A history of faking it

"We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight."

_Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground, and much more in the skies... Europe under the Soviets. How were its agricultural, conservative, religious regions forced behind the industrial, atheistic ... Iron Curtain? The Crushing of Eastern Europe History flows from geography. Place is everything. So says Robert Kaplan. What about the impact of ideas? They’re no match for high Tatra mountains and bohemian indian summers...

To see a Venice or Prague audience cowering as Rossini's feisty Rosina hurls darts at the wall in a rage—and makes a feint at the stalls—is to realise how powerful Aleksandra Kurzak's stage presence can be. A me dia dra gon soprano who loves to die

The brain likes a challenge—and putting a few obstacles in its way may well boost its creativity. JI takes a hard line ...

Without yarrow and camomile stuck to their teeth, the poor Neanderthals would have died of dietary boredom. Eats shoots and leaves clues

Reality of Illusions: Old World of Cold River & Recent Universe of Hot Tin Roof

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.
-Benjamin

The psychopathic society. Our era is marked by a casual callousness. Empathy is down, narcissism up. What good news!... Psychopathy's Double Edge

David Copperfield on illusions, far-flung homes, and rope tricks (gone wrong) Better than reality

Most provocative illusionists, thinkers, people with the bravery to challenge convention and imagine the future. Back to the Brave Future

Democracy and independent journalism depend on one another but their interests are not always aligned ... Beyond press freedom How literature became data: The dispiriting tale of intellectual failure begins on a Friday in MMII

Sunny Bondi - Snow Choked the Frogs and other Bohemians

Feeling jet leggish (Emiratish) We just could not believe what We were reading at sunny Bondi Snow and gales hit France and Switzerland over the weekend, possibly leading to the death of a homeless man in Paris, while searches continued for a missing windsurfer and a 12-year-old British boy who vanished Saturday in the south of France while cycling in a gale.

We left France and Italy filled with Indian Summer Weather on 26 October... Three temperature records were broken in Merle this October after high south winds brought warm air to the country in the midst of fall. At the same time, a spell of cold and precipitation brought by so-called Cassandra cyclone poured early snow over much of Central Europe this weekend ...

As Orwell put it, "Words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details." So back to surreal land of characters filled with Barrowman ... "Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!" . Joes like me dia dragon can’t stop touching them, smelling them, scribbling in them, and reading them – 6,128 of them, to be exact... A life in books

Golden Caves of Pech Merle & The Black Wine of Cahors

You could hardly visit Cahors without seeing the city’s trademark image: the Valentré Bridge. A unique example of medieval defense, it has three towers. The bridge is located at the northwest corner of downtown. Don’t forget to look for the devil statue atop one of the towers... At midnight We grab a baguette and a bottle of water and Czech out the circus

Pech Merle is a cave which opens onto a hillside at Cabrerets in the Lot département of the Midi-Pyrénées region in France, about 35 minutes by road east of Cahors? It is the home of one of the few prehistoric cave painting sites in France which remain open to the general public. Extending for more than a mile from the entrance are caverns the walls of which are painted with dramatic murals dating from the Gravettian culture (some 25,000 years B.C.) Some of the paintings and engravings, however, could date from the later Magdalenian era (16,000 years B.C.) The number of visitors is limited to 25 persons and there were only seven of us as it was out of season Last treat before we head for Milan via Laon

Amazing Grace surrounds the place called Laon ...

Weekend @ Eton & Wick

Eton is an historic town nestled in the centre of Royal Berkshire. At one end of the High Street is the celebrated Eton College (arguably the most famous school in the world) and at the other end is Windsor Castle - the official residence of the Queen of England. These two keys attraction alone make Eton a worthwhile place to visit but add to that our eclectic mix of shops, cafes, restaurants & pubs and you have the recipe for a great day out. Wick

At Eton The world smiles in flowers

Bawa is only uncle to Few Sikhs, But he is that figure within the Punjab household who kind of looks after things: the worker, the person who they could all depend on. He becomes unpredictable and undependable and inconsolable and it throws everyone’s world upside down....

