cascada

Geting Tired of all this War Stuff

2009-01-12T14:56:00.004-06:00

Here is how I feel about it:

The sculpture was created by Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd in 1980 and was a gift from the government of Luxembourg presented to the United Nations in 1988. It is located in the Visitor's Plaza, facing First Avenue at 45th Street, New York.

There are replicas in Lausanne, London, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö, Berlin, as well as in South Africa. There should be a replica in every capital city of the world, and in every school.

Trefoil from 2005

2008-12-01T19:19:00.006-06:00

Playing with Maple back in May 2005 I found this pretty trefoil which I encountered again today digging through some backup CD's looking for something else. Hope you enjoy it.

May Trefoil
(click on image to see it larger)

Squares on a grid

2008-11-28T09:53:00.012-06:00

Over on Yahoo!Answers someone asked how many squares could be drawn on a 8 by 8 grid. I didn't have a clue so I wrote a program to generate them all and count as it went. The answer turned out to be 540. The image of all those squares is quite nice so I thought I would share it here:

Polyhedron from the inside.

2008-11-26T09:06:00.004-06:00

Several people liked the swimming tadpoles, so here is another animated graphic. This one I created. It it is based on the snub dodecahedron. A stellated version of the entire polyhedron was projected from the center to a rectangle (like a Mercator projection of the earth), while the object rotated. Here it is:

Swimming Tadpoles

2008-06-08T11:57:00.015-05:00

This is a test to see if tadpoles can swim in this blog.
But why are there 4 blank lines at the top?

End of test. It appears that they can. They were created by Patrick Snels whose other art and design work you can find by clicking here. If you can explain, or tell me how to remove the 4 blank lines above the image, please do so.

Rita's Dog Blog

2008-05-23T18:24:00.006-05:00

Rita is our oldest dog and recently she and I had a heart-to-heart. It seems she has started her own blog here: http://rita314.wordpress.com. Her blog will include all dog-related stuff, especially dog-art. Actually this is good because it should free me up to write about other things, including Mexico, other art, geometry or whatever else strikes my fancy. Rita's most recent post is about portraits of dogs, click here to see it.

So, to make it very clear, there will be no more dog-art on this blog, instead it will (by mutual agreement) be on Rita's blog, see above.

Land of the Free

2008-04-23T10:30:00.004-05:00

Today I learned a startling fact: 1 out of every 133 people in the United States of America is in prison, incarcerated, behind bars! This is the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. By comparison Mexico imprisons 1 out of every 505 people. The incarceration rate of the United States is nearly 4 times higher than that of Mexico.

What does that say about the 'land of the free'?

You can view an interactive world map showing incarceration rates of different nations by clicking here. Sources are given on that graphic.

More Dog Art

2008-03-29T15:05:00.029-06:00

In the labyrinths of lives and civilizations long past there were in Mexico and other parts of the Americas some who revered the dog. This first photo is a ceramic dog made perhaps 1900 years ago. I took the photo in a museum in Colima, Mexico in April of 2004. Probably it depicts a kind of hairless dog, known as the Techichi or Escuincle which is believed to be a relative of the Chihuahua and possibly also of the Mexican Hairless also called the Xoloitzcuintle. Apparently these dogs or their ceramic representations were sometimes buried with their masters, to guide on the long trip to another world.

Pre-Hispanic dog in Colima, Mexico

In Xalapa, capital of the state of Veracruz, in Mexico there is a wonderful museum of anthropology. I took the next two photos there in July, 2002. They are also prehispanic representations of dogs -- unfortunately I did not record the civilization or period they came from.

Ancient Mexican Dog

I wish I knew why this poor dog was hunched over and whether it was functional or ceremonial or decorative or what -- but I do not.

The next photo, also from the Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa, proves that the wheel was known in the Americas before Europeans came. Apparently this dog was a child's toy and so far as anyone knows the wheel was not used otherwise.

Prehispanic Mexican toy dog

On the edge of the city of Colima, in the state of Colima, Mexico is a wonderful statue of two dogs dancing. To me they seem to be kissing as well. Here is a photo I took of that statue in April, 2004:

Dancing Dogs -- Colima -- Mexico

These dogs are really quite large, maybe 6 or 8 feet tall, I wish I could remember better. They are modeled, I believe, after a much smaller archaeological find dating back to 150 AD approximately.

Back in August of 2003 I was in St. Louis for my daughter's wedding and had a chance to visit the St. Louis Art Museum. They allowed you to take no-flash-no-tripod photos then and I took a this picture of what I think is a well known painting of two sighthounds:

Two sighthounds. Artist = ???

Unfortunately I didn't write down the artist's name or the date of the painting. Please email me ( jbuddenh at gmail dot com) or comment if you have any information about this painting and I will update this blog entry.

The next image is a photo I took at the Texas Clay Festival in Gruene, Texas back in October, 2005. I don't remember the artist's name. Here it is:

Dog art at Texas Clay Festival, October, 2005
(ceramicist unknown )

By the way, I put 49 photos of the Texas Clay Festival of 2005 out on the internet and they are still there, just photos, no text. To see them click here.

In the year 2004 my wife and I drove across the United States and spent a couple of days in the Silver City, New Mexico area. We heard there would be a festival called "Fiesta de la Olla" in the small mountain town of Pinos Altos near the 7080 ft high continental divide north of Silver City. This festival celebrates (among other things) the wonderfully decorated Mexican pottery made in the village of Mata Ortiz, Chihuahua, Mexico. So we went to see the fiesta and I took some photos including this one which should give you an idea of the Mata Ortiz pottery:

Mata Ortiz pottery

Later we wandered a bit around the town and I came across this wonderful sculpture of a dog in someone's yard:

Folk Art, Pinos Altos, New Mexico (July 17, 2004)

Some of you, like me, may be old enough to remember when the Soviet Union shot off Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957. This was the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth and it shocked the U.S. out of the complacent feeling that we were the most technologically sophisticated nation on earth. It precipitated changes in the teaching of science and mathematics and was surely one of reasons for John F. Kennedy's 1961 decision to put a man on the moon. You may also remember that Sputnik 1 was unmanned but that shortly thereafter on November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union put the first 'astronaut' into space and that astronaut was a dog named Laika (original name кудрявка). That poor dog met a terrible fate. At least we have this painting (which I snagged from some commercial site, if memory serves) to remember her by:

Laika the Space Dog

My next dog art image is by Irish printmaker Tim Mara(1948-1997) and is one of my favorites. One Tim Mara site said that images can be used 'for educational purposes only', so I hereby declare this an educational blog. Here is the image:

A print of Tim Mara

Last (and in some sense least :)) let me conclude this dog art post with a painting of the well known Colombian artist Fernando Botero (born 1932):

Dog Turning a Corner -- Fernando Botero--1980

This concludes today's posting on dog art. Since my collection has swollen to over 250 images, I reserve the right to someday post again on this topic.

Four dogs and a Cat

2008-03-28T12:30:00.021-06:00

We used to have one dog and one cat, but now we have four dogs and a cat. Too many, and yet it has opened my eyes. I used to think one owner one dog. Not any more. Now I think dogs' personalities only blossom -- they only really become full dogs -- when they can socialize and play with other dogs, and curiously they become more interesting for their owners then too. Here are our four dogs:

Rita

This is Rita, a foundling of nine years ago from San Antonio, Texas. Click on the image to see it larger.

Happy

This is happy our sweet Mexican mutt just under one year old. She was dumped as a puppy in the market in Coatepec, but my wife rescued her. Click on the image to see it larger.

Cosi

This is Cosi our other lovable Mexican mutt about one year and four months old. A neighbor rescued her as a puppy and then gave her to us. Click on the image to see it larger.

Giaco

There was an incredibly sad weak street dog, so thin and weak we thought he would die. But we fed him outside our gate. The idea was that maybe we could get him healthy and then give him away. After about one week of care I took the picture you see on the left. The weather turned cold and we started to cover him at night -- then, finally, we started to let him sleep on the porch. We called him Giaco, pronounced "Jocko" and short for the famous sculptor Alberto Giacometti.

The sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, 1951, and our dog Giaco's namesake.

Giaco, healthy and happy again.

Giaco got to be a really nice and pretty dog. We kept him. He is our fourth dog. But enough is enough, don't bring puppies or needy dogs to our doorstep.

Click on image to see it larger.

Louie

And this is Louie, our cat a foundling from San Antonio, Texas, and now five years old.

And you may as well see a recent photo of Esther, my wife, and me with Pico de Orizaba looming in the background. For more about this picture click here.

Most of the above photos came either from Rita's flickr site or mine. At least one cast of the Giacometti dog is at MoMA and there is a good chance the image originated there. You can find more information about the sculpture at the Hirshhorn museum, click here.

My next post will be soon and will feature part two of dogs in art.

Squares and Wallpaper

2008-03-27T11:21:00.009-06:00

One of the nice things about writing a blog is that you can write about whatever you want. So today a few words about wallpaper patterns and squares. I haven't forgotten that I promised to write more about The Great Swede. In due course, hopefully, I will.

