As well as being a so-called snow hole – there’s often tons of snow here when it’s all melted down in Oslo – up where we live it’s often foggy, especially in the morning. Roll the three kilometres down the hill to the fjord and it’s clear with sharp sunlight. Sometimes down there there’s what appears to be steam coming off the fjord but there’s no overhead cloud except for the one wrapping our hill. Our fog clears round about lunchtime, usually. Here is what happened yesterday.
There was a glimmer of sun when we started out from the house.
After a quarter of an hour’s walking I could see the sun – sort of.
And then the fog started rolling back off the lake.
It happened within a couple of minutes.
It was still difficult to see the cliff behind our house. 
When that cleared, the sky was also revealed. There’s our house at the bottom right, in the shadows.
Finally, from the garden, through the trees, I could see the horse farm on the far side of the lake. 
A Bad Guide 
Fog’s funny. Where I grew up it was rare. In Edinburgh it tended to come in off the North Sea on what was otherwise going to be a sunny warm summer’s day: it’s called ‘haar’ on the Scottish east coast. The sharpness of the front was most impressive – you could walk a couple of paces from warmth to chill. Sometimes it would stop only a few hundred yards inland, sometimes it would penetrate for miles.
How do you pronounce haar?
harr
We get very dramatic coastal fog in our special coastal place (Westport, Massachusetts). That’s in the summer: you can have blazing sunlight three miles up the road and down by our house a dimming blanket of almost palpable–no, palpable–wispy blowy cloudy fogginess. I’m told that it’s due to the breeze that blows from sea to land on days like that, drawn in by the way the sun warms the land faster than it warms the sea–and the resulting encounter between this moist cool air and the heat of the sun-soaked earth.
I don’t know if we get winter fog, too, down there: we don’t get there so much in the cold dark times. In a week or so I may be in a position to observe.
What’s harr, exactly? Is it a specifically wintery thing?
Here in Halifax (Nova Scotia), we are right on the sea, and sometimes the day starts foggy, then the fog starts lifting, so that it is clear on the ground but the tops of high buildings, or of the two suspension bridges over an arm of the sea, are invisible for a while. But it is not as dramatic as what dearieme describes – at least not in the city. Perhaps it is different in the coastal villages or in a different area of the province.
AJP, i forgot to say how beautiful the pale colours are in the first few photographs,with the sky, the snow and the sun.
Yes. The colours are gorgeous. Fog can be very photogenic. Strangely, here there is a huge gap in the blog (a big blank space) after the word “shadows.” but before the photo that shows the house in the bottom corner. Nothing seems to be missing, but space has been introduced. I wonder why or how?
In our part of Lleida, the fog is notorious. When our daughter applied for a job (which she hasn’t got yet) at a business in a nearby village, the interviewers said “Oh, you’re from here. Good.” and went on to explain that anyone they hired from Barcelona (say) would tend to leave after a year or so because they couldn’t stand the “boira baixa” – low fog – that arrived around September and stayed until around April every year. Really. There’d be a sunny moment from around two in the afternoon until maybe five or six when the winter evening begins to draw in.
Strangely this has begun to change in the past three or so years. People remark upon it. Where’s the fog?
Is that Topsy up there? Is she dirty? Has she been playing in a muddy spot? Or is it a trick of the light?
(Here, scarcely a stone’s throw from the Bridgwater docks, it has been drizzling most days. Appropriately funereal weather.)
It’s haar, Ø , pronounced harr – a specifically summery thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haar_(fog)
The picture there gives some impression of how sharp the front can be, but I’ve often seen sharper. It’s impressive as it advances towards you, and even more so if it crosses your line of vision.
Oh, right, haar. Advection, that’s a good word. I think I was influenced by hoarfrost when I asked if it was a winter thing.
I think I was wrong: “haar” isn’t pronounced exactly as an abbreviated version of “hard”. I’ve tried it out and I’m pretty confident that we lengthen the “a” – I don’t mean that we change its sound, I mean that we say it for longer; the “a” is sustained a bit before the trill ends the word. Whether that was originally a spelling pronunciation I’ve no idea, but I learnt the word in speech long before I saw it written.
