Julia put up on Facebook a couple of pictures she took as she was walking through Buenos Aires. It must have been early this afternoon in Argentina, because it was around nine pm here. I thought I’d do the same, a simultaneous event on the other side of the Earth, but being me, by the time I was done it was eleven. Her pictures show blue sky, sun and giant palm trees. Here we just have a foggy evening and a nosy peek through the window:
You can just see Topsy curled up on the sofa next to Dyv, on the right-hand side:
A Bad Guide 
Ohh! HOW NICE! It’s like a fary tale…
I would never change this wonderful afternoon for my crowded, dirty and (ok) sunny city.
Oh, this really is becoming a watching your wife watch TV blog! 20 minutes into Nytt på nytt now.
I could have guessed your profession by that lamp.
Yes, the other man’s grass is always greener…
Yes, I’m afraid that’s my motto.
Or it will be my grave’s inscription…
That’s right, she’s watching Nytt på Nytt, a Norwegian TV version of the BBC’s The News Quiz but without the leftist bias that irritates even me. The only lamp is the brass candelabra… oh the other one’s from IKEA.
It’s a pretty good inscription, assuming there’s lots of grass around the grave.
Oh, it’s an IKEA lookalike? I think we had one of those too, then, until it broke. That’s how you can tell I’m not in the profession!
Oh, you’re talking about the kitchen one! Yes, that’s real, not IKEA. But it’s my wife’s.
Oh, the blueness of it all!
I’m not sure why it decides to turn everything blue like that. I can easily remove it in Photoshop, but in this case I quite liked it. You can see I removed it in one, though.
Yes, Empty, all that blue is wonderful. Great pictures, Crown.
In 1871, at the age of 16, in a poem that remained famous, Arthur Rimbaud coined the word “blue-ity”.
Here’s a nice wee Blues for an evening of this ever-lasting winter.
The French have got a thing about blue. Some of the best blues are French, including Yves Klein’s blue and the artisanal jacket colour (bleu de travail).
Remember also that blue jeans were made from denim, i.e. “toile de Nîmes”.
All that blues! (Fabulous!)
Serendipity! I was just listening to Sidney Bechet on a 1924 recording called “Mandy Make Up Your Mind” by a one-off band called Clarence Williams’s Blue Five, with Louis Armstrong on trumpet (not yet famous — he had just left King Oliver to go to New York to play with Fletcher Henderson) and Buddy Christian on banjo; Bechet was expected to play his soprano sax, but instead he showed up with the monstrous bass sarrusophone, which absolutely steals the show. The solo starts at 1:48, and just thinking of it makes me smile.
Hat, do you know their wonderful track of Cakewalkin’ Babies?
The chantoosie on those tracks was Eva Taylor, a favourite of mine. She was still performing 50 years later. In Scandinavia!
Hat, do you know their wonderful track of Cakewalkin’ Babies?
You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to find an early Pops track I don’t know. But I could listen to “Cakewalkin’ Babies” an indefinite number of times, and I’m really enjoying it now — thanks!
At times like this I wish I didn’t hate playing music on my computer.
Why do you hate so to do?
I don’t know. Partly about sound quality, partly about concentration, but maybe it’s not about the computer at all. I all but stopped playing music after I got kids. Now, if the TV’s not on, or if nobody else is playing music in the room, I get disturbed by something every other minute. If I’m alone in the house and I crave for music rather than enjoy the silence, I put on a dusty CD from the last millennium.
I don’t hate music on the computer, but I don’t listen very often either. I find it’s too close to my face. I listen to music mostly from an iPod in the car. My daughter listens everywhere, especially the bathroom, my wife nowhere.
I believe I’m more like your wife — though not completely.
Here’s a nice article about a woman who lives around here and has some parrots that she lets fly free. It says they (the owners) require lots of training. I think it could be translated satisfactorily using google translate.
Sig, I meant to say I liked your Rimbaud bleuités.
I enjoyed all the music too. I would like to put it on my iPod, but I don’t think it’s possible. I think if I want to download records onto my iPod I have to pay the late Steve Jobs cash money.
My daughter uses a website which converts any soundtrack on Youtube into an mp3 that you can save on your hard disk. I asked her whether that was legal. It was almost as if I was speaking Martian to her.
I’ll tell her to give it to you if you’re interested.
Yes, please! That would be so useful. My daughter may know how to do this too, but she would consider explaining it to me to be a massive waste of her extremely valuable time.
