Nepenthe

I have a theory that we each have a vague kinship with an exotic animal. Perhaps you have an inexplicable affinity for leopard print. Or your shower curtain is covered in butterflies, similar to the one on your ankle. Or you were a Rubenesque, somersaulting toddler and your family nicknamed you Panda. For me it is the giraffe. My career as a long-necked mammal began at a supermarket checkout circa 1987, when a woman actually said it: "Aw. You look just like a little giraffe!" I looked up to my mother for help, but her face was hidden behind the People announcing Princess Diana's marital woes. I was left to fend for myself. I must have looked stricken, because the woman said, "Don't worry honey, it's a compliment." "Don't worry" is code for, "You should really worry a lot about this." She was a puffin of a woman, smiling warmly down at me. Stick drawings were an accurate representation of my body that year, so I'm sure that my ...

Por indicação da Poison Ivy , sempre atenta a esta vida trabalhadeira mas precária :|

The Guardian Canadian short story writer Alice Munro has emerged victorious from a clash of the world's literary giants to win the £60,000 Man Booker International prize. The 77-year-old writer, whose win places her still higher on her ascent to what fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood last year described as an elevation to "international literary sainthood", was picked from a line-up of towering international talent that pitted Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa against the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, Australia's Peter Carey and the UK's contender, the Booker prize -winning Scottish author James Kelman. Judge Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer prize-winning American novelist, admitted that selecting a winner from the 14 longlisted authors – who are assessed on their bodies of work and the contribution they have made to " fiction on the world stage" – had been a challenge, but that Munro "just won us over". "Her work is practically perfect. Any writer...

Guest post by Nick Lane, author of Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution When Matt Ridley read Nick Lane’s new book he said “If Charles Darwin sprang from his grave, I would give him this fine book to bring him up to speed.” We asked Nick to write a quick 10-point primer for the father of evolution about our current understanding of the science of life. "Darwin knew everything and nothing about evolution. Everything, because nobody grasped the priciples of natural selection better than he. Nothing, because almost all of today’s proofs of his theory are written in the languages of genes and molecules that he knew nothing about. Darwin would be amazed and delighted by the scope and details of our current understanding of life. In Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution I take life’s most celebrated ‘inventions’, each one of which transfigured our planet, and trace what we know of how they came to be" Here’s what Nick would tell Darwin: 1. The ...

And a beautiful, beautiful film website

Jorge Colombo drew this week’s cover using Brushes , an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. “I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself,” says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he’s checking his e-mail. There’s a companion application, Brushes Viewer , that makes a video recapitulating each step of how Colombo composed the picture. (Watch how he drew this week’s cover below.) Colombo leans heavily on the Undo feature: “It looks like I draw everythi...

aka Vampire

7 de Maio a 7 de Junho de 2009 A Tarumba-Teatro de Marionetas realiza em Lisboa a 9ª edição do Festival Internacional de Marionetas e Formas Animadas – FIMFA Lx , com direcção artística de Luís Vieira. Um projecto renovador e aberto a novas tendências, de dimensão internacional, que pretende promover e divulgar uma área específica de expressão artística: o universo das formas animadas. A 9ª edição tem o apoio do Ministério da Cultura/Direcção-Geral das Artes e envolve, mais uma vez, um conjunto de parcerias fundamentais para a sua realização com alguns dos mais importantes agentes culturais da cidade, destacando-se a que se realiza com a EGEAC e as co-produções com o Museu da Marioneta e o Teatro Maria Matos, o Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, para além dos apoios e parcerias com a Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, o Museu do Oriente, o Centro Cultural de Belém, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, entre outros. No âmbito do seu programa de descentralização, o FIMFA Lx efectua ainda extensões a Viseu...

Why do human beings spend so much time telling each other invented stories, untruths that everybody involved knows to be untrue? People in all societies do this, and do it a lot, from grandmothers spinning fairy tales at the hearthside to TV show runners marshaling roomfuls of overpaid Harvard grads to concoct the weekly adventures of crime fighters and castaways. The obvious answer to this question -- because it's fun -- is enough for many of us. But given the persuasive power of a good story, its ability to seduce us away from the facts of a situation or to make us care more about a fictional world like Middle-earth than we do about a real place like, oh, say, Turkmenistan, means that some ambitious thinkers will always be trying to figure out how and why stories work. The latest and most intriguing effort to understand fiction is often called Darwinian literary criticism, although Brian Boyd, an English professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the author o...

Check the gallery at the Telegraph

The triple A tag post ;)

Full Gallery at Telegraph

These stamps that look and smell like chocolate have been issued in France to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of chocolate beans at the port of Bayonne Cette année, les traditionnelles Journées du Chocolat prendront une ampleur exceptionnelle pour célébrer les 400 ans de l'arrivée à Bayonne de la recette chocolatière apportée par les Juifs portugais , faisant de notre ville la première ville chocolatière de France. A l'initiative de l'Académie du Chocolat de Bayonne, le lancement par Phil@poste en avant-première, d'une série de timbres inédits retraçant la route du chocolat jusqu'aux portes de notre cité, donnera à cet événement un rayonnement national et exemplaire.

