For video razzle-dazzle, it's hard to beat the US$5 million mansion of the Florida concrete multimillionaire Bill Williams, in Naples. The slickest piece of engineering in the home is most likely the 32-inch Samsung LCD screen in the master bath, which, in a Disneyesque bit of business that a wicked stepmother might appreciate, is embedded in a large mirror. If you feel like watching a movie from the tub, as Williams, a 51-year-old bachelor, often does, you turn it on; when it's off, you see only the mirror.
Williams has a designated indoor home theater, of course, with a Yamaha projector and a 110-inch Vutec fixed screen. His grounds, including a 25m pool overlooking the Tiburon golf course, are wired for surround sound. His outdoor bar has a 40-inch Sony LCD screen. If this TV seems large for an outdoor bar, you should know that his is 4.3m long and covered, and is equipped with a refrigerator, freezer and two dishwashers.
For this year's Super Bowl, Williams wowed his guests with a 16-foot outdoor inflatable screen set up beyond the pool. Partygoers could float, drink in hand, and watch the game. All wet and good, but you couldn't have that screen up there all the time or it would ruin the view.
PHOTOS: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Criteria of Naples, the Florida-based firm that designed and installed Williams's US$270,000 audiovisual system, is overseeing the construction of a permanent large-screen outdoor setup, likely to cost US$30,000. The original idea was a screen that could disappear into the ground, but what with concerns about water seepage, Dave Tovissi and Chris Locadia, the president and managing partner of Criteria, decided to go in another direction. Literally.
"Chris came up with the idea to make a backyard arbor, with a screen that will drop down," Williams said. "There are speakers in the column. We'll have bougainvillea over the top."
"We call it Dive-In Theater," Locadia said.
Outdoor video has landed. It's been seen here and there in the last few years — a pop-up TV in the side of the hot tub, a video projection on an inflatable screen — but it's been an outdoor novelty, the equivalent, perhaps, of Angelenos and their mobile phones 15 years ago. But with such advances as weather-resistant television sets impervious to rain; good-quality, low-cost video projectors and screens; and widescreen high-definition TV, as well as the general trend to move the indoors out, outdoor theater is gaining ground.
"It's becoming more and more popular because the products are better and cheaper," said Jeff Hoover, the president of Audio Advisors in West Palm Beach, Florida. "Instead of having to spend US$10,000 or US$15,000 for a projector, you can get a nice little US$1,500 projector now that will make great 100-inch pictures. And now that there are large-panel TVs that are getting brighter and cheaper, people are starting to put outdoor theaters in patios that are mostly covered.
"I put a 65-inch flat-screen LCD TV in the retaining wall of a man's pool," he added. "It's motorized up and down out of a weatherized enclosure. He's got a little waterproof remote control, and he can turn on the system in his Jacuzzi or pool."
Maureen Jenson, editor of Home Theater magazine, also sees what she calls "a huge trend" in outdoor viewing, particularly in the area of weather-resistant equipment, which is designed to be left outdoors.
And that outdoor equipment is getting bigger. SunBrite will introduce a 46-inch set next month, with a manufacturer's suggested price of US$5,000. Global Outdoor Concepts, which manufactures MirageVision outdoor sets, has added a 42-inch set to its line and is planning to bring out a 47-inch one. Cal Spas, which introduced a spa with a 15-inch pop-up TV six years ago, just brought out the Cal Spa Outdoor Room. Internet-ready, it has an antiglare, antifog, 65-inch pop-up plasma TV, a fire pit and three padded weatherproof recliners. Suggested retail price: US$60,000.
Which brings up the matter of the whiz kids of the home-theater world — the integrators or, in the term used by the people at the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association, which offers training and certification in the new field, "the fourth contractor."
Often brought in from the beginning of planning or remodeling a home, they pull together all the electrical systems, including those that control audiovisual, security and climate-control systems, and even the system that opens the drapes of your indoor theater. Then they wrap it up with that technological must-have, the touch-pad panel, perhaps in a system by AMX, perhaps in one by its arch rival Crestron.
Speak to the integrators and you see a backyard future in which one might never be forced to sit in a tiresome garden and sniff a rose again: Drop-down motorized screens hidden under the eaves; lots of little speakers all over the property (because multiple speakers on low volume create less spillover noise than two big speakers on loud); tiny speakers that look like lights in the trees; speakers in the pool, so that you need not miss Barry Bonds breaking the home run record when your head dips into the water.
AFFORDABLE LUXURY
Outdoor theater setups can be done much less expensively.
Inflatable screens, which formerly sold for thousands of dollars, can be purchased for much less. Gemmy Industries sells its Airblown Movie Screen for US$200. Stewart Filmscreen, which does a good deal of high-end custom work, introduced a glass outdoor screen last fall. The outdoor speaker manufacturer Rockustics, which disguises its speakers as planters and coconuts and rocks (check out the 70-watt Pavarocci model), now find those speakers doing double duty for video.