The address is: http://www.savetube.com/
Just copy-paste the Youtube link and click on “MP3”. Then you can choose the quality of your audio document (I advise you to take the lowest one. It’s not so bad and takes much less time to convert the video).
Lilith – does it work on a Mac?
Thanks very much, Lilith! How exciting. I’m going to show my daughter that I know something she doesn’t…
…And please feel free to hang out here any time.
dearie, it says you can try this one for your mac.
I’ve just tried it on Annie Lennox. It worked perfectly.
I just tried it on Radiohead. Lilith’s link works, just as Lilith said, on my Mac. Fantastic! Just follow her instructions, dearie.
Eek! I now have dearie’s Bechet & Hines “Blues in Thirds” available to play when I drive the car.
Language is right about the monstrous bass sarrusophone solo on “Mandy Make Up Your Mind”, it’s hilarious and wonderful.
Now I can go back through the old posts and put all dearie’s videos on my iPod. Whoopee!
Splendid! Now, Crown, you mustn’t overlook Willie “the Lion” Smith.
Done. That one’s better than the Fats Waller version – at least, in my opinion (he said defensively).
Now I can go back through the old posts and put all dearie’s videos on my iPod. Whoopee!
And the best thing, perhaps, would then to be able to listen continuously to the song, without any of these annoying and recurrent breaks during which the Youtube video is “buffering”…….
You need more modern computers on Mars. I can’t remember the last time I had that “buffering” experience.
I get it a lot with videos from newspapers, but not from Youtube. I don’t think it’s the computer’s fault; isn’t it the connection? But what do I know about such things.
Here’s a track from a codger concert. The Irish-looking fellow on the cornet is Jimmy McPartland, one of the original Chicago gang. The broad on the joanna is his English wife Marion: quite a player isn’t she?
When I said “Chicago gang” I should, I think, have said “Austin High School gang”. Oops.
New York Times story about how Buenos Aires is going to hell in a handbasket: “historic buildings have been demolished at astonishing speed since Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001…” As a former porteño, I can’t help being sad.
Hello, Mr. Hat!
Don’t be so sad.. This article is not very reliable, actually. It also make me sad when I see many old houses demolished in BA neighbourhoods, but they lost me when they write here:
“One of many buildings at risk of demolition, preservations say, is the 1923 Palacio Barolo”
They’re just saying “boludeces” if you remember what that means. The Palacio Barolo is at no risk at all! (as all the important buildings of our city).
I’m not saying by this that our architectural heritage shouldn’t be more protected, but the situation is not as bad as is shown here.
¡Qué alivio! Thanks for making me feel better.
Still, it’s a great article to read about things in BA. Thanks, Language.
I like that the underground trains run on the left, like in London. I LOVE those old trains with slatted wooden benches. I never saw anything like them in London, there they always used padded upholstery, but they used to have beautiful ones in Paris. When they threw them out in Oslo my parents-in-law salvaged enough thin strips of teak to lay a new floor in their house. It was lovely, but I’d rather the city had just renovated the carriages.
entire neighborhoods of Tudor homes or German chalets – that sounds interesting. Did German & Swiss immigrants live in the chalets at first, and did suburban Britons first move into the mock-Tudor villas?
Yes, Wiikipedia says the Palacio Barolo was “declared a national historic monument in 1997”.
The Palacio Barolo was designed in accordance with the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy, motivated by the architect’s admiration for Alighieri. There are 22 floors, divided into three “sections”. The basement and ground floor represent hell, floors 1-14 are the purgatory, and 15-22 represent heaven. The building is 100 meters (328 feet) tall, one meter for each canto of the Divine Comedy. The lighthouse at the top of the building can be seen all the way in Montevideo, Uruguay. The owner planned to use only 3 floors, and to rent the rest…Today it houses mainly lawyers’ offices (in Hell), a Spanish language school (Purgatory), and a store that sells Tango clothing (Heaven).
I wonder if there are any well-written architecture of BA books in English? It’s a place that needs several, it seems to me, but I may just not know about them.
boludeces = crap, according to my googling.
Here’s one. I remember them having black velvet curtains in 1st class, but I probably made that up – that, and the waiters carrying champagne in silver buckets.
A very slightly interesting linguistic note: RATP is the well-known (at least to Parisians) Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens, the Paris transport authority similar to the late lamented London Transport (that Mrs Thatcher must have abolished while I was out of the country). Anyway, RATP is also Regia Autonomă de Transport Public Iaşi, a transit operator responsible for public transportation in Iaşi, Romania, established in 1898. Now that must have been deliberate.
