflection, I found myself focusing on what Jesus must have experienced.
I got lost once in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago on a family trip when I was about 10 years old. I got completely captivated playing with a set of really cool mechanical gear displays. (It turns out someone else liked them too and put a recording up on Youtube.) I think playing with these displays was one of the first really big moments when I got fascinated in engineering. It was definitely a formative moment for me and hit a chord that lead me down the roads of math and sciences.
After being completely captivated with workings for a long time, I turned around and realized the rest of my family wasn’t there. I tried to find them but didn’t know where they’d gone. A couple saw my peril and took me to the central desk. They pinged my parents on the intercom. It turns out I was only a room away from them. It was only for a few minutes but with 5 kids they didn’t notice I wasn’t still in the gaggle of kids in the crowd, nor had I notice they had moved on. I think every parent/child has had this experience.
I was reflecting on this reading and that memory surfaced with all the feelings at the time. Perhaps Jesus was also completely captivated by the Temple and felt a powerful connection to His Father. The passage says they went every year, but this particular year Jesus must have been drawn especially for some reason. Perhaps it was like Samuel who is called while in the house of the Lord where the ark was kept.
I think we all have these moments of being completely captivated by something so that everything else falls away. For me as a kid it was those fascinating mechanical workings – to the point I didn’t even realize I’d ‘lost’ my family. In later years, praying with the blessed sacrament was the place I found an even more profound captivation and sense of place, home, and real peace in my heart. In those moments, there was nowhere else I could imagine being. Maybe Jesus experienced this at the age of 12 as He was captivated by His Father’s house and spent time there until He’d completely missed the fact his parents had left. I certainly have felt that kind of complete absorption in prayer at times.
But what about first night? Where’d He stay? Or the second night? Where did He get food? I get the feeling this might have been the very first awakenings of turning to and trusting in His heavenly Father to provide everything He needed. At some point as the evening fell, He must have realized his parents were gone. Perhaps He decided to stay where He most felt at home – the Temple where He was in His Father’s presence – the only place Jesus could imagine being. Perhaps He slept in the doorway or inside the Temple itself. Perhaps people gave Him bread and food the second day. While being there, He probably met the scribes and priests and started asking questions.
Jesus speaks very matter of fact to His parents about this. I think many parents have asked kids why they did something and children also state such wisdom and reasoning so matter of fact. I also wonder that this was probably a huge formative moment in which He, and all of us, learn that we can and need to completely trust our heavenly Father to provide what we need. Jesus seemed to think all His answers, material needs, and place was with His Father.
Do we find ways to turn to God in our day – as the one place we come back to again and again no matter what goes on in life? Do we return to God in prayer as the one place we find refuge during the great joys, the quiet times, the worried times, and even times of feeling completely lost?
You might not know the name J.I. Rodale, but I guarantee you know some of his work – such as the founder of Prevention magazine and coining the term ‘organic’ for farming/produce grown without artificial additives. What you might not know is how it all ended and what we can learn from his life.
History
Rodale was an early advocate of sustainable agriculture and organic farming in the United States. He popularized the term “organic” as a term for growing food without pesticides. Inspired by his encounters with other health-minded experts, he started promoting a healthy and active lifestyle that emphasized organically grown foods. In the 1940’s he established the Rodale Organic Gardening Experimental Farm and started publishing Organic Farming and Gardening magazine, which was later retitled Organic Gardening. In 1945, he wrote Pay Dirt, the first American book on organic gardening.
One of Rodale’s most successful projects was Prevention magazine, founded in 1950. It pioneered the return to whole grains, unrefined sweets, using little fat in food preparation, folk cures, herbal medicines and breastfeeding. It also promoted nutritional supplements and cutting nicotine and caffeine. Rodale opposed the consumption of milk and sugar, which he blamed for many diseases. Rodale once stated “I’m going to live to be 100, unless I’m run down by some sugar-crazed taxi driver”
What happened
In June 1971 at the age of 72, Rodale was giving an interview on the wonders of organic food on The Dick Cavett Show. During Rodale’s interview he stated such things, “I’m in such good health that I fell down a long flight of stairs yesterday and I laughed all the way,” “I’ve decided to live to be a hundred,” and “I never felt better in my life!”
