Well, I may have found it for you:
(Seen in somebody’s garden behind the train station in Rometta Marea.)
Did you miss your train?
Easily confused (30) Brothers
The Brothers Grimm:
Grim brothers:
“Little Nellie” in Sicily
This is to all the doubters who believe that James Bond films are unrealistic fiction: they are not, and if you walk through the world with open eyes and an open mind you will see evidence from time to time. Like I did last week, when I was in the beautiful city of Taormina in Sicily.
I was exploring the Ancient Theatre, both the sea and Mount Etna in sight, when I heard a faint humming approaching quickly. Being trained to identify moving objects by their sound, I couldn’t believe my ears. But as it approached, it was indeed Little Nellie, the gyrocopter from the James Bond film You Only Live Twice.
This strongly suggests that all the other James Bond gadgets are real too.
Posted in Cinema, Italy, Photography, Sicily, Travel
Tagged James Bond, Little Nellie, Taormina
2 Comments
My clothes line
One practical advantage of living in Sicily is that after doing the laundry, the clothes dry quickly thanks to the wind and the sun. But it’s a tough job to put up the clothes line between one part of the castle and the hill on the opposite side.
(Seen in Taormina in Sicily.)
Clouds are not necessarily bad
… at least not if you are a photographer.
(Photos taken in Rometta Marea in Sicily on 16 October 2013.)
Storm & Sea
When I was a child, I used to run outside and play when it was stormy and rainy. I loved thunderstorms and fierce winds. The worse, the better.
Later, as a young adult, when it stormed and rained, I was worried that my suit or my lawyer’s files would get wet. I sought shelter in a café, hoping that I had enough of a newspaper or a book with me to pass the time it would take the storm to move on.
When, two years ago, I first lived by the sea, I got excited about storms and the waves they caused, not least because they were beautiful to photograph.
Now that I live in Sicily, when it is stormy weather, I think of the poor refugees in their boats and I hope that they will survive their journey.
(The photos were taken in Rometta Marea in Sicily on 16 October 2013. – Diesen Artikel gibt es auch auf Deutsch.)
Posted in Human Rights, Italy, Life, Philosophy, Photography, Sicily, Travel
Tagged Human Rights, refugees
8 Comments
A lonesome man on the beach
(Photographed in Rometta Marea in Sicily on 16 October 2013.)
Pushy person poses paradox
I receive a lot of questions through my blog and by e-mail, most of them about law. Some of them are interesting, some of them are funny, others are incomprehensible. The worst ones are those by people who believe that they are entitled to an answer or a reply. I never understand where such an entitlement would come from, in the absence of any contract between me and the e-mailing person.
Today, I received something from one of these people, but at least he managed to pose a real paradox (although I am not sure he intended to do so). Let’s take a look at his e-mail.
Hi Andreas I have read a lot of your blog and it is very informative.
That’s true. It is very informative. It also informs you about how I deal with people who believe they are entitled to a reply, and about how to increase your chances of getting a reply.
I don’t mean to be pushy but I have attempted to contact you through 2 different mediums. 1. Your blog and 2. Via email.
“I don’t mean to be pushy but …” is as revealing as “I am not a racist but …”. And dear Sir, after already having exhausted two mediums, please don’t resort to the spiritual medium next.
If you are not interested in responding to my question then please tell me.
And here’s the paradox! If I tell you that I am not interested in responding, then I would be responding. But maybe I am that much disinterested in responding, that I really don’t want to respond. – The only way of resolving this paradox was to publish my answer. It’s not a direct response, but I still hope that the person so desperately longing for a response will find this blog post.
But then it gets better: some people who want a favour really believe that insulting the person that they want the favour from is a good idea.
If you can at least respond to this mail I will then know where I stand. I also understand that some problems are to [sic] complex and difficult and people do like the simpler life.
So, if I refuse to answer the questions of any- and everyone who e-mails me, I will be branded as a simpleton? Is that coming from the guy who can’t resolve his own problems without resorting to a lawyer? Accusing me of taking the route of the simple life without knowing the least bit about what I have been doing instead of answering this person’s e-mail is not a very promising method if you want to get my help, I can tell you.
By the way, don’t let that scare you off. If you are nice, I’ll always be happy to help you, as thousands of my readers can attest to.
Sunset at my Beach in Sicily
One of the great things about my recent move to Sicily is the house in Rometta Marea where I live and it’s proximity to the sea. I can see the sea from my balcony when I am studying or enjoying the results of my increasingly Italian cooking skills. I fall asleep to the sound of the waves. I can go for a spontaneous swim whenever the weather is good. And yes, I have been swimming even now in October.
I don’t know how many meters I live from the sea, but I counted the exact number of steps from my home to the sea: it’s 122 steps. And that’s not until I reach the sand beach, but after 122 steps I am already standing in the water.
Today, it was also a beautiful spot to watch the sunset, looking towards Milazzo.
Yes, at this time of the year the beach is almost always as empty as in these photos.
Language Game
If you need to procrastinate but still want to (pretend that you) do something of educational value, I recommend the “Great Language Game”. You listen to short clips and have to identify the language of the recording. At first you must choose between two different languages, but as the game progresses you get offered up to six choices, making it harder to get it right merely by luck. You get 50 points for each correct answer and the game is over after three mistakes.
Try it! It only takes a couple of minutes.
My score was 750 points, putting me in the top 10% according to the current statistics.
Some of the choices were really simple for me, like the one between German (my mother tongue) and Yiddish, or picking Italian, a language I am currently learning in anticipation of my move to Italy next month. Also, Slavic languages were easy to identify if all the other choices were non-Slavic. Because it sounded very much like a Romance language, I was able to identify Romanian, although I had never heard it before.
With other languages, I was just lucky in guessing them right.
Lastly, my travelling helped. Living in the Baltics, I could easily identify Latvian, and thanks to having lived in Malta I could confidently tell what was Maltese.
My three mistakes? I confused Khmer with Tagalog, Sinhalese with Thai and Welsh with Scottish Gaelic.
(Hat tip to Crooked Timber, where I found the link to the “Great Language Game”.)
The Happy Hermit 