Yes, boludez, derived from boludo ‘dumbass,’ is (in the nice phrase of the Oxford Spanish Dictionary) a “piddling little thing,” and the plural boludeces is “nonsense” or (as you put it) “crap.” Porteño Spanish is very pungent and evocative.
I’m sorry, I couldn’t comment before. And now is not much the time I have
For an overview of our architecture these posts look fine.
http://www.gringoinbuenosaires.com/buenos-aires-architecture/
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/argentina/100112/buenos-aires-architecture
The “detective” who appears in this video speaks worst English than me!
I had no idea of his work… I will take a look who he is and what he does. But not now, I’m late (think of me with long furry ears, an old jacket and a big clock. Rushing out… but I will return, if you don’t object)
We don’t object! Thank you for finding these. The detective is an obsessive, but it’s good to have him around for work like this. Nothing wrong with his English, it’s nice of him to bother.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/new-kid-on-the-block-chefs-are-discovering-the-amazing-succulence-and-delicacy-of-billy-goat-meat-8579184.html
No, I’m not going to eat the dogs or goats. Call me sentimental, but pets or children will never be served up for dinner in this house – actually, we don’t eat meat at all any more.
We know someone who lives in Watertown, Mass., don’t we? He’s supposed to stay inside his house and not let anyone in except police. I do hope his cat is indoors.
We’re safe in our bedroom and wide awake in the middle of the night. Our cat is indoors as usual.
The area where police are searching for “suspect #2” is less than a mile away from us.
Jolly good! Stay safe.
BBC TV played your Officer Callaghan, alias “Robocall”, telling everyone in Watertown to stay inside. She sounded rather nice.
But her name’s not Callaghan, right? I can never remember what it is. And I heard it just a few hours ago.
This note started as an attempt by AJP to share a simultaneous moment with Julia. Now it’s almost as if we could now see Empty live on TV. Unfortunately, or fortunately, he can’t see much of us.
I’m very happy you’re OK, Ø!
Where can I get reliable information? I’m watching right now some videos at The Washington Post. But I’m not sure where to look
Try http://www.boston.com/, the online version of the Boston Globe newspaper.
We’re still confined to the house, along with everybody in several towns/cities around here. SWAT teams have been searching in various places. There has been a pretty much constant sound of helicopters all morning.
I don’t think there’s much reliable info. On TV, I watched CNN for as long as I could stand listening to the self-important, vacuous announcers. Then I watched the BBC’s coverage, which was more sensible, but it wasn’t continuous. Tweets are a good way of getting up-to-the-minute totally unreliable information, but I like the tweets of Inga Saffron, an architecture journalist who’s currently in Boston and who covered the war in Chechnia, where the suspects came from.
https://twitter.com/IngaSaffron
Thank you both.
The whole thing is awful.
It must be a pain to hear all this. What have you been doing all morning? Watching TV? (Here it’s dark already, and I think I’ll go home now, since I can do it.) What happened to those were not at home and need to go back? I hope you managed to eat breakfast nonetheless.
Good luck, Empty.
Hang on, Ø!
When they stopped the metropolitan transit system this morning, they instructed everybody who was trying to get to work to go right home.
You must be wondering how long they can keep this up. I read on TV that the authorities were now looking in Connecticut for a gray Honda SUV with Mass plates.
>Empty
It’s good to read that you are safe. I hope the police arrest the 2nd terrorist as soon as possible finishing with this hell.
Our friends on the next street over were visited by a SWAT team. Maybe we are just outside a zone in which all houses got searched.
We are relying on internet, not watching television, because we don’t want to alarm our daughter. For the same reason, we are confining phone calls and conversations with each other to rooms out of earshot. Our daughter is 12, but (as I may not have mentioned here before) she is mentally more like a much younger child. She would not understand and would worry needlessly. She was to be home today anyway, because it is a school vacation week. We have not yet needed to come up with explanations for her about why she is not going where she expected to go today, like to the orthodontist or to her friend’s house.
Look here to see those stupid-ass streetlamps that I was telling about a few weeks ago.
The governor of Mass., the mayor of Boston, and police officials just gave a press conference in which there was no big news and no questions were allowed. (I’m not blaming them.) They now say we may remain in our homes for days.
It sounds more or less like a hurricane, one of the few occasions when hundreds of thousands of people have to stay indoor by law. The problem arises for those who need to go out, for medical treatment for instance.
