Creepy stalker cat

It has reached the point of ridiculousness. Mouser's little stalker friend is being a bit of a nuisance. It clings to the poor little cat like a shadow.
And it doesn't do anything. It just sits there and watches. And stares. Good thing it doesn't ring up at odd times or something.
It has peed on my car come to think of it. I washed it down, but the place it'd hit was just the right hight for a cat spray.
The minute it starts wearing a trench coat with rolled up collar hiding in the bushes with a pair of binoculars, I'll be on the phone to the police like a rat up an aquaduct.

Science: No shit

Lollipop noise

I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, I do not like those stupid facebook apps. No matter how hard I tweak the filters and try to bar any of those silly things showing up in my feed, some do manage to sneak through. It's annoying. It's noise.
But this one caught my attention. It is double entendre prone for sure. For privacy's sake I took out my friend's name. (click to enlarge)




My reaction to that would be (in following order):

Has he really? I don't care who it is. I'm certainly not going to comment. I'm certainly not going to do that thank you very much.

Massive damage to heritage after quake

Yesterday's earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy caused ''huge'' damage to the medieval city's artistic heritage, Heritage Ministry Secretary-General Giuseppe Proietti said. The apse of the Abruzzo city's largest Romanesque church, the 13th-century Basilica di Santa Maria di Collemaggio, had collapsed ''from the transept to the back of the church,'' he said.

The Basilica, with its famed pink-and-white jewel-box façade, was the site of the coronation of Pope Celestine V in 1294 and thousands of pilgrims still flock there each year.

The Porta Napoli, the oldest and most beautiful gate to the city built in 1548 in honour of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, was destroyed in the quake.

There were also concerns for the National Museum of Abruzzo, which is housed in the 16th-century castle.

Created in 1950, the Museum unified the collections of the civic and diocesan museums as well as a private collection of paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries and includes a beautifully preserved fossilised skeleton of a prehistoric elephant found near the town in the 1950s.

The castle suffered a collapse on its third floor and is too dangerous to enter, according to Proietti.

''The store rooms where damaged works are kept safe are also in areas that have collapsed or unstable,'' said Proietti, who added that he was gathering a team of heritage experts from other regions to help salvage the works.

Elsewhere in the city, the cupola of the 17th-century Anime Sante church and the bell tower of L'Aquila's largest Renaissance church, San Bernardino da Siena, were also down.


The cupola of the 18th-century Baroque church of St Augustine collapsed, flattening the prefecture that held L'Aquila's state archives.

St Augustine was previously destroyed in an earthquake in 1703 and had to be rebuilt.

''Naturally there have been various collapses all over the city, with cornices, walls and pieces of roof often obstructing the streets,'' Proietti said.

Source: Ansa.it

More pictures of the devastation caused by the trembling earth can be found at the Italian State Police Site.

For a more detailed historical and scientific look at quakes in the Abruzzo region go here.

Inertia is my homeboy

I've discovered I'm quite the little sadist when it comes to watching sporting events on the box.
The Malaysian Grand Prix made me come to that conclusion about myself. I was hoping for more rain so cars could skid off the track and make it just a tad more spectacular.
Same goes for cycling. A wet stretch of road is just grand. I remember when I was working at the Zolder race track during the Road Cycling World Championships about six years ago, that new layer of asphalt induced massive pile ups and when one guy fell, he took down a fair amount of the peloton with him.
Another example could be the Tour de France. I never watch that, except for the descent etappes if the Alps, or any other mountain ranges, are included. I just watch to see if one of those guys misses the turn and takes a massive dive into a ravine.
It could just be I associate the Ronde van Vlaanderen with pain. About seven years ago, on the same day the Ronde took place, I fell down a flight of stairs, banged my head on the floor and ended up with a mild concussion, a chipped tooth and a stitched eyebrow.
Football, that other boring sport, is only interesting when it's been raining for days on end, the field is covered in a thick fog or the ground frozen solid so the ball bounces the other way everyone least expected it to go.
Now rally and those kind of things are just silly. You just know they're gonna crash sooner or later. The suspense is missing.

Gravity rulez! Inertia is my homeboy!

