Thursday, December 22, 2005

Free accents.

Following on from the previous post, on character codes, here's something very useful. It's a great little free program called MoreKeys.

It opens in a small window that's always on top; and it gives you, at hand, all the accented letters in Albanian, Catalán, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish, as well as some useful symbols and fractions (€ ƒ ‰ £ § ® ¶ ‹ ›  † ™ ¢ ¥ © ¼ ½ ¾ & ¡¿!?).

Sunday, December 18, 2005

CSS drop cap.

Ha! I always wanted to do a dropped capital. If you want to get into CSS, or just borrow (it's OK'd) some tricks for your blog, there's a great site called CSS Play. It's an easy way to pick up CSS, with only small pieces of code to think about at a time. I'm itching to do some sort of CSS popups: he has a good one giving character codes (for which I'm often stuck).

Saturday, December 17, 2005

The power of punctuation.

I just finished 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' by Lynne Truss.

It's a very good read, and pretty much definitive on punctuation; the purpose of which, according to a Thomas McCormack, is 'to tango the reader into the pauses, inflexions, continuities and connections' of the spoken word.

I thought this an interesting point:

In translating the Bible from the Hebrew, which had no punctuation, arguments arise over how some passages, like this (Luke, xxiii, 43), should be interpreted:
Protestant interpretation of passage:
"Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise."

Catholic interpretation of passage:
"Verily I say unto thee this day. Thou shalt be with me in Paradise."
A couple of other amusements:
"What is this thing called, love?"
"He shot himself as a child." (...shot, himself, as...)

Monday, December 12, 2005

Virtuoso ukelele.

George Harrison's 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' played on the ukelele.

Some of the comments:
"Beautifully played,"
"cet artiste est épatant !!!!" ('top hole')
"awesome I really got down with my badself with this one."
"héhéhé pas mal!!!"
"wow... snif..."

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Baraja española.

Baraja española, the Spanish deck. Aren't they lovely? - fascinating, colourful designs; pretty to play with.

Spanish-style cards are 'Latin-suited': with suits named coins (oros), cups (copas), swords (espadas), and batons (bastos). These are the original suits, the suits found on the divinatory Tarot deck, and the suits found in the oldest surviving European decks.

The suits depict the most important classes in medieval times: merchants (coins), clergy (cups), nobility (swords) and peasants (clubs). Coins equal diamonds; cups, hearts; swords, spades; and batons, clubs.

They're normally sold as a 48-card pack, with numerals 1 to 9, and court cards labelled 10, 11 and 12; though many games use only 40 cards, omitting the 8 and 9. You can buy 52-card packs, though (+ jokers, see below).

Spanish-style cards are also used in many parts of Italy, northern Africa, parts of the west coast of France and in Latin America.

Some expressions which originate from card playing:
Cantar las cuarenta - to give someone a piece of one's mind
Barajar varias posibilidades - to toy with various possibilities
Tener un as en la manga - to have an ace up one's sleeve
Ser un as - to be an ace

Jose's Page on Games with the Spanish Pack (in English).
Heraclio Fournier's page of games, each as pdf (in Spanish).
Serena's Guide to Divination and Fortune Telling with Spanish Playing Cards (in English).

In software: 65 classical Spanish solitaires with the 'beautifully designed, award-winning, artistic' Fournier cards. (in English. Download free 21-day demo. $12.95 to buy.)

Some card tricks (in English).
A History of Playing Cards (in English).
The origins of the Tarot (in Spanish).

Something else to do with a few packs of cards.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Lorca's tuberoses.

On an earlier post I quoted from Lorca's essay, 'Theory and Function of the Duende'. This was a speech, first given by Lorca in Havana in 1933. It is translated in the 1959 Penguin anthology of Lorca by Joan Gili.

Here's a link to the text in English (though this is not Gili's translation).

The poet Ted Hughes first discovered Lorca's works in Gili's 'admirable anthology'. He considered Lorca's 'Theory and Function of the Duende' the 'unsurpassed articulation of the possibilities of Theatre'. (Hughes' version of Blood Wedding, which premiered in London in 1996, is described as one of the most intense dramatisations of the work by Lorca in any language.)

I first came across Lorca, too, in this Penguin edition, and noticed Gili's translation of 'nardos', a word Lorca uses a lot ('the ubiquitous nardo'). Gili translates 'nardos' as 'tuberoses', and it seemed a reasonable word to find in a surrealist's poem, given the tuberous shapes in some of Dali's paintings.

Some of Lorca's 'nardos':
From Malagueña:
Y hay un olor a sal
y a sangre de hembra
en nardos febriles
de la marina.

translated by Gili: And there is a smell of salt and woman's blood in the feverish tuberoses of the sea-shore.

From Serenata:
La noche canta desnuda
sobre los puentos de marzo.
Lolita lava su cuerpo
con agua salobre y nardos.

by Gili: The night sings above the bridges of March. Lolita bathes her body with salt water and tuberoses.