Er, one question: what if they don’t find him for the next three weeks?
Hmm, nine fifteen this (Friday) evening. Everything is calm outside, there is a gentle breeze and no rain. Sirius and Canopus are already low over the western horizon. Time to go to bed. Hope the rest of the day will be calm enough for you, Empty.
Is the Watertown Mall the same as the Arsenal Mall they mentioned? I don’t like those streetlamps, but I saw a very nice pink flowering cherry on one of the side streets. I’ve seen pictures on facebook of your daughter, she’s lovely. I suppose the last thing you’d planned for the weekend was to have a bunch of terrorists show up. Maybe it’s a good time to … I don’t know, catch up on some movies, cook some interesting meals that don’t require a trip to the shops.
…There’s going to be a “controlled blast” at some point, on Norfolk St in Cambridge, in case you wonder what the noise is.
>Empty
According to a piece of news I read one hour ago, the police are surrounding the residential area where the terrorist is. If it’s true, he will be arrested soon.
Jesús,
I don’t think the police are certain that he is in that area.
The Watertown Mall is on one side of Arsenal Street. The larger Arsenal Mall is right across from it.
Watertown has plenty of nice flowering trees here and there, but there is very little about Arsenal Street that is visually attractive. My feeling about those lampposts, and about the street signs in a matching style, is that they represent a vain effort at turning that around: the visual equivalent of an “air freshener” in a smelly room.
Yes, I’d like to be able to treat this next stretch as a quiet little holiday, but it’s hard to shake off the jittery feelings, not to mention the urge to get the hell out of the house, if only as far as the garden.
This morning I kept having the following sequence of thoughts: I wonder if it’s unwise to go out to the driveway and get the morning paper. Oh, no, silly me, the guy who delivers the paper can’t today. Eventually this led to the idle question: How many complaints did the newspaper people get today from subscribers who got no paper and somehow didn’t figure out why not.
On the bright side, the helicopter sounds have ceased for the time being.
The weather enters into one’s frame of mind, too, of course. It started as a lovely bright spring day, nature saying all’s right with the world and offering a cruel contrast to current grim realities. That was true on Marathon Day, too. And also (substituting “fall” for “spring) on 9/11/01.
Now it’s gone to alternating that bright blue stuff with a sort of threatening grey blowy manner.
If you’re at work, you can go home (unless, maybe, you work in a hospital?). Taxis are operating. I read about somebody who was found sleeping in her car in a parking lot and was assisted in getting home.
Our thoughts are with you, Ø !
One of our national just papers published this piece written by an argentine student at MIT
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1574330-un-argentino-testigo-del-tiroteo-en-boston
Julia, I thought that article was (mostly) very easy to understand using google translate. Maybe it’s Spanish-English service is improving.
I was wondering whether you could order hampers of exotic foods to be delivered via Amazon, but I suppose it’s the same as the newspaper deliveries.
Let’s hope so!
(Some days ago I understood pretty well that article you linked about parrots, written in Norwegian )
What?
What? Well, I order marrons glacés for my mother at Christmas, via Amazon, and I noticed that they’ll send you lots of different exotic foods. I’ve always wanted to do it for myself, but I’ve never had a good enough reason to.
I thought they said there weren’t any taxis or other public transport, but maybe the taxi drivers complained.
One thing about this, I’ve been able to have a good look at your weather. It looks like you’re ahead of us. We still have a little unmelted snow, and certainly no trees in bloom.
Good to hear you’re OK. I did think of you when I heard of the bomb, but I didn’t make the connection when the news said “Watertown”.
If they don’t find him soon, they’ll have to conclude that he probably got away and let life and society get back on tracks again. People need stuff, so it can’t be that long. And that’s a good thing. That banal need and will to keep going as normal that keeps horror and lasting damage to society away.
I hope they take him alive and manage to keep a calm and low-key investigation and trial. So far it looks as another internet-fed selfmade boyroom terrorist. Or one of those and his loyal brother.
Today was nice. I cycled home from work in my shirt and with rolled-up sleeves, just to be able to tell about it here.
Tomorrow I’ll be going out in the forest with the kids to sleep in the snow again. It was meant to be 15 degrees and sun and dry in the forest by now, not 15 degrees and sun and still half a meter of rotten snow. I just tried to tell my son to pack lots of dry socks.
Maybe they’ll start dropping groceries from their helicopter.
Dry socks are vital. I’ve had got wet feet every day this week.
