Nepenthe

What a beautiful logo!

  The Alcorn Studio & Gallery In the past month, Leonard Cohen’s 1985 composition “Hallelujah” has experienced what seems like its fifth resurgence of the past 10 years. Cohen’s ode to sex, transcendence, and key changes appeared on three major television events of varying levels of gravitas: Justin Timberlake, sitting at a piano, performed the track on the Hope For Haiti Now telethon with the assistance of a former Mickey Mouse Club co-star; k.d. lang, alone on a podium in all white, crooned the track during the Olympic Games’ Canada-saluting opening ceremonies; and the American Idol producers scored a montage of this season’s finalists celebrating their triumphs to Jeff Buckley’s cover, which appeared on his 1994 album, Grace. This isn’t the first time that Cohen’s song—or, rather, others’ interpretations of it—has seemingly blanketed the airwaves. In 2007, music writer Mike Barthel wrote an analysis of the song’s popularity with music supervisors , particularly in situat...

Thanx to JC :-B Via: Online Schools

The logos alone entice you to surf their websites ,) I've been to the cities above (apart from Gotham, ie, NYC ;) and there's more North American places.

(because :) Information is beautiful !

How many people does it take to draw a map? How many, especially, when a city is in ruins? The BBC has a slideshow of what might be called social cartography: in the hours after an earthquake hit Haiti, the map of Port au Prince at OpenStreetMap went, with a little help from more than two thousand users, from this: To this: A few unlabelled arteries and a lot of terra incognita became something that helped relief get to where it was needed. The most moving picture in the slide show is the one of the map downloaded to the GPS device of a Red Cross worker who is following it through the streets of Port au Prince. The World Bank’s Haiti situation room had a giant print-out of the map on its wall. Christopher Osborne, a “neogeographer,” described the work of OpenStreetMap and CrisisMappers in a column for the Guardian ’ s Web site a couple of weeks ago, noting that the project was aided by the release of high-resolution satellite imagery. The map wasn’t just drawn from, sa...

It looks like something from a sci fi film but this creation may be the answer to the problem of water pollution. Dubbed the 'floating garden' the craft is designed to carry passengers on waterways like the Thames and purify murky water as it goes... ..The impressive green machine, called the Physalia, also generates enough energy to power itself and sustain the vast array of plantlife on board Telegraph

  And Grand Lisboa casino in Macau: some of my favourites: website

Kings, Fox Next channel Hollywood regularly cherry picks the best in British talent and turns it to unexpected purpose. But if there is a more genuinely surprising rise to the A (or at least B) list than that of Ian McShane in recent years , I've certainly failed to spot it. The trades this morning are reporting that the 68-year-old Blackburn-born actor who once plied his trade on the British small screen in the likes of Lovejoy and Minder, as well as stints in US series from Dallas to The West Wing, is to play Blackbeard in the next Pirates of the Caribbean film. McShane will presumably be pitting his dastardly wits against Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow in what will surely be one of next year's biggest blockbusters, Jerry Bruckheimer's series having so far stacked up enough box office gold bullion to rebuild El Dorado. What's so remarkable about McShane's arrival at the top table is that it has come so late in his career, and seems to have been a slow a...

Ao que parece, alguém se enganou com o seu ar sisudo e lhes franqueou as portas à chegada: os vampiros estão em todo o lado. Na literatura, no cinema, na televisão, aparecem vampiros a toda a hora. Saiu uma antologia portuguesa de contos com vampiros, há filmes e livros estrangeiros cheios de vampiros, e quase todos os programas de televisão incluem um vampiro: nas telenovelas, lá está um vampiro; nas séries juvenis, lá está um vampiro; nas conferências de imprensa do ministro das Finanças, lá está um vampiro. Por que razão abandonaram os vampiros a Transilvânia e vieram povoar o resto do mundo? Por uma razão artística muito forte: porque vendem. Aparentemente, o público do início do século XXI tem um interesse sem precedentes pelos vampiros - o que, diga-se, não é fácil de perceber. Os vampiros são um monstro que não inspira particular terror. São, no fundo, um monstro totó. Gostam de sangue, mas isso também os apreciadores de cabidela, e eu não tenho medo deles. Não podem apanha...

The three virtues we need At first sight, of course, vice is more attractive. She is sexier, she promises to be better company than her plain sister virtue. Every novelist, and every reader too, has more fun with the villains than with the good guys. Goodness is staunch and patient, but wickedness is vivid and dynamic; we admire the first, but we thrill to the second. Nevertheless, I want to say a word in praise of virtue: the quality or qualities that enable a nation and its citizens to live well, by which I mean morally well. And to see what virtue looks like, we need to look not to lists of laws and commandments, but to literature. Was a lesson on the importance of kindness ever delivered more devastatingly, or learned more securely, than Mr Knightley's reproof of Emma in the novel that bears her name? Was the value of play in childhood (a profoundly ethical matter) ever more memorably conveyed than by Dickens's description of the Smallweed children in Bleak House ? The hou...

How to Write Illustration: Andrzej Krauze Elmore Leonard : Using adverbs is a mortal sin 1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams , you can do all the weather reporting you want. 2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non- fiction . A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday , but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy...

From Gadling : So many language programs boast their superiority by claiming they teach you the same way you learned your native language as a child. Not Fluenz . "Up until now, people have been limited to the 'see a picture, memorize the word' language programs that teach adults as if they were children. But, adults learn differently from children," says Carlos Lizarralde, co-founder of Fluenz. "That's why Fluenz f² introduces a tutor who incorporates the user's knowledge of English grammar and syntax as leverage for reaching fluency in the shortest time possible." Part of what Fluenz advocates is using a student's native language to their advantage; emphasizing similarities in Romance languages and grammatical similarities with Chinese, for example. That makes sense to me. Having had some good luck with Rosetta Stone's intuitive, yet far more expensive TOTALe program, I decided to put this theory to the test. I opted for French, a la...