Now for squares: back in the early 20th century some folks puzzled over whether it was possible to disect a square into smaller squares, each a different size. An easier problem would be to disect a rectangle into unequal squares. Fairly early on, in fact it was in the year 1903, the same year my parents were born, Max Dehn proved that it sufficed for the squares to have whole numbers for the lengths of their edges. Then in 1925 a fellow named Moron (OK not quite, make that Zbigniew Moroń(1904-1971)) came along and found a solution for the almost square rectangle of dimensions 32 by 33. Nowadays it is known that there are infinitely many different almost square rectangles (length minus width equals 1) which can dissected into unequal squares. Moroń's 33 by 32 example was the basis of a ceramic tile I built a few years ago. Here is a photo of it:

Ceramic tile based on Moroń's dissection

For a while it was suspected that such a dissection was impossible for a square. But in 1939 R. Sprague published the first example of a 'squared square' as such things came to be called. At nearly the same time, in the years 1936-8, four youngsters, then undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge became nearly obsessed with this problem. They found squared squares and developed a whole theory involving electrical networks for working with this and related problems, eventually published as: The dissection of rectangles into squares. R. L. Brooks, C. A. B. Smith, A. H. Stone and W. T. Tutte. Source: Duke Math. J. Volume 7, Number 1 (1940). These youngsters all went on to be well known in mathematics-related fields. A more thorough discussion of all this can be found here.

The examples of squared squares at this time were far from the simplest, and no one knew what the simplest example would be. Finally the simplest, a dissection of a square into 21 unequal squares, was found in March 1978 by AJW Duijvestijn, published as 'Simple perfect squared square of lowest order', J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 25 (1978), no. 2, 240-243. You can see a colored picture of it in my previous blog post called Hommage à A.J.W. Duijvestijn.

Recently I found and tried out some free recursive postscript software and made this image based on Duijvestijn's order 21 squared square:

OK, enough about squares. Now a tiny bit about wallpaper. Wallpaper often contains repeating patterns and mathematicians have studied these and determined that every repeating wallpaper pattern belongs to one of 17 possible types. To see examples of these 17 different types and much more information just click here. I just wanted to share a wallpaper pattern I recently created with free software called 'kali' which has been available on the internet at least since 1995. Here is my image, now on flickr (a larger version is here):

cascada post 26

2007-12-31T19:30:00.000-06:00

The Great Swede

This being the last day of year 2007 is also the last day to celebrate the 300th year of the birth of the great Swede. Of course there are many famous Swedes: Ingmar Bergman, Greta Garbo, Bjorn Borg, Alfred Nobel, Dag Hammarskjöld to name a few. There are surely also many Swedes great in their fields whose names are not well known to the public. But at least since the mid 19th century "THE Great Swede" refers to just one person: Carl Linnaeus, also known as Carl von Linné or Carolus Linnaeus.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

I learned of him about 50 years ago in high school biology, for he was the person, more than any other who made sense of the extreme diversity of the natural world of living things. He started the system of scientific classification of living things that we still use today. His principal work on classification of life was: Systema Naturae which in its first edition was less than a dozen pages. Here is a sample page of the early 1735 edition:

Sample page of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae early 1735 version
(click here for large version -- 385K)

Linnaeus continued to work on his classification system until it grew into a multi-volume work. At least 19 of his students traveled to various parts of the world collecting biological specimens which were included in later editions. The tenth edition of this book is considered the starting point of zoological nomenclature. Here is the cover of volume 1 of that tenth edition.

Cover of volume 1 of the tenth edition (year 1760) of Linneaus's Systema Naturae

To be continued in 2008...

cascada post 25

2007-12-19T22:36:00.000-06:00

Unknown Animals (y mas)

The other day, November 17, 2007 to be precise, I went out in my yard and noticed a strange bug on one of the leaves of a bird of paradise plant. At first I didn't think it was a bug or even alive. It was tiny, smaller than a pencil eraser, maybe about 3 mm in length (about 1/8 of an inch). I was standing there about 3 feet away and it looked like a whitish or grayish spec, maybe dirt or ash, or maybe some white mold or fungus. Then it moved. Hmm, that funny little thing is alive, I thought. I looked more closely and now I see it crawling slowly along the leaf .. it didn't look like an insect since it seemed to have many legs. It didn't look like a caterpillar either. What could it be? I ran and got my camera, a 2001 vintage digital which back then was called a Nikon Coolpix 995. It does a nice job with closeups. Here is the picture of this odd creature:

Unknown #1: Strange 'bug'. What is it?
(click on picture for discussion)

That's my thumbnail over on the right, so you can better gauge how small that bug is. I count 24 appendages plus one short one right on the axis of symmetry. The photo shows it more clearly than I could see it with the naked eye. It looks a little like a trilobite I thought. But, in spite of the fact that there is a recipe for trilobite cookies at one of my favorite sites, trilobites have been extinct for 250 million years.

I made a real effort to identify that little guy, but so far not much luck. Part of my effort involved searching the internet and eventually posting a query at buguide.net . There was one response which suggested it was some kind of mealybug. So I 'google' mealybug and find out there are hundreds of different kinds. And then I 'google image' mealybugs and find many pictures -- but none look like the little guy above. You see, mealybugs have this white powdery dusty stuff all over them. In short: mealybugs are mealy! Not the little guy above. No dust. No powder. I keep my eyes open in my backyard and soon find some real mealy bugs, really small, maybe 2 mm in length. I got a good picture of one. Here it is:

Mealybug (Pseudococcus elisae ?)
Common name: banana mealybug (?)

This mealybug looks bigger than the unknown creature above, but it is actually smaller. The photo was taken by holding my digital camera above the eyepiece of a microscope -- the very one my parents gave my brother and me back when we were in high school around 1958, nearly 50 years ago!

Since this post is about unknown creatures (or maybe some are fungi) found in my back yard, let me show you another:

Unknown #2: snail or scale insect or something else?

This looked like it might be a snail, but it was very tiny, only 1.5 mm in size. Then again maybe it is a scale insect. Ignorance is not bliss. I could see it move very slowly on the leaf it is resting on, and whose cell structure is visible. The picture above represents the maximum closeness I can get with my camera, unaided. Let me show you a couple of other pictures of the same specimen under the lowest power of my microscope. The first shows it upside down and you can see clearly the semi-translucent structure of the fat 'under-belly' with some dark material inside.

Unknown #2: a closer view

Remember, this guy is only about 1.5 mm in length, that is slightly less than 1/16 of an inch. I have no idea what this is. If you do, please either leave a comment or email me (jbuddenh at gmail.com). When I moved this little guy around under the microscope I could see in one position what looked a little like antennae or some other kind of small appendages. The depth of field is close to zero, so it is pretty blurry, but here is what I saw:

Unknown #2: detail showing antennae-like structures

Let us proceed now to unknown #3 which I thought was some kind of fungus but which some folks on flickr thought was more likely to be an egg sack of some spider or insect. Possibly it my be something altogether different. If you think you know please chime in. Here it is:

Unknown #3: diameter of 'sphere' about 2.8 mm (about 1/10th of an inch)

This thing is made out of thin hair-like fibers interwoven. I cut it open and it seemed to be hollow. I had no proper instruments for this delicate surgery so I used my pocket-knife :( and the results are less than for certain. I looked a bit on the web and found that there do exist galls of similar shape to this and some of similar size, but all were more securely attached. Incidentally this was attached to a leaf, but I don't know the name of the plant.

Next comes unknown #4. It is an example of scale on a leaf. Probably you have seen scales on leaves. They are roundish things that look sort of like a fish scale, maybe 1/8 of an inch in diameter or a little bigger. They sit on the leaves and grow a bit but otherwise do not move. Perhaps you, like me, did not realize that many of them are actually insects and go through various stages in their life cycles. The first stage in the life cycle, called the first-instar nymph, is the crawler stage. Soon they become scales and females are condemned to remain scales even into sexual maturity. The males eventually develop a pair of wings and can fly but die after a few days. Most of their lives scale insects are just motionless scales on leaves. Their is a huge diverse collection of different kinds of scale insects, perhaps 8000 species. These fall into three main classes: the hard-shell kind that look a bit like tiny barnacles stuck to leaves, the soft-shell kind, and the mealybugs which are not scales per se but are related and grouped with them. You can find a lot more about scale insects here. So that brings us to unknown #4 which is nothing more that a closeup photo of an unusual scale on a leaf:

Unknown #4: strange scale on a leaf

The green background is the leaf. The round thing, which is about 3 mm in diameter (a tad more than 1/10th of an inch), is the scale which, however, is unusual in several respects. First there are the orange filaments or hair like structures in the middle. So far as I know these don't occur with scale insects, but I am not a biologist so I could be wrong on this. Second, the base material has a greenish cast which makes me wonder if it contains chlorophyll, which makes me think plant, not insect. Fungus? Slime mold? Gall? Something else? You tell me, because I don't know. Click on the picture to see what a couple of people on flickr think.

Let me close out this blog article with one last unknown creature, unknown #5, which is has attached itself (or is attached) near the edge of a sick leaf. Here it is looking maybe like one of those hard-shelled scale insects, but only about 2.8 mm in length.

Unknown #5: scale insect, or snail, or ?? on a leaf

Here is a low magnification microscopic closeup, not clear on top but showing the edges pretty well.

Unknown #5: could it be a fungus?

To me it resembles a fungus, such as might be on a dead or rotting tree, just much smaller, about 1/10 of an inch in length. I pried it off the leaf, which was difficult since it was stuck on pretty well. But, when I looked carefully at the bottom side I saw a few strange leg-like projections. Here is a closeup again my digital camera hand held above the eyepiece of a microscope, set at a low magnification.

