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

I need to learn some of the most common terms used on a sailing boat:

Swedish	English	French	Spanish
akter	stern, aft	le arrière, la poupe	la popa
ankare	anchor	la ancre	la anchla
babord	port	bâbord	el babord
boj	buoy	un buoy	boya
bom	boom	bôme	bumo (?)
dirk
durk
fall		la drisse
att falla		au portant
fock		le fock
för	bow	la proue
försegel
gajar (skot till spinnaker)	spinnaker sheet	l’écoute de spinnaker
genua		génois
att gippa	gybing	empanner
knop	knots	noeud
att kryssa		louvoyer (zigzaguer)
köl	keel	quille
latta	lath
lova (att styra upp båten mot vinden)	heading up	border
lovart (båtens vindsida)		au mûr
lä	lee	abriter du vent
läns	running downwind	vent arrière
mast	mast	le mât	mástil
ombord	aboard
att reva	reef, take in sail
roder	rudder	rames
rorkult		le barre
segelbåt	sailing boat	le voilier	barca de vela
sittbrunn	cockpit	cockpit
sjömil	nautical mile	mille marin
skot	sheet	l’écoute
skott (båtens vägg)	hull	le coque du bateau
att slå	to tack	de virer
styrboard	starboard	tribord	el estribor
winschvev		la manivelle	la manivela
vind	wind	le vent	el viento
vinsch	winsch	winch

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

Avis de Coup de Vent sur les Poulains

My brother and his wife gave me this nice poster last year. Now it hangs above my computer, and I have checked up a little on its story:

 

The shot was taken by the photographer Philip Plisson from a helicopter on 24 November 1996, and the island we see is Belle-Isle-en-Mer, off south Brittany’s coast, and the name of the lighthouse is Les Poulains. Apparently the the wind was blowing up to 72 knots (130 km/h speed) at the time.

Isn’t it a magnificent shot full of life and strength…? It certainly inspires me to do great work at the computer. :-D

Dream interpretation

Another way to tap into the messages of the bodymind is to pay attention to one’s dreams. I would like to be able to recall and transcribe my nighttime dreams.

What happens when one dreams? Different parts of the one’s bodmind are exchanging information, the content of which reachers one’s awareness as a story.

I should keep my journal and a pen close at hand so that when I wake up I will be able to write down the dreams that come to mind. No filtering or editing is allowed. When associations arise, write them in parenthesis. Even more important than the content, however, are the feelings and emotions one experiences in the dream. Always ask: how did I feel? And include these observations in the writing.

Autohypnosis

I am getting interested in self-hypnosis, to be able to communicate in a direct fashion with my bodymind’s intelligent network. Here is a step-by-step approach I’ve found and want to personalize:

1. Take a seat in a comfortable chair in a quiet place. Be sure that your clothes are loose and comfortable and the temperature is not too warm or cool. 
2. Turn down the lights so that it’s not too bright. It doesn’t need to be dark. 
3. Relax. You can have your eyes open or closed, whichever is most comfortable for you. 
4. Let yourself go loose. Feel every muscle go limp. Feel your mind slow down. Good. 
5. Breathe deeply and hold it. Feel all of your stress and worries sucked from your body and your head into your lungs. Blow them out slowly and watch them swirl away from you. 
6. Notice the different colors of each concern. See them float away and dissolve in the air. You are feeling more and relaxed with every breath. 
7. Feel your heart. It is strong and slow. You can feel it beating, slowly, slowly. Each time you exhale, your body relaxes more. You are calm and safe. You can feel your heart. It’s beating so slowly. 
8. Feel your toes. They feel empty and light. They want to float away. That lightness is spreading up your legs, through your hips and into your back. Your body is so empty. You can see through it. 
9. Feel your arms. They feel empty. Your shoulders are empty. Your neck is empty. Your head is floating, weightless. You feel so calm. 
10. Feel liquid begin to fill your body through your navel. It’s deep blue. It feels cool and comfortable. Watch it fill up your body. Cool blue. When you are full, you will feel calm and completely at ease. 
11. Now open your eyes and sit up. Your cool, blue feeling will stay with you.

As well, once you feel relaxed, take a deep breath and imagine yourself walking down a set of stairs. Count them on the way down, taking note of each step. Once you have practiced this, try walking down them backwards and counting them every time you take a step.

The bodymind

As one answer to the question how mind and body relate to each other, an issue that has eluded philosophers and physicians alike over the past centuries, Candace Pert talks about the “bodymind”:

Most psychologists treat the mind as disembodied, a phenomenon with little or no connection to the physical body. Conversely physicians treat the body with no regard to the mind or the emotions. But the body and mind are not separate, and we cannot treat one without the other.

Research has shown that the body can and must be healed through the mind and the mind can and must be healed through the body.

Pert’s striking conclusion that is our emotions and their biological components that establish the crucial link between mind and body does not, however, serve to repudiate modern medicine’s gains; rather, her findings compliment existing techniques by offering a new scientific understanding of the power of our minds and our feelings to affect our health and well-being.

Chief Joseph

I have recently put up a poster of Chief Joseph that I’ve had rolled up for the past five years. I got it at the National Museum of the American Indian in NYC in 2001. Unfortunately the text below his photo is covered by the passe-partout so to remember it I put it here.

  

Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself — and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.