October 17, 2007
Clues
"I saw a rhinoceros there, just such a one as Hans Clerberg had formerly showed me. Methought it was not much unlike a certain boar which I had formerly seen at Limoges, except the sharp horn on its snout, that was about a cubit long; by the means of which that animal dares encounter with an elephant, that is sometimes killed with its point thrust into its belly, which is its most tender and defenceless part." ---Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, published in 1532 in Lyon
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Portrait of Johann Kleberger by Albrecht Dürer, painted in 1526 in Nuremberg
During his sojourn in Nuremberg, in 1525-26, he had Dürer paint his portrait and, after having married the daughter of Willibald Pirckheimer - Dürer's friend - he returned to Lyon, where he acquired various properties. He gave enormous financial donations to the city, as in 1531 when, during the plague epidemic, he gave 500 livres to benefit the orphans of the plague victims. He was called le bon Allemand, and a monument was erected in his honour, of which a replica still exists today. -- source.
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Drawing of a Rhino by Albrecht Dürer, 1515, Nuremberg
The inscription on the woodcut, drawing largely from Pliny's account, reads:
“ On the first of May in the year 1513 AD [sic], the powerful King of Portugal, Manuel of Lisbon, brought such a living animal from India, called the rhinoceros. This is an accurate representation. It is the colour of a speckled tortoise, and is almost entirely covered with thick scales. It is the size of an elephant but has shorter legs and is almost invulnerable. It has a strong pointed horn on the tip of its nose, which it sharpens on stones." -- source
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A trace of Dürer in Rabelais, Salomon in 1943
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August 21, 2007
by Bronzino, National Gallery, London
"Venus holds an apple in one hand, and an arrow in the other. What does that say: I tempt you, and I have a wound for you. And look at all the secondary figures - the raving figure of jealousy behind Cupid, speaking so clearly of despair, of love despised and rejected; the little figure of Pleasure who is about to pelt the toying lovers with rose leaves -- see at his feet the thorns and those masks of concealments and cheats of the world, marked with the bitterness of age; and who is that creature behind the laughing pleasure - a wistful, appealing face, a rich gown that might almost blind us to her lion's feet, her serpent's sting and her hands that offer both a honeycomb and something beastly - that must be the Cheat - Fraude, in Latin - who can so prettily turn love to madness. Who are the old man and the young woman at the top of the picture? They are plainly Time and Truth, who are drawing aside the mantle that shows the world what is involved in such love as this. Time - and his daughter Truth. A very moral picture, no?" -- What's bred in the bone, Robertson Davies.
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August 16, 2007
And there were other things in our companionship that took strong hold of my mind: to discourse and jest with him; to indulge in courteous exchanges; to read pleasant books together; to trifle together; to be earnest together; to differ at times without ill-humor, as a man might do with himself, and even through these infrequent dissensions to find zest in our more frequent agreements; sometimes teaching, sometimes being taught; longing for someone absent with impatience and welcoming the homecomer with joy. These and similar tokens of friendship, which spring spontaneously from the hearts of those who love and are loved in return--in countenance, tongue, eyes, and a thousand ingratiating gestures--were all so much fuel to melt our souls together, and out of the many made us one. -- St. Augustine, Confessions (Book IV)
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May 22, 2007
I wanted to write about...
...the centennial of Hergé and how despite being a Tintinophile I am also a contrarian. Hergé used to say that there was no place for sex or women in Tintin's male friendship world. So I started a post on Tintin porn parodies only to realize this site has a fantastic compilation of bootleg Tintin albums from the 80's and Arte channel aired a great documentary called "La vie sexuelle de Tintin". I also found a couple of bloggers or website owners who got sued (and condemned) for promoting "illegal" Tintin album versions. Which made me want to blog about copyright, civil liberties, the moustache on Mona Lisa, the power of dead people's wishes over the creativity of the living and trash Belgian law but I'm too lazy.
(Roy Lichtenstein is allowed to throw a Matisse painting on Tintin's living room)
...Elias Canetti's Auto da Fé and how if were this book edible it would leave a bitter-sweet taste on my mouth. It's a wonderful bizarre and funny novel, a chimera born of crossing Lynch with Ionesco with a german twist. Alas, the version I own seems like someone pasted the results of Babel Fish "German to English" translation into it (my book says the translation was supervised by the author). Here I am holding what could be one of my favorite novels of all times, wondering if this will be the final trigger to upgrade my current tourist babble german language level. Which made me want to blog yet again about the difficulties of translation, the wonder of learning a new language, post an hilarious excerpt of the novel when the main character tries to convince his books to go to war and faces the opposition of buddhist texts and of Schopenhauer who suddenly found the will to live, quote Walter Benjamin, add an excerpt of Saramago's Baltasar & Blimunda and show you how crappy the english translation is but I'm too lazy.