Unknown #5: detail showing a strange appendage

What could that be? Do fungi have appendages like that. Admittedly, there were only a few of these in evidence. Maybe it is not a fungus but instead one of those scale insects. Well, as a non-biologist I certainly don't know. If you can ID any of these things, or shed any light on any of them, please comment or email me at jbuddenh at gmail.com. Please mention the unknown by number as shown in the captions under the pictures.

cascada post 24

2007-11-13T14:09:00.001-06:00

Dog Art

I know. The title should say 'The Dog in Art'. If you came here looking for dog art I apologize. But this title is surely more of a lure. My file of art pictures with dogs now has about 125 pictures, so I thought I would share a few and maybe more another time. Most of these pictures have been on my computer for a long time. Some came from usenet and others from web sites and I really didn't keep track. If you see something that is 'yours' and you want me to remove it or provide a link to your site containing it, please let me know.

First is a detail from a 16th century Korean art piece attributed to Yi Am, 1499-1566.

Dog with feather (detail) -- 16th century, Korean
Attributed to Yi Am, 1499-1566

Picasso apparently liked dogs. At any rate I have seen several photographs of Picasso with dogs. Here is a Picasso painting with a dog from his 'blue period'.

Boy with Dog -- Picasso -- 1905

Next is a curious painting of Charles Christian Nahl (1818-1878) who was born and studied art in Germany, moved to Paris in 1846 where he exhibited in the Paris Salon. To escape the French revolution he moved the United States and ultimately went to California during the 'gold rush'. Not finding gold he opened a studio in Sacramento and later moved to San Francisco.

Sacramento Indian with Dogs -- Charles Christian Nahl -- 1867
(see it large )

Charles Christian Nahl did lots of commission work to support himself, including designing the Grizzly Bear that appears on the California state flag. He ultimately died in San Francisco of typhoid fever in 1878.

The next image is by Paulus Potter was a Dutch painter in the period of the 'Dutch Golden Age' who specialized in painting landscapes with animals. He was born in 1625 and died of tuberculosis at the young age of 28, in 1654. In spite of such an early demise he painted over 100 paintings and this one is truly a portrait.

The Wolfhound -- Paulus Potter -- 1650-52
(see it larger )

There is a sad dog that roams our neighborhood here in Mexico that looks a lot like Potter's wolfhound. Someday I'll get a picture of it.

The famous Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo (1899 – 1991) made several images featuring dogs. This one is called 'Perro Aullando' (Howling Dog).

Perro Aullando -- Rufino Tamayo -- 1960

I'm not sure if the black disk in the background, with the faint image inside it, is supposed to be the moon or the sun or what. Nor do I know why it is black. In any case this picture could just as well be in one of my 'art circles' posts!

Next is a detail from an etching of Italian printmaker Stefano della Bella (1610 - 1664).

Two Hunting Dogs (detail) -- Stefano della Bella -- 1641
(see it larger)

Acclaimed contemporary artist Lucian Michael Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, a grandson of Sigmund Freud. When about 11 years old, he moved with his parents to London to escape Nazi Germany. Here are two interesting paintings of Lucian Freud with dogs as important parts of their subject matter. I especially like this next image, partly because the dog reminds me a lot of our strange dog Cosi.

Eli and David -- Lucian Freud -- 2005-6

The next (and last) image is, I think, quite familiar. It is called 'Girl with a White Dog' but the subject is Freud's first wife, Kathleen Garman.

Girl with a White Dog -- Lucian Freud -- 1951-52
(see it larger)

Why her right breast is exposed, I have no idea -- especially since the white dog is already such an interesting subject!

cascada post 23

2007-11-11T14:34:00.000-06:00

Axolotl in Cruz Blanca

Recently I have been suffering from a severe case of blogblockitis which is an intransigent form of the more transient malady known as blogblock. One of my favorite blogs recently passed through the final solution and on to the other side. There was a certain beatic way in which it happened and I have to admit to a smidgen of jealousy. But, for unknown reasons, I trudge along still on this side.

If you are wondering what the title refers to, at least in my imagination, were you to speak the title without benefit of visual cues, you might misapprehend it as "accidentally in Cruz Blanca". Of course, if you are axolotl-aware you probably wouldn't. But just supposing that you did you wouldn't be entirely wrong: I was in Cruz Blanca twice a few years ago without even knowing it. Back then I thought it was all part of Matlalpa. In fact, when I mentioned to Kyoka, the young Japanese woman who has the strange fortune to work in Matlalapa, that the road ended in Matlalapa and that the only way to get to Cruz Blanca was to walk from there, she looked at me curiously but was far too polite to set me straight.

If now you are about to Google "Cruz Blanca", let me save you some trouble. Cruz Blanca is the name of at least five different towns in Mexico, and two are in the state of Veracruz. Is the true cross white? Our Cruz Blanca sits in the foothills of the nearly 14000 foot volcano, Cofre de Perote. It is just a little above Matlalapa which in turn is above Xico Viejo, whose indigenous precursor was, many believe, passed through by Cortes with his troops nearly 500 years ago. You can find this Cruz Blanca in Google Earth if you enter in this latitude and longitude: 19 28.424, -97 05.183. My GPS reports the elevation as 7290 feet.

Here is a picture from a little higher up looking back at Cruz Blanca (lower right) and Matlalapa (left side). If you follow the road back to the right until it seems to disappear you can see a few houses, which mark the upper limit of the small town Xico Viejo.

Cruz Blanca (right) and Matlalapa (left)

There is a small church at Cruz Blanca which honors 'San Isidro'. Here is its picture:

Iglesia 'San Isidro' at Cruz Blanca

The temporary structure on large bamboo stilts spanning the door is called an 'arco' and with much fanfare is marched to and erected at the church on the patron saint day of the town. This happens at most Catholic churches at least in this part of Mexico and is always a big festival.

Appropriately there is a white cross at Cruz Blanca. Here it is:

Cruz blanca a Cruz Blanca

Enigmatically, perhaps, there is also an axolotl at Cruz Blanca. And what is an axolotl? Well, when they are mature they are about nine inches long and look like this:

Axolotls as drawn by Jitka Horne

(I have to confess that I glommed this wonderful drawing from some no longer remembered internet publication. Jitka, if you or your publisher object please contact me). And here then is the much larger axolotl at Cruz Blanca, still under construction:

Axolotl (building far right) at Cruz Blanca

I'm afraid you can't see its tail, just its head, eyes, and mouth. So why are they building such a strange structure at Cruz Blanca? To understand you must know a little more of axolotls, which are unusual and interesting creatures.

Axolotl (in Spanish ajolote) is the common name for the species Ambystoma mexicanum, a kind of neotenic salamander. The 'mexicanum' part of the name derives from 'Mexico' because this animal only existed in Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco in the highlands of Mexico surrounding Teotihuacan (city of the gods) and just to its south the town of Xochimilco (city of flowers--from Nahuatl xóchitl = flower; milli = cultivated field, co = place). These lakes were full of axolotls which were a delicious and important food for the people of this region. These cities are ancient and are thought to have originated around 200 years before Christ, and by the 4th century (about the time Ethiopia was Christianised) Teotihuacan was the sixth largest city in the world.

Now of course the region is the giant megalopolis known as Mexico City and the lakes have long since been drained or dried up with only vestiges remaining as a few canals at Xochimilco, in the southern part of Mexico City. As late as 1911 axolotls were still common in the markets of Mexico City. Whether they are still eaten and still available in markets I don't know, but I am skeptical because axolotls in the wild are now endangered.

As you probably know, each of our cells contains the complete genetic information of our bodies and so, in a sense, each cell contains a plan which if followed would could create a clone of ourselves. Unfortunately however it is only the youthful embryonic stem cells which can actually develop into a full clone, or into various parts of us, say a hand or a heart or skin depending on the environment that cues them. This is why stem cell research is so important, because only the stem cells are (as it is called) pluripotent.

Not so with the axolotl, for not only is it neotenic, that is it never metamorphoses like most salamanders into an adult form, but rather its youthful form including external gills continues into reproductive adulthood and throughout its life; but also its mature cells are pluripotent. Exactly why this is so is not well understood, but this attribute allows the salamander to regenerate lost limbs and other parts of its body.

These, then are the reasons that the axolotl is today important as a research animal in both regenerative medicine and stem cell research.

As a former (and maybe future) pool player I couldn't resist sharing the above diagram, grabbed from somewhere in the vast miasma of the Internet.

So now the reasons for the axolotl at Cruz Blanca emerge: axolotls will be raised for use in medical and pharmaceutical research. I am indebted to Alberto, friend and native speaker of Spanish, for talking to the local people at Cruz Blanca and explaining to me what they said. However, any errors here are mine since this posting is partly suppositional.

One small question. The great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, for whom I have great regard, reported, as a result of his own exporations around 1803 or 1804, that the axolotl existed in other high altitude Mexican lakes besides the two mentioned above near Mexico City.

Alexander von Humboldt, as painted by Joseph Stieler, 1843

This is apparently not true today and I have not seen any confirming evidence that the salamanders reported by Humboldt in other lakes were in fact axolotls. If you can shed any light on this please comment or contact me.

Finally, on a personal note, I have had a persistent cough for nearly a month now. Happily I can report that a doctor in Xalapa has determined that it is not a contagious malady, and that following his prescriptions I am much better now. Still, though not suggested by my doctor, I cannot help but wonder whether this product,

which I have not yet been able to obtain, might have helped.

cascada post 22

2007-09-28T17:46:00.000-05:00

Art Circles -- Part 2

Recently I learned that 'tondo' a shortening of the Italian 'rotondo' i.e. 'round' is the word used in the art world for round paintings as shown in my last post. Today let me move temporarily away from tondos and show some interesting art involving circles in which the paintings are not circular. First is a painting by Arthur Dove (1880-1946), arguably the first American abstract painter. Here it is:

Arthur Dove, 'Red Sun', 1935

I really like that large red sun, at once a natural object, a three dimensional spiral, and a symbol. The muted red stripes in the foreground seem agricultural. The image is both austere and yet warm. Even the artists signature in the lower middle seems part of the composition.

