Went out to lunch today in quiet Chalandri, walked past a remarkable church that clearly ran out of cash halfway through construction, all naked concrete with reinforcing steel poking through. The steel bars are bent flat against the facade every which way and resemble the streamers that indicate airflow on experimental aircraft. It should by rights have statues of Cayley, Prandtl and Zhukovsky inside, each holding a model aircraft, eyes turned […]
One of the things I find hardest to do in my lab work (apart from keeping my mouth shut) is changing only one thing at a time when trying to perfect an experiment. If you make several changes, you’re not quite sure which made things better and you have to backtrack. The same applies to exceptional meals. If you go to a great restaurant and you order a dish you never […]
The sublime Cadet Chapel of the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, designed by SOM architect Walter Netsch (1920-2008). In this superb photo against a dramatic sky, the building seems to be a fulfilment of Gothic, a metaphor of uplift: sursum corda, fly with the Angels if at all possible, but in the meantime try to keep formation with Blue ones* when racing through the Rockies’ endless thin air. All airplane museums give […]
Not perfumes, but music.Valentyn Vasylyovych Sylvestrov‘s 5th symphony (1982) and his Postludium for piano and orchestra (1984) are two of the most beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard. Best for headphones, btw, unless you own a pair of Soundlab U-1s. pic credit: Seattle Times (detail)
Jolie laide is a reputedly untranslatable French expression that means ugly-pretty. It and its old-fashioned sister tag beauté de singe denote the fact that Frenchmen used to find it inexplicable that a woman might exert compelling charm while not being obviously pretty. JL sent me seven samples of oils in lovely tiny roller bottles. They are all named after Nouvelle Vague movies, and merely reading the labels brought back delightful memories of the golden age of French cinema. These are botanicals, […]
I once occupied a lab next to a US oceanographer colleague, a praeternaturally handsome and fit man in his sixties who was an insane wine buff and thought nothing of having $300 of reds (2 bottles) on the table to wash down a salade niçoise. His wife hated booze, so we had to lend a hand, no hardship at all. He was of the opinion that, contrary to popular wisdom, one could in fact […]
New kitten (adorable in most respects) spilled water over keyboard and Apple says the machine is “vintage” i.e. more than 4 years old, may be impossible to find parts! Apple’s new Hermès watchstraps and no new Mac Pro thing is starting to chap my ass, given that one way or another I’ve probably spent over $200k on their hardware (lab and home) since 1981. Update: fixed, €270, i.e. the price of […]
When I was a schoolboy in Paris, I and my classmates would say to each other that we belonged in Charenton, site of a famous upper-crust mental asylum, even though it had lost that name decades earlier. CM chose the name because D.A.F de Sade spent time there (and wrote no doubt tedious things, now mercifully lost). Another patient was the great Paul Verlaine who, unlike Sade, wrote far too little. All […]
Italy’s best kept food secret is a little tin of corned beef, or to be exact boiled beef chunks in jelly. I order it on Italian websites. This is not mashed-up mystery meat that sticks to your palate and needs chloroform-methanol to wash down. It is really good, high quality stuff from Argentina, contains practically no fat, and tastes delicious. I suppose you could put it in a salad or spread […]
Tonight at long last I visited the recently completed building site of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, a huge complex in the middle of Athens. Only part of it is open to visitors, but you can walk along the long rectangular pond to a plaza that has the Opera on the left and the National Library on the right. It is an oasis of magnificent, Ancient Egyptian architectural scale and grace, […]
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