Randy Fisk is the administrator of backyardtheater.com, a Web site for backyard video buffs that averaged 6,900 visitors a day last summer and has many do-it-yourselfers among its 400 members. He said that a careful shopper, buying secondhand equipment, could put together a backyard theater for as little as a few hundred US dollars. Many of his members take it a step further: They make their own screens.
Kevin Kalkbrenner (screen name: Cinema BBQ), a software salesman in Shakopee, Minnesota, southwest of Minneapolis, is one such member. He estimates the cost of his backyard theater, which has an impressive 10-by-16-foot screen, at about US$2,600. His big-ticket item was an NEC projector, for which he paid US$2,000. He recycled old audio speakers for the sound system. Then he tackled the problem of the screen.
"I realized what I was really building was a giant sail," Kalkbrenner said. "I got steel pipes from Home Depot — it was maybe US$250 invested for that and two sheets of plywood for building the stand around the speakers. For the screen I have a very elastic fabric called Trapeze. I took it to my tailor, who now really hates me." The cost of the fabric, which came from Dazian, was about US$100; the tailor charged US$200.
"I'm not that old — I'm in my 40s — but I wanted to reminisce about outdoor drive-ins and that whole feeling of being outdoors," Kalkbrenner said. "I think that's one of the reasons people are out here, trying to achieve that feeling that you can't articulate, a memory wrapped in an experience you had. It involves smells and popcorn, slapping a mosquito.
"I've got a 70-inch TV I paid US$13,000 for seven years ago," he added. "I would prefer to be outside watching, on my metal pipe screen."
OUTDOORS AND OUT OF POCKET
Robi Blumenstein, who runs MRSSI Inc, which is involved in Huntington's disease research in New York, watches outdoor movies on an inflatable screen he sets up behind his Nantucket summer house. The Sanyo projector, for which he paid US$3,150, is on the back patio. He estimates that the whole setup, which included a US$5,753 Airscreen he ordered from Outdoor Movies, cost about US$10,000.
"The screen is like an AeroBed, but vertical," he said. "We got a relatively little one, 9 feet by 16 feet. We just put it out in the field. The thing blows up in less than 10 minutes. It's not like a permanent home installation — we just lug the thing out, blow it up and take it down in the morning."
The first movie he showed?
"Jaws," Blumenstein said. "Just a good New England beach movie."
At the other end of the backyardtheater.com consumer spectrum is Jeff Kunsemiller, who goes by the screen name OrthoFunk. He is not, as his name suggests, a depressed orthodontist, but an orthodontist who plays bass guitar and is into funk music. When Kunsemiller, 38 and married with three young daughters, was planning his US$650,000 house in suburban St. Louis, he wanted a system that would allow him to access computers, DVDs, CDs and games from any of the half dozen video screens in the house. The cost of the system, which was designed by Audio Video Concepts in Columbia, Illinois, was about $120,000.
Then one day in spring, after the house was complete, he was sitting in his backyard as the trees were beginning to bud, and it occurred to him that it might be nice to have a theater outdoors. Since he already had six weather-resistant speakers around the pool and patio for his outdoor sound system, creating that theater was relatively inexpensive.
Kunsemiller bought a Sanyo projector for about US$3,000. His 8-by-10-foot screen was custom made by Lawrence Fabric Structures, a St. Louis company that does awnings. It is hidden under the eaves at the back of the house when not in use and cost about US$3,000. It goes up and down at the touch of a waterproof keypad. (The projector setup is not as high-tech — it's on a rolling rack that Kunsemiller hauls back and forth from the basement.)
Should the doorbell ring when he's out back watching the ballgame, Kunsemiller can switch to a video image of the person on the doorstep.
"Very 007," an admiring visitor wrote in a comment left at backyardtheater.com.
There was a little trouble with the neighbors when he first started using the outdoor setup, but Kunsemiller employed the method used so successfully by other backyardtheater.com members: He invited the neighbors over to watch some movies.
If you want an outdoor theater that doesn't require dragging the equipment out of the basement to, say, the beach of your multimillion-dollar retreat in Hawaii, you might enjoy a screen that rises up out of the ground. Engineered Environments of Alameda, California, created such a design for the Maui vacation home of a retired software executive. The house was built into the side of a hill overlooking the ocean; a lanai is on a lower level and beyond the lanai is a pool and then the beach.
The executive, who would spend about US$800,000 for his indoor-and-outdoor audio-video system, wanted an outdoor environment where his guests could sit poolside, have drinks and watch the sunset, and then watch a movie or a football game without having to go inside.
Greg Jensen, Engineered Environment's director of engineering, designed a setup in which a 20-foot-wide custom Stewart Filmscreen is hidden beneath a 6m teak bench that runs along the side of the pool nearest the beach. The bench is watertight, and the screen is further protected from the elements by a 1.2m concrete bunker. The projector, a Digital Projections Mercury 5000HD, drops from the roof of the cabana across from the pool. The cost of the screen was US$50,000; the projector was US$20,000. Total cost of the Dolby Digital 7.1 theater: US$175,000.
Of course, you can't watch it until it gets dark.
But there are always those two 37-inch Sony plasmas in the lanai.
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated