Winter Apples

Poetic News

Thirty swans arrived in Eforie Sud, a Romanian seaside resort, on Christmas Eve, to the surprise of the tourists. They stayed in a little gulf in front of the casino, long enough for people to feed and photograph them.

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An American from LA taped his children for 25 years as they were coming down the stairs on Christmas morning to see what Santa had brought them.

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Over twenty tons of oranges fell from a lorry and scattered on the Bucharest-Ploiesti motorway on 22 December.

Jazz Evening

On Giving

My father tells me stories of his grandmother as a young woman taking food to the outlaws on the hills around Strehaia, and of an old Romanian custom... villagers leaving food and wine in small wood cottages built along frequently walked-on trails, for travellers to quench their hunger and thirst. It seems there are still traces of this in some areas, where people leave watermelons by the fountains in summer.

Fenceless Church

On the way to my grandparents' house we often used to drive past a village church that had no fence around it, so hens and turkeys always roamed the area stretching to the street, which should have been the churchyard. My parents kept making disapproving comments, they would have preferred things to be 'proper' and 'respectful'. I kind of liked the idea, though - after all, why should there be no turkeys near the church?

Christmas Morning

Mist and frosty fields. In the villages, women go from house to house, carrying baskets full of food they give away in the memory of the dead. In some places, people also light candles on the tombs of the family dead, so if there is no wind, the graveyard looks like a sea of light. These rituals completed, everyone returns home -sits by the stove, drinks brandy... And so Christmas Day is off to its proper start.

Da Vinci

Craiova: Bulevard

Craiova: Christmas Decorations

Metamorphoses

Étienne-Jules Marey (1830 - 1904) was a French scientist and photographer. His 1882 invention, the chronophotographic gun, allowed him to capture and study the movement of birds and animals. The device was shaped like a gun and used a rotating photographic glass plate to shoot twelve consecutive frames a second, all recorded in the same picture. Not surprisingly, the results are quite similar in some ways to Escher's metamorphoses.

Long Exposure

While going through the English in Use paper of a Cambridge advanced test, I came across these bits of information about ways of dealing with long exposure times in early photography:

"In the early days of photography, a stand or some other firm support for the camera was essential. This was because photographic materials were so insensitive to light that a typical exposure lasted several seconds. The camera would have to be held still for this time in order to obtain a sharp picture. The subjects also had to be still if their images were to register properly on the film. Some early street scenes included blurred, transparent, ghostlike images of people who wandered past while the scene was in the process of being photographed.

Studio portraits from the late 1800s show people posed rigidly, often leaning against furniture, which helped them to remain motionless. Since it was important to keep the head still, a support was often provided for the neck. Bright studio lights, sometimes produced by setting fire to a strip of magnesium or a small pile of magnesium powder, helped by reducing the required exposure time. These burned with an intensely blue flame that gave the necessary amount of light, though the smoke was unpleasant and there was also a risk of fire."

Ursul

Over a Cup of Coffee

Long afternoon chat over coffee and cakes...

Dancing Elephants

Dancing Elephants de explore

"Do the dancing elephants of India dance naturally, are they born with the instinct to dance, or are they trained to dance?"

"They're not born that way, they are trained to dance. However, oddly enough, there have been many reports of the elephants, after years, after they've been trained - people will come across them in clearings in the jungle at night, with nobody around, dancing in the moonlight."

(From a Jack Gilbert interview)

Once Upon a Time