The next image is a painting of Chagall. I am not sure I can put into words why I find it compelling. Stare at it a bit, because it will just have to speak for itself.

Chagall, 'Compostion aux Cercles et à la Chèvre', 1920

Next is a strange glowing circle in a sort-of landscape by Christopher Orr. I hope you like it.

Christopher Orr, Untitled (Circle), 2006

Christopher Orr is a contemporary artist, born in 1967. You can find more about him, and see more of his work, by looking at his CV at IBID PROJECTS, London.

Now, let us step back two millennia and compare Christopher Orr's painting with this image on a classical Greek bowl:

Classical Greek Ceramic Work, 2000 or more years ago

There is a similarity in that both images feature a man seemingly enamored with a circle. In the first image the man seems amazed that he can make a circle of light with his finger, while perhaps in the Greek image the man is simply enjoying the pleasure of rolling a hoop. Certainly I do not know. Perhaps a more knowledgeable person can explain the symbolism, if any, of the circle. The rooster in the Greek image is the symbolic gift of love, or perhaps more often an offer understood to imply a desire for sex. But, in this case, there is no other person in the image. I still have to wonder if Orr might have been influenced by this or some similar Greek image from another era.

For today's last image let us move forward, past the Renaissance, to the Dutch Golden Age and examine this self-portrait of Rembrandt in older age:

Rembrandt, 'Self-Portrait with two Circles', 1665-1669

I think the circles add something important to the picture. Without them the painting would be much less interesting.

This series of circles in art will be continued in some future postings.

cascada post 21

2007-09-27T13:22:00.000-05:00

Art Circles

For a while now I have been collecting images of art in which circles played an important role. My collection now has over 350 images, mostly snagged from the Internet, some from Usenet groups, a few from photos I took, a few from things I scanned or created. For the most part I know little of the artists. Still I thought it would be fun to share some of these images and in some cases say something about the artists who created them. In the beginning I set myself some ground rules, such as no crop circles, no religious paintings in which a large halo around someone's head is the circle, no mandalas, no spheres or 3D sculptures, no plates or bowls, no manhole covers, no large moons or suns, no coins or medallions, no amazingly circular breasts, etc. In the end I occasionally broke many of my self imposed rules and just saved what caught my fancy. So it will be a little of everything that you see here, but always involving a circle in some way. Some of the artists are famous and some are nearly unknown, and perhaps some (for example me) are not even artists.

Let me start with Banksy's dictum. Banksy, as you may know is a famous (or infamous) graffiti artist many of whose works you can find on walls or buildings in London and elsewhere. His homepage with many interesting images you can find here. Next, as one of his pieces of 'art', is his dictum:

banksy's dictum

Mind you, I am not arguing that this is one of Banksy's better pieces -- in fact it may be self-refutational -- but it was an easy lead-in for this article. So far as I know, Banksy mostly did not follow his own advice. I have only seen one of his other pieces that featured a circle. It is a sort of modern day Iwo Jima image with a political statement, but not particularly noteworthy otherwise, so I won't show it here.

Following this idea let me first show you some art pieces which, it seems to me, are rather arbitrarily framed by a circle. The circle in these cases does not seem to have much to do with the art other than to frame it. Let us start with the early Renaissance artist Botticelli (1445-1510). He is most often known as Sandro Botticelli, but his original name was Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi. Most of his life was spent in Florence, Italy. Probably his most famous work is Birth of Venus (c. 1485). Here we see a circular painting by Botticelli in which the Virgin offers her breast to the Christ Child:

Botticelli, 'The Madonna and Child with Three Angels', 1493

Notice that the hands of the angels at the left and right are chopped off by the circular frame and the base of the ceramic at the bottom is also truncated. It seems unlikely that Botticelli would have painted it that way. It seems more likely that a circular frame was imposed on a larger painting, maybe even a rectangular one. However, I have seen a digital version of this painting where noticeably more of the angles hands were visible, so this version has most likely been digitally cropped to a slightly smaller circle. Compare this with another of Botticelli's circular paintings:

Botticelli, 'Madonna of the magnificat', c 1485 (diameter 118 cm)

In this tranquil, peaceful painting the arcs above the crown and the leaning figure on the left suggest that Botticelli intended a circular frame. The bisected hand at the left may indicate that the circular diameter was a little smaller than Botticelli expected or wanted.

Botticelli's work, in addition to religious paintings like the above, includes many depictions of classical Greek mythology and many wonderful portraits of the powerful Medici family. The vast majority of his work is not framed by circles.

The next painting is by the Dutch artist Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) who painted mostly landscapes in the Netherlands and in Germany.

Jan van Goyen, 'Summer', 1625, diameter 33.5 cm

I downloaded this image from a usenet group a few years ago. A larger version (1600x1600 pixels, 400k bytes) can be found at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is well worth clicking here to see the large version. A second Goyen circular painting is entitled 'winter'. Here it is:

Jan van Goyen, 'Winter', 1625

In the second image parts of the black diamond (or tilted square) shaped frame can be seen, insuring that the full extent of the circular painting is visible. The people seem to be carefully arranged to fit in this circular frame so Goyen must have consciously designed the piece for a circular frame. The circular frame does not seem to serve any artistic purpose, other than perhaps giving one the illusion of looking through a circular window or perhaps through a telescope, since low power telescopes were readily available in the Netherlands at the time this picture was painted. See here for an interesting history of the telescope. I do not know if Goyen made paintings for 'Autumn' or 'Spring'. Certainly most of his over 1200 paintings and 800 drawings were not circular.

Now let us jump to the year 1740, where we find this wonderful painting by the Dutch artist Jacob de Wit. Yes, it looks 3D, like maybe it is made out of plaster. But that is not the case. It is a painting. The children may be playing with fire, but they are also keeping warm in the winter.

Painting by Jacob de Wit, 1740

Now here is a curve ball for you:

Picasso, 'Nature morte à la chaise cannée', 1911-12 **

**You are right if you are saying 'wait a minute', because, so far as I know Picasso did not paint any circular pictures. The original of the above is elliptical and you may well like it better. It should be easy to find using google image search. Still, the circular version above, which I created using Irfanview, doesn't look too bad. The rope and the cane are not painted -- at least I don't think they are -- as this is a multi-media picture.

I will continue with more 'art circles' in a future posting, and I will include non-circular pictures in which the circle plays an important role.

cascada post 20

2007-08-14T12:07:00.000-05:00

Chile Extranjero Update

Chile habanero (left) and chile extranjero (right)

click here for a larger version

In a previous posting, cascada post 8, I discussed the beautiful chile pepper (or chili pepper if you prefer that spelling) you see on the right in the picture above. Here locally, in Col. Ursulo Galvan, near Xico, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, people call this chile "chile extranjero" which literally means "foreign chile". Apparently it originated in the Andes mountains of South America many millennia ago but was not introduced into Mexico until roughly 100 years ago.

The vast majority of chile peppers available in the USA are different varieties (or cultivars) of a single species: Capsicum annuum. The two chile peppers above are both unusual in that neither is Capsicum annuum. The chile habanero is Capsicum chinense (a misnomer since it is not of Chinese origin) and the chile extranjero is Capsicum pubescens. If it has black seeds you know you have chile extranjero.

Both of these chiles (the habanero and the extranjero) are tasty but very hot. The interior part of the chile extranjero and the seeds are much hotter than the meaty part near the skin. Even just touching the seeds will cause your fingers to burn, even if you wash your hands. Be careful not to touch your eyes after cutting or preparing chile extranjero.

What I learned recently, which did not surprise me, is that 'chile extranjero' is just a local name. Here in the state of Veracruz the correct name is 'chile cera', which literally means 'wax chile'. In much of Mexico it called 'chile manzano' (apple chile), in the state of Oaxaca it is called 'chile canario' (canary chile, because it is yellow), and in the state of Michoacán it is called 'chile Perón'. Click on this link for more information about Mexican chiles, and look under 'Chile Manzano' for more about chile extranjero, which from now on I will try to remember to call 'chile cera'.

cascada post 19

2007-07-06T10:38:00.000-05:00

Niños y Niñas

Colonia Ursolo Galvan is the name of the small town where I live. It is a small place, maybe 1000 people, about a mile or so off the main road, roughly halfway between Coatepec and Xico, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. The 'Colonia' part of the name is because it is a 'Colonia' of Xico. This means that officially it is in the municipality of Xico, even though it is about three miles from the population edge of Xico. It is a peaceful, friendly, and generally nice place to live although is quite poor. Most people do not have cars, most cook on wood fires, and some have dirt floors. Still, there is community pride, and family pride, and pride in the state of Veracruz. There are lots of children here and they are, compared to many kids in the U.S., well behaved. They often play in the streets, and save for buses there is little traffic and it is safe. The picture (above left) shows about one third of the town.

When I first arrived here I was surprised to learn that this little town has four schools. One is a preschool which seems to have two or three levels, roughly like kindergarden and pre-kindergarden. There are two primary schools, and a secondary school called a 'Telebachillerato', roughly like a high school in the U.S. but much of the instruction is piped in via satellite TV. This seems to be fairly common in rural parts of Mexico.