A mound of wiki

Ah, my favourite online encyclopedia makes me giggle once more.
After seeing a brief troll intervention on the 'Dinosaur' entry (see my I love wiki post), some more gibberish found its way on the wikipedia-entry for 'Tumulus'.
Don't bother looking now, it has already been edited. Luckily Mrs B took a screen cap for all of you to smirk at! (click picture to enlarge)

Pig Latin

I've been wrestling with some Latin text I'm trying to translate. It's several pages (well, 54 pages actually) of the Acta Sanctorum. It's not going very smoothly. I ran into some obstacles along the way:

-I did not study Latin in secondary school. The inflections and all the other stuff was too much to cram into my head at the time, it was just not worth it.
-The text is very ugly Latin. Not the classical pure stuff you would find in text books or dictionaries. They sure made some stuff up as they went along.
-So I tried the easy way out. But there is no online latin translator to help me out. None whatsoever. Zilch, nada, bupkis, zero, niente, didly-squat, nix.
Even if it were a very bad one I'd be fine with that. I get the gist of the text when skimming it, but once I get started on single sentences, I get bogged down.

While still hoping to find an online translation tool I ran into several sites but none did what I had expected them to do.
Then I saw a google ad at the bottom of the page:

Pig Latin? I was aware of something called Dog Latin, the Private Eye sometimes has a section devoted to mock honorary degrees. But had never heard of Pig Latin. I must be getting on, out of touch. Not down with the kids anymore.

Otnay ownday ithway ethay idskay anymoreway.

Polonius is offline

A funny satire of facebook:
It's William Shakespeare's facebook page.

It has little gems like:
-Hamlet added England to places he's been
-Laertes wonders what the hell happened while he was gone
-Horatio thinks he saw a ghost

NIN Freebie

NIN is currently on tour. Their tour website is up. If you register you can download previously unreleased material from Nine Inch Nails, Jane's Addiction and Street Sweeper.
If you liked The Slip, you'll like this too.

Richard Gere has a statue at Chartres Cathedral

If you ever go to Chartres and visit the beautiful cathedral, make sure you also look at the wonderful portals.
Take your binoculars with you to see every detail.
I'm taking a course on gothic art, the professor was talking about the difference in styles between two portals and was pointing out an evolution in the way statues were being used and why they looking the way they look mid thirteenth century.
And then he pushed the button on his computer to put the next slide up.
It was an image of the Porch of the Martyrs (the left doorway on the south transept).
The statue on the far left is Saint Theodore. He showed us a closer shot of the statue and then suddenly stopped mid sentence. He stared up at the image projected on the screen and then said:

'Don't you think that statue looks exactly like a young Richard Gere? That statue is a dead ringer for how he looked from the time he starred in American Gigolo'.

Roaring laughter.
Throughout the rest of the lecture he kept referring to it as Richard Gere instead of Saint Theodore. These scolars say the darnest things due to lack of sleep.

1 + (-1) = Napoleon

Yesterday my Professor of Philosophy pointed out that according to Hegel 1 + (-1) equals not zero but Napoleon.

I thought that was quite funny, I wonder if Napoleon would have liked the comparison.
I am referring to the little known fact Napoleon himself was a brilliant mathematician.
And having a theorem named after him and all that. It goes something like this: 'If equilateral triangles are erected externally on the sides of any triangle, their centers form an equilateral triangle.'

Simple comme bonjour, non?

Here's more exciting math if you can't get enough.

Well how about that

One of the online monkeys at De Standaard newspaper put this on the front page today:











'Fourteen dead in plane crash'

Sarcasm, who needs it?


UPDATE:
My post about this on the ILS forums caused a bit of a stir. I thought this was funny but most people couldn't see anything funny about a plane crashing into a graveyard.
Well, I saw the picture with the caption above it and had to think about a joke which could go along the lines of:

"Reports have come in that a two seater plane has crashed on a cemetery, so far as much as fourteen bodies have been recovered, aid workers are expecting many more"

So just to be clear on this, I don't think crashing planes are casually funny, but the caption and photo are if you think about the joke as mentioned.

Widgety weather

Apple's weather widget had a spell of extreme climate change at the beginning of the week:

Tuesday's prediction: 24º and thunder, around freezing point at night.

I'll have to re-arrange the clothes in my cupboard so I can reach woolly jumpers and my bikini.

