Vacation

Just a note ... I'll be away for the next week, up at the flat where the internet access is slim to none. The Max, The Big G and all 3 kittehs are coming so I'm not sure if it's really a vacation from anything but the interwebs, but even that's a good thing sometimes. I'll leave you with some 80's girlband goodness.

Astronomical


photo courtesy of mjkjr on Flicker

Today – March 19 – features the closest full moon of 2011. Some are calling it a supermoon.
Ooo oo ooo what a little moonlight can do!

Kid Charlemagne
Owsley Stanley, LSD pioneer, RIP

Augustus Owsley Stanley III, AKA the "Bear," died in a car crash in his adopted home of Queensland, Australia today. He was 76. Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley homebrewed more than one million doses of LSD in the San Francisco Bay Area fueling a revolution in consciousness, music, art, and the counterculture.


Here is a rare interview with "Bear" from 2007. "For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area"

L'Image du Jour

I found this at thisisnotporn.net, a most wonderful collection of celebrity candid photos ( and no, not THAT kind).
For me, this pretty much sums up everything I love about Freddy Mercury.

Oh and this too:

Travelin'



Off to Italy for a wedding this weekend and yes, we get to stay here.

Obit

R.I.P. George Shearing
August 13, 1919 – February 14, 2011

L'Image du Jour

Hand Jive - Basel Style

Weekend (a travelogue by Roscoe)



Going up to the mountains is always a nice change of pace.




There are new things to play with



What's that up there?



Whooooaaaa..it's a lot bigger close up!



The shift in altitude is always interesting.




The day winds down and jets make their way to Geneva.





The Argentine lights up briefly.





Sunset...off to bed.

Press Leak



A fable for our times:

The Dumbing Down of America
by Leonard Pitts Jr.

Once upon a time, there lived a stupid giant.

The giant had not always been stupid. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say the giant had once revered intelligence, reason and the byproducts thereof. Indeed, the giant was renowned for an ingenuity and standard of living that made it the envy of the world.

But much of the world did more than envy the giant. Much of the world admired and respected it. Its basic decency, along with its strength and intelligence, set it apart.

There came a time, however, when, though the giant retained its strength and arguably even its decency, it lost its intelligence.

No one can say exactly how and when the loss occurred. There was no great blast of thunder and lightning to herald it, no sudden instant when the giant's intelligence plummeted dramatically from the instant before.

No, stupidity crept over the giant with the stealth of twilight, a product less of one abrupt moment than of a thousand moments of complacency, of resting on laurels, of allowing curiosity to be teased and bullied out of bright children, of dumbing down textbooks so kids could get better grades with less work, of using ``elite'' like a curse word. And, of behaving as if knowing things, and being able to extrapolate from and otherwise make critical use of, the things one knows, was a betrayal of some fundamental human authenticity -- some need to keep it real.

Read the rest here.

Track Back



I must confess, when I was a little girl I had such a crush on Dean Martin. I don't know which I wanted more, to be grown up so I could marry him, or have him be my daddy and sing me to sleep every night.

L'Image du Jour




How fabulous are these globes from ImagineNation? Go check out the Maurice Sendak themed one and more here.

L'Image Du Jour





There are a lot of blogs and pages out there with photos from Chernobyl, but these ones grabbed me because most of them are basically average snap shots, but there are a few that are simply haunting. Browse the set here.

L'Image du Jour

I found this fantastic French blog, Le Divan Fumoir Bohémien, and spent most of yesterday drooling over the pictures and finding all kinds of nifty little museums to check out next time we're in Paris.

And to keep you in that French state of mind, here's a little Georges Brassens:

L'Image du Jour

The Big G and I were in Paris last month (for our first anniversary!) and found FLEUX, a shop full of weird, wonderous and beautifully designed things for your home, office or life in general. We saw these serving trays arrayed along one large wall ... can something be charming and creepy at the same time? See more here (under plateaux).

Track Back

They play this a lot on Option Musique these days and I'm trying to convince The Max to learn the piano bit. I think this video is tres charmant ... kitties and claymation together, yeah!

Fire Good!

(or she likes it when we've got wood)

We've been conducting a little experiment this winter... heating the house with the fireplace instead of the foul smelling, sooty mazout (oil) in the chauffage (central heating device) and I have to admit, I love it. There is some debate about how carbon neutral burning wood actually is, but the consensus seems to be that the carbon released by burning is not adding to the total carbon footprint, as the tree absorbed the carbon to begin with (the same holds true for petroleum products however that absorption was millions of years ago) and that by burning wood, new trees absorb the carbon faster than the earth does to make coal, etc.

Of course, the Swiss know a thing or two about forest management, having had a couple of thousand years to get it right. Every commune has a forest, that is planted, harvested and neatly stacked for curing and sale, done in that tidy Swiss way. We've burned through about 4 stere (one stere =one cubic meter of wood) so far and it's considerably cheaper than burning oil.


2 stere all stacked.

But for me the very best part is caveman TV. I could sit and watch the fire all day. I am soothed by the glow, excited by the whole chemical process going on and find myself relaxing and thinking about things that seem somehow more important than who is in the top running on X Factor or Master Chef this week.

PS It's also allowed the Big G to make continuous 'wood' jokes as well, much to his endless amusement.

L'Image du Jour





Basel October 2010

Merry Christmas

May everyone have a little peace, joy and magic this holiday season!
Here's my favorite little bit of joy: Three Ships

Press Leak

Best Headline of 2010 (or possibly ever):

'Female squirrels never turn down sex'

Seriously, this is on the CBC News website today!

Also, my apologies for being absent for the last while, this song pretty much sums it up for me: