"Oliver was a young lawyer, fresh from the schools, who had gone out to the deserts of Nevada to begin life. He found that country, and our ways of life, there, in those early days, different from life in New England or Paris. But he put on a woollen shirt and strapped a navy revolver to his person, took to the bacon and beans of the country, and determined to do in Nevada as Nevada did. Oliver accepted the situation so completely that although he must have sorrowed over many of his trials, he never complained -- that is, he never complained but once. He, two others, and myself, started to the new silver mines in the Humboldt mountains -- he to be Probate Judge of Humboldt county, and we to mine. The distance was two hundred miles. It was dead of winter. We bought a two-horse wagon and put eighteen hundred pounds of bacon, flour, beans, blasting-powder, picks and shovels in it; we bought two sorry-looking Mexican "plugs," with the hair turned the wrong way and more corners on their bodies than there are on the mosque of Omar; we hitched up and started. It was a dreadful trip. But Oliver did not complain. The horses dragged the wagon two miles from town and then gave out. Then we three pushed the wagon seven miles, and Oliver moved ahead and pulled the horses after him by the bits. We complained, but Oliver did not. The ground was frozen, and it froze our backs while we slept; the wind swept across our faces and froze our noses. Oliver did not complain. Five days of pushing the wagon by day and freezing by night brought us to the bad part of the journey -- the Forty Mile Desert, or the Great American Desert, if you please. Still, this mildest mannered man that ever was, had not complained. We started across at eight in the morning, pushing through sand that had no bottom; toiling all day long by the wrecks of a thousand wagons, the skeletons of ten thousand oxen; by wagon-tires enough to hoop the Washington Monument to the top, and ox-chains enough to girdle Long Island; by human graves; with our throats parched always, with thirst; lips bleeding from the alkali dust; hungry, perspiring, and very, very weary -- so weary that when we dropped in the sand every fifty yards to rest the horses, we could hardly keep from going to sleep -- no complaints from Oliver: none the next morning at three o'clock, when we got across, tired to death.
Awakened two or three nights afterward at midnight, in a narrow canon, by the snow falling on our faces, and appalled at the imminent danger of being "snowed in," we harnessed up and pushed on till eight in the morning, passed the "Divide" and knew we were saved. No complaints. Fifteen days of hardship and fatigue brought us to the end of the two hundred miles, and the Judge had not complained. We wondered if any thing could exasperate him. We built a Humboldt house. It is done in this way. You dig a square in the steep base of the mountain, and set up two uprights and top them with two joists. Then you stretch a great sheet of "cotton domestic" from the point where the joists join the hillside down over the joists to the ground; this makes the roof and the front of the mansion; the sides and back are the dirt walls your digging has left. A chimney is easily made by turning up one corner of the roof. Oliver was sitting alone in this dismal den, one night, by a sage-brush fire, writing poetry; he was very fond of digging poetry out of himself-- or blasting it out when it came hard. He heard an animal's footsteps close to the roof; a stone or two and some dirt came through and fell by him. He grew uneasy and said "Hi! -- clear out from there, can't you!" -- from time to time. But by and by he fell asleep where he sat, and pretty soon a mule fell down the chimney! The fire flew in every direction, and Oliver went over backwards. About ten nights after that, he recovered confidence enough to go to writing poetry again. Again he dozed off to sleep, and again a mule fell down the chimney. This time, about half of that side of the house came in with the mule. Struggling to get up, the mule kicked the candle out and smashed most of the kitchen furniture, and raised considerable dust. These violent awakenings must have been annoying to Oliver, but he never complained. He moved to a mansion on the opposite side of the canon, because he had noticed the mules did not go there. One night about eight o'clock he was endeavoring to finish his poem, when a stone rolled in -- then a hoof appeared below the canvas -- then part of a cow -- the after part. He leaned back in dread, and shouted "Hooy! hooy! get out of this!" and the cow struggled manfully--lost ground steadily--dirt and dust streamed down, and before Oliver could get well away, the entire cow crashed through on to the table and made a shapeless wreck of every thing!
Then, for the first time in his life, I think, Oliver complained. He said,
"This thing is growing monotonous!"
Then he resigned his judgeship and left Humboldt county."
I am posting now from this very building on the top of San Domenico's hill, between Florence and Fiesole. The history of the area is interesting. Some followers of Saint Peter were executed in the first century where the church now stands: Saint Romulus and his friends. (Mark Twain observes that in Roman times, the government was offering to the people violent amusement while taking rid of their new "enemies", the Christians, in order to protect their own interests). Then Cosimo de' Medici (the Elder) decided to build a bigger church, this one on the pic.
But the family de Medicis had troubles and decayed. Till Charles V helped them and restored the old name of the family. At that very time, Filipinos, people from Tierra del Fuego up to Colorado or even Montana, people from Cádiz and south Germany, people from Florence, all of them were under the same flag and crown and scepter. That accounts to a first and political globalization.
Then Cosimo (the Younger) build also his library next to the church, the building on the left, today it belongs to the European Institute University and a community of two friars. Here is where I am now, in the library, full of Ph.D. students from all different countries, most of them Europeans.
The Habsburg Empire under the rule of Charles V is the most impressive "globalization" considering the technical limitations. Such a huge territory couldn't be governed by a single head. But it is still a strange feeling to consider that once upon a time the people living here and the people living in Mexico belonged to a single "country".
The predict of Saint Peter and the blood of Saint Romulus began long before the Habsburg another kind of (religious and political) pre-globalization: Christianity. The Spanish Empire of the XVIth century was built on it. Somehow here, on this hill, are some of the oldest roots...
Some weeks ago, FAZ newspaper asked me to go to the Amazonas and check the situation there between the indigenous groups, the oil companies, and the ecoturism. I am still working on my report, but Lloyd Alter posted something already about our trip in the famous blog Treehuger, as well as some pics of the fauna we saw there.
The sloth on the picture is important. While swimming in a little lake full with piranhas and caimans, the people in the shore started yelling: "Caiman, caiman!". Two guys jumped out of the water in half a second, but it was this sloth you see there. It had fallen into the water, was exhausted and close to get drowned, so some guys saved him.
The thing is that caimans eat fishes (specially piranhas) and small mammals. They rarely attack humans. And they sleep during the day. Piranhas just attack if there is blood. Since there was no blod and it was during the day, I swam for more than 20 minutes in the lake. An experience full of adrenaline, in any case.
This afternoon I finally went to the Uffizi. It is a shame! If you hadn't reserved your tickets online, you wait hours in the queue. In any case, they are expensive (plus the reservation charges). Anyways. The paintings are ok (full of saints, as Mark Twain was complaining). The sad thing is that the explanations are missing: with such a great collection (and those prices and a constant flow of visitors from all countries), they should have a friendly and more professional museography, instead of those domestic pieces of paper printed 15 or 20 years ago. It is so bad, that some funny guy damaged a Botticelli with masking tape. The sign to visit the "area" reserved to Caravaggio is an A4 paper in plain Arial fonts.
Italy should be ashamed of treating this art pieces so badly.
Interesting was to "discover" another portrait of Gabrielle d'Estrées, Duchess of Beaufort and Verneuil, Marchioness of Monceaux, Lover of the King Henry IV. She is the one who convinced the King to end the religious wars. "Paris is well worth a Mass", he famously replied. A similar portrait is in the Louvre, with Gabrielle and her sister are also taking a bath.
Cerca de Latacunga, en los Andes ecuatorianos, veo una bandera con los colores del arcoiris. Supongo que es casa de unos gays, pero luego veo otra, y otra, y otra, hasta que me explican que es la bandera del partido Pachakutik, de raigambre indígena. Viéndola con atención es mínima la diferencia con la bandera gay: tiene una línea violeta abajo. (Acorde, supongo, a la discusión sobre el cian y el índigo ocasionada por Newton, quien quería a fuerzas que fueran siete los colores primarios para que cuadraran con las notas musicales, los planetas, los días de la semana, y, así, incorporó el índigo.)
Otros muchos ejemplos de arcoiris ondeantes, como la italiana de la Pace, que colgaba de todos los balcones cuando Bush comenzó sus contraataques después del 11 de septiembre.
Y ésta es la bandera propuesta por Rem Koolhaas para la Unión Europea, basada a su vez en las banderas de los países.
Esta observación minuciosa de los colores del arcoiris me recuerda anthelion que vi el pasado 2 de abril en los suelos aún húmedos de los valles toscanos. No pude tomar ninguna foto, pero era algo parecido a esto que se ve acá abajo.
Last week I had to be in five different airports: the biggest one being Heathrow, the smallest one was Quito's VIP terminal (VIP doesn't stand for Very Important People, it is just the name of the airline), which is as small as my flat. All in all I spent like 30 hours of the last week in airports. A lot. Very bad for people like me who doesn't like them.
Airports have something repulsive. They are places of transit, being the rolling bands their perfect symbol: going, coming back, going, rolling, moving always in or out, the only two movements allowed: ir y venir, hin und her. Period. Too much movement contrasts with the limitation of those two possible movements. That is exactly why people move so fast, trying to get out of the airport as soon as possible, since it is not more than a necessary condition in order to be there, in the desire destination (where all kinds of movements are possible: up and down, in circles, left or right, backward and forward, zigzag...).
Now, airport designers are trying (unsuccesfully) to make them "a nice place to stay" or "to spent the time". That is a contradictio in terminis, since an airport is by itself a temporary place. But since there is always an exception to confirm the rule, Sir, Alfred Mehran's lived 18 years in the Terminal 1 of Parisian airport Charles de Gaulle.
The same can be said about bridges: two directions to go, a "place" to connect to real places. Following the "stay-in-the-airport-philosophy", some architects want to transform bridges into places of staying, specially in China. One of these bridges "should provide for a dedicated space on the river, a room over the water, more than merely acting as an engineering device that solves a communication problem." Mexican architect Fernando Romero finished already one in Jinhua City, China, and is working on another similar project in Matamoros, Mexico.
(The Ponte Vecchio is an exception worth of mentioning, since it has always hosted some houses and shops.)
Some of the most beautiful (Chinese) bridges are the lángqiáo, built by the Dong people. They serve the basic purpose of crossing a river in order to join two shores. Plus: The roofs offer a shelter for wind and rain. They are beautifully designed, and are not intellectually pretentious.
This way or that way, as you wish, just keep walking. Do not stop. Not in airports and bridges.
Just came back from Amazonas and the Andes. I missed two creatures I was looking forward to see: the river dolphin (I was indeed in the area, but they left some time ago up the river due to the oil pollution), and the transparent butterfly, which I could just see on pics. That reminded me of the fish with transparent head, and other transparent creatures.
"Oliver was a young lawyer, fresh from the schools, who had gone out to the deserts of Nevada to begin life. He found that country, and our ways of life, there, in those early days, different from life in New England or Paris. But he put on a woollen shirt and strapped a navy revolver to his person, took to the bacon and beans of the country, and determined to do in Nevada as Nevada did. Oliver accepted the situation so completely that although he must have sorrowed over many of his trials, he never complained -- that is, he never complained but once. He, two others, and myself, started to the new silver mines in the Humboldt mountains -- he to be Probate Judge of Humboldt county, and we to mine. The distance was two hundred miles. It was dead of winter. We bought a two-horse wagon and put eighteen hundred pounds of bacon, flour, beans, blasting-powder, picks and shovels in it; we bought two sorry-looking Mexican "plugs," with the hair turned the wrong way and more corners on their bodies than there are on the mosque of Omar; we hitched up and started. It was a dreadful trip. But Oliver did not complain. The horses dragged the wagon two miles from town and then gave out. Then we three pushed the wagon seven miles, and Oliver moved ahead and pulled the horses after him by the bits. We complained, but Oliver did not. The ground was frozen, and it froze our backs while we slept; the wind swept across our faces and froze our noses. Oliver did not complain. Five days of pushing the wagon by day and freezing by night brought us to the bad part of the journey -- the Forty Mile Desert, or the Great American Desert, if you please. Still, this mildest mannered man that ever was, had not complained. We started across at eight in the morning, pushing through sand that had no bottom; toiling all day long by the wrecks of a thousand wagons, the skeletons of ten thousand oxen; by wagon-tires enough to hoop the Washington Monument to the top, and ox-chains enough to girdle Long Island; by human graves; with our throats parched always, with thirst; lips bleeding from the alkali dust; hungry, perspiring, and very, very weary -- so weary that when we dropped in the sand every fifty yards to rest the horses, we could hardly keep from going to sleep -- no complaints from Oliver: none the next morning at three o'clock, when we got across, tired to death. 
