Lentulov's Depiction of Moscow

A marvellous artistic depiction of Moscow, done by Aristarkh Lentulov. He was one of the famous Russian avantgard painters during the first decade of the 20th Century. Lentulov also used Cubist elements. This painting was painted in 1913.

Who is the Boss?

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published the findings of a study about what kind of people often become leaders. The surprising news: Those who speak loadly and speak well, offering lots of ideas, are likely to be followed. Offering loud and quick answers seems to be the key, and the answers don't have to be correct....

The Cyclical Destiny of the Golden Buddha

I heard a story about a Golden Buddha making it from China to Cuba. The statue, standing up right, made of pure gold, emerged during the T'ang Dynasty between the 10 and 7th century bc . It survived the first great purge of Buddhism in China in the 9th century BC. Then it just had disappeared, for the first time.

Even before the Spanish kings, vessels traded with the Philippines, which was Asia's trading hub where Cina, Japan, and other Asian merchants had met for centuries and were joined by the Spaniards from the end of the 16th century....Spanish ships brought back invaluable treasures, resting in the Caribbean before moving on to mainland Europe. This is how the Golden Buddha eventually landed in Havana because the Spanish somehow got hold of the statue and sailed on the Manila galleon back to the Carribean at the beginning of the 17th century, via Brazil and Mexico. Normally, at the time, art works were rather melted down to pure gold or silver, but this statue must have impressed the new owners so much that they wanted to present it to the Spanish king in tact.

(Photo: random buddha in Gold)
Again, the Buddha was lucky to survive Spanish inquisition and Counter-Reformation, a time when means of religious display other than Catholic ones were mercilessly persecuted. Apparently, so the history, the Buddha came to Havana in 1631. It disappeared a second time shortly after that from the governor's coffers where things where kept until departure to Spain. Two and a half centuries later, the Golden Buddha came back to life when a Cuban plantage owner intended to smuggle it out the country amidst the War of Independence. For another time it was brought to the acting Spanish Captain General's treasury who had been informed about its re-appearance, and Spain was still the lawful owner. In 1870, the buddha was put on the ship Las Mercedes, heading for Spain. But the ship never made it out of the bay. A storm made it sink and the buddha disappeared for the third time.

Then, as the legend goes, the captain of that ship, Nathaniel Chavarria, must have brought it to Uruguay because he was able to establish a rich cattle ranchat around 1880, the word of which spread all the way to Cuba by a Basque geneologist who knew the Chavarria family. This Nathaniel must have given the buddha to a man called Manuel Riva Fernandez, who showed the buddha in 1902 to friends as a family relict. Shortly after that he was invited to exhibit his treasure at an art exhibition in Paris, which is the way a wider audience got to know of its existence. Eventually, Manuel's daughter Zenaida Riva inherited the buddha, married a banker called Guevara, in whose house it was securely stored until thieves broke in and stole the buddha in 1951. The Golden Buddha had vanished for the fourth time.

In 1962, an old lady of a Cuban bourgeois family who had resided in the Guevara-Riva Villa died and all her possessions were confiscated by the now revolutionary Cuban authorities. Among these items was a valuable desk of French make with secret compartments. In one of these compartments a map was found, pointing to a secret location where the buddha was allegedly buried. But the story seemed so abstruse that nobody followed the trace and the story was forgotten again until 1978. Apparently, a Cuban official being responsible for looking after confiscated bourgois valuables, kept this secret hidden in order to prepare his own escape with it from Cuba. By 1998, the attempt to escape failed and the police who had tracked the secret location following the maps clues, nonetheless, did not succeed in finding the Golden Buddha which had been wrapped in mystery for about 15 centuries by then. Still, the buddha has refused to appear, finally.........

Lev Tolstoi ueber Schriftstellerei

In einem Brief vom 2. September 1908 an Leonid Andrejew (1871-1919) schrieb er: "Ich glaube, schreiben darf man erstens nur dann, wenn der Gedanke [...] einen derart packt, dass er einen nicht eher los laesst, als bis man ihn ausgedrueckt hat, so gut man vermag. Alle anderen Beweggruende der Schriftstellerei - Eitelkeit oder das widerwaertige Geld - kommen zwar zum Hauptanlass, dem Ausdrucksbeduerfnis, hinzu, koennen aber die Aufrichtigkeit nund den Wert des Werkes nur beeintraechtigen. [...] Die Bedeutung jedes literarischen Werkes besteht allein darin, dass es nicht in direktem Sinne belehrend ist wie eine Predigt, sondern den Menschen etwas Neues, Unbekanntes erschliesst, dass dem, was das grosse Publikum fuer unstreitbar haelt, entgegengesetzt ist." (Seiten 152-153 in Tolstoj. Insel-Almanach auf das Jahr 2010. Frankfurt und Leipzig: Inselverlag, 2009).

Wanna Fun Flying? - Avoid Ryanair!

The 'Verbatim' section of Time Magazine quoted Michael O'Leary, chief executive of the European budget airline Ryanair, as follows: "We're all about finding ways of raising discretionary revenue." He dropped this hint when talking about his thoughts about charging passengers to use the toilets on board of his aircrafts....(issue 19 March 2009) O'Leary is such a dinosaur when it comes to business: greedy, greedy, greedy with no sense for people and modernity. (Photo: Guardian)

Film Reel

Soon, film reels will be historical artefacts.....