Look It is Lukas's Name Day: Rugby Games of Opera

Rugby is a market town in Warwickshire located on the River Avon. The town has a population of 62 thousand (including Marcel and Lukas) making it the second largest town in the county all of us dining, wining and Singing for Lukas name day

In the eighteenth century Bath was re-designed as an outdoor showplace for Georgian society. Almost the entire town centre is a coherent and attractive map of honey-coloured limestone terraces.

Everything Changes even Rouen Antiques and Hotel de Bourgtheroulde

Knowledge doubles every 15 years. This is how long it took me to return back circa of 1997. But much of what you know is wrong. What to do? “Stop memorizing things and just give up”... ruins of our existence

The capital of Upper-Normandy, Rouen like Paris, sits on the Seine, an hour from the capital. The city of the Impressionists, Rouen has inspired countless artists over the centuries. The places is filled with a sensory overload, it is the city where Joan of Arc is ever-present... Malckeon came across a famous mansion (name pronounced "boor-trood) is a bank (open during banking hours) built at the time of Law Courts (early 16C in Renaissance style). Seeing the inner courtyard is why you would visit. In it you will see elaborate gables and roofline with an octagonal tower. Along one side is a carved frieze with historical illustrations. The outer face is also worth looking at with basket-handled arch doorways like the window arches. "Everything changes, even stone." Claude Monet wrote these words in a letter and vividly demonstrated them in paint, conveying a wondrous combination of permanence and mutability as the sun daily transformed the facade of Rouen Cathedral. Extending the building's encrusted stone surface to the richly varied impasto surface of his painting, he portrayed the cathedral perpetually re-emerging in the suffused light of early morning. Town with a Thousand Spires and it is not Prague

The St-Maclou quarter or antiques area - All around St Maclou church you will find antique shops - so many that is the second highest concentration of antique dealers per square metre in France!! Here all aspects of the antique and antiquarian trade are represented: pottery, picture framing, restoration work, book binding etc. It is fitting that these ancient crafts should be housed in this one of the oldest surviving parts of Rouen under the gothic splendour of St Maclou ...

Mistral of Reims: Marie Cecile - Lea and Kulture of Koronation

Coronation City, Champagne town... Reims, one of the main gastronomic centres of France is eager to show you the legacy of its glorious past and to lead you into a prestigious realm of the most celebrated and festive of wines. Czech Out Louise for crepes

Over French luncheon and dinner with MC and Lea as well as Gama these kind of stories kept stirring me in different time zones ... 

 "When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, 'What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?'
"'They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,' Pa said. 'Go to sleep, now.'
"But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.
"She thought to herself, 'This is now.'
"She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago."
_Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (courtesy of The Rat)

Story of Zofka in Champagne

Family lores makes us who we are or become. In my case, the amazing stories of my mother's mother sister Ota, and also my father's sister Sofia were defining. They both migrated at young ages and the myth of their heroism were inspirational with surreal consequences for me and media dragons ... It was in champagne region where story of Aunty Zofka aka Sofia began.

Bits of Imrich exile stories are mentioned at abc tales and cold river. 

Coda:How to write a 400-page, historically accurate stories in five months? Take pains in the research, of course. And listen to the voices in your head... Well all those childhood voices …

Town of Many Roads in Alsace

The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different
-Peter F. Drucker

Strasbourg (City of the Roads) is France’s cute northeastern metropolis and the intellectual and cultural capital of Alsace. Situated only a few kilometres west of the Rhine, the city is aptly named, for it is on the vital transport arteries that have linked northern Europe with the Mediterranean since Celtic times. Stras of Bourg Precursors of the textile industry in the Lake Valley, the Garnier-Thiébaut weaving mills, one of the world's leading companies in terms of hotel linen ...

Silva Nigra

"A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."

We tend to fake smile, fake laugh, think we’re smart and good-looking. We’re neither, probably. But it is ... ok ... Inspiration and creativity comes from within but draws from observations >and experiences. So take any opportunity to travel when you can. Experiences, especially foreign ones, help you see things from a different perspective and help spur the creative process. Travel to Broaden the Mind

The Black Forest aka Schwarzwald is a wooded mountain range in Baden-Württemberg, southwestern Germany. It is bordered by the Rhine valley to the west and south. The highest peak is the Feldberg with an elevation of 1,493 metres. (Low Tatras heights) The name Schwarzwald (German for "Black Forest") derives from the Romans who referred to the thickly forested mountains there as Silva Nigra (Latin for "Black Forest") because the dense growth of conifers in the forest blocked out most of the light inside the forest. To be at the heart of the Forest and walking the darkest corners is a strife worthy of Shakespeare ... King Ludwig’s ‘fairytale’ forests and castles

In mittleurope filling a gap in the “ideas market” is Quirky.com, a place where ideas are populated by people through collaboration. Inventors pay just $10 to submit their ideas and the member community – consisting of over 270,000 – then make decisions on which products should be developed, including how they should be developed. wow...