And another thing: I got a present today, a bag of “air dried pear crisps” subtitled “Variety; Doyenne Du Comice”. Not bad at all, and completely new to me. Maybe they were produced as stocking-fillers, but they made me a pleasant “pudding” after lunch. I suspect that goats might like them.
http://www.perrycourtfarm.co.uk
So in theory you could have a ha-ha haar.
Foggy top, pink bottom?
I don’t know if this is due to my own screen (or eyes perhaps), but the snow appears pink on the first photo. Tell me this is not pollution.
Catanea, I didn’t know that fog occurred in Spain. Tpsy wasn’t dirty, just damp. It makes her fur more curly. I don’t know where all those gaps came from, but they weren’t visible in the place where I put the post together and they disappeared on their own. I will have to google Bridgwater docks…
The pink is from the sunlight, I think. The colours are refracted through the fog, so perhaps that changes them when they hit the snow. I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but one thing I do know is that most of the time it’s very b&w here in winter: no green, only snow and bare twigs and a grey sky. Often when we go out for a walk the only colour is provided by the dogs.
m-l, thanks. You’re right, it’s lovely. Can’t you take some pictures of where you live?
Ø, I bet you get winter fog too. It sounds very Moby-Dicklike. Julia recently did a couple of posts about a similar phenomenon in Argentina on the River Plate (you know she’s a sailor) where the cloud gets blown about.
dearie, you’re right, the goats would love those. I’ll have to see if we can buy them. The dogs would like them too, they love apples & pears.
Normally pink isn’t found in a rainbow, is it?
Sometimes before a cyclone there is a very peculiar light in the sky. But I don’t think there is anything special with the light before a snow storm.
Topsy looks very cold, and miserable. The shower and hairdryer must have been particularly good on that day.
Like the colour of water, the colour of snow (which is water too!) is influenced by the colour of the sky. Not directly (you never see blue snow or pink sea) but perhaps through something in the air. Ice has a colour too: if you have ever seen the face of a glacier, or crevasses in it, where you can see deep into the ice, the parts farthest from the surface are a deep blueish green, like the sea on a really sunny day. Along the border of British Columbia and Alaska, there is at least one place (that I have seen) where a glacier ends up in a lake, quite close to the road. From time to time a block of ice falls from the face of the glacier into the lake and floats on the surface. These floating blocks of ice are a very light blue.
Pink is just a lighter shade of red or magenta. Red reflected off the white snow would turn pink.
There’s usually a dark grey sky before it snows, and very often a bright blue sky afterwards.
I’m pretty sure Tops wasn’t at all miserable or cold. She loves going for walks and after she’s been running she drags her upper body along the snow to cool off.
I never thought of that, m-l. Of course, you’re right.
You can see that the fog itself is pink in some of the pictures. It often is just when the sun is about to break through.
There’s often a ring of light around the moon before snow. Ice crystals in the atmosphere, they say.
I think scottish haar could be translated by Norwegian havskodde or just skodde “thick fog”.
As we took down the holly and the ivy this morning, my wife fell to musing about the places she’s lived. “Does six weeks count?” she wondered. Well, does it?
(If it does she can count Inverness and I can count Aberdeen and NJ.)
If six counts, does five?
If six doesn’t count, does seven?
I don’t count anything less than a year, myself. But that suits an ordering of my own history. My wife’s trump cards are 1980s Russia and Egypt. Although she wasn’t in either place for more than a couple of weeks, as far as I know, I’m sure she’d want to count them.
We certainly count six months. Heavens, that’s at least two seasons – which is quite a lot in Brisbane which only has two seasons.
Havskodde would be a sea mist, wouldn’t it?
There’s often a ring of light around the moon before snow. Ice crystals in the atmosphere, they say.
I didn’t know it was connected to snow. It was certainly there the other day during the snowy weather. I tried to photograph it because it was during a full moon. I got the rainbow halo but I couldn’t get good images of the moon’s surface and since it was jolly cold I gave up.
I was in Australia for three months and yet I’ve never said I lived in Australia. Maybe it’s because I had a return ticket.
Look, in Brisbane we even had cats.
For those who have cats that’s as good a criterion as any. Did Mrs Dearie have a cat in Inverness? A pet mouse would probably do too, but not a worm or insect.