Stunning Volcano Pictures

(Source: FAZ online)

(Source: FAZ online)

Eyjafjallajokull? Huh?

Europe should recognise this name. Eyjafjallajokull is the name of the powerful volcano in Island that catapulted so much volcanic ash into the air after a spectacular eruption on the 14th April 2010, that the airspace above Europe had to be closed for almost a week. The BBC issued an informative series of slides explaining:
1. Why the volcano has such an explosive power,

2. How the ash cloud evolved,

3. How ash particles endanger flying,
4. How the ash cloud spread over Europe in the course of several days,
5. How the ash cloud spread in satellite images, and
6. How the closure of the airspace above Europe affected the air traffic.
(Source of image: 'Island-large')

Another Earthquake Hits China!

China was hit today again by an earthquake of a magnitude of 6.9. 300 people are believed to have died and hundreds more hurt. The region is remote, which will make it difficult for aid and aiders to reach the people in need now. Poor souls.
BBC compiles a list of earthquakes in the last 100 years. Shocking, how many people died because of earth's tremors!! (Graph: Wikipedia)

Quote by Garcia Marquez

"[...], Judge Arcadio thought that life is nothing but a continuous succession of opportunities for survival." Quote from In Evil Hour (1996) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Bailout

Bailingout might be the most-used and most-hated word of 2009 and 2010, most-hated at least by those countries which have to pay the bailout bill. Last year governments in Europe and America had to bailout their banks. Now bailing-out has reached the highest ever form of preventing total and utter ruin: countries bailing out other countries. The bailout contenders in the moment of truth: Germany and Greece. The Germans - with utmost reluctance  and unwillingness - were forced to give billions to the Greeks because the Greek system had gone bust. It happened in April 2010.

There is one man who had predicted exactly that: Nouril Roubini, Economist. That was in March 2009! Time Magazine published his assessment.

EU to Bail out East European Countries?

Time Magazine in March 2009 incidentally reported in a few lines that the European Union dismissed a request of bailing out nine East European countries, which claimed to be hit too hard by recession in order to cope. They would need $240 billion. Hungary led this initiative, insisting that Europe soon would have a "New Iron Curtain" because of the unequal economic stands. Hopefully, the European Union with the strongest nations Germany, France and Great Britain at its centre will not become the cow that all countries in Europe can milk when they are hungry! (Source image: howstuffworks.com)

Garcia Marquez about Wisdom

"But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good." (Garcia Marquez in Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985)

Lev Tolstoi ueber Verzicht auf Gewalt

Am 07. September 1910 schrieb Tolstoi in einem Brief an Mahatma Gandhi: "Die Liebe ist das Streben der Menschenseelen nach Vereinigung und ihr daraus sich ergebendes Verhalten untereinander. [....] Er (Christus) wusste, wie es jeder verstaendige Mensch wissen muss, dass jede Anwendung von Zwang unvereinbar mit der Liebe als dem hoechsten Lebensgesetze ist und dass, sobald Vergewaltigung auch nur in einem einzigen Falle als zulaessig erscheint, damit zugleich dies Gesetz negiert wird." (aus Tolstoj. Insel-Almanach auf das Jahr 2010 von Lux, Christian & Hans-Joachim Sinn (eds). Frankfurt und Leipzig: Inselverlag: 2009)

Who's Europe's Engine?

Cover of the magazine The Economist (March 13-19th 2010)

Fascinating vs. Normal Fate

There are as many different life courses as there are human beings. Everybody is born under different circumstances, in different environments and by different parents, which ultimately shape how the life is lead. People share each others’ lives stories by just talking to each other, amongst other ways. What is it then that makes a life story more intriguing and worth listening to or remembering than others? Perhaps it is an element of drama and otherness that evokes attention and interest. In this case, I think it was.

The other day a young woman told about a person she did not like in the beginning because of her too extravagant and weird behaviour. A few months and a few encounters later, her perception had changed since she had heard more about the woman’s fate, which has been something like this: Being a young, wealthy girl from a good English family, she fell in love with a Nigerian man and went along to live with him in Nigeria. That must have been in the 1960s; the family disapproved. In Nigeria, they had 2 daughters and pursued some business together. After some time, they fell out and she had to flee with her daughters because her husband sent the mafia after her. They hid in New Zealand and could only come back to England after her husband had died. Very sadly though, the older daughter did not make it until then because she committed suicide when she was 18, which must have been in the 1980s. Being 70 years of age today, the woman has not lost any of her positive spirits, is lively and kind, and does not mind people’s attention which is often directed to her outer appearance in the first instance as she dresses extravagantly and consistently in the style of the 1940s.

"Among Russians"

Colin Thubron in his book Among the Russians - From the Baltic to the Caucasus (1984) captures a testimony of a Latvian man about Russian authorities: "You are always treated like a child. There is nothing but bureaucracy, dogma, interference! It's all so stupid." (p.120, Vintage London)