...Gilbert & George's downloadable art and how the open source paradigm should invade every corner of knowledge, cadavres exquis, the recent trends on how art can be an effective political and social integration tool, how weird that most art reviews I read are favorable and hardly ever anyone dares to say that - although Gombrich says there is no such thing as a bad work of art - that red canvas with a bit of newspaper glued to it brings nothing new and is a lame attempt at originality, the New Yorker article on Banksy and how even the most wannabe rebels give in to money and vanity despite maintaining their anonymity, the Hopper exhibition at the MFA in Boston, the underrated value of art in the developing world and Maslow's hierarchy of needs but I'm too lazy.
...my plans for the second semester of 2007, Cavafy's poems, Socrates' "know thyself", healthy doubts, status quo, Ecclesiastes, Ovid on fishing, missing oneself, the Bloomsbury group, low cost airlines, auction houses, journalism, aging, optimism, adventure, excitement and romance but that would be too personal.
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April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut died. So it goes.
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January 08, 2006
Let's get Physic-al
I'm reading Lawrence M. Krauss' "Hiding in the Mirror - The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String theory and Beyond".
What's interesting about this book is the way the author links the developments in physics to art & literature. The quest - even if unintentional - for extra dimensions brings together Einstein, Bohr, Kaluza, Dirac and Picasso, Wells, Faulkner, Duchamp, Lewis Carroll.
Like in many other things in my life, I'm not that interested in the practical side of physics. I'm interested in the concepts and how they interact with or inspired other fields of study. Pure intellectual masturbation.
And also, Krass has a sense of humour (he was born in NY but grew up in Canada):
"Quantum mechanics is, as I like to say, just like the White House: As long as no one can measure what's going on, anything goes!"
"In cooking, the proof is in the tasting. In physics, it is in the testing."
"As any European high school student could tell you, the sum of the angles inside this triangle is 180º."
Although it's an easy read, I realized how much I need to brush up some basic physics concepts and my geometry.
I've always felt like physics was a low priority subject for me. Somehow, I must have had this mystical notion of nature and had no interest in understanding how the world works, risking stopping being marveled at things with a child-like innocence. And physics concepts were not as intuitive to me as other more abstract ones. I can understand the maths behind it but to say that I fully apprehend the meaning of it in practical terms takes me a lot of work.
So, it'll be like going back to school, only this time I have a purpose and no examinations. Which will be much more fun.
Not to mention being motivated by my private interest in space & time.
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One example of these literature/science links I had run into before:
-"Are you saying I'm superficial?"
-"No...what others call profundity is only a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube."
in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Although I know now what a tesseract is - especially after being enlightened by Banubula's post on Hinton's cubes and after checking an applet featuring a tesseract visualizer sent by István - I still have no idea what Eco meant.
Salman Rushdie mocked this same excerpt on "Imaginary Homelands" as intellectual pretentiousness/gibberish.
I kinda like it. I'm having fun coming up with alternative interpretations.
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December 02, 2005
Greguerías
Ramón Gomez de La Serna was a Spanish writer, inventor of the Greguerías - humorous and poetic epigrams which, for the most parts, were published in newspapers. He defined it as:
Greguería = Humor + Metaphor
Some make great quotations, others great jokes. All are just plain beautiful and witty.
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El amor nace del deseo repentino de hacer eterno lo pasajero.
Love is born out of the desire to render eternal what is fleeting.
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Entre los carriles de la vía del tren crecen las flores suicidas.
In the middle of the train tracks grow suicidal flowers.
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Hay un momento en que el astrónomo, debajo del gran telescopio, se convierte en microbio del microscopio de la luna que se asoma a observarle.
There's a moment when the astronomer, under his big telescope, turns into the microbe which the moon sees with its microscope.
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Serpents are the trees' neckties.
(Illustration by David Vela)
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Tenía tan mala memoria que se olvidó que tenía mala memoria y comenzó a recordarlo todo.
He had such a poor memory that he forgot that he had a poor memory and started remembering it all.
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Escribir con lápiz es marcar sólo la sombra de las palabras.
To write with a pencil is just to mark the shadow of words.
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(found this in english only)
It is only in botanical gardens that trees carry visiting cards.