The first place I ever lived was only for six weeks, unless you count time in the womb. My parents had lived there for a couple of years, but they moved soon after I was born. I’ve always thought of that as being a place where I lived, even though it was only six weeks.
Looking at examples of extended homes away from home, my longest out-of-the-USA experience was my 6+ months in Edinburgh. I’ve always thought of that as living there. I have even spoken of a four-month visit to Berkeley, or a three-month visit to Germany, as living there. I’m not sure about the five or six weeks I spent in Germany.
What I have sometimes wondered about is what counts as being somewhere at all: what counts as a visit, or as setting foot in a country. I have never set foot in Belgium except in the most minimal sense, because I arrived by train, went straight to the airport, and flew away. I have been to Italy three times in my life, but one of them doesn’t count because it was only Trieste, if that.
The only time I ever set foot in the former Yugoslavia was when my friend and I got off a train in Skopje, one day between Christmas and New Year’s in 1976, with the vague and adventurous idea of staying for a few days. The idea very quickly lost its appeal, and we quickly got right back on the same train.
I had the same experience in Yugoslavia, except I think it was Belgrade in July. My justification for saying I’ve been to places is that on a certain day at a certain time I was nowhere else except x, so I have been there. I’ve been to Bombay (airport) and Milan (both station & airport). Nowadays it doesn’t impress people very much when I tell them that I’ve been to Milan station, because young people have been everywhere. My mother’s next door neighbour has even climbed Mt Everest.
I’ve hardly been anywhere. My wife goes places with her job every late summer, and when she comes back she tells how interesting and beautiful and inspiring it was and that she’s done that now and doesn’t have to go back.
I don’t count places I haven’t stopped and experienced. I’ve been to Schiphoel (Amsterdam Airport) several times, but I’ve never left the transit zone, so I don’t say I’ve been to Amsterdam or to Holland. I’ve been through Gothenburg and Hamburg by car, and through Worms and Newcastle and Burgundy by train, but they don’t count. But a couple of hours, maybe half a day, in Karlsruhe and Manchester and Kalmar and Odense and Ålesund does count.
For places I’ve lived, I don’t think the point is how long I stayed there but what sort of arrangements were made. I do count the first house my family lived in in Bergen, even if it was for three months, but I certainly don’t count Stavanger, even though I’ve spent more than four months there together (for military service and a CAD class).
I think that if you say “I have been to such and such a place”, people assume that that was the goal of your trip, so “I’ve been to Milan station” sounds like you wanted to see the station and that was it, just as you would say “I’ve been to the Sistine Chapel”, or “to the Eiffel Tower”, places that many people travel especially in order to visit, and make the high point of their visit. I say “I have been in Newark airport” (near New York), not to it since it was just a necessary stop on the way to New York City.
Sorry, I forgot to cancel the italics after the last to.
– Taken care of!
I’ve never been to Milan. My favorite thing about it is that in Germany it is called Mailand.
Trond, it sounds like your wife’s employer sends her to a different place every summer–or at least never to a place that she was already done with. That sounds like an excellent arrangement. Maybe you should try to go with her some time.
Actually, say what you like about Mussolini… Milan station is well worth a visit. And so is Venice’s – what a way to enter a city! The other thing about Italian railway stations is their wonderful names: Venezia Santa Lucia, or Firenze Santa Maria Novella.
I’ve always liked Mailand too. And Venedig.
I’ve hardly been anywhere.
Except last summer, when you went to Engen.
Yes, the Milan station looks like it was built in anticipation of the late-model trains there! (like the French TGV’s, they look sort of like pencils from a distance, but that shape contributes to making them go much faster than the old ones). Unless you are versed in the history of architectural styles, it does not look dated at all. The colours help.
The Venice station is not remarkable in itself, but its entry certainly is!
If any of you go to Paris, the Saint-Lazare station (for Western suburbs and long distance lines) has been renovated and now looks much better and brighter inside, as well as being better designed for passenger traffic.
My wife’s whole office goes somewhere new every year. It’s only for a long weekend, but it’s enough for her to feel that she’s done charming little places like Helsinki, or Rome, or New York.