After his interview, Rodale remained onstage and was seated on a couch beside the next interviewee. Rodale then appeared to lose consciousness and leaned over. After calling for medics to perform CPR, Rodale was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead of a heart attack. The episode was never broadcast out of respect. He died at the same age as his own father died. All his efforts didn’t even yield him one extra year of life.
Not the first
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. Dr Robins Atkins famously created the Atkins heart-healthy diet, “the apostle of protein gluttony as a passport to health, wholesomeness and the perfect figure”. Atkins had a heart attack the year before his accidental death slipping on ice. The medical examiner accidentally revealed that Atkins was suffering from hypertension and congestive heart failure at the time of death. He also died at the age of 72.
What to learn
This is not to say we shouldn’t do our best to stay healthy. We know that smoking, drinking, obesity, and other factors absolutely shorten our lives. But what we should learn is that time and again we’re shown that we can only do so much. Our best laid plans do not guarantee success for our health. We often learn later we were wrong about the science. Sometimes you just get unlucky. But no matter what, eventually all our best laid plans and efforts will fail us.
Our efforts might eek out a few more years, or even a decade or two – or in Rodale’s case – not a single year. We are all going to die someday – but this is not being overly morbid. “Carpe Diem”, Memento Mori, and other phrases and sentiments are something Christians have lived for millennium. It’s a reminder that we must live our lives with purpose and direction. Every day is a gift, and one day that gift will run out whether you are doing something with your life or not. So what are you making of the days of your life?
If you’ve driven much of Portland, you’ll see strange, unfinished ghost ramp branches like this one off the right of the connector ramp between I-5 to I-84.
Peter Dibble does a fantastic job of talking about these interesting historical artifacts from the sometimes bizarre history of Portland road building.
If you think this kind of poor planning is a new problem for Portland, a desperately needed improved and seismically safe I-5 bridge across the Columbia has been worked on for over 17 years. It has absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars, produced dozens of plans, yet not a single shovel of dirt has been moved in all that time.
While many people focus on the kind of acting folks are doing, we often forget the part about them having to memorize lines. Tons and tons of lines. Rote memorization was always a bit of a struggle for me so I usually needed lots of practice, or later use things like mnemonics. Others use a memory palace-like system.
This guy shows a memorization technique he picked up from actor Lauren Tothero that follows a 5 step plan:
Read over the lines a few times
Write down the first letter of each word.
Read it using first letters of the word only a few times to help sink it in.
Rewrite the letters just from memory.
Try the whole section just from memory without the letters.
He tries it live on camera to see how well it works – and it seems to work really well (but maybe not quite as ‘instant’ as he proports). Still, it’s something I might try in the future.
I’m going to give you an actual quote from a historical figure, and see if you can figure out what she/he was talking about and who said it. You’ll get two tries. First, I’ll remove a key word from the quote that would give it away.
“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than <our political party name here> attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we <political party name here> conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.”
Figure it out yet? Here’s another way to put this same quote by translating some of the philosophical language to layman’s statements we use today:
“Everything I have said and done in these last years is based on the idea that we decide for yourself what is true and right. People who claim there are are things that are objectively right and wrong are incorrect and should be opposed. Everyone has their own truth to tell. There is nobody that embodies this attitude more than our party. From the fact that all truths are of equal value, our efforts conclude that we have the right to speak our own truth and spread that truth with all the energy of which we are capable.
Some of this sound familiar? I would bet a good number of people would agree with some or many of the ideas behind this quote. We see leaders and experts in the media encouraging people to ‘tell their truth’ and that each of us has our own ‘truth’. We also see a lot of people who are very against religions and to increasing degree our own Democratic political and legal systems. We definitely see groups that use social media witch hunts/doxing and cameras as a weapon to intimidate and silence others.