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La ü con diéresis es como la letra malabarista del abecedario.
The ü is the juggler of the alphabet.
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Los remos son las pestañas de los barcos.
The oars are the boat's eyelashes.
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Era un pintor tan viejo que se le habían quedado calvos los pinceles.
The painter was so old that his brushes had gone bald.
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El Pensador de Rodin es un ajedrecista a quien le han quitado la mesa.
Rodin's "The Thinker" is a chess player whose table has been taken away.
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El libro es el salvavidas de la soledad.
The book is the life-guard of the lonely.
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November 27, 2005
I've made it!
I met the Great Persky; I tried to be discrete but someone has already found me. Off with his head!
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November 23, 2005
Kugelmass
"The Kugelmass Episode" is one of my favourite Woody Allen's short stories for two main reasons:
- he uses a fictional character crossover as a narrative device which is something rather common in film and tv but seldom used in literature;
- the idea of a magical machine that can transport me to the inside of a book sounds fascinating.
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"In Woody Allen’s New Yorker short story “The Kugelmass Episode,” collected in Side Effects (Allen 1982), Kugelmass is a professor of humanities at the City College of New York who, longing for some excitement in his middle-aged life and sick of the sensible advice offered him by his analyst, hooks up with a magician named The Great Persky. Persky has invented a machine that can insert living human beings into books: the client climbs into a coffin-like box and The Great Persky throws in a book of the client’s choice, whereupon the lid is closed and the client is magically transported into the chosen book.
Kugelmass chooses [Flaubert's] Madame Bovary, and appears in Emma’s bedroom at an auspicious period in between her affairs with Leon and Rodolphe(...). They have a steamy affair, and college students all over the country wonder who this bald Jew is, kissing Emma Bovary on page 100. " --- more here
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Emma couldn't hide her excitement at seeing him. The two spent hours together, laughing and talking about their different backgrounds. Before Kugelmass left, they made love. "My God, I'm doing it with Madame Bovary!" Kugelmass whispered to himself. "Me, who failed freshman English."
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So, if you're reading "Alice in Wonderland" and all of a sudden there's a thin brunette wearing glasses walking around, making small talk to the Mad Hatter and taking photos, that means I found the Great Persky :-)
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November 21, 2005
Mr. Mojo Risin'
When I was 13 I decided to paint my bedroom walls bright red. I hanged a huge Jim Morrison b&w poster (the young lion photo series by Joel Brodsky, see below) by my bed. I bought every biography of his life I could get my hands on - which was not that easy seeing that we’re talking about Portugal in the 80’s!
More often than I care to admit, I have been made fun of by pseudo-intellectuals for having been a Jim Morrison fan as a teenager. I know it’s a bit pathetic for a 13/14 year old girl to lust after a dead, alcoholic, drug abusing rock star but the fact is that Mr. Morrison was such a great intellectual influence in my life.
I realized this the other day, while meditating about synchronicities, and mentally mapped some of the connections(click to enlarge):
(I've been having so much fun lately drawing mind maps)
I read so many, many books during this period which in one or other way were triggered by these references. I became an obsessive reader - like a chain smoker, I couldn't stop. Then I found boys…… Just kidding, it’s hard to distract me from my reading even today ;-)
(even later, as any true morrisonite, when I visited Paris I HAD to visit his grave at Père-Lachaise. And take a look at the building where he lived –and died - Rue Beautreillis, nr 17)
And none of this would have happened if it hadn't been for my very cool parents LP collection (Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Queen, The Doors, AC/DC, Cream,Yes, Moody Blues, Procol Harum, Leo Ferré, Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg and many, many more).
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synchronicities, coincidences, etc. I went to see "The Constant Gardener" yesterday (fabulous movie). There was an intermission and as I was deep in thought about the brevity of life, how petty my own problems are compared to my other fellow human beings who are striving to survive, how my hapiness is sheer luck and all the thoughts one has on a particular sentimentally vulnerable day, when I suddenly realize that the theatre's background music is "L.A. Woman" by the Doors ;-)
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October 31, 2005
Memoraphilia
"Simonides was engaged to recite a poem at a banquet, given by one of his patrons, and after doing so the room fell in, burying all in its debris, and disfiguring the bodies so as to render identification impossible. Simonides, however, had noted the position each guest had occupied, and was thus able to point out the remains of each. Cicero and Quintilian both refer to his system and advocate its use; and we may add that it is the basis of most modern methods. Simonides found that to fix a number of places in the mind in a certain order was a great help to the natural faculty. His plan was to form in the mind a building which was divided and subdivided into distinct parts arranged in a certain order. The order of these parts were to be thoroughly learnt. As many words as there were parts were then symbolised by the images of living creatures, and when a number of things were to be committed to memory in certain order, mental images representing them were to be placed regularly in the several parts of the building.."
