Nepenthe

 From The Independent   In the summer of 1921, the German filmmaker FW Murnau began shooting his film Nosferatu on location in northern Germany and at Jofa Film Studios in Berlin. This was the first important vampire movie in cinema history and it was entirely fitting that it was a rip-off. Author Bram Stoker ’s estate had refused Murnau permission to make a film adaptation of his 1897 novel Dracula . The director and his screenwriter Henrik Galeen dealt with the inconvenience by calling the main character Count Orlok rather than Count Dracula and renaming all the other main characters too. Even so, the production company Prana Film, which was soon to go bankrupt anyway, was sued by Stoker’s widow. Nosferatu was the perfect prototype for all the other vampire films that have followed it in such profusion over the last 100 years. To its detractors, Stoker’s widow among them, it was a scandalous affair: an exercise in tacky plagiarism. To its admirers, it still rank...

It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way. The river can not go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear, because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.   by Khalil Gibran

 

 

 With culinary classics

 Um prazer e uma dor - em suma, uma paixão - traduzir este livro.

 With Tom Gauld

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  The Chaos by Charivarius (Gerard Nolst Trenité - 1870-1946) Dearest creature in Creation , Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse , and worse . I will keep you, Susy, busy , Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear ; So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer . Pray , console your loving poet, Make my coat look new , dear, sew it! Just compare heart, beard , and heard , Dies and diet , lord and word . Sword and sward , retain and Britain (Mind the latter, how it's written!) Made has not the sound of bade , Say-said, pay-paid, laid , but plaid . Now I surely will not plague you With such words as vague and ague , But be careful how you speak, Say break, steak , but bleak and streak . Previous, precious, fuchsia, via; Pipe, snipe, recipe and choir , Cloven, oven; how and low ; Script, receipt; shoe, poem, toe . Hear me say, devoid of trickery: Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,...

Planta inédita em Portugal descoberta no Parque Natural das Serras de Aire e Candeeiros Decorrente de uma ação de prospeção botânica no Parque Natural das Serra s de Aire e Candeeiros (PNSAC), concebida e coordenada na Direção Regional da Conservação da Natureza e Florestas de Lisboa e Vale do Tejo (DRCNF-LVT), foi identificada uma espécie de planta nunca antes observada e registada, em território português. A nova espécie para a flora de Portugal, cujo nome científico é Arenaria grandiflora L. ocorre no PNSAC quase exclusivamente em fendas de rochas calcárias. António Flor, Vigilante da Natureza especialista em botânica que exerce funções na DRCNF-LVT, é o coordenador do projeto e autor da descoberta que resultou de um processo de investigação documental relacionado com geologia, geomorfologia, pedologia e solos da área do Maciço Calcário Estremenho. Na mitologia romana, Maia é uma antiga divindade itálica, filha de Fauno e esposa de Vulcano. É a deus...

by Leah Falk For the body Alan Turing, age 16 is a machine, sharing its eyes with the horse and the cinemascope, blood with the gas engine, fountain pen. What have I in common with other living things? The moment a dinosaur’s jaw cracked in two — one half snapping birdlike, the other ground to powder. We have that. We have the objects in this room where a billion years have come and laid down on the tile, seeping out the screen door and down the garden drain. This parlor: dresser scarf — ashtray — good light for reading — easy chairs with ribbing. Moonstone bust of a mother, a child rising out of her, mountain from slip-strike. Although it hurts me, out of a living line, out of stone or meat, I choose myself again, again that is one of me , here where my carriage grew vertical, where my fists forgot the heavy ground. But your body, wedge, remembered. Cartridge leaking...

From BBC Travel When 16th-Century Portuguese came to Japan, they brought a special dish with them. Today, in Japan, it’s called tempura and has been a staple of the country’s cuisine ever since.  In 1543, a Chinese ship with three Portuguese sailors on board was headed to Macau, but was swept off course and ended up on the Japanese island of Tanegashima. Antonio da Mota, Francisco Zeimoto and Antonio Peixoto – the first Europeans to ever step on Japanese soil – were deemed ‘southern barbarians’ by the locals because of the direction from which they came and their ‘unusual’, non-Japanese features. The Japanese were in the middle of a civil war and eventually began trading with the Portuguese, in general, for guns. And thus began a Portuguese trading post in Japan, starting with firearms and then other items such as soap, tobacco, wool and even recipes. The Portuguese remained in Japan until 1639, when they were banished because the ruling shogun Iemitsu bel...