Except last summer, when you went to Engen.
That’s right. It’s not true that I haven’t been anywhere. The last few summers I’ve been to different European countries with my family, going around for a few days and renting a place for a week. But I’ve never been outside northwestern Europe. Well, if ou extend west to Prague and Helsinki and North to Avignon.
And this spring we’ll be going to Paris to visit a family friend who’s studying there. He lives in the 5e, but I don’t think there’s anything to see or do in that part of the city, so a visit to Saint-Lazare will be a welcome diversion.
Trond, you have the wrong priorities, or you did not read the proper guidebook. The Ve (cinquième) is a lovely place, and your friend is lucky to be living there. It may not have the most spectacular monuments but it includes a very old part of Paris, and it is close to Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower, and not far from the Louvre on the other side of the river. Around the Gare Saint-Lazare is a business and shopping area (large department stores and smaller stores) but the Ve has the Sorbonne and other educational institutions, and many secondhand bookstores (there used to be even more when I was young). There is also the small Musée de Cluny which has the lovely set of medieval tapestries on the theme of La Dame à la Licorne (the Lady with the Unicorn). The Ve extends from the Seine up a hill with the Panthéon on top (a Greek-style building with a dome, now used for tombs of people considered of national importance). The main street up is called Boulevard Saint-Michel and you see the Sorbonne behind a little plaza as you go up. Behind the Panthéon and going down the other side of the hill are a bunch of picturesque little streets where various historical events took place over the centuries. I spent a couple of years there when I was young, living in a student residence while attending the Sorbonne. Parallel to the Seine is the Boulevard Saint-Germain which is one of the wide streets built under Napoléon III, and between the Boulevard and the Seine is another set of picturesque little streets, with more commercial activity than behind the Panthéon but nothing on a large scale. Right along the Seine you have the bouquinistes, who sell used books, etchings, etc from huge wooden boxes set on top of the parapets. (The street runs along the Seine but at a much higher level).
I was going to forget that the Boulevard Saint-Germain takes its name from the old church of Saint-Germain des Prés which is still there. The area became famous during and after WWII because the very deep old cellars (some several stories deep) allowed nightlife to go on there in spite of the early curfews imposed by the occupying Germans. Afterwards some of the cafés became famous for their intellectual clientele, for instance Les Deux Magots which was a favourite of Sartre and his friends (it is still there).
The fifth, and the sixth (to the west), are my favourite bit of Paris, and where I’ve nearly always stayed when I was visiting. That’s a great description m-l. I didn’t know about the deep cellars.
The Panthéon is Roman classicism rather than Greek, by the way. It was built by Soufflot before the Revolution as the church of Sainte-Geneviève. One thing about the Panthéon that might interest Trond is that the construction of the pediment over the entry contains iron bars to reinforce the stone (you can see the diagonal bars that take the shear stress, and all sorts of other details). I understand that this – la pierre armée – was a French construction method in the mid-18C. (I read somewhere that they put iron chains in stone walls as tensile reinforcement), but I think this is the most famous example. It’s anticipates reinforced concrete by about a century, and that was of course a French invention. You can read all about it (and the great Hennebique) here. NOT ONLY THAT, Trond. Across the street is the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, a beautiful, huge purpose-built national library by Labrouste, with cast-iron columns and high-tech iron arches that make the interior look almost like a railway station.
The Panthéon displays an “exact” copy of Foucault’s Pendulum which is lucky because they recently trashed the original.
Thanks, marie lucie. And apologies. I was being facetious, trying to make an ironic point about travelling ens ærend to railway stations. But it’s very nice to have tips from locals. Although I know the Ve from before, having spent a couple of half days there, I’ve mostly been north and east in the city, since my sister used to live in the eastern suburbs. And I’ve never strolled as far south of the Seine as where we’ll be staying this time, somewhere in the last blocks before les Gobelins and the XIIIe.
I’ve always written “Ve” for le cinquième arrondissement de Paris, but seeing that Google Earth is using “5e”, I checked Wikipédia, decided I’d been wrong all the time, and changed it.