Stairway to Heaven

Nearly 800 years ago our ancestors started building the Sint-Rombouts Cathedral tower in Mechelen and they're still adding bits today.
A glass walk way is being added so all lovers of high and old things can peruse around at 100 meters above street level.
Louis XV, Napoleon Bonaparte and King Albert I all had to do without such a contraption.
I wonder how long it will take before the first base jumper gives it a go.

Kruithof and rat poison

I do like entertaining lectures.
So far my professor of Philosophy has told us:
-he murdered his wife by putting rat poison in her tea
-he has monsters inside his head
-his mother in law can't tell a joke because she gives away the pointe at the beginning
-he sleeps with a mathematician

I wonder what the lover of reason will share with us tomorrow.

Speaking of philosophers: Jaap Kruithof died today.
The world has lost yet another humanist thinker.
I met him once when I was in filmschool.
The man was a walking chimney.

The Sound of Silence

Well, I've lost my voice. Thanks to laryngitis.
It started out with a sore throat, some swollen glands and it has ended in silencing the Chatterbox Extraordinaire™, a.k.a. moi.
I went to see the doctor and he forbade me to try and utter a single word.
'I'll prescribe you a saying', he said: 'Silence is golden'.
Yeah right. But my eyes still see.
I have to communicate with Dr Livingstone. It started out with writing down words on paper, but he has trouble reading my handwriting (I should have been a doctor).
The most efficient way of communication is writing on a blank page on a word processor program in a type 76 font.
It is much quicker to type anyway.
When I'm away from either paper or lap top I try and resort to some kind of charades, but they don't always work.
Middle Teen™ was wathcing the news yesterday and she saw an item on two convicts escaping from a prison by helicopter. Dr Livingstone asked her where this was and she didn't know. I knew. As we were in the kitchen, I had no means to express myself. So I thought a quick way of explaining would be to show the leading folkloric custom associated with the country. So I went to the table, I had already set it, and picked up a plate and made a gesture of smashing it by throwing it to the floor. Yep, you guessed it. It was in Greece.
But they didn't get it, it only confused them even more.
Even Mouser is confused. Usually I respond when my fourlegged friend makes noises. I can only make smacking or whistling noises, snap my fingers or clap my hands to get its, or anyones, attention.
I hope my medication will help out and I will be able to function on a normal level again by the weekend.

Ring peace to the world

The history of my university carillon started with a tragedy. On the 25th of August 1914, during the night, German occupation troops were dealing out death and destruction in the inner city of Louvain.
Even the ancient library in the university hall was maliciously set alight. The immense number of burnt ancient manuscripts and books shocked the Western world and in several countries initiatives were set to raise funds to help the martyred Oxford of the Low Countries with the rebuilding.

American universities and other institutes donated a new library. The American architect Whitney Warren designed a magnificent building that was lavishly endowed with symbols of war. Or should I say symbols of peace to remind us of war.
In the New York Times article from 1920 he says after learning of his nomination: "Aside from the honour, I should be only too happy to do my part in this work, which is but part of the debt we owe to bleeding Belgium."

The tower clock and the carillon formed a memorial for the American engineers who lost their lives in Europe.
The 48 stars on the dial of the clock (green arrow on the tower picture) and the same number of bells of the carillon symbolised the then number of American States. At this level we can also see the automatic carillon that uses only six bells. The little drum triggers the bells by jerking some hammers and every quarter the 'Reuzegom' melody can be heard. The drum has no little holes in it so it cannot be 'reprogrammed' to play a different tune. After 75 years this melody is to Louvain what the Big Ben melody is to London. Albeit nothing has happened to it like in that Albeit not as exciting as in Captain Scarlet episode.
The library and carillon were inaugurated on the Fourth of July in 1928.
When the new library burned again during the second World War on the 16th of May 1940, the tower and carillon were miraculously spared. After 1945, sadly, the instrument started to fall into decay.

When American carrionneur Margo Halsted visited she was shocked to find the carillon in a dilapidated state. She rallied support and in 1983 the instrument was thoroughly renovated and was enlarged to 63 bells. Sixteen bells were made redundant, but can now be heard in the Sint-Jan-de-Doperkerk every half hour. All bells weigh around 35 tons. Only the carillon of the Romboutstower in Mechelen is heavier.
Since that time, it is considered one of the most beautiful carillons of the world. It is praised because of its warm sound of the base bells. The 32 heaviest bells were made in England by Gillett & Johnston. The other 31 were cast by Eijsbouts in Asten in 1983.