Our friend Marie dropped by one day to invite us to attend Daniela's end of school celebration. Daniela (or Dani) is her preschool daughter, about four years old. At left is a picture of Dani, from about a year ago. That is a really serious pose. She is really a happy, smiley, busy little girl and a delight to be around.

So the time arrived and we went to Dani's school. Here are some pictures of her school.

The first is the sign on the front of the school. The second is the entrance to the school as decorated with balloons for the celebration.

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Next the 'Bienvenidos' or welcome sign near the entrance and a portion of the playground.

After quite a wait during which the audience, proud parents, relatives and friends, was remarkably patient, the ceremony began. First some speeches, for which my Spanish was largely inadequate. Then came some sort pledge of allegiance and applause and finally each class of children (there seemed to be three) performed a dance or two. The sound system was terrible and the volume way too loud for it to handle, but it really didn't matter.

Here are some scenes of the children dancing, and the audience audience watching. All were dressed for the event. The first photo shows the little children waiting for their turn to dance. Next we see some of them dancing.

After the picture showing some of the audience [hopefully the next photo, this blogging software's preview never shows what the published post will look like] is a photo of Dani, kneeling as her part in the dance is about to begin. She is older and more mature than in the photo above taken about one year ago. Click on any photo to see it larger.

Soon came more dances of the other two class, each dressed in a different color.

The music was mostly Mexican, loud and crackly.

Then a real surprise for me. The oldest group came out to dance. I guess these were the graduating preschool children. An when the music came on it was the 1966 Percy Sledge favorite "When a man loves a woman".

What a strange feeling it was to see those little children, in this very foreign (for me) country dancing to that song to which I have my own set of memories.

And here they are at the very beginning of the dance:

I have to confess that I didn't stay till the very end of this event. Presumably the graduating preschoolers all got certificates and parents and children when home pleased and happy. In any case I was really glad I went and I came away proud of my little town, Col. Ursulo Galvan.

cascada post 18

2007-06-23T21:19:00.000-05:00

Video of Cascada

Here you have it, short on quality, but it is my cascada -- the view from my front window.

My Cascada

And here you have Cascada at her worst:

Cascada, August 6, 2006

That's all for today.

cascada post 17

2007-06-23T20:09:00.000-05:00

Hark Back

There was once, long ago, a day when Africa had a chance. Sadly, it seems, that day has passed.Here are four photos I took in West Africa, which I remember fondly, many years ago.

Transportation, Kano, Nigeria, August, 1965

Young Girl, Kano, Nigeria, August, 1965

Waiting for the mammy wagon (as was I), Kano, Nigeria, August, 1965

Court in session, Kaduna, Nigeria, August, 1965

It will take a concerted effort .......

But maybe there is hope. See Gobou's photos.

cascada post 16

2007-06-17T09:15:00.000-05:00

Finding Cascada

Google Analytics (the free version) tells me that 14 people in 11 different cities around the world have visited my blog in the last two days. Now that's some warm fuzzies!. Well, maybe not, because Google Analytics also tells me that the average length of visit was zero seconds! Hmm. They must have been looking for something other than the strange fare I offer. Again, Google Analytics, to the rescue. They were looking for photos and information about the singer who calls herself 'Cascada' -- or maybe that is the name of the group.

So, if that is why you are here, this is for you:

Cascada the singer

But your jollies may be limited since you probably saw this photo already, 'cause I stole it off the web. If the owner wants it back I'll be happy to oblige.

Sorry to disappoint you but the namesake of this blog is the cascada I see every morning when I get up and look out my front room window.

This cascada:

Cascada -- before the storm

Cascada -- after the storm

Hang in there, you cascada fans! But that is it for today.

cascada post 15

2007-06-11T22:43:00.000-05:00

The Scream You Didn't Hear

Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter was born near Olso, then Christiania, in 1863. At that time the United States was in the middle of its Civil War, and Sweden and Norway were united, albeit with stresses. Munch was to see his mother die when he was five, and his favorite sister a year older than him, when he was 14. Both died of tuberculosis. It seems his life was filled with struggle and he once said "Sickness, insanity, and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life." So perhaps it is not surprising that his most famous painting, The Scream, painted in 1893 is full of psychological torment.

The Scream, by Edvard Munch, 1893

I once thought there was just one scream, and was perturbed when I learned a few years ago that it was stolen. In fact at Munch made at least 50 versions of The Scream including lithographs. Two different versions were stolen, one in 1994 the other in 2004.

Munch described the circumstances which led to the scream as follows:

"I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there were blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

So the figure depicts Munch himself, but it was not he who screamed, rather the picture depicts fear, angst and panic and the desire to escape it. Some believe that the red skies are real because the recent eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa caused intense sunsets throughout the world at about that time.

The 2004 theft included also this Munch painting, about which I know very little:

Madonna, by Edvard Munch, 1894-95

Both paintings were recovered in 2006, but were significantly damaged.

When I recently read that one Munch painting caused a scandal and that people demanded that his show be taken down, I thought it must have been his Madonna since it is a surprisingly sensuous Virgin painting (if, in fact, that is what it is), especially for one painted in the nineteenth century. But no, the painting which caused the scandal was this one:

The Sick Child, by Edvard Munch, 1886

It was in Berlin in 1892 and the show was taken down and the art was called degenerate. Apparently, the art critics of Berlin at the time were conservative and expected realistic, natural, and perhaps formal art. Pieces such as the The Sick Child and some others in the show seemed unfinished, and unprofessional with the surface scratched and some paint scraped off in places. Although the mood evoked was reminiscent of Munch's sick and dying sister, a sort of "psychological realism", it was interpreted as at best disrespectful if not outrightly provocative and anarchistic. In fact Munch was closely connected to the bohemian group Kristianiabohêmen and a good friend of one of its key members, Hans Jæger, writer, philosopher, and political activist, and ribald anarchist.

Hans Jæger, by Edvard Munch, 1896

The paradoxical consequence of Munch's 'scandalous show' was immediate notoriety which Munch was able to parlay into new shows and commissions.

In this next painting Munch portrays his family in the sickroom with his dying sister, seated.

Death in the Sickroom, by Edvard Munch, 1893

Below, in no particular order, are several more pieces by Munch.

Ashes, by Edvard Munch, 1894

Dr. Linde's sons, by Edvard Munch, 1904

The Flower of Pain, woodcut by Edvard Munch, 1898

In Munch's troubled life he suffered at times from over indulgence with alcohol, with insomnia, and with depression. Still, he had several relationships with women, who apparently pursued him more than he pursued them. The most noteworthy was with Tulla Larsen whom he met in 1898. Her ardor and desire for marriage exceeded his and their relationship came to a dramatic end in 1902 in an incident in which he (apparently), either accidentally or purposefully shot himself in the left hand. The next painting is usually interpreted to reflect this incident, although, the name refers to a same-named work of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825).

Death of Marat I, by Edvard Munch, 1907

We end with three Munch self portraits:

Self Portrait with a Cigarette, by Edvard Munch, 1895

Self Portrait with a Bottle of Wine, by Edvard Munch, 1906

self portrait, The Night Wanderer, by Edvard Munch, 1923-24

It is worth pondering, I think, some of Munch's own words:

‘Whether the picture resembles nature or not is irrelevant, as a picture cannot be explained;
the reason for its being painted in the first place was that the artist could find no other means
of expressing what he saw. The finished work can only give a hint of what was in the artist’s mind.’

‘The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs
can be taken in Heaven or Hell.’

‘In my art I have tried to find an explanation for life and to discover its meaning.
I also intended to help others understand life.’

As old age approached Munch became increasingly isolated. He remained productive and eventually donated his voluminous collection of personal work to the city of Oslo.

At the time of his death in 1944, Norway, his homeland, was still in the grips of the Nazis. And I was 6 months old!

If you endured this far, but found this posting a little heavy, you might want to try this obliquely related link, which is billed as a brainteaser but is more of an optical thing where you stare at a picture for about a minute, until you 'get it'. Click here to try it.

Directory: February through May, 2007

2007-05-31T20:50:00.000-05:00

Directory: February through May, 2007

May:

cascada post 14 Hommage à A.J.W. Duijvestijn

cascada post 13 In the Xalapa Sculpture Garden -- Part 2

cascada post 12 In the Xalapa sculpture garden -- July 2005 -- Part 1

cascada post 11 Impossible Art 2

cascada post 10 The Impossible Art of Oscar Reutersvärd

cascada post 9 Chile Miscellanea

April:

cascada post 8 Chile Extranjero

March:

no posts in March

February:

cascada post 7 A giant sculpture in the town of Álamo, Veracruz, México.

cascada post 6 Frida

cascada post 5 Insects and evolution

cascada post 4 Units and history

cascada post 3 A bit of art

cascada post 2 Beekeeping in La Mancha

cascada post 1 Cascada and a little about me

cascada post 14

2007-05-28T10:20:00.000-05:00

Hommage à A.J.W. Duijvestijn

21 squares each a different size form the large square

The arrangement of squares in the picture above was discovered by A. J. W. Duijvestijn and published by him in 1978. He was a Dutch computer scientist and mathematician who lived from 1927 to 1998.

You may see a larger version of the picture by clicking on the word large in the caption under the picture.

If you would like to know the story of how 'squared squares' like the one above were discovered, comment or send me email and I will give more information in a future posting. Otherwise, just enjoy the picture.

cascada post 13

2007-05-22T11:47:00.000-05:00

In the Xalapa Sculpture Garden -- Part 2

Here are more pictures of the Xalapa Sculpture Garden, taken back in July of 2005. The indoor pictures were part of a show, not part of the permanent pictures. My apologies to the artists (and to the readers) for the artists names that I did not record.