An aerial view of the sand dunes at the Lençois Maranhenses National Park taken from an Air Force helicopter providing relief supplies to flood victims in Maranhão state, Brazil

No... A B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is frozen in time as it breaks the sound barrier during a test flight above the Californian desert

One of the coolest chapters in Bram Stoker's Dracula (the book, not the Coppola movie) is the one in which the titular bloodsucker is on a boat ride from Bulgaria to England, and he uses the crew as a rather messy all-you-can-eat buffet. It's a sequence that certainly seems spooky enough to warrant its very own film, so I say it's good news that Marcus Nispel is on board to direct The Last Voyage of Demeter . Variety describes the story with a bit more clarity than I can muster at 6am on a Sunday morning, so here goes: It's "based on a chapter in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" describing the arrival of the vampire count in England on a cargo ship that has crashed into the rocks at Whitby with no crew and the dead captain lashed to the steering wheel. Stoker tells the story via the captain's log of the voyage, which begins in Bulgaria and becomes increasingly disjointed as members of the crew disappear." Cinematical

Coming soon... In The Tempest , Shakespeare puts romance onstage. He gives us a magician, a monster, a grief-stricken king, a wise old councillor, a beautiful princess, a handsome prince, and two treacherous brothers. In Julie Taymor’s version of the play, the magician is transformed to ‘Prospera,’ and is to be played by Dame Helen Mirren. She is the widow and heir to the deceased duke of Milan. Her intense attraction to the study of magic and science causes her to lose sight of the necessity of maintaining political power, which she then loses to her treacherous brother-in-law, Antonio. When we first meet Prospera, she has already suffered twelve years of exile on a desert island, where her only companions have been her daughter, Miranda, now a beautiful young woman, the spirit Ariel, and the monster Caliban, whom Prospera has used her magic to enslave. Sailing by the island and caught in a terrible storm are Prospera’s enemies (and one of her friends), who are returning from No...

JRR Tolkien was famously appalled by the eagerness with which American hippies in the 1960s snapped up his tales of hobbits, elves and wizards. It was, he wrote, a “deplorable cultus”, and he commented dismissively that: “Art moves them and they don’t know what they’ve been moved by and they get quite drunk on it. Many young Americans are involved with the story in a way I’m not.” So what he would have made of the abiding influence of his Lord of the Rings books on 20th century culture – an influence driven more than anything else by the American uptake of his work – is anyone’s guess. Tolkien’s “cultus” is now an integral part of our culture. Without his particular brand of high or epic fantasy – its feudal Celtic settings, Edwardian cadences and contrasting dramatisations of good and evil – our shelves would be bare of the kind of bulging, bodice-ripping, medieval fantasy that buys yachts for people such as David Eddings, Julian May and CJ Cherryh. Not a bad thing, perhaps. But write...

German prosecutors believe that John Demjanjuk was a sadistic guard at the notorious death camp Sobibor. They would like to put him on trial in Munich, but his family says the 88 year old is too old and frail to be extradited -- and that he is innocent anyway. The wife of the alleged concentration camp guard is petite and rather friendly. She's wearing a blue-green checkered blouse, and her long hair is pulled back in a bun. Standing there at the door of her yellow farmhouse in Seven Hills, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, she seems a bit lost. Vera Demjanjuk speaks a mishmash of German and English. She looks exhausted as she explains that everything is starting over again and that, once again, she will have to fear for the fate of her 88-year-old husband, John. Her family, she says, has neither the energy nor the means for a new court case, especially not in far-off Germany. "We are poor and have no money," she says. It was 1977 when American Nazi hunters first set the...

Integrada nas comemorações do Ano Internacional da Astronomia , que se celebra em 2009, a Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal organiza uma exposição em que pela primeira vez será apresentado um conjunto fundamental das obras mais emblemáticas da história da astronomia, manuscritas e impressas. Uma oportunidade rara para conhecer um património cultural que revela a evolução da mais antiga das ciências exactas – a Astronomia – e testemunhar o fascínio que o espectáculo da abóbada celeste exerceu em todos os povos e culturas, nas suas expressões tanto científicas como estéticas. Constituída por quatro núcleos documentais, complementados por alguns instrumentos astronómicos de época, a Exposição começa por apresentar os Antecedentes da Revolução Astronómica , com obras de Ptolemeu, Sacro Bosco, Afonso X, Regiomontano e Pedro Apiano, entre outros, mostrados através de manuscritos de Alcobaça, códices árabes, incunábulos e edições do século XVI. Em A Revolução Astronómica mostram-se raras edi...