Energitjuvar

Jag har börjat läsa en bok av Ingalill Roos som heter Energitjuvar. Den är väldigt jordnära och bra skriven.

Qi Gong

I participated in a course of Qi Gong the past weekend, and I think I will continue for a long time with practising it. Qi Gong suits me to the bone. :)

Leaving Geneva

After seven years I have now decided to leave Geneva. I will settle in Scandinavia for a few years, with my Venezuelan girlfriend Jeannette.

I would like to work in Copenhagen and have been looking for a suitable job there. In this way I would keep up my international approach, and learn a new culture and language.

Will keep you posted on our Nordic adventures. :)

Live Au Château ‘06

On 14 October it’s time for the 2nd Live Au Chàteau, a music festival with 9 local bands (I’m myself the lead singer in “C Nos Vis”).

The poster is made by my girlfriend Jeannette, and got very nice comments.

Pelléas et Mélisande

On Tuesday night 3 October I will perform the role Pelléas in the play Pelléas et Melisande, written in 1892 by the Belgian Nobelprize-winner Maurice Maeterlinck. The play is one of the regular playreading set up by the Geneva English Drama Society.

The performance will take place in the English Church Hall, at Rue de Montblanc, at 20h00.

My grandmum’s trip to the USA

For her 85th birthday my grandmum got a trip to the US from her relatives in Sweden. Her half-sisters emigrated in the early 20th century to Minnesota, and in September she got the opportunity to visit her nieces and nephews + other family members in Chicago, Tennessee, New York, Grand Rapid and more places.

For the special blog installed for the trip, see usaresan.wordpress.com.

Jonathan’s baptème

The son of my brother was baptized to Jonathan this past weekend, in a beautiful ceremony in the old church of Stora Hammar in Höllviken, Sweden.

Parc de la Tête d’Or

At the beginning of August I visited Lyon with my sister Anna and my nephew Filip. We stayed with the family of Filip’s father Kamel, and were shown a good part of Lyon by Filip’s uncle Chukri.

Terms for sailing

Le Chat Noir

When a good friend moved away from Geneva, I was given her poster of Le Chat Noir. I have framed it and it now hangs in my apartment. What is the story behind the famous poster?

Well, the original Le Chat Noir (”The Black Cat”) was a famous 19th century cabaret in the (notoriously bohemian) Montmartre district of Paris. It was opened on 18 November 1881 at 84 Boulevard Rouchechouart by the artist Rodolphe Salis, and closed in 1897.

Salis most often played, with exaggerated, ironic politeness, the role of conférencier. And it was here that the Salon des Arts Incohérents (Salon of Incoherent Arts), the “shadow plays” and the comic monologues got their start.

The artist behind the iconic poster is Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, who was a Swiss-born French Art Nouveau painter and printmaker.

Pursewarden’s advice to the budding artists

In the Alexandria Quartet, the author Pursewarden asked the children of the literary group at the Jewish school to write down three things in the notebooks might help them some day if they didn’t forget them. Here they are:

1. Each of our five senses contains an art.
2. In question of art great secrecy must be observered.
3. The artist must catch every scrap of wind.

BARD1

I have been asked to help to get the development of a possible marker for breast cancer underway. So I am reading up on breast cancer these days.

The gene that might be used is called BARD1 and here is its technical description:

BARD1 interacts with the N-terminal region of BRCA1. In addition to its ability to bind BRCA1 in vivo and in vitro, BARD1 shares homology with the 2 most conserved regions of BRCA1: the N-terminal RING motif and the C-terminal BRCT domain. The RING motif is a cysteine-rich sequence found in a variety of proteins that regulate cell growth, including the products of tumor suppressor genes and dominant protooncogenes. The BARD1 protein also contains 3 tandem ankyrin repeats. The BARD1/BRCA1 interaction is disrupted by tumorigenic amino acid substitutions in BRCA1, implying that the formation of a stable complex between these proteins may be an essential aspect of BRCA1 tumor suppression. BARD1 may be the target of oncogenic mutations in breast or ovarian cancer.

More is to come on this topic.

“Prevention starts at home”

A good friend of mine at the UN gave me a 2006 calendar which has been hanging on the wall since a couple of months back. I thought it’s about time to check up on the background of this calendar.

The calendar is produced by UNISDR, and its cover photo is one of flooded houses south of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Covered by a vast network of 300 waterways, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers, which descend the slopes of the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh is a delta plain that is subject to seasonal monsoons. In 1970s, two-thirds of the country remained under water for several months following the worst floods of the century that claimed half million deaths. Bangladesh suffers monsoon floods almost every year. The worst floods in 15 years swept the country in 2004, killing more than 1,000 people and making millions homeless. A rising sea level, possibly caused by global warming, will only aggravate the difficulties of this country, and may lead to permanent flooding of a considerable portion of its rice fields. Before 2020, 20 million people might have to leave their country because of flooding.

http://www.entico.com/unisdr_2006/index.html

Fantasia 27

Yesterday we were a gang of four people that went sailing with a Fantasia 27 (a boat from Jeanneau, see this page for more info). We started at the marina La Belotte and with Frida as helmsmen (see left, and click also on the photo for more photos from the trip) we did pretty well. :-D