And thanks. AJP. I’ll certainly be going there. (I’ve taken holiday tips from you before.)
the Boulevard Saint-Germain which is one of the wide streets built under Napoléon III
We used to dream of owning a flat on the Ile St Louis, failing which the Place des Vosges. Ah well.
And i’ve hardly ever been in the VIe, except for the tourist trap immediately off Saint-Michel and of course passing through on my way to and fro the Eiffel Tower. Same goes for the VIIe.
I had the same dream about the Ile St Louis. What, you think it’s not going to happen?
Everybody has that dream about the Île Saint-Louis.
Well someone’s got to live there.
For someone to get to live there, someone else has got to die there.
Yes, that’s what they say about rent-controlled apartments in New York. Eventually you get one if you really, really want one.
I forgot to say… To me in Norwegian skodde is denser than tåke and in English fog is denser than mist. But mist may be lighter than Norwegian tåke, like Norwegian dis.
Living on the Ile Saint-Louis … Dream on!
The Panthéon: I used to walk by it everyday while going to the Sorbonne. I never had a desire to go inside, and I did not know about those details of its construction. At that time it was all black, as were most monuments built with la pierre de Paris, which darkens with exposure to air. I occasionally went to study in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which is named for the saintly lady who repelled the Huns when they attacked Paris.
AJP, the picture is of another boulevard but they are all more or less in the same style. At the bottom right of the picture is the Galeries Lafayette which is one of the biggest and most famous department stores (if you go shopping there, better go early as it will be packed more and more as the day goes on). It now occupies two buildings next to each other (across a small street) but the original one is worth going into for its architecture: outside it is a conventional Haussmannian building, but inside it is built around an open centre going all the way to the top (with balconies on each floor) and a spectacular glass dome above. You can have coffee or ice cream in the café on the top floor, and if it is nice weather go out on the outside terrace filling in the space between the glass roof and at least one corner of the squarish building. There is a very nice view from that terrace, which is somewhat higher than most of the neighbouring roofs.
Another interesting (though now invisible) thing about the building is that some years ago it was raised 1 metre over a long period, without the activity in the store being disrupted! I know, I went there several times during that period. You could see that something was going on at street level, but that was all that seemed different from the usual, at least to a person ignorant of the details of building construction.
A few blocks away is the other big and famous department store Le Printemps which is more conspicuous from the outside (with a domed turret covered with mosaic at the corner of the main building) but more conventional inside. Both of those stores are not far from the Gare Saint-Lazare: one or two metro stops, but if you come from another quartier and have to transfer to a different line it is easier to walk on the street as you might have to walk through miles of tunnels anyway. Like the stores, the sidewalks tend to be very crowded in the afternoon and before the stores close at 7 pm. The metro too gets very crowded as the railway station has a number of suburban lines and people working in Paris are rushing to catch their trains home. I know the station well since my sister lives just North of Paris, two stops from Saint-Lazare, and that’s where I mostly stay when I go to France.
Need I say more?
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/News/Wallaby-spotted-near-Warboys-07012013.htm
the farm said it was not one of theirs and that they had heard reports of wallabies being seen as far away as Godmanchester.
…not to mention Australia. This is the same Cambridge News that had the story last October 16, behaving as if this is the first they’ve heard of any wallaby. I’m glad it’s relatively ok. Birdseed is a meagre diet, and it ought to be put with the other Cambridgeshire wallabies.
m-l, I love hearing all this about Paris. I’ve never been inside the Galeries Lafayette, although I know of it, and it too was mentioned when I was at architecture school (the open interior that other retailers tried to imitate). Do you know why they had to raise it by a metre? Was it sinking?