Central Park, New York, has a sculpture of Alice in Wonderland surrounded by the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit and the Dormouse. The image of Alice herself is 11ft in height, perhaps testifying to her strange contortions at the beginning of her adventures. It is proof, too, that the seven-year-old girl and her companions have travelled across the world. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into more than 100 languages. Perhaps it has been turned into Martian. The book has been the subject of ten operas and choral settings, appropriate for a work that contains several songs without sense. It has been adapted for 27 films, for cinema and television, the latest of which is Tim Burton’s version starring Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen of Hearts. It will no doubt continue the tradition of arch overacting that the text itself seems to demand. Mannerisms must be exaggerated; costumes must be outrageous. The...

A Telegraph Gallery

Thanx to Tchetcha ;)

It's a great idea for a novel anyway. Spencer Ludwig, the arty, ineffectual filmmaker son of a tough self-made businessman and Holocaust survivor, finally gets to feel stronger than his heroic father, who is dying. Snatching him from the care of a resented stepmother, Spencer takes his ailing dad on an impromptu road trip to Las Vegas, where Spencer is taking part in an obscure film festival that is actually screening his obscure films. But it's not just the main thrust of the action that makes David Flusfeder's latest book, A Film By Spencer Ludwig, such a joy to read. Spencer's own justification of his life as a "real artist", and his reasons for despising mainstream cinema, are perfectly drawn. One constant bugbear is the debasement of Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin by the lesser directors who have bowdlerised the celebrated baby-bouncing-down-the-stairs-in-the-pram scene . Another is the turpitude of artists who allow their work to be seq...

O Tejo from Abilio Vieira on Vimeo . TreeHugger

Chris Guillebeau AC360° Contributor When you first head off to places in the world that are a lot different from where you live, a number of things change. You have to learn to adapt. I still make a lot of mistakes everywhere I go, but I try to learn from each of them. Here’s a short list of things I wish I’d known before I started my routine of extensive overseas travel, especially in countries in Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America that are not part of the tourist circuit. Health Care 1. You can legally buy safe medicine , including prescription drugs, for very little money overseas. When in Africa or Asia, I stock up on anti-malarials that cost $5 a day in Seattle. On location, it’s more like $1 for a 10-day supply. 2. The best health care is not in the U.S., Canada, or the U.K. The best healthcare is in places like Thailand and Costa Rica; that’s why the practice of medical tourism will continue to surge as both travel and overseas healthcare become more a...

It took me a fair bit of heartache to change the title of The Brothers K to The K Brothers , trapeze artists or no trapeze artists (Those famous brothers have the wrong name, G2, July 29). And then, would I get it past the publishers? Fortunately World's Classics, as it was then known, before it changed to the more quirky Oxford World's Classics, were very understanding. But The Brothers K has become so ingrained, probably not for 130 years, though for long enough, that I was in two minds whether to proceed with the switch. As I found out later, mine was not a totally unprecedented idea, but it was the first time the novel was actually published in the west under that title. There is something about language that, given time, mistakes have a habit of turning into the norm. In 130 years it probably would be too late to do anything about the word order. So, I'm glad I went ahead in 1995. The less stilted version is preferable (in Russian there's no choice in the...

( The Burning of Avvakum (1897), by Grigoriy Myasoyedov ) by author Daniel Kalder Many years ago a friend made one of the most perceptive comments I have ever heard about Russian writers. "Yeah," he said, "they're profound and all that. But they're also incredibly hard . I mean, there's Pushkin: died in a duel. Lermontov: died in a duel. Tolstoy: fought in the Caucasus. Dostoevsky: sentenced to death, exiled to a Siberian prison camp. Solzhenitsyn: fought in the second world war, sent to the Gulag, survived cancer, defied the USSR …" "Don't forget Griboyedov ," I added. "Torn to pieces by angry Persians after he tried to save an Armenian eunuch. And Varlam Shalamov : Seventeen years in the Gulag." "Yeah – and what have English authors done? Dickens? Who did he fight?" I still think this assessment stands. And recently I discovered possibly the hardest Russian of them all: Avvakum the Archpriest , author of both the ...

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire in thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, and what art? Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand, and what dread feet? What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, ...

Thanx to Stranger in a Strange Land ;) CUPID - Happy Valentine's Day from Billow Talk on Vimeo .

Vinte anos passaram anos desde que começou a pesquisa para "O Formato Mulher - A Emergência da Autoria Feminina na Poesia Portuguesa". Vinte anos necessários para que Anna Klobucka, professora de estudos portugueses na Universidade de Massachusetts-Dartmouth, EUA, conseguisse encontrar um espaço para a sua publicação, espaço pessoal de confronto com o seu projecto de doutoramento iniciado em 1989, mas também com a situação dos estudos feministas em Portugal. Tentou publicá-lo em Portugal em 1993, mas não conseguiu. Quinze anos depois, revisto e aumentado, o estudo ganha outro fôlego pela mão da Angelus Novus: na tese original, estavam Florbela Espanca, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Maria Teresa Horta e Luiza Neto Jorge. Nesta edição, Klobucka inclui Adília Lopes e Ana Luísa Amaral. São cinco capítulos, um sobre Florbela e outro sobre Sophia, e dois estudos comparativos (Maria Teresa Horta e Luiza Jorge, Adília Lopes e Ana Luísa Amaral). Em "O Formato Mulher", Klobucka a...