First, Clear Water...

'Oshibori' is the name given by the Japanese to the art and culture of hot towels and hot towel massage.

The practice is certainly known in other cultures too, of course.

All your senses, while put into a kind of temporary relaxed state, should still be working and available at a subtle level...

Six Stone Jars

I read earlier this week, someone's response to the Paris Cathedral fire, that 'Catholicism was an abomination to god...' And that was on the basis, the gentleman said, of around half a dozen points, one of which I clearly recall that he said: 'Catholics pray to Mary, who is dead and the bible says one must not pray to the dead.'

Personally I find these kinds of very widespread arguments quite funny from a distance, but then again quite boring if you have to get too closely involved in any such discussion.

I can think of two issues with making the sort of pronouncement that was made regarding the bible - one is that virtually no one these days has read the bible in the languages it was originally written in, almost no one at all has a Universally-accepted framework of translation (actual word meanings, phraseology, grammar what of it existed at the time...), and two, even if people have read the bible these days they seem not to possess any kind of memory that serves them accurately.

I don't know anywhere in the bible where it says that Mary the mother of Jesus Christ is dead...

Why didn't Macron burn down a great restaurant?

Not only that, as for consulting the dead, the Witch of Endor is only famous on account of accurately making predictions (in the bible) for King Saul after having summoned and speaking with the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel, admittedly though Jesus is meant to have said neither were any of the prophets 'dead' either but living somewhere not on the Earth.

Sometimes in all of the diatribe and gibberish that gets uttered regarding the bible (well, or just about any religious text at all, really; it's not restricted to the bible) rather pointed ideas go missing in the egocentricity of people's fired-up self-importance over their 'pronouncements.'

I often taunt certain people about the water-into-wine story - not just Christian religious people, but wine aficionados too: firstly what actual wine was made, and secondly, does anyone know how much was made in the incident...?

The story is that it was 'the best wine' and that there were six stone jars able to carry between twenty and thirty gallons of water.

...And so we are talking about more or less a 1,000 bottles of wine here.

That's no small 'miracle.'

Right now just for a while I'm staying away from talking about Pablo Miller (real name Tony D'Dalgo), or 'Darktrace' and why the cross-flow of ex-NSA employees with UK internet security companies is deadly dangerous.

LOL

Or that Macron is not just a drug addict, but that the French Secret Service is having some difficulty keeping him 'together' for the cameras. Most European politicians in cabinet roles - and that includes a lot of UK politicians, are using standard 'Beta Blockers' to mediate their body language over-activity (so do numerous film actors and actresses on account of the fact that the film camera amplifies the slightest movements), but some go over the top and try and express 'empathy' with people by using specialist drugs when they are in fact lying; the secondary problem being that such chemicals are highly addictive and some have adverse physiological and neurological side-effects.

The question for you is, is money more like water, than it is like wine? You know, flowing cheaply and plentiful - or like a marketing scam at $30,000 a small bottle of... That's the important question. Not whether or not politicians are crooks. We know that answer already. There's no surprising miracle entailed down that path. 

Speaking Of Old Things...

Off the top of my head (an unfortunate metaphor, perhaps, in context of anything even vaguely connected to Paris...) the world's most expensive wine is the Royal Tokaji 2008 vintage. At $40,000 a 1.5 liter bottle.

Once again we have Louis XIV 'the Sun King' implicated in another wine legend, since he did in fact call the Hungarian Tokaji 'the wine of kings and the king of wines.'

I have had different editions of Royal Tokaji, not the new highest-priced one, and the brand and name never went for such elevated prices (at least not in relatively recent times) prior to a decided effort by the winemakers to deliberately re-establish the wine at the very top of the world's clearly and widely esteemed styles and names.

I mean they are entitled to position the wine there - it is certainly good enough.

But there are a number of 'oldest, best-est,' and 'most expensive-est' wines, especially when it comes to the matter of Napoleon cognac.

We have spoken of the Remy Martin Louis XIII not long ago, and this contains an amount of 100-year old authentic Napoleon liquors in the total blend. We are talking $35,000 a bottle there. And there are those auction house show-stoppers that claim the Guinness Record now and then for 'the most expensive' or 'the oldest' bottle ever, or ever found...

You have to be careful though and not equate apples with oranges because sometimes the old bottles are close to a gallon in size/quantity of liquor!! When cut back to the same volumes, per volume, it is the Royal Tokaji that is the most expensive.

Cuvee Leonie Cognac - oldest, most expensive individual bottles...

I can tell you about another brand of though - Seppeltsfield in Australia. This is consistently rated 100/100 by a large number of world-famous wine experts.

You can easily buy a Seppeltsfield 100-year old Para Port wine any day, for about $150 for around 700 ml., and around $35 for a 'Grand Tawny' Seppeltsfield and maybe $500 for the

major 'Vintage Tawny.'

Now, it's worth remembering that these Port wines - virtually all Port wines as far as I know - contain brandy or cognac in them that stops the continuing fermentation of the grape juice, thereby preserving the freshness and some of the acidity.

So... ...if you buy a Seppeltsfield 100-year old Port, it will contain 100-year old brandy or cognac in it.

What's the difference in taste and taste experience? The Seppeltfield Tawny is much more tart than you would suppose, given it is a Port wine - which is meant to be very sweet. It is of course, sweet but it is also complex with all kinds of other flavors that come through.

The 100-year old Vintage is even more complex with slightly less of a tart profile. 

With either of them, you get a real sense of antiquity and yet also esoteric and complex beauty. They are highly pleasurable experiences, either wine.

And I am sure so is the Royal Tokaji. I wouldn't turn one away from the door.