There’s a magnolia coming into bloom near us.
The only connection I’ve ever had with a (threatened) bombing was when the university site where I used to work was evacuated. It was the exam season (of course it was, you may think) and so the morning session of exams had to finish an hour early. A friend of mine, who was a Chairman of Examiners that year, and took his responsibilities very seriously, then took his stomach very seriously too; ulcer.
The authorities did ring our doorbell eventually. At the moment when the doorbell rang I was cuddled on the sofa with our dear daughter Amadi (thanks for your kind words, Crown), having recently fallen asleep reading to her. Tesi answered the door while I stayed with Amadi and did my best to prevent her from being traumatized.
There were about 6 men and a dog, heavily armed but very calm and polite. (Well, the dog seemed polite but it was not armed.) They did not come to search the house, but only to search the yard (garden) and any outbuildings that might have been reachable from outdoors. At our request they looked in the garage and the basement.
For me the worst of it was the mud on their boots, but it was easy to clean up.
Amadi’s main concern was related to our cat Nika, who is not allowed outdoors (but who coincidentally did get out for a while yesterday to Amadi’s great distress). She didn’t want anyone to leave the sliding doors to the back garden open and let Nika out, and when the saw the dog in the back yard she was concerned about what Nika would make of this intrusion.
Trond’s 8:28 comment expresses some of my feelings about this exactly.
Except that I don’t know what “boyroom” means.
I saw that at Boston College they were going to deliver food to the dormitories so that the students would not have to go to the dining halls.
“Boyroom” is Bad English for Norwegian gutterom. “Boys room” would have been better, I think.
One thing I dislike about drawn-out emergencies (from safe distance across the Atlantic) is how authorities with nothing meaningful to do in the situation start imposing unnecessary precautions just to show that they take it seriously, and how that even can turn into a competition.
I mislike it this side of the Atlantic too, of course. When I make sweeping generalizations, I base them entirely on casual observation of my own neighbourhood.
mislike
I’ll go to bed soon.
Rightly or wrongly, I trust that the “lockdown” precaution in this case was a wise one and not just for show.
But it has now been lifted. We are free to move around as needed.
That suggests that the suspect may have slipped through the net during the night. On the other hand, the helicopters are back, and I’m hearing sirens, too.
Oh, no, I don’t think it was wrong, and I don’t think it lasted long enough for lesser authorities to really feel the pressure building.
Now we’ve heard gunshots. We’re staying away from windows, and from the ground floor.
It appears that they have got the guy in a boat in someone’s yard, maybe a quarter of a mile from here. Does he have a bomb?
Oh… All this is horrible!
Enviado desde mi BlackBerry de Movistar (http://www.movistar.com.ar)
I’m very happy you’re ok, Tom
Enviado desde mi BlackBerry de Movistar (http://www.movistar.com.ar)
We’re holed up in the bedroom again, on the theory that it’s a little safer, although it seems like the only danger to us at this point is if the guy has a powerful bomb to set off.
One downside of this is that I can’t finish making myself some dinner.
They got him! You can come out and make dinner now, Ø.
I’m eating! Also breathing more deeply.
Have a good sleep tonight. Things will certainly look different tomorrow morning.
Yes, things will look different. Thank goodness you’re all ok. I hope Amadi wasn’t too put out by the police showing up. I expect Asa was very relieved to hear his family was (were? – they’re on the other side of the state, so I think John Cowan would suggest were) his family were ok. I had to go to bed, but it would have been frightful if it had been left unresolved for another night.
Empty, the definition of Googlemap for the Boston area is quite good and I pleasantly went down the river from Watertown Dam to downtown Boston. One must be able to do that in a rowing boat, no? (Though there seems to be an awful lot of locks and bridges when you arrive at the city centre.) Do people easily go rowing along that river? At times there seems to be a number of highways along the banks, but there is also a lot of greenery suggesting a peaceful place.
There are no dams or locks between Watertown Dam and what is called the Science Museum Dam (although it is more like a lock or set of locks than a dam). Below that you are in salt water, in Boston Harbor. There are rowboats and powerboats use this stretch of the river. This includes competive rowing crews from a number of local universities. There is a major annual rowing race called Head of the Charles. There are fairly fast roads on both sides in the Boston-Cambridge area, but also long strips of green parkland for the public, and bicycle paths.
Further up the river the banks are wooded in many places, with paths for biking and walking.
When I drive from Providence, where I teach, to Watertown, where I live, I cross the Charles 7 times.