Mi nieto by Rocio Sagaon -- high temperature ceramics
(another view is in my previous Part 1 posting)

look carefully and you will see a daddy-long-legs spider

intermission -- garden flora
(photo by Esther)

made of bamboo

photo by Esther

Thats all! If you want to see more, come and visit Xalapa and go to the Sculpture Garden.

cascada post 12

2007-05-18T00:28:00.000-05:00

In the Xalapa sculpture garden -- July 2005 -- Part 1

Here are photos taken in the Xalapa sculpture garden in July, 2005. Mostly I did not record the artists names. My apologies to them. Most photos are taken by me, a few by my wife where indicated.

the entrance

Sculpture or living thing?

living thing

photo by Esther

Mi nieto by Rocio Sagaon -- high temperature ceramics
photo by Esther

detail of a wonderful cow, artist: Manuel Velázquez

Hombre Azul, by Valentina Sandoval (ceramics)

That is all for today. More coming in part 2....

cascada post 11

2007-05-12T21:45:00.000-05:00

Impossible Art 2

Last time I talked about the impossible art of Oscar Reutersvärd and how his first impossible drawing was a sketch he made in 1934 of a curious collection of cubes arranged like the picture at the left. Along came Sir Roger Penrose, who was three years old in 1934, and made it into a solid triangle, now called a Penrose triangle. Penrose was not yet famous (for physics, cosmology, mathematics, Penrose tilings etc) back in 1958 when he published his triangle, jointly with his father in a psychology journal. I don't have a copy of Penrose's actual picture but presumably it looked something like the triangle at the right.

In all fairness, the Penroses apparently never heard of Reutersvärd or his triangle made of cubes so it is really all right to call it a "Penrose triangle". Well, it was published in a psychology journal, and for some reason psychologists really get off on impossible figures and optical illusions and such.

Remember this? (below):

I first saw the wife/mother-in-law picture in some psychology book, probably in the 1960s.

It was only a matter of time until someone would try to make a real impossible triangle, and Bruno Ernst (real name Hans de Rijk) made one out of wood and took this photo of it in 1985.

The in-your-face spoiler is in the mirror in the background.

There is a wonderful sculpture in Perth, Australia of the impossible triangle:

Impossible Triangle by Brian MacKay and Ahmad Abas, 1999

When you walk around to the side the view is quite different:

same sculpture, different view

You can get the canonical 'impossible triangle' in scalable vector graphic format, which you can enlarge as much as you like without loss of resolution from from wikipedia. Of course to enlarge it you need an svg viewer. There is built in svg support in the firefox browser, but it was a big disappointment to me because you can neither pan nor zoom. What good is scalable vector graphics if you can't change the scale! Might as well view a gif file. Apparently a lot of folks think differently. There is a plug-in from Adobe for the IE browser that works pretty well. But you have to download and install it. The commands for pan and zoom are totally hidden and most likely the average user would never find them. Pan is 'alt + click + drag' and zoom is 'hold down ctrl and then click'. That makes it zoom in centered at the mouse pointer. Scalable vector graphics are lots of fun and easy to create. It is a shame that Adobe is dropping support for them on Jan 1, 2008. More money to be made from flash, no doubt. In any case, here is what that canonical 'impossible triangle' looks like:

canonical 'impossible triangle' converted from svg to png

And, if you didn't bother with the svg stuff but still want to see it really BIG, click on the word BIG, but if you view the big guy you may have to click on it to make the jaggies go away; that is because your browser will resize the big pic, and they don't do that very well. If it doesn't quite fit on your screen try hitting F11 to get more screen out of your browser.

Back in ancient days, when the Internet was young, most folks on the net were Unix geeks and they all had dot-sig files stored among their files under their user ids on the Unix system. These were one line text files that had to have the name '.sig'. The dot made them hidden files and the sig, I suppose, just stood for signature. In any case, whenever you posted something to the Internet the contents of your .sig file got appended to your message. There was netiquette and strong peer pressure to keep your .sig down to a SINGLE line of text. So there was this one guy named Jellby (hey I don't know his real name) and he kept posting messages with a single cryptic line of POV source code at the bottom of them. It was too tough to figure the code out and I got curiouser and curiouser till one day I cut and pasted that line of code into to the POV program and it generated this picture!

Jellby's dot-sig

If you're still here you must have figured out that I've got some kind of 'thing' for triangles, and you'd be right--but I'm thinking maybe, if you slogged through all of that, you may be just a little bit weird yourself, in a good way of course.

There is nothing special about triangles though, you can have 'impossible rectangles' too:

And somebody actually tried to build a cube like this:

But it ended up looking like this:

Possibly this inspired Escher to make this picture:

Man with cuboid--Escher 1958

Though, chances are Escher came first.

Our friend Oscar Reutersvärd:

Oscar Reutersvärd
(photographer not known to me)

also experimented with endless stairways and this was a theme in many of his drawings. The general idea is this:

endless stairway--walk downhill on bad days

This was also the inspiration for Escher's famous waterfalls picture:

Escher--Waterfalls 1961

Oscar Reutersvärd and Escher as well influenced a number of other artists, among them the Flemish-Belgian artist Jos de Mey, born 1928. Here is a painting of de Mey's with characters imitating Bruegel but with an 'impossible gateway'.

Painting of Jos de Mey's, characters after Bruegel

Here with this piece Jos de Mey satirizes a classic painting of Bruegel,

The Owl on the Gallows by Jos de Mey

namely Bruegel's 1568 painting 'Magpie on the Gallows" which,

Bruegel--The Magpie on the Gallows--1568

if we think of it as an 'impossible gallows' is surely the world's first piece of 'impossible art'.

cascada post 10

2007-05-10T10:23:00.000-05:00

The Impossible Art of Oscar Reutersvärd

Above you see the the "impossible trident" also called "blivet" and many other things. I first saw it back in the 1960's, possibly you did too. Or maybe you saw this version back in 1965:

Boy, I'll bet you're glad your member is not the middle tine, it's really weird! That's not the art of Oscar Reutersvärd. But his art, or drawings are certainly similar, and date back to 1934. Who was he? He was a Swedish artist who lived from 1915 to 2002. He was professor of art history and theory at Lund University in Sweden. He wrote journal articles and did serious stuff, but he became famous for his 2500 or so pieces of impossible art, which was really his life work. It all started when he was a college student bored in class one day (weren't we all?) doodling on a piece of paper. He started with a six-pointed star and then filled in between the points of the star with cubes .. and then realized that the perspective was off, or something else was wrong .. the thing looked plausible but was clearly impossible. That was the first piece of impossible art, done back in 1934. By 1965, when the "impossible trident" appeared, he had already made hundreds of pieces of impossible art, all done in what he called "Japanese perspective" (I'm not sure why). This simply meant that parallel lines going off to infinity don't come together at a point but remain parallel. We would call it orthographic projection. Anyway, over time he became famous, at least in Sweden, for his strange impossible images and so they honored him with a postage stamp of his first impossible drawing:

There were actually three stamps, each with a different Reutersvärd drawing. You can easily poke around the internet and find the other two.

I accidentally discovered these cubes a couple of years ago while whiling away my retirement hours trying to learn a little POV-Ray, wonderful free ray-tracing software. I happened upon this German site with interesting POV-Ray images and the source code used to create them. One image was of cubes arranged in this strange way. Here is the image I saw:

I downloaded the zip file containing the source code and was amazed to find that just one page of code created the picture above. I modified it ever so slightly and ran it through POV-Ray to create my own large version of the same image, which, if your still here, you can see by clicking here. Boy they look real, but impossible. The site had no mention of Reutersvärd and it was only later that I learned he was the originator of this arrangement of cubes, and eventually some 2500 drawings of impossible figures. Here is a taste of a few:

So, you get the idea, of the strange impossible art of Oscar Reutersvärd. I will say a bit more in my next posting.

If you would like this posting as a pdf file click here.

cascada post 9

2007-05-01T12:04:00.000-05:00

Chile Miscellanea

Since I don't seem to have got chiles out of my system yet I have added this collection of chile oddities. First, without scruples, I give you this clip from an article by John King in an 1855 issue of American Eclectic Obstetrics:

Since obstetrics must be at least distantly related to pediatrics, let me add for the over-holistically inclined, that one infant death has been reported from over enthusiastic parental administration of capsicum capsules. Be careful, you chile-hot-heads!

And then there is this by Alfred Stillé excerpted from an 1874 issue of "Therapeutics materia medica":

Hey, you didn't have to read all that. But did you catch the part about flatulence? I'm really skeptical about that. In case it is true, I'm sure you can countermand its flatulence-fixing character by just adding a little more onion to your chile seco. I'm not sure about the effect on the "urinary apparatus", but after well more than 40 years of chile-eating I can personally attest that the aphrodisiac bit is false. Of course mileage may vary. Chime in if your experience is different.

