Prague Property

This week’s entry for Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats

At 5pm the Queen became the oldest ever British monarch, overtaking Queen Victoria who lived to be for years, seven months and 29 days.

The Queen has reigned for 55 years, making her the fifth longest reigning monarch in Great Britain. Her reign is surpassed by Henry III (56 years), James VI of Scotland and I of England (almost 58 years), George III (59 years) and of course Victoria (63 years). Given the longevity of her mother there is a good chance that she will beat Victoria’s record. If she lives to 98 years she will become Europe’s longest serving monarch, beating Louis XIV 72 year reign. She is very unlikely to beat Pharaoh Pepi II who clocked up (a disputed) 94 years on the Egyptian throne

I feel the need to write here fairly often, however I am so busy I do miss posting for some time. Therefore I was thinking of something easy for myself and something easy if you are just starting out on SEO.
1. Go to

and sign up. I am not telling you [...]

 
The Central Bank in Dublin is a real ugly building.  It dominates Dame Street, but it is good for a couple of things.  One it is an easy place to meet at, for some who don’t know Dublin this is one place that is easy to find, see, and get back to.  Another good thing [...]

Prague Christmas Market in Old Town Square is one of my favorite places to wander in the late afternoon and evening.  The crowds are often thinning by then, there is a smell of mulled wine and chestnuts, the snow crunches under my feet and I feel at home - though it is not.  I am [...]

God, time disappears. It has been a good year, as most are these days. Websites keep being built and I can see huge progress between this time last year and now.
Last year, for the first time for many years, I did not write out my aims and goals for 2007. That I don’t [...]

Though one won’t feel the light returning for a while — it’s the nigrum nigrius nigro here now, or Clayton Eshleman’s “alchemical broth,” pale incandescent snowflakes having long ago replaced the last, even less luminous neon hammers and sickles in what was Red Army Street for half a century — this winter’s solstice (so far muddy, verdigris) will be remembered as the day that many a border disappeared. Over All the Obscene Boundaries, Lawrence Ferlinghetti once titled a book of his poems. Here — from the Iron Curtain and between the countries held captive behind it — they truly were obscene. Here is an article with some reflections by Sandra Kalniete.

Latvia signed away a swathe of its territory (in yellow on the map) this week, exchanging the ratification documents of the Border Agreement with Russia — the last act in a tragedy I tried to chronicle in four parts (I, II, III, IV). Though most of us will be celebrating one of the most palpable aspects of “returning to Europe” — freedom of movement is as tangible as inflation — let’s take time out to raise a glass in recognition of the sorrow of those who’ve lost their lands forever. It’s a loss for all of us, except for those politicians who haven’t a share in the real. A song from the area, sung in Latgallian, can be heard here.

And then — let’s celebrate! I wasn’t here until after the worst was over — my first Soviet visa was issued in the final fizzle of the USSR, obtained in Berlin. What it means to be from a small nation — the Latvian Consul, who issued a Latvian visa with a number in the low teens that no official ever saw because the Latvian border barely existed, invited me and a friend to celebrate the 18th of November, Latvia’s Independence Day, at his villa in Dahlem. The anthem blared from scratchy vinyl. Der Spiegel described the Baltics as hopeless Soviet provinces where deluded dreamers desired to become part of the West. A filthy train, its Rīga car doubtless still staffed by KGB informers, bore us eastward. The change of gauge at Białystok (men lazily kicking the wheels out from under us, arc lamps). The brief transit through Soviet Belarus, still filmic, Jurassic, faceless creatures unscrewing the panels to look for contraband or stowaways and depriving babushki of the money they’d earned abroad.

Belarus is still on the other side. Last year I danced with a girl who had to be gone by midnight, like Cinderella. But the border between Latvia and Lithuania is fairly erased at last, for all practical purposes. Between the wars, border towns like Subate languished, Poland and Lithuania locked in conflict — even postal relations between the two were as bitter as wormwood.

Lietuva

coming back into this
country I am ignorant of
& tired of being foreign to
everywhere, in a way as in she is in
a way — back in after the brief curve through Belarus –
the border-guards asking not for passports but whether we have them
– will be border by November –
remembering Irby, I am a citizen of that state that is a haziness in the air
& long for that color that is the eye of love like a body for its clouds
between cars for a smoke a man gestures at the frozen fields & says vot,
your America, your Plains –

NO RELATION

ate apples fall, ābolu gads, apple year,
till could hardly stomach them –

apple eaten

at dawn down the bright law the Gypsies made
forbids them to sow,
keeps them moving

to youthen this cessant Europe

I have come to stay at the stalk of
where it pushes up still pale from the bloodied ground

here Lith. the earthen smitten,
the generations

come put their mind to it,
as their mind came from it

some stones say are
or aren’t, past
oblivion some thing you know
about stone or the hair in the trees that mean you

can’t go back, a matter of how much it hurts
not to, lost in the hands

I traveled in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia illegally, without a visa, because the sudden fall of the empire left a breathing space for some.

Then a flood of other memories — the crying, screaming people removed from buses once their status was noticed. The waiting room for foreigners in the Lviv train station — packed; “we’re all foreigners now.” The buses that ran to Warsaw from Daugavpils every Wednesday, full of “Polish riders”; there are almost as many ethnic Poles as there are Latvians in Daugavpils, and Poles would pack the aisle with Soviet goods to sell in the “Russian Market” in Warsaw, just as traders from Warsaw would head for Berlin. They used their earnings to set up some of the first decent businesses here.

Not being able to get to the platform at the station in Daugavpils — this was a border zone, and one needed a passport to kiss someone departing on a train. Bicycling to Zarasai — the smell of ink and the cost of a new passport when the pages were filled — and the other side different how?

At the summer solstice, when Latvians wander from farmstead to farmstead singing and demanding drink, wandering into Lithuania at dawn — the border guards at least as drunk as we were, urgently calling Vilnius because I then had an American passport with the stamp given to children, a weird tattoo — citizen of Latvia.

The Kazakh who set himself on fire in Daugavpils because he couldn’t get residency and couldn’t provide for his family.

The bar that was in neither Latvia nor Lithuania. “The Queen of Between.”

Standing in subzero temperatures for hours whilst guards fished for bribes — have you any alcohol, precious metals, cigarettes?

For me it was merely exotic, often romantic. For most here it was prolonged incarceration, and then an incessantly demeaning process. “Use your American passport — it’s easier.” Once I allowed my US PP to expire, I got a slight taste of that — but I never had to eat it. Show the money, and see the bills rubbed between the fingers to see that the ink doesn’t come off. Where are you going, Untermensch, and why.

Let’s kiss it goodbye.

Improbable Research has announced two dates on its 2008 Ig Nobel UK tour- 11 March at Imperial College London and 12 March at the Guardian Visitor Centre. I would imagine that more dates will be announced shortly.

The shows will feature Marc Abrahams, If Nobel Prize organiser and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research. There will be the performance of a mini-opera, and also The How-to-Give-a-Bad-Science-Lecture Contest. Speakers include Kees Moeliker, who won the 2003 Ig Nobel Biology Prize for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck, and Chris McManus who wrote the study “Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture,” for which he received the 2002 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize.

Tickets will be free but limited to two per applicant. How could anyone with an interest in science pass up on this opportunity?