Introducing...the tie color test...(Jan 6, 2021)

 This is a picture from the Congress hearing with Cassidy Hutchinson yesterday, the former White House aid:

Judging by the ties of the people around the witness, we'd say that Trump is losing the tie color test. 

Craftsmen in the house

 You haven't heard from us in a while--for various reasons, obviously, such as slosh, long covid, more slosh induced by long covid, plus the painters that arrived to redo the house who forced us into temporary retirement in Switzerland. But they finally left (the painters), so we could return to Alcobaça and put the house back in order. And here we are with a new view of the entrance hall:

Note the difference? You don't? This is how our entrance looked before:

And the difference? Well, the colors, but also the metallic print on the wall. Here it is enlarged:

"Tata, the Beatles also survived," it says, and it's a quote from our second GREEN-EYES book, where John's neighbor Joe instigates John's friends to face/ignore the exalted crowd outside and exit the building urgently (the Beatles, remember, the first boy band, facing exalted crows all the time during the exalted part of their career).

 

Here's a brief fragment of the episode: 

The bell rings again. I walk to the buzzer, and there’s commotion on the parking lot below, thrilled voices on the intercom asking for Ben. And now it arrives from the other side, a mid-level pitch of cheers and shouts traveling around the condo and through the windows on the canal side. Ben, holding on to a window catch, peers nervously at the sound waves. 

There’s a knock on the main door. I peek through the peephole, but it’s not a groupie (if there was one there would be all), it’s a middle-aged man with no trace of fandom on his face—-my neighbor Joe. He looks upset even though he lives in the duplex penthouse above and owns the latest model of my jalopy. I open the door.

“This is you, right?” he says with an abstracted gesture while staring past me at the girl on the couch. “What is this?”

“That’s Juliette,” I answer. “She’s just back from visiting her sister at the hospital. The festival, you know, yesterday. The doomsday, the storm. Professor Bienpensant.” 

He shakes his head. “Not her. The hullabaloo below.” 

“It’s not us,” I say.

“It’s hem,” he replies, and points a finger at the nervous Ben near the window.

“Ben is a friend,” I say, “he’s staying with me because he was working for the festival.”

“Working, ha! It was on TV, this woman with her name like ice cream.”

“What can we do? It’s not our fault.”

“Look,” he says, “I ain’t no nigga-haitin’ redneck, and your Ben, with his third leg, that’s what it is all about, ain’t it—-I’m from the South too, from Louisiana, I’ve seen guys like him in the locker room. You must get him out of here. This is a quiet, unspoiled neighborhood. We want to keep it that way. Now!”

The doorbell shrills—-amped-up electrons working their way into everybody’s nerves.

“How do we get him out of here?” I ask.

The shrilling has ceased, and the jeers below segue into a sing-song: “Happy Birthday to you...”

“They’ll storm the building before you know it,” Joe says. “This structure is way less solid than it looks. Five floors of pure timber. If these hoi polloi get up here to your floor, God help us.” Meanwhile, the singsong has disintegrated into high-pitched shouts, “Ben, Ben, Ben.”

“We can’t leave, they’ll tear us to pieces,” I say.

“Tut-tut,” Joe shakes his head. “The Beatles also survived.”

Stay tuned...

A well-kept secret finally revealed: Albert Einstein turned transsexual later in life

Einstein here with his beloved granddaughter Evelyn

 

Russian chopper shot down

The last taboo

Nobody is talking about this, for there's a touching touch of political incorrectness. Ahem...did you observe that the waiting list of successors to the scandal-plagued British prime minister Boris Johnson is rife with very foreign names (?):

Rishi Sunak

Priti Patel

Sajid Javid

Kwasi Kwarteng

Nadhim Zahawi

Jan 2, 2022

Lunch is prepared in the garden

 

In the bleak midwinter -- Jacob Collier (and Andrew McGregor)

. 

 And here is what Andrew McGregor has to say about this (scroll down for the lyrics):

Musical notes are a really, really, really complicated subject:

The base standard of western music, now, is A=440 Hz, and equal temperament, that is that there are 12 other tones related by powers of the 12th root of two, meaning 12 distinct tones in each octave.

That is a convenient approximation to a set of tones you can make out of the harmonic series, which was known to the ancient Greeks… except that if you actually try that, you discover as your music gets more harmonically complex that things sound pretty bad in some combinations, and musicians start wanting to correct them so they sound ‘right’ despite being wrong.

If you tune by ear with voices, or instruments that are not entirely fixed in their tuning, you end up using something called just intonation, and as you change key the frequencies you use for certain notes change slightly. That can mean that you can change key several times, change back to the key you started on, and end up at a different pitch (shifted by an interval called a comma).