Moonshine, Karlovy Vary, Utopias and Spas

Everywhere in Bohemia Utopias are possible Such as Ontario or zameNske spa...

The Castle Spa is located in the heart of the Carlsbad spa area, in the vicinity of the Market and the Hot Spring Colonnade... The first project of a spa facility designed in the style of architectonic modernism was prepared in Karlovy Vary on the threshold of World War I, i.e. at the peak of bloom of the development and the "Golden Age" of the town. The building of a unique complex of the Castle Colonnades commenced in the very heart of the spa zone, where the most precious Carlsbad springs rise from the ground. One of the fundamental ideas of the new structure was to connect the colonnade leading around the Upper Castle Spring with the Market Colonnade, and thereby, to build a worthy abode for the ruler of all Carlsbad springs, who has been safeguarding all the natural curative resources for next generations at this site. Here Russians have facelifts and all kinds of other mmedical procedures performed and debates about diet rages in every spa :-)

PS: The death toll due to illegal alcohol use in the Czech Republic has climbed to 28 with the latest fatality reported in the village of Borzice-u-Blatnice. Last month the country’s health authorities introduced a sweeping ban on the sale of strong liquor in the wake of a wave of poisonings from drinking vodka and rum laced with methanol, the biggest such incidence registered in the past three decades. Moonshine is called rotgut for a reason

Oliver Wendell Holmes described the camera as a “mirror with a memory.” At that time, photography was not yet routine; a single picture could capture a person for life. 10000 images of one trip ...

Mel Nik & All That Jazz (Praha's Message to Lidka)

First visit...




 Second you end up....


 

Ked |Lidka neockuje tak spieva Po Cesku Spanielsky alebo Italiansky :-)

V době, kdy se zde narodila a žila kněžna Ludmila, byl zámek obýván vdovami českých králů a knížat. Teprve za vlády císaře Karla IV. se město stává věnným majetkem českých královen a kněžen. Jeho poslední manželka dala přestavět zámeckou kapli v gotický styl. Jako poslední zde žily manželky Jiřího z Poděbrad. Poté byl hrad obýván různými šlechtickými rody.
V roce 1542 byl hrad přestavěn v renesanční zámek a nechalo se přistavět severní křídlo s věží a arkádami, které jsou bohatě zdobeny sgrafity. Během třicetileté války zámek velmi zpustnul a v roce 1646 byl zastavěn hraběti z rodu Černínů. Ten potom koupil panství od císaře Leopolda I. Poslední dědička z rodu Černínů Marie Ludmila se v roce 1753 provdala za Augusta Antona Lobkowicze.
Rodina Lobkowiczů vlastnila zámek až do příchodu komunistů. Od roku 1992 začal současný majitel Jiří Lobkowicz zámek rekonstruovat. Mel's Bohemian Place

"Le Nozze di Figaro" was composed by Mozart by command of Emperor Joseph II., of Austria. After congratulating the composer at the end of the first performance, the Emperor said to him: "You must admit, however, my dear Mozart, that there are a great many notes in your score." "Not one too many, Sire," was Mozart’s reply.Only in Slavia with Franto Dominique a Tomas

So the four of us, Janka, Pavel etc, went to a jazz club called Reduta to hear amazing voice created by Eva Emi ... Praha is filled with art & creativity Kevin is writing from the Augustine Hotel in beautiful Prague…

Coda: Planes bound for Prague will no longer be landing at Ruzyně Airport; at midday Friday the airport was officially renamed Letiště Václava Havla Praha, or Václav Havel Airport Prague at a lavish ceremony in Terminal 2. Some 80,000 people signed a petition organised by the film producer Fero Fenič to rename the airport to honour the late former president, who died in December. What a Great Timing to be in Prague