I’ve been to the Lafayette every time I’ve been to Paris with my wife, and here’s the reason. When my wife’s great aunt was young and impressionable, she came to Paris from Tromsø and met an exiled Georgian prince with ambitions to the opera. They fell in love and got married, but the prince turned out to be better at dreaming about home with his exiled aristocrat friends than at holding on to a job. His wife, who was a resourceful woman and spoke several languages, which of course was why she’d come to Paris in the first place, found a modestly paid job as a tourist guide and interpreter at the Lafayette. She stayed there her whole life. When she retired she got a driver’s licence, bought a small car, and drove all the way to North Cape
The first time my wife and I were in Paris together, for my sister’s wedding, the great aunt was long dead, but we spent a day with the lady’s son, my wife’s father’s cousin. He let us off at the Lafayette in the afternoon, and we went in to admire the dome. Well inside, my wife found it necessary to perform a thorough inspection of the facilities, and a couple of hours later we were in the toy department on the sixth floor (or some such number) waiting in line to pay. It took a long time, and the problem was that the newly retired American couple who wanted to pay in dollars and the young French cashier who tried to direct them to the exchange desk on the ground floor obviously couldn’t understand eachother, noo matter how loud and slow they each repeated their lines. Obvious to my wife. that is, in spite of not speeking French — I was half asleep — so she stepped up and explained the problem for the Americans They were very thankful, the cashier was very thankful, the Dutch couple in front of us were thankful, and my wife was proud that she could fill in to perform her great aunt’s job!
That “dreaming aboout home” part is my interpretation, by the way. The history would possibly be told very differently by someone closer to the source.
Trond, so you make a pilgrimage to the Galeries Lafayette every time you go to Paris: you could do worse. Nice story about the great-aunt and about your wife’s intuition and resourcefulness.
About the raising of one of the buildings, I thought this would be mentioned in some of the sites about the stores, since it was a spectacular operation although done quietly, but (without looking beyond a page or two of google) I can’t find a reference to it (by the way there are pictures of the GL inside and outside on the first page and also on the Wikipedia articles). Then I thought that perhaps I was mistaken and it was the Printemps which had been raised, but nothing there either. I am pretty sure it was the Galeries. Perhaps they had to install something in the basement, or just expand it, but it was too low and it would have been impossible to dig? If it had been sinking, other buildings in the neighbourhood would have had the same problem.
Not quite a pilgrimmage ,I think, for there’s not that much reverence involved. But she feels that she holds a tiny stake in the place now.
Such operations usually have to do with sinking, but sinking is uneven and one would expect visible cracks in the façade. They would have been mended in restauration, but hardly without leaving a single trace. I’ll have to walk around the building with my engineer’s glasses on. Not that I necessarily could tell cracks stemming from sinking from those due to the raising or other impacts on the building. The easiest may be to ask Siganus, since he might well know.
Ahoy, Crown, I don’t think I’ve asked you this before: what does your artist’s eye make of the popular minor art form emerging on youtube where people combine images and music? Here’s a Benny Carter tune with Martin Lewis graphics.
And here’s a Haydn string quartet with paintings by Alfred Henry Maurer.
The aunt who married the sluggard.
I too am fond of the Ve and the VIe.
That’s a great story about your wife’s great aunt, Trond. Did she stay married to the Georgian prince? And do you happen to know his surname? I have a list of Georgian princely names somewhere.
They stayed married, but he must have died long before her. I know she lived in a small apartment in the increasingly troubled northern suburbs and took the Métro to work every day and to the Norwegian church every Sunday. When her son, a bank manager, wanted to help her move to a better neighbourhood, she kept refusing.
I’ll e-mail you the name of the prince, since I don’t think it would be right of me to do it publicly after such an irreverent presentation. But my wife’s also a genealogist, and she’d be very interested in whatever you may have to add about his family (I wouldn’t be too surprised if “prince” turned out to be family legend, but that’s me, the cynic).
Not many people these days have a list of Georgian princely names. I get the impression from Wikipedia that Georgia’s a bit of a dynastic mixed bag.
Here, by the way, is The Aunt Who Married The Sluggard. Though I greatly enjoyed reading it I think it’s flawed as a story, because the aunt who writes letters and has a vicarious interest in New York seems to bear no resemblance to the Aunt Agatha type who shows up unannounced. I would have liked to hear more about the nightclubs too.