From La Aurora:
La aurora de Nueva York gime
por las inmensas escaleras
buscando entre las aristas
nardos de angustia dibujada.

by Gili: New York's daybreak moans along the immense stairways, seeking between ledges tuberoses of delineated anguish.
From Gili's translation, I had an image of Lorca's 'tuberose' as something tuberous; even, in the context of his 'sea-shore' and 'bathes her body', something like a 'loofa'. I perceived it as like the shapes in this letter M; and later (with different graphics software) as these trumpet-shaped plant-like forms:

'Tuberose' is, in fact, the given common name for Polyanthes tuberosa. This is what English-speaking horticulturists call it.

Chambers Dictionary gives 'tuberose' as meaning 'tuberous'; but goes on to say, "often, by false association with tube and rose, a Mexican amaryllid (Polyanthes tuberosa) grown for its fragrant creamy-white flowers, propagated by tubers" (?)

Larousse Diccionario Moderno gives 'nardo' as 'nard, spikenard'; though this is defined as Nardostachys jatamans, not Polyanthes tuberosa. The Weekly Wire notes a translation of 'Poet in New York' in which nardo is translated as "spikenard".

Collins Paperback Spanish Dictionary gives 'nardo' as 'lily'.

Real Academia Española Dictionary gives 'nardo' as 'Planta de la familia de las Liliáceas'.

Meaning

From Las Flores en La Poesía Española: "Lorca emplea nardos, claveles y rosas para simbolizar la blancura y el contraste con la sangre." (Lorca uses 'nardos', carnations and roses to symbolize whiteness in contrast with blood.)

In the language of flowers, popular in Victorian Times, 'Tuberose' appears, signifying 'dangerous pleasures'.

As the 'nardo' is a member of the lily family, perhaps, to English ears at any rate, a translation of 'nardos' as 'lilies', would have better conveyed Lorca's meaning.

Liz Henry, a literary translator, discusses 'nardo' on her blog. She considers its use in poetry in a context of a sexy, morbid, funereal splendor and perhaps of a heavy overpowering incense. She offers 'scented lily', 'costly balm', 'myrrh' and 'fragrant valerian' as possibilities.

Polyanthes tuberosa

I couldn't get a picture of an actual tuberose without paying $79.95, so here's a link to that beautiful picture. (Some of the keywords attached to this image are: fragrant flower, polyanthus lily, mexican flower.)

There are some lovely comments made about the plant, including: 'It is a unique flower - possibly the one which is used in every sphere of the Indian - Hindu life'; 'The Flowers of this plant blossom in the night and should you happen to pass by this plant in the night you will be engulfed by its sweet smell'; 'I have never smelled anything so romantic or captivating';
'The Tuberose (polianthes tuberosa), is a flower that is both mythical and magical, its nectar said by some to have special powers and its scent magical to all who experience it'.

At the time of the Spanish conquest, Polianthes tuberosa was already entirely domesticated by the indigenous civilizations of Mexico who used the essential oil of the plant to flavor chocolate. (mmm!)

About the plant: in Spanish, in English.
Good sites on Lorca: in Spanish, in English.
A pdf on the difficulties of translating Lorca.
More on Ted Hughes.

In Argentina nardos are eaten - and, from the recipe, do seem to be something tuberous!

Una risa inglesa.

A father was reading Bible stories to his young son. He read: "The man named Lot was warned to take his wife and flee out of the city but his wife looked back and was turned to salt." His son asked: "What happened to the flea?"

Otro:
A flea and a fly in a flue
were imprisoned so what could they do?
Said the flea "let us fly"
said the fly" let us flee"
so they flew through a flaw in the flue.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

Less pain in Spain.

Spain is the first country in Europe to give patients access to Sativex outside a clinical trial.

GW Pharmaceuticals has reached agreement with the Health Department of The Regional Government of Catalonia to supply the herbal extract. The programme will be coordinated by the Catalan Institute of Pharmacology with six Catalan hospitals participating.

Sativex, a cannabis extract which is sprayed under the tongue, is to be supplied to 600 patients suffering from multiple sclerosis and a number of other conditions under a compassionate access programme. The programme will include an evaluation of safety and tolerability and an assessment of impact on quality of life.

Notable point: A Judge in Germany criticising criminal prosecution of severely ill persons who use cannabis, said: "Why don't we allow a man with such a heavy burden some good days".
(Source: International Association for Cannabis as Medicine)


Image: El Quitasol by Francisco de Goya y Luciente.
About Goya: in
English, in Spanish.

Lo Tengo el tango.

This wine bottle label does the tango, sort of. It's lenticular printing; where prepared images are overlaid with a plastic sheet ridged with lines of lenses. I love lenticulars. I have a pretty Japanese girl on the wall, who winks when I pass by.