Happy Valentines Day to everyone

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

Rainer Maria Rilke

rerun of Eliot Erwitts pic.. coz I think love just glows of it...

days..... today it's ten years ago that E.'s dad died, tomorrow we will live in this house for 4 years... saturday my dad turns 55...... and when on the train going home I realized that today somehow all these things made me miss my mum... all these things and the other things going on in my life....

On this weeks quote....
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."  ~ Confucius

That is exaxtly where I am... taking the first step on a brand new and unexplored road...  the one less traveled by...

Went to Utrecht again this time for a meeting seems I'll be in two prject teams/committees for sigchi.nl : automation and communication

Utrecht is one of the biggest cities in the Netherlands. It situated kinda in the middle. Did you know that the CIA has factsheets on countries? The dutch one has a map too.

These are stairs in the museum I visited in Utrecht yesterday.

Went to Utrecht to  Centraal Museum... There was an exhibition called Four Generations showing work of Jan Toorop, his daughter Charley Toorp, her son Edgar Fernhout and his son Rik Fernhout... especially I like the work from Rik and the works from Jan Toorop  that are from his symbolistic period.... don't really like hers... but I am intrigued by the eyes of her portraits....

My impression of one of Charley's selfportrait:

Porcelain

In my dreams I'm dying all the time
As I wake its kaleidoscopic mind
I never meant to hurt you
I never meant to lie
So this is goodbye
This is goodbye

Tell the truth you never wanted me
Tell me

In my dreams I'm jealous all the time
As I wake I'm going out of my mind
Going out of my mind

© Moby - click title for real audio file

On old loves:....
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.

Old loves... since some changes have taken place/are about to tkae place in my lif I also seem to have resdiscovered some longtime favourites of mine.  One of them is the Tom Stoppard play 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead'.  It has such cool part. F.I. it starts with a  the two main characters tossing coins and no matter how many times they do it comes up heads.

List of possible explanations. One: I'm willing it. Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past. Two: time has stopped dead, and the single experience of one coin being spun once has been repeated ninety-times. On the whole, doubtful. Three: divine intervention. Four: a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does.

This is followed by discussion of probability. what I also like is the connection with my favourite Shakespeare play Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two characters from that play. Most of Stoppard's play takes place off stage from hamlet... but the Hamlet scenes with R&G are included.

The following quote kinda says what is going on:

We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.

In essences it is a funny play but it also reflects on serious issues like death. that is also what triggered it death... when reading Prometheus's blog on death I had to think of this play....: Two quotes:

ROS: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
GUIL: no,no,...Death is... not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occured to you that you don't go on for ever. It must have been shattering - stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. It never occured to me at all.

An extra: Some good Hamlet quotes:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below;
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
III,iii,97

I took the What Mythological Creature Are you? test!

There is another popular mythological bird; the immortal phoenix. Held in high esteem in both China and North Africa, the long-lived phoenix has one very unique aspect which makes it special. After centuries of life, the phoenix burns up inside its own nest, turns to ashes, and is then reborn from the ashes, a perpetual cycle of renewal. For this unique quality, the phoenix is held up in many cultures as a symbol of the immortal soul.

Thanx to Raw_Flame

• Photos' from the Alan Siegel Collection
  
• Don't you just looooove pixels... wanna give them a hug?
  
• In for some cool music? Go to Amon Tobin's site
  
• Sometimes NOT finding the page you are looking for on the web can be fun