So who would you guess said this? What political party was he referring too?
The answer is this was from Benito Mussolini. The party was his National Fascist Party. Here’s is the original quote from his philosophical writings:
Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth … then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity… From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.
Diuturna The Lasting as quoted in Rational Man : A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics
It’s no longer Tesla – it’s BYD from China. BYD sold 1.86 million cars in 2022 which surpassed Tesla’s 1.3 million cars. This wasn’t unexpected – back in the financial crisis of 2008’s, Berkshire Hathaway invested a hefty $230 million in BYD stock. How has that gone? Charlie Munger of Berkshire has said the investment was one of his best investments and is doing ridiculously better than Tesla. (paywall free) That outlay has ballooned more than 1,570%, and even after the most recent selldown of it’s holdings in late 2022/early 2023, Berkshire’s remaining stake is still worth around $4.5 billion. BYD is looking to expand it’s reach in Japan and Europe.
BYD has made batteries for commercial and industrial purposes for years – and now they have developed their Blade Battery that seems to handle puncture and temperature tests much better than current EV batteries that have a bad tendency to catch fire and explode in accidents. Tesla plans on using a blade battery in its car in upcoming models.
BYD hasn’t come to the US, but are (obviously) selling quite well in China and Europe. Middle class Chinese customers are flocking to the $14,500 and $29,000 price tag instead of Tesla and other EV makers. So what do these cars look like? Their more recent dual motor flagship model the BYD Han is quite nice. It sells for $42,000 in China and 70,000 Euros in the EU. The interiors and ride is about as nice as the fact it can do 0-60 in 3.9 seconds.
Some of the other offerings from BYD, and a whole host of other makers if you’re curious:
Refik Anadol makes projection mapping and LED screen art. His unique approach, however, is embracing massive data sets churned through various AI algorithms as his visualization source.
I think one of his unique additions to the space is visualizing the latent space generated during machine learning stages.
The first personality tests appeared in the 1920s and were intended to aid in personnel selection, particularly in the military. Since then, a number of personality tests have been developed and optimized for different purposes. Some of these—such as the MBTI and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter—really can help people understand themselves better, but others are made more for fun.
One of the first ones I heard was the field, cube, ladder, and horse test. You ask those with you to sit quietly and then imagine each of these things as you ask the questions. Don’t tell them how many questions there are. Encourage some time as you ask the question so they can get a very good visual picture in their mind before moving on to the next question.
Think of an open field. How big is this field? What is it filled with? What are the surroundings like?
Think of a cube. How big is the cube? What is it made of, and what is the surface like? What color is it? Where in the field is it? Where is the cube (e.g. on the ground, floating, etc.)? Is it transparent? If so, can you see inside?
Think of a ladder. How long is this ladder, and where is this located in your field? What’s the distance between the ladder and the cube?
Think of a horse. What color is the horse? What is the horse doing, and where is it in relation to your cube?
How to interpret the questions:
The field represents your mind. Its size is the representation of your knowledge of the world, and how vast your personality is. The condition of the field (dry, grassy, or well-trimmed) is what your personality looks like at first glance
The cube represents you. The size of the cube is your ego.The surface of the cube represents what is visibly observable about your personality, or maybe it is what you want others to think about you. The texture of the cube (e.g. smooth, rough, bumpy, etc.) represents your nature.
The ladder represents two different aspects of your life—your goals and your friendships (though I heard it originally only as your friends). The size location and material of your ladder can also tell you how close you are with your friends. You guessed it—the closer the ladder is to the cube and the stronger the ladder is, the better it is for your friendships
The horse represents your ideal partner/sexuality. It could be playing, running around, or grazing right next to your cube or clear across the field.
See the links below for additional guides on how to interpret the results as well as some other tests you might try.
