Beijing Language & Culture University campus, April 2021
Beijing Language and Culture University is one of the oldest Universities to offer instruction in English. Nowadays it caters to many foreign students wishing to learn Mandarin.
“I am Dionysus, the child of Zeus, and I have come to this land of the Thebans, where Cadmus’ daughter Semele once bore me, delivered by a lightning-blast. Having assumed a mortal form in place of my divine one,”
The Bacchae by Euripides
“Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory – all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.
The origins of this rhyme are uncertain.
Banbury used to have several crosses: the High Cross, the Bread Cross and the White Cross until they offended puritan sensibilities and were destroyed around 1600.
The present cross dates from 1859 to commemorate the wedding of Victoria, the Princess Royal , to Frederick of Prussia whose coat of arms were blocked out during World War 1.
So removing and defacing statues by those gifted with moral certainty is nothing new.
Widely seen Chinese Covid poster:
人 rén – person
丛 cóng – a collection or group
众 – zhòng – a multitude or crowd
Chinese covid poster 2020/21 Beijing
There is a tradition of health posters as we can see:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_not_go_gentle_into_that_good_night
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Heart_Cathedral_(Jinan)
Once in a lifetime by the Talking Heads re-imagined
and you might ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here…?”
and by Talking Heads I don’t mean Alan Bennett
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbin_International_Ice_and_Snow_Sculpture_Festival
Well, I stand up next to a mountain
Chop it down with the edge of my hand
Well, I pick up all the pieces and make an island
Might even raise just a little sand
Whether Hendrix did actually visit Annapurna is moot , but it’s a nice story.
Updates progress: still working on fixing things
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Raising beef cattle is very common hereabouts
The place on the Venn diagram where “I can has Cheeseburger’ intersects the works of Samuel Beckett.
Vladimir Yu. Arkhipov, Arkhivov / CC BY-SA
The Cuckoo comes in April
She sings her song in May
In the middle of June
She changes her tune
In July she flies away.
Planted:
Castanea sativa (Sweet chestnut)
Apple trees:
Soft Fruit:
Constructed:
Numbeo is a collaborative online database which enables users to share and compare information about the cost of living between countries and cities.
It also includes data on:
Turf cutting in Co Roscommon in 1881, from the Illustrated London News, February 26th, 1881
Cut turf stacked for drying, Lissananny, Co. Roscommon, August 2019
To sit beside the board and drink good wine
And watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire
And feel content and wisdom in your heart,
This is the best of life;
William Butler Yates
Cutting turf to heat homes has been a tradition for millennia, but the EU has ruled that it must stop.
‘The life of Riley’ is an easy and pleasant life.
Founded in November 2007, Low-tech Magazine questions the blind belief in technological progress, and talks about the potential of past and often forgotten knowledge and technologies when it comes to designing a sustainable society. Interesting possibilities arise when you combine old technology with new knowledge and new materials, or when you apply old concepts and traditional knowledge to modern technology.
My personal favourite articles:
Research shows that it’s possible to grow warmth-loving crops all year round with solar energy alone, even if it’s freezing outside. The solar greenhouse is especially successful in China, where many thousands of these structures have been built during the last decades.
How to Downsize a Transport Network: The Chinese Wheelbarrow
For being such a seemingly ordinary vehicle, the wheelbarrow has a surprisingly exciting history.
Make a raised bed
Prepare the soil
Rhubarb prefers a sunny site and should not be harvested in the first year. Three crowns should be enough to feed a family. Once mature the crowns can be split to provide new healthy plants.
‘Timperley Early’ is one of the earliest varieties to mature, producing pink-red stems streaked with green. It’s ideal for forcing to provide tender pink stems as early as February. If left to grow naturally, ‘Temperley Early’ is ready to harvest from March.
What are my responsibilities as a riparian owner?
How do I maintain the watercourse?
a) Keep growth of vegetation (trees, weeds, reeds, grass etc) under control
b) Keep watercourses free of debris (e.g. litter, grass cuttings, and fallen trees and branches)
c) Remove excess silt
Here are some good URLs:
http://www.theriverstrust.org/media/2017/04/Pinpoint-21.0-Soil-Management-Managing-ditches.pdf
Futility Closet is a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible.
The database contains more than 10,000 items, and more are added each day.
You can read Futility Closet on the web, subscribe by RSS, or sign up to receive a daily email.
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To commemorate this day the primary domain of this blog has been changed from: nolligan.co.uk to nolligan.ie
Incidentally, you can also use nolligan.com and nolligan.uk
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
