At this time last week, I started posting about the Down Under vacation that my partner and I went on in early November. The previous photo diary ended as we set sail from Sydney Harbour out to open waters. Tonight, we will take a brief look at one of the featured attractions on board our cruise ship.
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TONIGHT’S FEATURE PRESENTATION: HOT GLASS AT SEA
Three of the ships in Celebrity Cruise Line’s fleet feature the Hot Glass Show, sponsored by the Corning Museum of Glass. The show is a demonstration by professional glass blowers, working their craft on molten glass, at sea. You might think this is a really odd thing to do, for many reasons. And you’d be right. But never mind, they do it anyway. Here’s how.
The show takes place at a custom-designed permanent installation on Deck 15, the high open-air deck of the cruise ship. The audience (a.k.a. passengers) can watch while seated on the rows of benches, or standing on the sides or further back.
This is the area the artists work in, behind a chest-high glass partition:
The next shot looks through the glass partition at a few pieces of art sitting on the floor: pitchers, urns, and other decorative pieces. These are actual things made as part of the show, by the people on the other side of that barrier.
Standing at the partition and looking toward the audience area, you can see the ship’s lawn.
Now, a quick word about the shots above. I actually shot those in June 2014, on board Celebrity Equinox, where we first encountered this show. Just this month, we were on Celebrity Solstice, which has a duplicate implementation of the same show. The fish-eye effect was from the GoPro camera I used to capture those stills, set for a wide angle. The remainder of this diary relates to our recent cruise on Solstice.
On a warm day, it’s very pleasant to sit or stand and watch the show up in the open air. But at sea, it can get chilly, and we had several of those on this most recent cruise. I shot this on one of the warm days. Some people are stretched out on the lawn; maybe they can still watch the show indirectly on the monitors.
Next we see Annie, one of the artists, working on a piece. She is also visible in the first shot above, from 2014, working on a different ship. The artists work on a contract for several months at a time, then have several months on dry land, and can then re-enlist for another contract at sea, and so on.
In this session, Annie produced a large champagne glass, with a wide base and three blown-and-sculpted glass sheep forming the stem, in honour of the Australia/New Zealand itinerary of this cruise. This is an early stage, rotating and shaping a blob of molten glass on the end of a blow pipe. She’s already blown an air bubble inside the glass to expand and shape it outward.
The artists always work in teams of three, and each team will be together for a few months at a time. Most days during the cruise, they will put on a two-hour show, during the afternoon. There will also be one or two evening shows on various days. During each show, each artist will produce one piece of glass art. One of the others will act as assistant, and the third will narrate what is going on, answer audience question, and also assist as needed.
There are four essential pieces of hardware shown below, behind the artists. On the left is the melting furnace that holds the clear molten glass. It is held at a constant temperature of 2100F/1150C for up to two years non-stop. Each piece normally begins with the artist dipping a blow stick into the pool of molten glass in this furnace, then quickly moving to the centre station to start rotating, blowing, and shaping the molten glass. After two years, the furnace’s internal crucible will be replaced and other maintenance will be performed.
Behind the man standing on the left is a holding oven. As the artists work on a piece, they may make sub-components individually to be incorporated into the whole piece later on. This oven holds the intermediate pieces at high temperature.
Next, behind the chalk marks, is the annealing oven. During the show, it is held at 950F/510C. Finished pieces are immediately put in this oven for a controlled cool-down. Overnight, the annealer is programmed to gradually reduce the internal temperature down to room temperature. This controlled cooling of the hot glass is essential to prevent the glass from cooling unevenly, and potentially shattering.
On the far right is another hot oven, nicknamed the Glory Hole. At 2050F/1120C, it is almost as hot as the melting furnace. It has nested doors of different sizes, which allow the furnace to be opened only far enough to accommodate the piece in progress, while keeping the internal temperature hot. As artists work on a piece in the open air, it cools quickly. They frequently move the piece back and forth from the work area to the Glory Hole, to keep it hot and workable.
Here is the piece about to go into the Glory Hole for a quick re-heat. Long handles on the oven doors allow it to be opened and closed in the proper size needed, from a safe distance.
Here, the piece is further along in construction, with glass sheep added to form the stem. More finished pieces are visible on the floor next to the glass partition.
A wide variety of coloured bits are available. Before beginning a piece, the artist will select the colours needed and pour some into the trays you can see on the small table.
One of the techniques for incorporating colour is for the assistant to grab a small blob of clear glass from the melting furnace, dip it into the needed colour, and roll it on the table to even the shape. This is then transferred to the piece the artist is working on and can be shaped as a layer, or attached however the piece is imagined.
Here’s a transfer taking place. This requires super steady hands on the part of the artist as well as the assistant.
You might be wondering how those hot furnaces are heated. Normally in a glass-blowing shop, gas is used to provide the energy source. You can’t do that on a ship at sea. No way, uh-uh, not allowed in any way, shape, or form. There are international rules about this sort of thing, according to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS). Putting a big propane tank out on the lawn to fire up the furnaces just isn’t going to happen.
These furnaces are specially designed to run on electricity, and apparently they consume large amounts of that. Remember that main furnace stays steady at 2100F for two years at a time, drawing its electricity from the ship’s supply, in turn provided by the engines, at least one of which also runs continuously. A cruise ship needs electricity for lots of things; glass blowing is just one of them.
On a completely different, and somewhat random note: Daily summaries of the news are available on board, in printed form distilled down to a couple of pages. Multiple editions are produced, for passengers from different parts of the world. Here, for example, we find news about Keystone XL. The Canadian and U.S. editions have the same headline, but the articles are different. As you might expect, one talks about President Obama rejecting the plan, and the other talks more about new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s reaction to it.
And finally, for this evening, a tranquil scene:
These are our lifeboats, from the Celebrity Solstice. No, we didn’t hit an iceberg. This scene takes place just before 8AM on November 9, at Akaroa, New Zealand. This particular stop on our journey doesn’t have a pier big enough or deep enough for the ship to pull right in and dock. Instead, the ship drops anchor further out, and several of the lifeboats are deployed in their alternate role, as tender boats. In the photo above, two of them are waiting close to the ship, for their turn to come alongside and pick up passengers headed to shore. As tenders, these boats can each comfortably carry 120 passengers at a time. If needed for life-saving functions, they can each hold 150. Later in the day, we will return to the ship on the same boats.
If you’re not listening to engine noises, the photo above presents a very peaceful scene. And it’s a good way to close out the journey for this installment.
TOP COMMENTS FOR MONDAY NOVEMBER 30, 2015
From Cali Scribe:
Came across this one in Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World post “Cartoon: ‘Tis the War on Christmas season!” -- notKeith has a song for the Republican Primary Holiday Season.
♫♪ Oh, this all just makes me want to break out into song:
Ted Cruz roasting on an open fire
Jeb! Bush nipping at your nose
Donald screaming “we need a yuuge fence”
to keep out Latino Eskimos
And so I’m offering this simple phrase
to wingnuts, one to ninety-two:
shove your bull, where the sun doesn’t shine;
Merry Xmas — “F” you.
From flitedocnm:
In akadjian’s diary, "Who framed George Lakoff?”, and in response to my comment about using his suggestions for "framing" to deal with those driven by racism, akadjian replies:
Great question. Not an easy one. A few thoughts:
1) Focus on teaching the next generation about racism. Many of the baby boomers are a lost cause. Don’t beat yourself up trying to get them to understand the academics of racism.
2) Reframe the economy with the baby boomers.
3) Do anything you can to help baby boomers meet people who are different from them. If they can see them as moral, it reduces the hatred.
4) Focus on the emotions. If they hate, what you want to do is invoke love (or at the very least, care). Talk about things they care about. Talk about what you see that’s really going on with the economy. Believe it or not, I have had really good conversations with people I never thought possible about race. But it takes some groundwork. You have to recognize whether you can have them or not. Our instinct is to want to start at the place of conflict and logically argue it out. Find something you like about them instead. Take them out for beers. Become friends. Smoke them up. On our local political forum, I made sure to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, for example. I told them I was thankful for our conversations over the year. Even though we didn’t always agree. I thanked them for having respectful conversations. I was flamed for it by one person. But I didn’t take the bait. He looked like an a-hole in the forum and almost everyone else thanked me back. He wanted war and conflict. I wouldn’t give it to him.
5) Start from points of commonality rather than disagreement. Disagreement equals competition and they’ll just want to “win.”
6) Agree with people when there’s points of agreement. This happens way more than you think.
7) Be honest. Don’t message. This might be the hardest thing on the list. Because our instinct is to want to say things to accomplish our goal (whatever that might be).
8) Tell stories and talk about yourself and your own experiences. An easy way to do this is to remember the words “I believe ...” and then couple them with why. Liberals tend to say “you” a lot. Because they want someone to do something. In personal conversations, it’s much more powerful to say “I believe ...” and then talk about why. For example, when I talk about racism, I talk about my own racism. I never call people racist. When I do this, people see that I’m not attacking them. I’m simply trying to talk about something that is not an easy issue. And I’m not pointing fingers … I’m saying “I have this problem too.”
9) Treat conversations as practice. If you view them as practice, you won’t get so down if at first you don’t succeed. Think about what happened and maybe why. Try to put yourself in the position of the other person. Did anything set them off? Why?
10) Set your goal for conversations as win the person, not the argument. People make decisions because they like people. If you have a relationship with someone, you’re odds of winning them over to something increase 1000%.
11) In the wake of the attacks on Paris, I spoke a lot about the need to be fearless and not allow ourselves to be terrorized. This is what the terrorists want. So I refuse to give it to them. I am all for going after the criminals, but let’s not blame an entire religion for the actions of a few. The same way Christians don’t want to be blamed for the actions of the Planned Parenthood attacker.
12) Ask someone to fight with on something. It almost doesn’t matter what it is. Fighting with people on a shared goal allows people to build relationships and see the other as moral and not evil. I’ve become friends with many libertarians and Christians this way.
A few thoughts for people you know. Media strategies are different. But they share a similar goal. Fight racism and hatred emotionally, not logically.
TOP MOJO FOR SUNDAY NOVEMBER 29, 2015
TOP PHOTOS FOR SUNDAY NOVEMBER 29, 2015
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