I cross the Charles 7 times: ah, a variant of the Bridges of Königsberg.
I wish I’d thought of that, dearie.
Was it Euler or Gauss who proved that this problem about the bridges of Kœnigsberg had no solution? (I always hated topology at school.)
Peculiar video about Argentina and bitcoins (have you heard about bitcoins before? I hadn’t)
“Euler’s Network Theorem”
I hadn’t heard of bitcoin until about a month ago. There’s a lot of negative stuff that isn’t mentioned in that video, which is understandable since it’s supposed to be promoting bitcoin. I quote from the Guardian:
The three things I don’t like about Bitcoin are: a) the biggest investor is the hateful Winkelvii twins, b) it’s a get-rich-quick scheme which, if history tells us anything, is bound to fail and c) it’s the currency of the drugs marketplace Silk Road, which, despite its anarchistic roots I’m not a big fan of.
On the other hand, I know next to nothing about moneymaking, so I’m the last person who ought to be offering an opinion.
You can see I get all my information from the Guardian. dearie wouldn’t approve, and he’d be right; it is a bit narrow politically.
For how long will Königsberg remain Russian? It has never been Russian in the past and it is a complete oddity nowadays to have an artificially created Russian exclave squeezed between Lithuania and Poland.
Just another topological problem, not unlike what can be found between India and Bangladesh.
Here is the interesting India-Bangladesh one, frightful for those who are stuck there, that Sig told me about a while ago. And some pictures.
For how long will Königsberg remain Russian?
Indefinitely.
It has never been Russian in the past
So? It’s been Russian since 1945; all the Germans were kicked out and it was completely rebuilt as a Russian province inhabited by Russians. Cities very frequently change nationality: Riga was a German city for centuries, Vilna/Wilno a Jewish/Polish one — it didn’t become Lithuanian Vilnius until 1939, and until then there were hardly any Lithuanians living there (it had been part of Poland). New York was Nieuw Amsterdam and full of Dutchmen once upon a time. Constantinople/Istanbul used to be Greek, Antakya/Antioch was part of the Syrian province of the Ottoman Empire, Tbilisi/Tiflis was full of Armenians and Russians and had hardly any Georgians in it until the 20th century… I could go on, but you get the idea.
an artificially created Russian exclave
All polities are artificially created. Ain’t no such thing as autochthonous peoples or age-old nationalities.
I knew a very nice German cleaning lady in Hamburg who had grown up in Königsberg before the war. She was sad she couldn’t go back, and although it isn’t the worst story to have come out of WW2 I felt sorry for her. Königsberg for the Königsbergers! Let Ostpreussen be Ostpreussen, I say. London used to be a lot better when it was just Romans.
Oh yeah, I feel sorry for the Königsbergers too, and I don’t expect anyone here is surprised to hear that I deplore most historical changes — Manhattan for the Mannahatta, say I! I was just reacting against the idea that this particular change is somehow special, or especially deplorable or transient. This is how history works. (History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.)
An exclave with a sea coast is presumably sustainable for a long time as long as the population is content with the status quo and the neighbours don’t try to bag it. Long ago when I had to introduce Euler’s T to students I would give them a three sentence history of Königsberg and then make mocking reference to John Major’s idiocy about wanting to be at the heart of Europe.
If Sig had had you making mocking refs to John Major, he wouldn’t have hated topology. He could have hated John Major instead.
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Finally, a quotation I can recognise without having to look it up! It must be from reading Languagehat, because I haven’t been reading Joyce, at least not lately.
John Major was an eminently unhateable man, oh yes. But he was, if I may say so, prone to the occasional ludicrous statement. “We have our backs to the wall so we must turn and fight.” Oh yes.
Haha. Did he really say that? Yes, he’s unhateable.
Spring has sprung
The grass has riz
All is bright and cheerful
Hear the birdies on the wing
Giving us an earful.
I don’t do poetry, but spring has sprung here too. No snow, only sunshine and flowers. Well, practically.
Breezy with hail today, so that we got cherry and magnolia “snow”.
How lovely. I’ll be in England in mid-May. i hope there’s some blossom left. I’m thinking of buying a mango-lia. They do have them in Norway, but I never see the blossom for some reason.
I’m going to Paris in the morning, and reports say that the platanes on the boulevards are in blossom. With a family of dedicated allergics, that’s a warning, not an advertisement.
Oh, they’re called planes. I remember making a joke about that just the other day.
