Thursday, June 12, 2008

Jasper!

Last night son of One Moment Caller arrived up in the Naki and his name is Jasper.

Jasper is apparently the Dutch/German version of Casper and the first one was one of the kings that gave Christ gifts at his birth - he gave gold (quietly showing up the other lot - I wonder what that Mary and Joseph did with the gold?).

So anyway, I thought I would mark the occasion by finding other Jasper's!

Like Jasper Engines and Transmissions!


Or Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada - It has a glacier! Plus there's a town.


Then there is the University of Victoria's JasPer Project - an open-source initiative to provide a free software-based reference implementation of the codec specified in the JPEG-2000 Part-1 standard (i.e., ISO/IEC 15444-1). Of course it is. Doesn't really lend itself to a pic unfortunately.

Jasper, Texas looks like a gas...


... and Jasper, Indiana, claims to be one of the 25 best small towns in the US! Meanwhile, Jasper, Alabama's Special Olympic swim team is called the Aquanauts! The mayor has a great name too - Sonny Posey. You will also find US Jasper's in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, Sunday brunch at Jasper's Restaurants "in the spirit of fun!" looks like something out of the Naki too!


Jasper (on the right below) was also the name of one of Cruella de Vil's henchmen in 101 Dalmatians.


It also turns out that "Jasperware" is a type of pottery, and you can find this fine example at the V&A in London.


There have also been quite a few other famous people named Jasper.

But my favourite one has to be Jasper Vinall - the first recorded Cricket fatality in 1624. He was fielding and was about to catch the ball, but the batsmen tried to hit the ball a second time (away from Vinall) but instead smacked his head in! Stranger still - it happened again in 1647!

So there you have it - at the very least he has quite a road trip of US towns ahead of him!

2 comments:

Martha Craig said...

I immediately assumed he was named for this Jasper - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Johns - but now you mention it, it seems more likely Jasper Transmissions, given their love of the 'Naki ;-)

beetlebum said...

I do love the idea of being named after a transmission. I think it was more likely that it was the character from 101 Dalmatians.