Well, another year has gone by. Over the past two weeks I have been working for Dover E-learning and I have been counting all sorts of taxes and benefits, trying to work out what sort of business venture form would be the best for me in 2012. I still haven't finished with the calculating but will keep a break now. Because it is the time of year to do these:
Because of my foot injury I returned to my old hobby: Playing the guitar and singing songs. Here is the last attempt of my favourite Simon and Garfunkel song, 'April Come She Will'. I stumbled a little over some of the words but on the whole I'm quite happy with it.
Do you use google translate? Have you ever thought about how it works? Read this article.
Note: the translator has translated the idiomatic title into Hungarian perfectly well. So, somebody must have used that phrase in a translation earlier :)
And this is what the 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' has to say about translation:
This is a pretty cool way of wasting time. I wholeheartedly recommend it. "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding. Watch, listen and read. Or just lie back and whistle along :)
Lyrics:
Sitting in the morning sun
I'll be sitting when the evening comes
Watching the ships roll in
And I watch 'em roll away again
[Refrain]
Sitting on the dock of the bay
Watching the tide roll away
I'm just sitting on the dock of the bay
Wasting time
I left my home in Georgia
Headed for the 'Frisco bay
'Cause I had nothin to live for
And look like nothing's gonna come my way
So I'm just...
[Refrain]
Look like nothing's gonna change
Everything still remains the same
I can't do what ten people tell me to do
So I guess I'll remain the same
Sittin here resting my bones
And this loneliness won't leave me alone
It's two thousand miles I roamed
Just to make this dock my home
Due to an unfortunate accident (in which I rather badly twisted my left ankle) I've been bedridden for a couple of days. This isn't the best time either (not as if there was such a thing for an accident) with the temperature over thirty centigrades in the flat. My solace is this book by P.G. Wodehouse. It is an easy and funny read, perfect for a rainy weekend or for a longer journey. Get it while you can.
I got stuck with this blog a few months ago and I'm still not sure which way to go from here. In my search for new directions I found this video. I thought I would share it so that it might give others some ideas too. I have found it quite useful myself.
Do you have a tattoo or a piercing? Have you ever considered having one (or some :-) ? This video is titled as 'sobering', meaning that it gives you facts that will discourage you from tattoos and piercings. Well, I'm not so sure. It is way too cool. More likely you'll end up having your body modified. So, watch it at your own risk.
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
I haven't written for a while and it's time I blogged a bit about the Paul Klee quotations that I mentioned two posts ago.
The first remarkable statement, which is almost like a revelation, is about the connection between the painter and colour. This is what Klee said after his travels in Tunisia and Egypt:
"Colour possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Colour and I are one. I am a painter."
The next one is about the importance of every single day. At the end of each day you have to look back and honestly judge whether you've accomplished what you planned for that day or you have fallen short of it.
"A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller."
What about your day? How has it been? Has it made you larger or smaller?
My favourite Paul Klee quotation is about perception:
"One eye sees, the other feels."
To me this means that perception does not only happen in an objective and rational way. Your emotions always interfere with the way you perceive the world. It is important to know this when you have a really strong feeling at the sight of something. Is it really there, or am I adding my emotions on top of what I see? Is the mystery really there or do I want it to be there?
Paul Klee is my favourite painter. The colours of his paintings take me to the world of dreams, so each time I see one of his paintings I perform a reality test just in case:) His compositions are very thoroughly planned and worked out yet they transfer a deep feeling of freedom that I seldom find in any other form of fine art.
Look at "Fire in the Evening". How can an orange square surrounded by coloured lines make me feel so high?
Klee was also greatly inspired by his travel to Tunisia, where he experienced a special quality of light that he really liked. The picture "Southern (Tunisian) Garden" is from that period.
And this is where lucid dreaming hits in. When I look at "Fish Magic" I feel as if I was floating in a dream. Girl, fish, flowers, clock and all the others woven into some surreal but very lucid and vivid fabric.
All the pictures are from here and here. Next time, I will post about Paul Klee's quotations that I like almost as much as his paintings. In the meantime you can watch this youtube video with the artist's most famous pictures. The images are quite good quality so I suggest going full-screen on this one.
This ad is great. It's humorous, it's short, it has a clear message, and because not a single word is spoken in the vid, it probably reaches a lot of people who cannot speak English.
The only problem is that when I actually googled the school that had the ad put on youtube, I couldn't find their webpage on the first five pages of the google search. The video and the sites that linked to it simply pushed it off to oblivion. Or did something happen to them? Who knows? Anyway, the ad is still perfect.
Choose a song and select your level (beginner, intermediate, expert) and start listening to the song. The higher the level, the more gaps there are to fill in. If you don't know a word, the track stops until you have typed in the solution. If you register you can also compete with other members on the same level. Have fun!
When somebody comes with the good old: "One day..." threat, I always remember this scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And the next scene with the guards is just a perfect model of typical human behaviour.
