PAINTING OF NEW YEARS EVE
So here it comes again, New Years Eve 2011, seems only yesterday that we were ushering in 2000 never mind the 10 in between. How does that happen? Where did all that time go, you tell me because I haven’t got a clue!
Happy New Year New York in Naive Art
This acrylic on board painting “Happy New Year, New York” (which sold in America) was such a lot of fun to do and it was painted in the time of innocents before 9/11 when the Twin Towers were still standing proud. At the time I had not yet been to the USA so it was great fun to do the research on all the buildings and images of New York. Then finally we did go to New York and here is a link to some of those adventures; I MISS NEW YORK, sadly by the time we got there the Twin Towers were reduced to Ground Zero but we did see all the rest of the things I had painted.
THE ART OF THE YK2 BUG
You know it’s funny to think about the turn of the last century when we thought the whole world may stop and planes would fall out of the sky due to the Millennium Bug, remember that one? The YK2 problem or YK2 bug, that whole problem stemmed from the programming of computers. When the computer programmers were trying to save space in the computer files they abbreviated the year to just the two last digits as in 91,92,93, but as the turn of the century grew closer they realized that the clocks of the digital age would turn from 99 into 00 which may make the computers of the world fail.
THE ART OF AVOIDING MAYHEM
Hence we may have all sorts of mayhem arising, from planes dropping out of the sky to hospital life support equipment failing, trains stopping, phone lines & mobile phones dropping out, electricity and water getting turned off and supermarkets and businesses in general not being able to serve their customers. The experts on TV and Radios around the Globe were discussing the various scenarios whilst us the public were in two camps on the issue – the “believers” and the “not”.
We lived on a farm at the time and fell into the middle ground on the subject and decided that we better stock up on some food and drinks just in case, lol. So we had a few boxes in the shed with the necessities, should the worst happen. Canned food, long life milk, potatoes and onions and candles and batteries, oh and plenty of alcohol, we figured we may as well be a little inebriated if we were going to live on the crap we had stored in the emergency boxes, lol.
MY BROTHER THE ARTIST
My brother was totally fascinated by the subject and read every book there was and preached doom and gloom, his artist brain ticking over. To his credit he really was on the right track because if the “IT” world had not gotten their act together in the mid nineties and started to seriously work on the problem we really would have been in dire straits. There was one person though who had spotted the mistake as far back as 1958 whilst working on genealogical software. His name was Bob Bemer and he had then tried for the next twenty years to make the programmers, IBM and the U.S. government aware of the problem. But as usual the whistle blower was ignored and it took nearly 40 years before they took him seriously!
THE ART OF WHAT DID HAPPEN
For most of us midnight 1999 past without too much trouble however there were a few glitches around the world and these statistics are from the Wikipedia site;
UK – incorrect Down’s syndrome test results were sent out and two abortions were carried out and four babies were born with Down’s syndrome even though the mothers had been told they were in the low-risk category.
Japan- had radiation-monitoring equipment at a nuclear power plant fail at midnight and at another nuclear site an alarm sounded at two minutes after midnight, both with no risk to the public they stated. Also in Japan their largest mobile phone company found their phones were deleting new messages instead of old ones but that was also fixed within a short time.
Australia- had problems with their ticket validation system on the buses in two states.
US- had 150 slot machines stop working at some race tracks in Delaware and the U.S Naval Observatory with runs the master clock that keeps official time for the whole country showed the date on its website as Jan. 1, 19100.
France- had the same problem on the weather forecast website Metro France which showed Saturday’s weather and the date as 1/01/19100.
No doubt there were some other minor problems across the world but all in all we were pretty lucky really that for the most part all was good!
So that brings me to this year and the first New Years Eve in our newly renovated house, the weather forecast is for a hot 37 degrees and we are planning a pool party in our Bali hut with good friends and too much food and drinks no doubt. The only thing I wish for is relative quite in the morning lol, and not like one New Years Day morning many years ago when we lived in an apartment. Apart from the annoying dog next door that would bark loudly at his own shadow we had a water pipe burst under the road opposite where we lived and the “Government emergency water brigade” thought they would find the problem at 7am with a jackhammer going at full speed! Normally when you call and tell them about a water leak they take six weeks to come out, what the??
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Happy New Year New York
So here is a thought for the New Year by Edith Lovejoy Pierce,
“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”
From me to you – I wish you the best New Years ever and hope it will bring love, joy, health, wealth and happiness to you all.
Till next time happy painting and sculpting and partying to you all,
Love Marie xxxx (c)
Why not come and have a look at Marie Jonsson-Harrison’s PAINTINGS FOR SALE, GICLEE PRINTS FOR SALE and SCULPTURES for sale or WALLBASED SCULPTURES. Enjoy an original artwork on your walls or perhaps one on your bed ARTnBED.
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