Yeah, it’s complicated all right.

Around about the 16th century several people worked out that you could do what we now call equal temperament, it seems to have been simultaneously invented in China and Holland. It became standard in the 18th century in Europe.

But… lots of contemporary music uses tuning based on guitars, and they don’t play in exact equal temperament.

Not only that, lots of contemporary music is based on blues scales, which contain a note that isn’t one of the regular set.

Arab, Japanese and Indian music each use a different set of intonation schemes… except when they don’t because they’re incorporating Western instruments (or guitars)… except when they do something like just intonation around what the equal-tempered instruments or guitars are doing to make it sound right in their heads… yeah. Complicated.

So, any attempt to define the exact frequencies of musical notes is just the start of a long, complicated journey. People have written books on the subject, and there have been several published on this subject every year for at least four hundred years. It’s that complicated.

Using different intonation schemes can be astonishingly beautiful.

Check this out… there’s an impossible modulation in this arrangement:

At one point he smoothly modulates into a key a quarter tone sharp (in exact quarter-tone equal temperament)… by stepping through something like the just intonation commas on the way there. By ear, multitracking with himself.

Lyrics

In the bleak midwinter

Frosty wind made moan

Earth stood hard as iron

Water like a stone

Snow had fallen

Snow on snow on snow

In the bleak midwinter

Long, long ago

Angels and Arc Angels

May have traveled there

Cherubim and Seraphim

Thronged the air

But only his Mother

In her maiden bliss

Worshiped the beloved

With a kiss

What can I give him?

Poor as I am

If I were a shepherd

I would give a lamb

If I were a wise man

I would do my part

But what I can I give him

Give him my heart

Give him my heart

Christmas eve...

 

This afternoon

We were on our habitual afternoon walk which gets us downtown and back in an hour.

Note the December flowers on the right. The white Lego House atop the hill got recently repainted; before it looked like Dr. No's residence. There's a dog kept in a cage next to the house (extreme left of the picture), and he barks less since the paint job was done.

From the trenches -- Wole Soyinka

Yes, we are still bedridden -- did we fail to mention that Michael and his partner Chang caught Covid (?) -- so we are cutting our way through the verbal jungle of a book by Wole Soyinka, titled "Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth" about Soyinka's home country, Nigeria -- Soyinka, world's first black Nobel Award of Literature -- Soyinka (who's compared in rave reviews to Vladimir Nabokov's).  

And so, while we are still wielding our verbal machete in Soyinka's verbal  jungle (well-written, somehow, but much too redundant, and confusing, and repetitive...), we swear this holy pledge: in the future, we'll only read books by the man himself: Vladimir Nabokov.

Yesterday -- wave alert

We've had a wave alert for the Praia do Norte yesterday, with estimated breakers of 10 meters. The sheep were characteristically unimpressed, though:

 

Art is art is art is art

 

Alcobaça yesterday

Alcobaça holds a weekly market on Saturday. It's in walking distance, so we walked the pitoresco walk to the venue along the Alcoa, the river. To the left, the blue structure houses the catholic kindergarden.

The market. We bought eggs, flowers, and parsley.

The Alcoa again, on the way back.

The monastery (which is huge) (as you possibly know). This corner is being transformed into a FIVE STARS, (or BOUTIQUE) hotel. Come and visit.

(Nice here, isn't it. Another gorgeous day.)

Yesterday's barbecue --

(Clip by our friend Charlie:)


There were raindrops, that's why everybody huddles under the pergola. The evening became very cosy and congenial, though, and no political incorrectness occurred.

Yesterday on the beach

September was a bit rainy, but the summer is back.

October is the season for big waves...

...which has started now (the season).

Forte de São Miguel Arcanjo (Fortress of Saint Michael the Archangel) the locus vivendi for surfing championships.

The street view of our house this (Sunday) morning

 

Note the bamboo on the deck to the left of the gate (click on the pic for enlargement)

Last week

The newly acquired Tesla MODEL Y (one of the first delivered to Europe) in front of the Alcobaça monastery.

Lunch at "Meat", the hamburgeria around the corner from the monastery.

Around 9:00 in the morning.

Antique market on the square of the monastery.

A morning around 7:30.

Our Model Y again, now paired with Tesla's Model 3 which belongs to the vet of our neighbors.

Praia do Norte in the afternoon.

(Pictures, as usual, by Chang Man Yoon)

Behold this poor pool

Lava from the active volcano dripping into an irrigation pool on La Palma 

 

There is always hope...

 

...at the end of the rainbow.

 

Our garden a few days ago.

Critical voices