dearie, I’ve noticed this new artform, though I must admit I hadn’t thought of it as that until now. Last week my daughter set a video she’d made, about a train journey, to that 1960s number In The Summertime, and I must admit I like hers the best so far, perhaps because it was unexpected (at least by me). Yesterday, I was trying to find this Nina Simone song, and I was quite irritated to find that the only acceptable non-live version was attached to a cartoon. It’s not always what I’m looking for, sometimes a still photograph would be more satisfactory. However, as long as someone’s not just knitting together two preexisting pieces of work for no apparent reason I’m fairly ok with it. There’s plenty of room for more imaginative presentations in the same way that 1980s music videos became pieces in their own right and not just filmed performances – I suppose we have the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour & Yellow Submarine to thank for making the first steps. I thought the Martin Lewis drawings added some very useful atmosphere to the Blues In My Heart. If you hadn’t been in the right mood when it started you certainly were in New York by the end, I found. The Alfred Henry Maurer, with its colours inverted, is more problematic: it utilises – if you’ll pardon my using your least favourite expression – it makes use of the Haydn to show the pictures. That’s the opposite way of working, and it would have been ok had the video makers revealed anything significant, but I wasn’t sure they did. I admit the blue and yellow colours are better than the murky colouring of the original non-inverted Maurer paintings, but why bother with Maurer at all? Why not use Matisse, who really knew how to draw and was the greatest colourist of the 20C? Or Modigliani, the other artist whose style he was apparently trying to imitate?
If my last name were Lewis I certainly wouldn’t land my son with the first name Martin, as if he were a one-man comedy double act. “John Lewis” might be acceptable, I suppose.
Thanks, Hat, for the answer.
I realized I could simply have linked to him in our genealogy database — the public version, containing only the names of recent persons.
My wife has a newspaper interview with her great aunt from the Christian daily Vårt Land, with handwritten corrections by her grandmother, apparently on occasion of her receiving a St. Olav’s medal for her work for the KFUK (Norwegian YWCA) in Paris. I’ll add a little more for fairness’ sake.
In the interview she tells that she came to Paris after a year and a half in England for a three months stay at the Sorbonne. After only a few days she met her Georgian prince at a ball, a handsome man with a mighty bass voice, who had fled through Turkey on a League of Nations refugee pass four years earlier. They got married in 1930, but not without her family sending her older sister to Paris to talk her out of it, and becoming convinced about the marriage. They got an apartment in a peaceful northern suburb. He studied singing and worked as an opera singer on lesser stages, until German imprisonment during the war put an end to his career. She got engaged in some sort of intelligence service against the Germans translating letters from prisoners. I think it must have been after the war that she took the job at the Lafayette. She also says that on her salary only, they soon lost contact with the Norwegian colony, but kept their friends among the much less snobbish Georgian refugees and Russian artists and singers. (Now I’m curious who she knew. There may be some memoirs floating around in Paris that might interest Hat.)
There may be some memoirs floating around in Paris that might interest Hat.
Indeed!
News from Norway.
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2013/01/12/wool-gathering/
Oh, what fun. It reminds me a bit of a clock my wife did at a primary school. It has a zoetrope image thingy going round the outside that’s powered by the wind. You can see a photo of it and you can see it going round if you click on the little video.
I like the idea of a clock that produces stuff. I always need more socks.
Well, I laughed.
“The victim in this case had just walked back to his car from a bar around the corner.
Kevin Dorsey says he hadn’t even closed his car door Thursday night when a man wearing all black and a ski mask put a gun to his chest. The man took Dorsey’s wallet, cell phone and car keys.
After he was robbed, Dorsey began running down the street and says two men in a Mercedes asked him what had happened.
Dorsey told them and they not only caught up with the suspect, but they started shooting at him.
The suspect fired back. In the end, the two witnesses turned vigilantes won and took down the bad guy.
“I don’t believe in guns,” said Dorsey. “I don’t own a gun. I’m totally at the mercy of my saviors. They obviously sent two angels to help me. These people protected me when I couldn’t protect myself.”
After the robber had been shot, police say he jumped over a fence and was attacked by a German Shepherd. That attack prevented him from getting away.”
They’ll never take away the right to bare teeth.
Is a “snow hole” the same thing as a frost pocket/frost hollow?
“In the case of the famous Rickmansworth (Herts.) frost pocket, a railway embankment prevents the natural drainage of cold air from the valley. Minimum temperatures in the pocket may be tens of degrees below the surroundings.”