I visited the carillon last Thursday.
It was absolutely brilliant.
There were two other visitors, a South African and an American lady.

Together with the carillonneur, or should I say carillonneuse, An Lommelen, we ascended the winding staircase of the bell tower. It got colder as we climbed the 289 steps to reach the level where the clavier sits.
It was already pitch dark when we reached the balcony overlooking the city (red arrow on the tower picture). What a view. I must come back in spring when I can see everything during sunset.
As we turned round, we saw the enormous Liberty Bell of Louvain behind us. It weighs a whopping 7 Tons.
Unlike its Philadelphian counterpart, it does not have an epic crack.
The bourdon has an inscription on the front:

This Carillon in memory of the engineers of the United States of America who gave their lives in the service of their country and its allies in The Great War 1914-1918

Bell º4's message of peace to the world reads in translation:

My sounds reveal the changes of life
I sing about fortune in good and bad days
Let there be peace and understanding on earth
This is my wish to you all from this tower

We resumed our climb to the clavier. A very narrow staircase, or should I say sturdy ladder, led us to a trap door and we gained access to the clavier, a small floor just above the Liberty and other big bells (blue arrow on the tower picture). Through another little hatch pulled ajar we could see the smaller bells above us.

The carillonneur had just finished adjusting the tension on the chords that link the clavier and the hammers and set herself down, and then we heard it.
Seven massive strikes on the Liberty Bell. It was seven o'clock. What a sound! It was amazing. We were all looking silently at each other and taking in the massive thuds and trembles.
Then An started playing. First some traditional carillon music. Then some different popular tunes. While she was ringing the bells we gathered round her and started singing the words to the tunes we were familiar with. Little Peter Rabbit was one of them.
There we were, four women from three different continents who had never seen each other before, one playing and three singing along. It was magical. An turned round after she had finished: "That was very special. This has only been the second time people have sung along. When I play people probably sing or hum along on the streets too, but I can never hear them, I'm a bit too far up.
But the carillon in my opinion is truly an instrument for the people. When I play everyone in the whole city can hear it."
And the carillon is the biggest as instruments tend to go. Hang those silly little buffet piano's, harpsichords or accordions.

Anyway, the most exciting bit for me was still to come: I got to ring a few bells myself! I chose some from the lower register. They sound so thunderingly awesome.

I highly recommend a visiting this wonderful instrument. It is free of charge, but you need to send an email in advance to arrange time and date.

The Bad Bunch

Dr Livingstone's mother came to visit us past weekend. She bought me another bunch of tulips.
I had just arranged them in a vase on the living room table and then the Doctor did something interesting. I've never seen Dr Livingstone leap into impro action around the house involving domestic things so quickly.
He took the vase and mumbled something like: 'There's not enough room on the table to put the drinks anywhere and they're blocking my view' and he took them off to the kitchen.
Now that's what I call thinking on your feet.
So we're shod of the flowers and the pungent smell they emit.
In the living room that is.
Now the kitchen is riddled with the stench.

Happy Darwin Day

Surprise Treat

We had a bit of a surprise treat yesterday. Our habitual makeshift spot in the stairwell of the museum where we usually have our classes was occupied by a catering business for some kind of evening do. Alternatively we were ushered into the Council Chamber. It used to be the boardroom for the painters guild of Saint Luke. A tiled wall above the impressive (yet slightly tacky) fireplace cannot be overlooked. I was seated right in the middle of the table facing the dominating wall.
Very nice. Very swanky. During our five minute brake we gazed at and ogled some of the 17th century artworks adorning the room; a still life by Jan Baptist Bosschaert (1667-1746), 'Animal concert' by Jan Van Kessel I (1626-1679), 'Oriental Port' by Hendrik van Minderhout (1630-1696).
On a side note, it struck me as being too hot in the room even for a conservatory plant like myself. There was a humidity controller and one of those paper graph scroll thingies on the buffet, but the lights glaring full blaze combined with excessive heating will probably not do the masterworks any favour.

The table we were using for our readers and course papers looked like it was being used for an emergency meeting called together during a cabinet crisis.