LOL ...Not saying anything!

Chef, We Burnt The Steak

Was posted on Sunday, 17 March:


Actually I hesitated to even approach what I need to talk about, because it was with a heavy heart and much misgiving that I was about to talk about certain things claimed to be 'in short supply' but which really are not. You see, if I talk about them, there is a chance that picture will change about their pricing and so on, and I'll readily admit I have an interest in exploiting lies people tell, if I happen to know they are lies.

Chef - we burnt the steak!

I don't really go around with this sense of moral duty to 'loudly proclaim the truth in the market square...' LOL

Now d'you see what I mean? I don't wish to save the people from anything. Not all of them, anyway. But I do wish to preserve the great ideas and technologies and texts and things like that, in case of flood. Although they do say 'the fire next time.'

Are we here yet?

We're here.

Sunday, 17 March 2019

Keep The Stack Of Books Tight Under Your Arm

The highest point of humanity, the peak chapter of the cycles of the human race, is this precise moment, when some person, young or old, man or woman, runs across a town square (such as it may be, for instance, in ancient Tyre or Sidon, or Alexandria when it was burning to the ground - which happened several times of course) with a small pile of books or texts under their arm, their cloak flailing in the breeze and tumult swirling around them.

If it were not for some of these incidents, I assure you we would not know Euclid as we do today, nor Al Kindi, nor several other incalculably valuable masters, that is to say, their written works.

Macron told journalists that he would govern like the Roman god Jupiter, and then he told the same journalists that they would not have the intellect to understand the complexity of what he was saying. Macron is of course Nero, and not Jupiter - the Roman poet Titus Calpurnius Siculus having likened Nero to Jupiter... Nero, as you know from the folklore (because nowadays the history books try to deny it as having been a fact in the first place) being the criminal dictator who burned down buildings when the owners resisted paying him protection money, and then claiming the glory of 'saving' the buildings from the worst of the fire when he 'sent' brigades to put out the fires (that he himself lit or caused to be lit). 

A Predictive Approach

This is the start of the Autumn Opera Season in Europe. Yes there is opera almost everywhere, but I am picking out Europe at the moment because that is where modern narrative dramatic singing we call 'opera' began after all. And for this post I wanted to look at something to do with large structural architecture associated with opera.

Now there are many things one might conclude about examining modern design as compared to design approaches of the past but I want to focus on the impact of computer-generated hypothetical visuals. In this mode, the human design decision-maker or design manager, matched what they saw with some internal aesthetic template, and then says 'yes' to one visual image in a vast series of them; 'we'll adopt that one...'

Inside the very modern Bastille Opera in Paris

In the past, the human designer internally considered an imagined concept against a different set of templates, which were not all visual alone, but consisted of idea frameworks and intangible base principles, not just iterations of pictures be they multi-dimensional or simple two-dimensional drawings.

What I would suggest is that the way in which humans think becomes characteristically different depending on such differences of approach - and that also includes the ability, or inability, to think using words alongside or instead of graphical images.

I could suggest that one reason that the upcoming schedule of appearances by the Russian-Ukrainian Anna Netrebko at the new 'Bastille Opera Building' rather than say the older Garnier Opera Theater, is to do with security issues.

The Bastille Opera was designed by the Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott.

And he is right at the top of modern architecture and designs very beautiful buildings. Without putting any pejoratives on it, the fact remains that modern architecture lacks the small detail and tiny intricate, perhaps ornate, design elements that old styles possessed - although one has to add that with the great modern exponents, you are looking at some considerable intellectual interplay of ellipsoids and regular polygons and clear, clean-faced surface geometry which seems to be a characteristic of this era's leading buildings.

New Ferrari Sp 38 -
an obviously computer assisted design.

My contention though remains that the approach endangers human thinking processes and limits them in what they are able to think and to predict - and the reason building architecture is possibly less fragile to the problems of computer-generated iterative approaches is that buildings are not moving in the way that cars, planes, pens, and similar kinetic mechanisms are. Yes, gravity, mass and void space also are considered in terms of 'dynamics' and conceptual motion, but the eventual product is a static thing like a statue, rather than a mechanism that creates friction due to actual motion. Buildings allow for a different pace of thought inside the mind of the architect and designer.

I say that modern people cannot predict their near-term future.

I say that they have missed the bleeding obvious and by a long way.

What happens in the future...?

Take the example of China - here we have an ego-driven dictator (quickly passed a law installing himself for life), running with the economic momentum of people who established the direction well before him, and whose mind he does not understand at all. It's entirely possible that with the death of Lin Biao in 1971, and the death not long afterwards (1976) of Zhou Enlai, that China has been in the hidden grip of a power-mad elite that bubbled along beneath the optimistic surface presented by people like Deng Xiaoping. ...Because the factual reality of Beijing politics is that all we have seen has been nothing but internal purges and fighting among themselves at the top, and a system that drove away clearly competent academics like Zhu Rongji from the top positions.

Today we have state-run propaganda and an obvious 'cult of Xi' afoot in China.

The end game to this story is crystal clear. It's a story that we are thoroughly sick of, having witnessed all of human history up until this moment - but, like any bad gambler, Xi no doubt thinks, 'but it will not happen to me.' We are beset by these types of characters walking the political stage, in such a way as they never have before; in the past, such people were more circumspect - Macron actually publicly equated himself to the Roman 'Jupiter.' 

I haven't heard Xi do similarly but then, I don't get as wide a range of reports from China, as I do from Europe. There is an ancient saying whose origin nobody knows - it is this: 'the god brooks none but himself to (show) overweening pride.'