The secret to getting wonderful views of Paris from the open top buses is to go before the trees are in leaf.
a warning, not an advertisement.
I don’t know much about French, but I know that “avertissement” means warning.
Likewise, I don’t know much about trees but I know that the sycamores down by the Charles River in Cambridge are not what are called sycamores in the Old World, nor are they the other kind of trees called sycamores in the Old World (just as the (Eastern) red cedars around here are not the same as what one gets when one buys (Western) red cedar at the lumberyard, but rather a kind of juniper, the Western red cedar being a kind of thuja, neither of them being anything like what is meant biblically by “cedar”), but I always forget that our sycamores are the same as plane trees. Plane trees, platanes, ought to be the same as platanos, which are a kind of banana, but they’re not. Also, I always think that plane trees ought to be the same as lime trees; I don’t know why. Linden trees, I mean, not lime like lemon. But they’re not that, either.
I went to see Unter den Linden once. It was being dug up.
Something to make you weep.
Tries again
Aw, sod it. One last try.
Oh thank you for persevering, dearie! I wish I’d thought of it.* I wonder if our dogs would like to try one of those robotic vacuum cleaners.
*Thought of the cat doing it. Obviously I’m not going to chase a duck, not when I’m wearing a Jaws outfit, anyway.
Ø, oak aren’t the same in Europe, either. Lime and plane are as different as…. well, they’re jolly different anyway. They are both the trees of London in my mind’s eye, despite the Unter den Linden – and does that even have lime trees at all nowadays? I couldn’t see any when I was there, and it wasn’t being dug up. Plane get to be absolutely huge and have big beige-coloured patches on their trunk bark. Lime get big but no beige patches and they have heart-shaped leaves. My mother’s got a neighbour’s lime tree hanging over her back garden and it secretes a dark sticky stuff all over the York stone paving. It’s not all fun & games, being middle class.
does that even have lime trees at all nowadays?
Yes, apparently. How could I have forgotten? You can see here, though they look pretty puny for limes. The Unter den Linden is worth a trip for anyone who’s interested in architecture, especially neoclassical, and as a way to get to the Museumsinsel from former West Berlin and so to Schinkel’s Altesmuseum, one of the most memorable architectural works ever, in my opinion, with its great void where the stairs are. (Subsequently copied, for example, for the University buildings on Karl Johans gate in Oslo).
oak aren’t the same in Europe, either
I think you mean that there are European oaks different from American oaks. But they are all in the same little taxonomic group. (And we have more than one kind around here.)
What I was saying about cedars and sycamores was something else: that a familiar name got attached to what was really a very different tree when people moved to faraway places. Like the way we call the prominent local thrush a robin.
Lime and plane are as different as….
Oh, I know, I was just making random conversation. I’m familiar with plane trees, except that sometimes I forget that I’m familiar with them (forgetting that they’re the same as what I call sycamores). I’m not familiar with lime/linden trees. I should look at a picture. Hmm. No I’m not. Except the Schubert song.
Wikipedia quotes a friend of Schubert, describing the time he invited some people to hear his newly composed song cycle Die Winterreise:
“Come to Schober’s today and I will play you a cycle of terrifying songs; they have affected me more than has ever been the case with any other songs.” He then, with a voice full of feeling, sang the entire Winterreise for us. We were altogether dumbfounded by the sombre mood of these songs, and Schober said that one song only, “Der Lindenbaum”, had pleased him. Thereupon Schubert leaped up and replied: “These songs please me more than all the rest, and in time they will please you as well.”
My wife is very fond of Die Winterreise. Alas.
I like to play it – them – in the car, and it tolerates being played over & over again better than most of his other work (and I’ve tried). Even so I still enjoy blasting the middle bit of the Trout out of the windows. I do wish he’d lived 30 years longer.
Ø, I don’t know much about Botany though like with you & your sister I do have family connections. I think the American oak looks so different to the European one, planks of the wood too, that I find it hard to believe they’re even related – I accept I’m wrong, just wrong, though.
Sessile and pedunculate oaks (i.e. Q. petroea & Q. robur) “are the two native oaks in Britain: most other countries have more”. So saith the sage Oliver Rackham.
Crown, possibly you are thinking of the difference between white oaks and red oaks. Over here we have both.
I learn from WiPe that
– Both of the ones dearieme mentions are white oaks.
– Q. robur is known as the “English oak” and also as the “French oak”.
