At this time of year, in the evening and early morning, the north facade of our house is completely illuminated by the sun. It’s the closest we get to living in the southern hemisphere. I’m not sure where else this is happening at the same time, besides in the arctic. Say it’s ten at night in Norway and it’s nine in the morning in New Zealand, then we’d both have the sun. Is it the same sun? How do they do that?
A Bad Guide 
mmmm I can smell the summer from your picture!
In Ushuaia (south, south of America) we also have long days at summer. I lived there when I was 12. And I loved it!
Huh, no trees. When I asked my wife where she thought this was, she said it’s either Svalbard or Greenland.
:-) It’s similar, perhaps, but no, no: Tierra del Fuego (I’d like to hear you pronouncing those “rr”)
So would the Norwegians!
:-D
As if I could pronounce something right in your “barbarous” languages…
Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Any language sounds better in a Spanish accent.
You think?!?
That’s just the power of ostranenie…
Possibly. But if so, then some ostranenies sound better than others.
Anyone better to re-write Animal Farm here than you, Mr. Crown?
But think again… listen how awful sounds Carlos Gardel singing in English (around 1:00)
At first I was going to ask why this was in the “About goats” category, but then I saw the goats.
Is it the same sun?
No, they have a different sun down there. Didn’t you take Gastronomy?
AJP,
It’s eight a.m. here, but the sun is neither here nor there. Obscured by California coastal fog (what is called “the marine layer”). A closed little world, but then again always expanded by a morning visit to your lovely visual room — as Wittgenstein might have called it.
(Though he was at pains to point out such rooms are actually nobody’s.)
Oh… thanks, Tom; Wittgenstein, perfect. Jamessal told me the story of how Elizabeth Anscombe was asked by Wittgenstein “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the Sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth turned on its axis?” And Anscombe replied “I suppose, because it looked as if the Sun went round the Earth.”
“Well,” said Wittgenstein, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the Earth turned on its axis?”
Language, it’s not really “about”, is it? I ought to change the categories to “With Goats” & “Without Goats”, but it makes them sound like cream & sugar, “Would you like your reading with or without goats?”.
Julia, Carlos Gardel sounds perfectly fine, but it’s a good job you pointed out he was speaking English.
jajaja
For me, always with goats, please!
You see, he sounds terrible! (He sings in Spanish and English here, though)
I can’t do goats every time, there wouldn’t be any suspense.
Except for Carlos Gardel, for some reason it’s much easier to lose a foreign accent when you’re singing in English than when you’re speaking it. I don’t know if that’s true for other languages too.
Ok, I like it without goats sometimes…
You may be right, but the funny thing is I think Gardel doesn’t even try to lose his accent here.
¡Escandolosamente horrible!
The good thing about accents is that they accentuate.
There is the song: “Ac-cen-tu-ate the positive…” & c.
About LW’s question to Anscombe (what was it about him, anyway, always asking such questions!): one of the more memorable movie passages for me is the opening ten minutes or so of Bela Tarr’ s The Werckmeister Harmonies, in which pub patrons at closing time act out the movements of the Earth, the Sun, Moon and planets. An unlikelier set of heavenly bodies you may never have seen.
A goat at any time is fine with me, as, for that matter, is not a goat.
Ha, you’re too kind.
An unlikelier set of heavenly bodies you may never have seen.
Yes, they’re heavenly bodies! That’s what’s great about it.
AJP, about those brilliantly lumpy heavenly bodies, I’ve long found the phrase “the music of the spheres” a bit anodyne as it does not take sufficiently into account the bumps and groans of our awkward ongoing attempt to stay on board the universe as it spins along oblivious.
Have recently been host to some perhaps related pseudo-thoughts on the subject of the orders of things and creatures, and how we humans seem never to leave off arranging those orders — at least in part, I suspect, so to as to explain away what is inexplicable in our endless concern with such arrangements. Your free-form menagerie, which appears to be largely left to its own arrangements, provides a happy relief in this regard.
(These latter vague considerations have now developed into this.)
I agree. Very well put too. Mankind imposes systems — hierarchies, grids and such like — that bear little resemblance to nature’s way. It’s often said at the outset that what we are doing is only an analogy for the way nature herself does things, but then we forget that important distinction in our excitement when some invention of ours seems to work. We have no humility and it reminds me of some fairy-tale that ends badly for the protagonist.
Dear AJP, I’d like to know your opinion on the style of some houses/buildings I put here.
(I think it’s an English style, but I’m not quite sure)
Thanks!
“California coastal fog (what is called “the marine layer”). ” How awfully wordy: we calls it “haar”.
Coincidences never cease. I am currently in Northern California where there is indeed fog in the morning.
This afternoon I was walking on a long, wide, almost deserted beach with my daughter and son-in-law. On our way there we passed a large van from which two horses had obviously just been discharged, and later we saw them come over the dunes to the beach.
But no goats?
I figured that’s where you were, m-l. Have a lovely time.
No goats that I have seen, although plenty of cows and some sheep.
It is very hot when there is no wind, but the wind right from the sea can be very cold.
“No goats that I have seen”
M.-L., for many a year there was a pleasant woman who walked her animal menagerie about the campus of the University of California, in a leisurely way, in the twilight hours, and among this charming flock there were indeed not only sheep but goats.
Having said this my next thought is the one I find myself having re. all too many pleasant things of late: haven’t seen her in quite some time, now that I think of it.
A bit less greensward there these days.
You know how it is, builders are always building something.
(Of course not forgetting “progress”.)
Then too there is the ageing of herders, and of their flock.
Perhaps it’s simply she and her animals have been there and I have not. That at any rate would be good to be able to report.
I hope she’s still there. I’d like to know more about her. There’s still some greensward left in the Berkeley hills, isn’t there? I haven’t been there for nearly twenty years.
I hope so, too. I would, too. Now and then over the years I have exchanged a few words with her. Most commonly however the mere organizational attention required to keep the flock relatively in order always seemed to be occupying her pretty fully, understandably.
Yes, there is some green area above the campus left, but not as much. There is a new Asian Arts Library you won’t have seen. Up at the top they have been building new sports training facilities & c. The major change came c. twenty years ago, you may have missed that. In the northeast corner of the campus there was a beautiful grove of some hundred or so species of exotic trees, brought in to that area around 1900 and fully mature. All that was razed to build an “animal test facility”, much of which is deep underground, like Cold War missile bunkers. That development changed the face of the campus forever, though of course of the thousands of students who mill about, talking on their mobiles, in that area, now, I would be surprised if one out of a hundred knew what was there twenty years ago.
On second thought, make that one out of a thousand… no, ten thousand.
And perhaps it’s the bombs bursting in air in the celebratory distance of the night that has jolted my memory into retrieving the relevant fact that, how can I have forgotten, for many years the University hired out the brush-clearing duties for one patch of hillside above the campus to a pack of goats. They were very efficient. They were trucked in by a group of herders who, as I recall, were either Basque or Portugese. At any rate the herders spoke no English and obviously had been dispatched by a contractor. But this means, yes, Marie-Lucie, there have at times been various manifestations of a Goat Presence hereabouts. (In addition of course to the far-reaching orbit of influence of A Bad Guide.)
I remember in the old days it was very difficult to get a green card to live in the USA, but they had special provisions for certain professions; it was easier to get in if you were a physician, for example. Another way of cutting in line was if you were a shepherd. I always thought it was a bit odd because I never saw much call for shepherds. Maybe there were a few bright prospects that UC couldn’t get in to the country as professors, so the university took advantage of the shepherd clause? It’s just a thought.
If so, they were definitely in Deep Cover… until their goats ate it, that is.