In case you have a sore throat consider this, taken from p. 150 of an 1878 book by John Yeats, entitled "The Natural History of the Raw Materials of Commerce":

Jero, our former house-keeper here in Col. Úrsulo Galvan,

Jero

once made chile seco for us (more about that one day, maybe) and part of this involves scorching chipotles (smoked, dried jalapeño peppers) until they are really dry and nearly black. The kitchen filled with acrid smoke causing tearing and coughing and the evacuation of all gringos. This gave new meaning, for me, to this ancient punishment:

Let me conclude with a couple of pretty chile pics. The first is of a variety of chiltepin that produces tiny peanut-sized peppers, both purple and red on the same plant:

chiltepin--yummy but very hot

The next is either from seeds I got from my son Paul, or possibly from seeds that came from dried peppers in an Asian market which some kind soul on the internet sent me in exchange for some of mine. Unfortunately, I don't remember which.

ill plant still managed this wonderful specimen

Thats it for today.

cascada post 8

2007-04-30T15:38:00.000-05:00

Chile Extranjero

chiles extranjeros grown at 6000 feet near Xico, state of Veracruz, Mexico

Surely one of the great pleasures of life is to sit and eat a well prepared, well seasoned meal -- all the more so if you are with friends, family, and with a bit of beverage. One of the nicest flavorings comes from chile peppers. There are over a thousand named varieties of chile peppers. The flavors vary from the truly bland to fiercely hot. The ways to prepare them, and use them in cooking or raw is enormous and used well they contribute subtle and interesting flavors to many dishes and add real pleasure to life. Today they are a mainstay in the diets in the Americas, in Africa, in Asia, India, most parts of the world.

But it was not always so. When I was in Ethiopia, now more than 40 years ago, chiles were an essential ingredient of nearly every dish. Dried chiles, powdered chiles, fresh chiles, 'meet-meeta', 'caria'. These were in every market and in some if not most dishes at every meal. I think the Ethiopians would have been surprised (as would I back then) to learn that there was a time when there were no chiles in Ethiopia, nor in any part of Africa, nor in Thailand, nor in India or any part of Asia.

Why? Because chiles were only in the Americas: South America, Central America, Mexico, and the southern part of what is now the USA. It was only after the Spaniards and the Portuguese came to South America, Central America, and Mexico in the 1500's that chiles began to spread to other parts of the world.

The earliest evidence of chiles used for food dates to 7000 BC near what is now Tamaulipas, Mexico, and by 5000 BC chiles were being cultivated in Mexico. It is noteworthy that cultivation of chiles predates that of both corn and beans, two other crops originating in the Americas. In Mexico, as in the United States, the vast majority of chiles cultivated and consumed all belong to the same species: Capsicum annuum. This includes many (100's if not 1000's) of varieties, or cultivars. Sweet bell peppers, jalapeño, pasilla, poblano, Thai, Cayenne, and Anaheim are common varieties of Capsicum annuum. Here is a picture from an old 1793 book of a variety of Capsicum Annuum:

This book, Medical Botany, is also available (presumably in facsimile form) from the Missouri Botanical Garden, see this link.

There are four other cultivated species of Capsicum, of which only two are common in the U.S.A. These are C. chinense, of which the habanero is an example:

habanero portrait

and C. frutescens, of which Tabasco (of 'Tabasco sauce' fame) is an example. If you have been keeping count, there are two more cultivated species of Capsicum, found mostly in South America: C. baccatum, and C. pubescens. Both of these had been cultivated for millennia in the Andes mountains of South America when the Spaniards arrived.

So what are "Chile Extranjero", the namesake chiles of this article? That is exactly what I wanted to know when I saw some unusual yellow chiles in the local market in Coatepec near where I live (in the state of Veracruz, Mexico). I bought a few and saved the unusual black seeds.

only chile extranjeros seeds are black
(see here for typical chile pepper seeds)

They grew quite readily and soon I had chile extranjero plants with nice purple flowers:

chile extranjero flowers
(actual size about 3/4 inch or less, i.e 1.5 cm)

To my disappointment no fruit was forthcoming. However, two plants survived till the next season, flowered again and produced fruit:

chile extranjeros growing

and (voila!) my first two ripe homegrown chile extranjeros:

hot, delicious, ripe chile extranjeros

In Spanish 'chile extranjeros' means 'foreign chile'. This seems to be a local name for a South American chile that was cultivated thousands of years ago and apparently not introduced into Mexico until the twentieth century. In any case it is a variety of the species Capsicum pubescens, the only species of chile with black seeds. It will not cross with other species of chile, and is native to the Andes mountains probably originating in what is now Bolivia or Peru. The seeds and interior pulp where the seeds are attached are very hot (pungent). The exterior pulp less so.

crossection of chile extranjero (=C. pubescens)

The name C. pubescens derives from the small soft hairlike structures on the stalks and leaves of the C. pubescens plant. You can see these 'hairs' in this closeup picture:

pubes on C. pubescens
(you may also see some ants, and another insect--I would like to know what it is)

Capsicum pubescens which seems only known as 'chile extranjero' here in this part of Mexico (near Xalapa in the state of Veracruz), is known as rocoto or locoto in its native Bolivia and Peru and as chile manzano or chile canario in some other places. There are several varieties, and here there are two: one which is yellow when mature (by far the most common) and one which is red when mature. Here is a photo showing these two types:

chile extranjero, the two red ones are a different variety

Pardon my Italian, but here is how C. pubescens fits into the hierarchy of living things:

There is much additional information about chiles on the web, caveat lector, there is a fair amount of mis-information. Here is a site that I would recommend: http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/Caps_fru.html

cascada: contents for February, 2007

2007-02-28T11:13:00.000-06:00

cascada post 7 A giant sculpture in the town of Álamo, Veracruz, México.

cascada post 6 Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

cascada post 5 Insects and evolution

cascada post 4 Units and history

cascada post 3 A bit of art

cascada post 2 Beekeeping in La Mancha

cascada post 1 Cascada and a little about me

cascada post 7

2007-02-19T19:58:00.000-06:00

Álamo Veracruz

There is a small town near the coast in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, called Álamo. The Internet says the population is 40,000 but to me it seemed smaller. You can see it on this map, near Tuxpan:

I really don't know much about the place, except that it seems to be the 'national capital' for oranges. My wife and I passed through there with Rita and Louie back in August, 2005, when driving back to Texas after a vacation in Xalapa. There is one incredible thing there in Álamo, and maybe more, but as I said we were just passing through. That is a huge concrete sculpture of a man emptying a large basket of oranges. Here is a picture just showing the oranges falling to the ground. Each orange is 2 to 3 feet in diameter and made of concrete.

Next is a picture looking up at the sculpture from underneath:

Next are a couple of pictures from further away which gives a better idea of the immense size:

Its really a shame how the electric wires and poles and signs obscure the view. On the other hand you wouldn't have believed how big it was.

Here is a detail of the oranges themselves. Remember, they are all made of concrete and 2 to 3 feet across:

concrete oranges 2 to 3 feet in diameter

Here are the guys that did it, inscribed on the basket of the sculpture itself, which you can see very small in the 'looking up' picture:

I need to find these guys because I would like to build some geometric sculptures (much simpler) myself, and I don't have a clue how to do it.

If you know about this kind of thing, or about Álamo, please chime in.

cascada post 6

2007-02-17T16:01:00.001-06:00

Frieda and Diego

In 'el centro' of Xalapa is a park called 'el Parque Juárez'. It is usually filled with people milling about, or sitting on benches, or buying balloons for their kids, or food from various vendors. There is restaurant, a movie theater, an art gallery and a very nice view. Check it out if you can. If you go down the steps on the west side of the park there is a street and there you will find another gallery, possibly called the 'Diego Rivera gallery', which for the last couple of months has had a show about Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. Picture taking is not allowed inside, but outside I snapped this shot:

That was invitation enough for me. Inside was a very nice exhibit with lots of works by both Frieda and Diego as well as a wealth of historical information. I won't try to give you any details here, just a flavor of those two Mexican artists who had interesting, if turbulent and painful lives. First here is a clip about Frieda which, if you click on it, will take you to the site where it came from and more information about both of these artists and there lives together, and apart.

Next, here is a 1985 image by Lucía Maya whose interpretation I leave for you to ponder:

Here is an honest photo of Frieda that I rather like:

This is a painting done by Frieda in 1931 in honor of her (first) wedding to Diego. I think it was done a couple of years after their marriage:

Here is a photo of Diego and Frieda taken at about the same time by Carl Van Vechten:

And here is one of many troubled and troubling self-portrait, 'The two Friedas':

Lest you thought border issues were new, here is that topic from 1932:

Now comes a painting which may surprise you, because it was done by Diego Rivera:

Diego Rivera - House over Bridge 1909

It was done very early in his career and bears little resemblance to his later work, such as his giant murals or his simple stylized pictures of people such as this:

Diego Rivera - Lo Molendera 1924

This last image is a 1914 portrait of Diego Rivera by Modigliani

In 2002 there was an excellent movie called simply 'Frieda' which portrayed the troubled life and time of Frieda Kahlo. Frieda was played by Salma Hayek, nominated for Best Actress Oscar that year. Diego was played by Alfred Molina and the movie was directed by Julie Taymor. The story is interesting, compelling and accurately told. I have heard that it was not well regarded in Mexico, but I don't know why.

cascada post 5

2007-02-15T13:59:00.000-06:00

Insects and Evolution

Here on the edge of the cloud forest there is more life and there is more death. Walking off-trail in the hills one quickly realizes why everyone owns a machete here. The variety and lushness of the plants is incredible.

So is the variety of insects. Those plants which could not survive the voracious insects are long gone. Those strains which could remain. This is part of the evolution of an ecosystem.

OK, I confess, the above grasshopper is in Texas. But we have plenty here in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, too:

This is the backdrop, this is my mindset when I accidentally encountered the following curious old book:

Wow! I knew those little critters were tenacious and clever. You should see leaf-cutter ants attack a tree! They give new meaning to 'society' and surely insects will have the last laugh over all of us. But 'psychic life'? You gotta be kidding. This book is for real and you can look at it yourself.

This book gives pause and raises questions. Even when I learned a little biology in high school around 1958 we learned that acquired characteristics could not be inherited. I believe this is true, and I think for good reason. But exactly when and why did the Lamarckian view decline? This book seems to advance a middle ground not unworthy of consideration for historical if for no other reasons. Let us not forget that Lamarck was a respected and intelligent person, as was the author of this book.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829)

Is it true as this book says that both Lamarck and Darwin accepted the "inheritance of acquired character"? Somehow I had thought that the last hurrahs of Lamarck had long since faded by 1920 when the original French version of Bouvier's book appeared. Is that wrong?

Someone will surely let me know. In the meantime here is a well regarded modern book on insect evolution that I hope to examine some day:

Evolution of the Insects (Hardcover) by David Grimaldi, Michael S. Engel, ISBN: 0521821495

cascada post 4

2007-02-13T12:42:00.000-06:00

Units and History

I suppose it is a truism that different countries have different cultures. Before I moved to Mexico I visited many times, usually for a week or 10 days. After I retired we stayed once for a month and once for six weeks. That was the longest visit and I remember toward the end of that stay really wanting to get back home to the USA, where the food and language and money and stores and everything else was familiar.

That memory worried me a bit when we finally made the decision to move to Mexico. Still, in spite of my beginner Spanish, I felt I knew Mexico pretty well. That six week stay was in Xalapa and our move was to be to a little place between Xalapa and Xico (in the state of Veracruz). Of course there would be an adjustment period.

Now that I have been here almost a year. I realize now how superficial my understanding of Mexico was. It is hard to be specific. What has happened I think, is that those things that were part of my persona in the USA, the neighborhood, the way people react to me, the things I liked to do, etc. are gradually being displaced and replaced by new things here. This must be acculturation. Not completely. I'm still me, it's just that my comfort level has gradually increased. I am beginning to feel at home. Tall, blond, light complected and with inadequate Spanish, I stick out like a sore thumb. But I don't FEEL like I stick out. That has been a gradual process which surely still continues. For me, a year is how long it takes.

One day perhaps I will try to describe life here, the people, the small community where we live, the bustling city of Xalapa, some of the people both expats and Mexicans that we have come to know, the climate, the countryside etc. Gradually I will hit on such things here, but lately I have been thinking and wondering how Mexico came to be like it is. Since I like books, especially old books, I have started to look at old mostly 19^th century books about Mexico. On google books there are many of these. To see some yourself go to http://books.google.com , click the "Full view books" button and search for Mexico. (You might have to register first if you don't use any google services, but it is free).

Many of these books are fascinating telling of a time of stagecoaches and riding horses. They describe Mexico as it was say in 1850. What a difference! There is no mention of miles or kilometers. Distances are measured in leagues and varas. What on earth are leagues and varas?

I remembered "20000 Leagues under the Sea" by Jules Verne from when I was a youngster.

Fighting the giant squid on the submarine Nautilus

Probably I thought a league was about a yard since "20000 yards under the sea" sounded about right. That is completely wrong! Jules Verne was French (1828-1905) and published "20000 Leagues under the Sea" in 1870.

I did some checking and found that in 1870 a league (called 'lieue' in France) was about 4 kilometers, so 20000 leagues was about 80000 kilometers, almost 50000 miles! There is no ocean that deep. The diameter of the earth is only about 8000 miles. What gives?

Well, the title page looked like this:

Original title page-in French

Notice that "MERS" is plural so the English title is wrong. It should be: "20000 leagues under the seas". So they weren't 20000 leagues deep, rather they made a journey of length 20000 leagues under the seven seas.

Leagues were not standardized. In Mexico, a league (legua in Spanish) was roughly: the distance a person can walk or ride (on horse or mule) in one hour. A more precise definition was: a league is 5000 varas, and a vara is 3 pies. Now 'pie' is Spanish for 'foot', not one of our large USA type feet, but a more petite 11 inches or so.

So a 'pie' is slightly smaller than a foot (USA unit), and a 'vara' is slightly smaller than a yard (about 33 inches instead of 36) and finally a 'league' is 5000 of these short yards, or about 4571 actual yards, or about 2.6 miles (= 4.18 km).

I guess they walked or rode pretty slowly. Anyway, now when you look at one of those old books about Mexico you will understand the units of distance.

An interesting side note: some deeds still valid today in Texas measure distances for plots of land in 'varas' !

cascada post 3

2007-02-10T16:21:00.000-06:00

A Bit of Art

For a change of pace, here is a bit of art. My view is that art is to be viewed and enjoyed. Some of these images are from scans that I made, others are from the internet and the scanner or source is unknown. I have not studied copyright law, if you see something that you think should not be here, let me know. If you see a scan that you made and want that mentioned, likewise let me know.

Lithograph of a face, Pablo Picasso, 1928

Head of a Woman, Pablo Picasso, lithograph, 1925

Salvador Dali, Portrait of the Artist's Father 1925

Orozco -- mujer mexicana

Edward Hopper - Monterrey Cathedral - watercolor 1943

Kees von Dongen - The Corn Poppy - 1919

That is it for now. I hope you liked the art.

cascada post 2

2007-02-10T08:56:00.000-06:00

Beekeeping in La Mancha

We set out around 9:00 in the morning for La Mancha on the coast a bit north of Veracruz. We were with Norma, a young woman with boundless energy, Directora of Pronatura, a scuba diver, para-sailor and who knows what else. The project is to set up beekeeping and promote tourism. They were having a training class, and we were going mostly just to see La Mancha and the bees. First we went to Veracruz so Norma could return a wet suit at her friends scuba shop. I only took one picture there, this scene near the scuba shop.

Veracruz

Veracruz seemed pretty nice, at least downtown and near the wharf. Norma said there was a nice aquarium. We will definitely return to check it out.

We headed north on the coast highway and soon came to a vista overlooking the Laguna of La Mancha. Here is what we saw:

Laguna de la Mancha with the Gulf of Mexico in the distance.

We turned down the dirt road to La Mancha, which I thought would be a small town, but we never saw a town. Norma said there was one but that the whole area there was called 'La Mancha'. Presently we looked out the car window to the right and saw a field with several birds. Here are Ibis we saw:

Ibis

A little further along we could see Mangrove trees along the far edge of the Lagoon. Pretty soon we came to the Pronatura place which consisted of seven or eight large round thatch-roofed huts. Each had maybe eight fairly comfortable cots, electricity, and round windows covered with mosquito netting. These were for eco-tourists, but I wasn't sure if that was the plan or if it was operational already. There was also an older more rectangular building which was a kitchen.

About ten people, some Pronatura staff and a few students, were suiting up with white bee-protection gear. They were about to head to the hives and we walked there with them. It looked like this:

Pronatura bee hives at La Mancha

Here is how we looked:

Learning about bees. Esther is closest.

The guides were very knowledgeable and answered all our questions and explained much about bees. All was home made, including the smoke makers. Bees retreat from smoke. We were told that each hive might have as many as 30,000 bees.

Soon our bee excursion was over and we walked back to the Pronatura site where a wonderful fish lunch awaited us. Here are the people we ate with. Norma is on the far left and Esther on the far right :-).

Fish lunch

Here is my fish. The red is a tomato sauce. (Esther says the picture makes it look like blood.)

The fish I ate

After lunch, which in Mexico is the big meal of the day usually eaten around 2:00 or 3:00 p.m., we were entertained by Daniel, a friend of the instructor. Daniel played classical music for us, starting with selections from the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. We all relaxed and listened in one of those round thatched-roofed huts. Here is Daniel:

Daniel, classical guitar

Norma, who was still energetic, then took Esther and me to the beach, where the La Mancha Lagoon meets the Gulf of Mexico. This was a couple of miles further down the road. There were some restaurants to one side in beach buildings with thatched roofs.

Restaurants at La Mancha beach

The beach itself looked like this:

La Mancha beach

La Mancha beach, another view

Walking in the sand back to Norma's car we saw these little guys busily cleaning house:

Sand crabs

Then we headed home, which took about an hour. And that is how we spent Sunday July 23, 2006.

Return to Mexico index of my homepage.

Return to my homepage.

cascada post 1

2007-02-09T13:45:00.000-06:00

So today I learned that google lets anyone have a blog for free. That's fine. But I'm sure they bought someone out and that worries me a bit. I used once to like microsoft. I still like that Bill Gates puts money and effort to fight malaria and aids and stuff. But google starts to remind me of microsoft and I get a bit worried. Where does the other shoe fall when I set up this brand new free blog with google?

Since this is my very first blog post, with no expectation that I will talk to anyone save myself, I thought I should at least explain why it is called 'cascada'. That is best explained by a picture:

This is the view out my front window that I see every morning when I get up.

'Cascada', as you may know is the Spanish word for waterfalls. Hopefully, if you click on it, it will be 640 by 480 pixels. But I don't know this blog software yet, so who knows.

Anyway, I am retired and live with my wife and with Rita and Louie (mis mascotes) in Mexico in a small place not far from Xalapa, in the state of Veracruz.

Finally, I may as well tell you that using this blogger software has not been fun. It refused to insert the picture after the cursor and instead put it above the first paragraph. I had to cut and paste to get it where I wanted. That caused other problems.

And the preview and published product don't look much alike. Oh well! So far this is not fun, and I may just give it up and and put this on my homepage, without the ability to comment. So if this is the last blog entry from me, that is why.

Here is a picture I took recently in Xalapa. It is on my flickr page.

It is a photo taken on calle Ursulo Galvan, on the right near the bottom of the hill.