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"The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci went to China in 1582 and spent the remaining 32 years of his life there.
In 1596, Ricci wrote A Treatise on Mnemonics, in Chinese, for the governor of Jiangxi Province. In it he recreated the medieval European idea of a memory palace - an edifice you build in your mind and furnish with mnemonic devices. Recollection is a process of walking through the rooms and associating information with their contents. Those contents must be distinct and dramatic."
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Johannes Romberch, Congestorium artificiosae memeoriae, 1533
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Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, 1619
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Giulio Camillo, the Theatre of Memory
"Various accounts describe the structure as a building which would allow one or two individuals at a time within its interior. The insides were inscribed with a variety of images, figures, and ornaments. It was full of little boxes arranged in various orders and grades. Upon entering the Theater, the spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero as he stands on a stage looking out towards the auditorium where the images are placed among seven pillars or grades. Each grade representing the expanding history of divine thought. In the first grade there were the 'seven essential measures' depicted by the 'seven known planets' which were the First Causes of creation and from which all things depended. The highest grade of the Theatre was the seventh level, which was assigned to all the arts, 'both noble and vile,' and is represented by Prometheus who stole the technology of fire from the gods."
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"Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered justice in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventory of mnemotechny; Metrodorus, who practised the art of repeating faithfully what he heard once. With evident good faith Funes marvelled that such things should be considered marvellous. He told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been - like any Christian - blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything - almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible."
-- Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious
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"Memory is, therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember."
-- Aristotle, On Memory and Reminiscence
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"One of the things for which I am still grateful is the way in which we were taught to memorize. Most Tibetans have good memories, but we who were training to be medical monks had to know the names and exact descriptions of a very large number of herbs, as well as knowing how they could be combined and used. We had to know much about astrology, and be able to recite the whole of our sacred books. A method of memory training had been evolved throughout the centuries. We imagined that we were in a room lined with thousands and thousands of drawers. Each drawer was clearly labelled, and the writing on all the labels could be read with ease from where we stood. Every fact we were told had to be classified, and we were instructed to imagine that we opened the appropriate drawer and put the fact inside. We had to visualize it very clearly as we did it, visualize the "fact" and the exact location of the "drawer". With little practice it was amazingly easy to - in imagination - enter the room, open the correct drawer, and extract the fact required as well as all related facts."
-- Lobsang Rampa, The third eye
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"But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."
-- Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu
"Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth."
-- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
Posted by claudia Permalink
September 21, 2005
Ophelia
Millais
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Hamlet, Shakespeare
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August 02, 2005
Marco
As any other portuguese from my generation might agree, "Marco - Dos Alpes aos Apeninos" was one of the cartoons (japanese anime, in fact) on TV during our childhood which left the most enduring impression. I used to cry my heart out watching it - the theme song was particularly depressing.
"3000 Leagues in Search of Mother is, as can be gleaned from the title, the chronicle of one boy who sets off all alone across an ocean and makes a grueling, bitter journey in search for his mother. His desolate trek spans the Atlantic, starting off in Genova, Italy and concluding in Cordoba, Argentina. The boy's name is Marco Rossi. In Genova, Marco's father oversees a free clinic which treats the vast number of people unable to afford the cost of medical treatment at a hospital. Due to the inexhorable debt into which this line of work has entrenched his family, and the national work shortage which plagued Italy at the end of the nineteenth century -- a glaring side-effect of the drive towards industrialization --, Marco's mother is forced to leave Italy, and go to Argentina in search of work. There she is to find work as a nurse to the poor, like her husband, to return only when the family's debt has been repaid." (more on the book and the anime here)
Recently, while reminiscing about our childhood with friends, I got two interesting pieces of information:
- the japanese series is based on the book "Cuore" by Edmondo de Amicis - "the italian Huckleberry Finn" (which was what triggered an intensive session of googling for this post);
- Ricardo C. tells me he has a group of friends who defend the theory that Marco's mother went to Argentina to become a prostitute; so much for childhood memories :-)))
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August 01, 2005
Heroes
Javier Cercas, in El Pais (plaisir de dimanche), on discovering through a news article that one of his childhood heroes was actually a horrid person:
"Pensé: es posible que todos los hombres necesiten de héroes, pero lo que es seguro es que la de tener héroes es una necesidad infantil. Pensé : uno prolonga la infancia hasta donde puede, o hasta donde lo dejan. Pensé que, a medida que se hace mayor - para lo cual es útil leer a Shakespeare, a Cervantes, a Dostoievski y a Kafka-, uno va háciendose menos ilusiones. Pensé que, de todos los avanzados de la humanidad que incluía mi enciclopedia, hasta aquel desdichado reportaje aún me quedaban tres a quienes podía no considerar unos desalmados sedientos de sangre. Pensé que ya sólo me quedaban dos: el Mahatma Gandhi y Florence Nightingale. Pensé: el día menos pensado se descubre que Florence Nightingale era en realidad una asesina en serie, y Gandhi, un tratante de esclavas. Pensé: no cedas a la tentación de pensar que ese día serás por fin un adulto."
