Stamp of the Day: Vasco da Gama, India, and the Cape of Good Hope

I am sitting at home on Martin Luther King Day, a holiday here in the US (but some, like PP, have to work anyway), and working on flowers from Colombia, putting firewood in the furnace, and helping the kids to study. Midterm exams are only 3 days away for them. AREA is learning about the great explorers, like Vasco da Gama, the first one that rounded the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and reached India. Dias had already passed the Cape but turned back.

This is a map of how he sailed and this how it might have looked like. I would not want to sail on those ships. But seeing new land must have been exciting.



PS. EH - Spring is coming nearer, I saw the first starlings ('starar') of the year in our tree outside the kitchen. But now it snows again...

Skogen är full av lingonben

...benen kliver över stock och sten
hipp och hopp och murkla,
där stod kantarellen.

Föränderliga semlesvamp,
bleka taggsvampar och därtill
uti gröna mossan tutade i tratten.

Långa klivet hemåt gick,
tunga armar då jag fick
tutade och vissla, men jag hörde inget

Glad med lingon i min hink
tunga kassen skogens guld
nu så ser jag huset
"nu ä mamma hemma!"

Barking dog plaza 13/9 2008

For all non-swedish speaking: If you use the automatic translator for this, I can tell you it doesn´t even make sense in swedish. I´m just fooling around with a swedish nonsense vocal, with my own words. Ask LS and she will, maybe, tell you the general idea.
Because...this is what the automatic translator comes up with

Forest is full of lingonben
bone stride over logs and stone
hip and spring and decayed ,
there stood kantarellen.
Alterable semlesvamp ,
bleach taggsvampar and därtill
uti greener pulp tutade in funnel.
Tall stride hemåt was going ,
tongue arms then self was getting tutade and hiss ,
but self heard nothing
Jolly with linguist in mine bucket
tongue bin forest gold
now so am seeing self accommodate
" now ä mamma housewife!"

Do you understand anything? How can lingon be linguist? And hemma translate to housewife?
I think it´s amazing they call this translation service. But of course, they claim to know 1600 different languages, and since almost nobody speaks swedish, who would know if they cheat a bit? Intertran

LS' translation (with some minor changes and no rhymes):

The forest is full of lingon legs
walking over logs and rocks
hipp and jump and morel,
there was the chantarell!

Everchanging pastryshroom,
pale spike fungi and more as well,
trumpeted in the green moss.

Long steps toward my home,
with burdened arms I walked,
toot and whistle, but I heard nothing

Happy with full lingon bucket,
heavy bag with forest gold
now I see the farm house,
"now Mom is home!"

Cabin fever

Just came back from the cinema where I saw "Zero Kelvin" / "Kjærlighetens kjøtere" (1995).

The poet "Larsen" leaves his girlfriend in Norway to work at a hunting station on Greenland for a season. Arriving at the station he meets his two hunting partners; the silent, calm and meticulous scientist "Holm" and the rude, vulgar and cynical "Randbek", also the station's boss. Right from the beginning there is a tension building up between Larsen and Randbek, with Randbek mocking Larsen's, in Randbek's view, naive and romantic belief in love. During the winter this escalates to a level where the inhabitants of the little cabin sleeps with a hand on a loaded revolver, and where the table is split up with a string of flour marking the border of between the two opponents halves of it. Great film and Stellan Skarsgård makes a splendid performance as the rough Randbek.

In the Biosphere 2 project, where 8 "bionauts" were sealed into a big greenhouse as part of a self-sufficient ecosystem for two years, they had problems getting along as well, with the group splitting up in two halves. Allegedly the two groups didn't speak with each other for ten years after they came out in the normal world again.

The polar explorer Ernest Shackleton had an interesting approach when it came to preventing "cabin fever". When he had managed to get his crew back on solid ground on the inhabited Elephant Island after his ship Endurance was crushed by the ice during the failed Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he picked the men with the weakest psyche to sail with him for help. The remaining, mentally stronger men had to stay in their little rock hut over the winter waiting for him to eventually return with a rescue expedition. He did, not a single life was lost despite the extremely harsh conditions they suffered through. There are several well-written books about this expedition. His own record of the events, "South", can be found on Project Gutenberg for free.

/O.K.
(Listening to while posting: Derek Sherinian - Czar of Steel)