I didn’t know about the Rickmansworth frost pocket, and I must admit I’d have said R’worth was in Middlesex. It’s the right time to ask about the weather; it was -18.5C. when we left the house this morning at 8 o’clock. I find that too bloody cold. I don’t know how mab puts up with Moscow winters (answer: you just do.) This is a snow hole because we have more snow and for longer periods of the year than, say, the people in Oslo. It’s not in a hole at all, though. It’s half way up a hill and nearly 200m. above the fjord. There’s a cliff 100 yards behind our house, the scarp face of an escarpment. That may cause the snow to fall when it blows in off the Oslofjord, about 3km to our East. Or not. I’m no good at science.
Oh, and there’s nothing to prevent cold air from draining away, thank God.
A friend of ours used to say he lived “above the snow line” in Edinburgh i.e. far enough south, up the brae in Morningside, that any snow that had fallen overnight hadn’t melted by the morning rush hour, though it had in the city centre.
I like that better than ‘snow hole’, which makes it sound like we’re hibernating.
We’re having a warm spell here. I try to take these things in stride, to say “surprise me, I’m ready for anything” to the element, but at the same time it’s a little creepy to have this kind of balmy week in January: I have to squelch the suspicion that it’s all due to global climate change and the world is going to hell. If instead of “surprise me” I were to place an order for something specific, I would ask for a lovely deep snowfall, but not before Friday, as I have to fly to Chicago and back in the meantime.
After several weeks of mild weather we had snow overnight and more today. I refuse to be astonished by a wee bit of snow in mid January, but the papers are trying to beat up alarm.
A Norwegian Brown.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21141244
Photos of snow
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2266870/Is-mesmerising-beautiful-picture-winter.html
the high concentration of fat and sugar in the cheese made it burn “almost like petrol if it gets hot enough
Just add this to the list of Norwegian renewable resources.
Great pictures in the Daily Mail which is apparently trying to put me out of business. It was lucky the snow stayed on the tree branches – sometimes it does and sometimes not, I’m not sure why – anyway, that’s what makes them look so Christmas-cardy.
But the Mail doesn’t have your lovely wee dugs.
>A.J.P. Crown
“the high concentration of fat and sugar in the cheese made it burn “almost like petrol if it gets hot enough”
It seems a “déjà vu”. Do you remember that we have written about a similar fat, a tunnel and a fire there?
I was also thinking of that one. It was in the Alps and it was margarine. Lots of people were killed that time. They banned margarine lorries from the tunnels there afterwards. I don’t know whether they did elsewhere too, but they ought to have. In fact we all ought to just ban margarine; it’s silly, worthless stuff.
“In fact we all ought to just ban margarine; it’s silly, worthless stuff.” I don’t care for it myself but I can confidently predict that all you have to do is wait and the medical fashion for lauding it or censuring it will swing round again.
That’s a good point. And vegans can use it, so it’s not silly or worthless at all.
Today we had our quasi-Christmas gathering for the family members who couldn’t meet over Christmas. Overnight the warm front arrived: it poured, and when we looked this morning the back garden basked greenly in the sunshine; there was no snow left. Then a beautiful fox came in from the field behind and walked around on a tour of inspection.
We have just enough snow left from the other night to be decorative. It’s a cold bright sunny day. Today we finally took the ornaments off the Christmas tree (we’re funny about that — don’t let go easily) and I heaved it out the back door.
I’ve been wishing the turkey would come by again.
We like to get our money’s worth from a Christmas tree too. I think turkeys would make good pets. I expect you can eat the eggs, although I can’t remember ever hearing of it.
Lovely to have a fox wander in like that, dearie. We still have a couple of feet of snow. Isn’t there something about foxes turning white in the winter? Probably not in southern England.
Not here. Or not yet. Apparently when the vikings arrived in Iceland there were foxes there. I could hardly believe it when I read it, but then someone explained that they were Arctic foxes that had strolled in at some point when Iceland was ice-bound.
P.S. We’ve noticed that the week-and-a-half of snow has resulted in all the berries being stripped from our cotoneasters. Pity: I like the flash of red.
Are you thinking of stoats ermine?
I was thinking of arctic foxes, which apparently are something quite different. I quite like cotoneasters, funny that the berries aren’t stuck on.
I’m planning to put up a new post tomorrow, by the way. It just needs some text.
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