"I thought: it's possible that all men need heroes, but what is certain is that the need for heroes is a childish one. I thought: one prolongs childhood until one can, or is allowed to. I thought that, as one grows older - for which is useful reading Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoievski and Kafka-, one is less prone to illusions. I thought that, from all the great people on my encyclopedia, until that unfortunate news article there were still three who couldn't be blood thirsty, heartless persons. I thought that I still had two left: Mahatma Gandhi and Florence Nightingale. I thought: when I least expect it, someone will discover that Florence Nightingale was actually a serial killer and Gandhi a slave trader. I thought: don't give in to the temptation of thinking that on that day you will be, finally, an adult."
note: only I am to blame for the translation
Posted by claudia Permalink
July 25, 2005
Octavio Paz on my notebook
Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sinbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.
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Al cerrar los ojos
los abro dentro de tus ojos.
(Closing my eyes
I open them inside your eyes.)
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Óyeme como quien oye llover
(Listen to me as one listens to the rain falling)
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Note to self: the blog as an online notebook - instead of pieces of paper everywhere and half-used moleskines; rebuild categories!
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June 07, 2005
The Grave of Jorge Luis Borges
Rui: We're going to Switzerland, do you want us to bring you anything?
Claudia: Well... a bar of solid gold; if you happen to go to Basel, bring a catalog from the museum of modern art; and if you go to Geneva, a photo of Jorge Luis Borges' grave which is in the Cimitière des Rois.
So, a big hug to R&M for fulfilling the entire order...even though I'm a bit disappointed at the chocolate gold bar ;-)
"The inscription 'And ne forhtedon na', formulated in old English, has been translated over and over again - perhaps by the influence of Maria Esther Vázquez's book "Borges, esplendor y derrota" - as "the doors of the sky were opened to him"; nevertheless, this seems like an error condemned to repeat itself, and the correct translation - according to the article "Siete guerreros nortumbrios" by Martín Hadis, published in the magazine Idiomanía - is in fact "and who did not fear".
"The engraving of the seven soldiers is a copy of the engraving of another tombstone - possibly the tombstone erected in the IX century in the monastery of Lindisfarne, in the north of England, which commemorates the viking attack suffered by the monastery in the year 793 and that Borges related to 'La balada de Maldon'."
Translated from here (in spanish).
Posted by claudia Permalink
October 02, 2003
Nobel
J.M.Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature....never read anything by him :-(
Posted by claudia Permalink
September 30, 2003
The Whore of Mensa
I found one of my favourite Woody Allen's short stories online!!!
Read The Whore of Mensa!
Here's a sample :-D
"For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master's, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine's over Freud's conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing - the perfect evening, for some guys."
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Pangloss
My intrusion detection system BlackICE reported this intruder who was probing my TCP port:
And I thought that this is really clever.....the Pangloss node is in the Utopia group :-)
Pangloss is a character on the satiric novel "Candide" by Voltaire and he is a very annoying eternal optimist; on one of the chapters Candide and Pangloss arrive in Lisbon on the precise day the big earthquake happens. After helping the wounded and walking around the ruins of the town:
"For," said Pangloss, "all this is for the very best end, for if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could be in no other spot; and it is impossible but things should be as they are, for everything is for the best."
By the side of the preceptor sat a little man dressed in black, who was one of the familiars of the Inquisition. This person, taking him up with great complaisance, said, "Possibly, my good sir, you do not believe in original sin; for, if everything is best, there could have been no such thing as the fall or punishment of man."
Your Excellency will pardon me," answered Pangloss, still more politely; "for the fall of man and the curse consequent thereupon necessarily entered into the system of the best of worlds."
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