– Q. petroea is known both as the “Welsh oak” and the national tree of Wales; and as the “Cornish oak” and the national tree of Cornwall.
– “The great dilemma for wine producers is to choose between French and American oakwoods. French oaks (Quercus robur, Q. petraea) give the wine greater refinement and are chosen for the best wines since they increase the price compared to those aged in American oak wood. American oak contributes greater texture and resistance to ageing, but produces more violent wine bouquets. ” [I am guessing that this is some kind of American white oak, not red.]
– Pigs are about the only farm animals that can be safely fed on acorns.
I don’t what a “violent wine bouquet” is. I might like it, or I might not.
I’m not much of a drinker of spirits – save for a G&T on a hot day, or a whisky with my haggis – but I recently enjoyed “OakHeart” rum – attractive, spicey stuff. Whether oak plays any part in the production process I have no idea.
Declaration of interest: the rum was supplied free by a family member who works for the producer.
Blimey, lucky you. I quite like a tiny rum occasionally.
Ø, I remember the difference between white & red oak. In New York I used to very occasionally specify white oak for cabinetwork (red was awful). When we were getting oak floors for this house my favourite samples came from France & Hungary (couldn’t afford either of them, though).
For those who like a “tiny rum” I recommend Lang’s Banana Rum. I last drank it more than forty years ago and still remember it as marvellous. We have a bottle in the back cupboard: maybe I’ll broach it on my birthday.
But hold hard: I’ve just checked and apparently they’ve stopped making it.
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090722144228AAYP7rk
Now my bottle must presumably be valuable so I’d better not broach it. Wot am I offered?
Ha, ha, ha!
http://en.wikicollecting.org/gold-medal-banana-rum-finest-old-banana-260712-lot-656
Oh. But it says:
“You can make any fruit rum yourself by buying a light flavoured rum and adding the fruit yourself. The alcohol will preserve it. Leave it in a clean, disinfected bottle and allow it to infuse for as long as possible.”
We have a bottle in the back cupboard. I last drank it more than forty years ago.
Must be a record.
For eighty quid I’ll make my own and xerox a label, thanks.
“Must be a record.” My wife was amused by my reminiscing about how good it was and then spent some years trying to find a shop near us that sold it. Hence my birthday bottle. We once sold a bottle of wine at a vast profit (Penfold’s Grange) so I’d be tickled if we could do the same with a rum. (Or a print!)
The strange hobbies people have.
http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/langs-banana-jamaica-rum-miniature-220429959#.UX7Sur8Ttjc
I’m not sure I approve of rums with added flavor in the bottle. But that’s just a prejudice based on years of being irritated by tacky advertising campaigns for Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum.
Years ago, at the end of a long stay in Germany as a visiting scholar of some sort, during which I had been hosted by the illustrious Herr Doktor Professor’s family and slept in their Gartenhaus and had meals with the family and watched World Cup matches on the telly over Yugoslavian red wine or occasionally Ratzeputz, and sung Schubert Lieder with him at the piano and generally been made very much at home, I thought I would give him a special bottle of something as a thank you gift. He had once told me about some kind of spirits that came with a snake preserved in the bottle, and I thought it would be a great joke if I could find it. Unfortunately when I went into a shop and asked about it there was a little vocabulary malfunction and I said Schnecke instead of Schlange, leading to stout denials of the existence of any such thing, so it didn’t work out.
Oh, but isn’t there something Mexican that has a Schnecke inside? Tequilla, or something? I’d have thought a Schlange would have been the odder one – bizarre, really. I don’t know whether it’s the same in German, but in Norwegian a schlange is also water hosepipe. I don’t like it. I’d like it to be clear if the subject arises that I’m talking about a snake in the garden, not a hosepipe.
I think the Mexican one is a worm (insect larva).
Do you have garter snakes in Europe?They are small and harmless and our commonest sort of snake. Some people call them ‘garden snakes’.
Garter snakes, like all snakes, are carnivorous. Their diets consist of almost any creature they are capable of overpowering: slugs, earthworms, leeches…ants, frog eggs
I’d say any large creature incapable of overpowering a frog’s egg but claiming to be a carnivore is living in a dream world.
No, no garter snakes outside of N. America, apparently. They’re very pretty. They live in Alaska, which reminds me that my brother in law, when he was in the Norwegian army, convinced a troop of visiting British soldiers on Arctic training that the reason his men were digging a trench around their own tent was to prevent the snow snakes from getting inside (it was to provide a low area for the coldest air to sink into).