The Temple of Dendur was relocated and rebuilt holus bolus in the Metropolitan Museum of Art t avoid its destruction due to the building of the Aswam dam in Egypt. The temple is huge, taking up an entire wing, and is housed in a purpose built building as large as the rest of the Egyptian collection.You can walk through the temple, and what struck me was that the building some of the stones contained graffiti from the 1820's. And what insightful piece of wisdom did people think was important enough to deface a monumental building to pass on to future generations ? Such wisdom can be summarised with the simple phrase (insert the particulars) " _(Name)_ woz ere, from _(Place)__ in 18__" It makes you wonder whether human beans ever change, from marks on the wall in caves in France, to elaborate spray painted designs on trains, it seems we simply which to make the point that we came, we saw and we left evidence thereof.
(One of the pieces of graffiti had a name, followed by New York, 1830, and it made me wonder if some family in New York comes to the Museum every year to show there grand kids and great grand kids what there grandfather did back in the 1800's)
Walking around Central Station and Fifth Ave, past a swanky restaurant, noticing that all people are eating are bread, salad and water. But I guess if you have the money you have to flaunt it - wondering how much they charge for bread and water these days.
- THE PARADOX OF THE F BOMB
At the same restaurant, I overhead two suits having a conversation
" There is your fucking problem... That fucking guy is never fucking going to pay"
New Yorkers are known for their directness, but the F bomb is everywhere on the the street, yet you never ever hear it on TV - with one exception. I didn't quite work this out completely but apparently it works like this - free to air TV has no swearing at all, basic cable likewise has no swearing either, however if you have extended cable - for which you have to pay a pretty sum - then you suddenly hear swearing coming from the idiot box - but usually only late at night. Thus only the rich get to hear the language normally associated with the poor and uneducated.
Yet somehow despite this straight out wealth based discrimination reserving swearing on the idiot box for only those rich enough to afford extended cable TV, the democratic street allows everyone to drop F bombs as frequently as they like.
Eponymousitis [€ponImsItis]
n the social disease in which every act of philanthropy must be recognised by naming the use for to which the money was put, commonly seen in foundations (Ford, Gates) museum wings, university chairs etc. Endemic to the entirety of the US. (Query whether really is philanthropy is the give receives something in return ?)
2 comments:
Almost made it to Aswan to see the water that caused so many temples to be moved. Decided to chill in Luxor longer. Better temple spotting. But the other week I went to a new dam in Northern Sudan - Merowe Dam. This is just upstream of a number of smaller pyramids and tombs, still with coloured painted walls (see the Sudan pyramids folder at www.flickr.com/sembrono). Not sure what was upstream of the dam but now it is flooded behind a 10 km dam wall, making a reserviour all the way to the horizon (a long way in a flat country). Since any sites here would have been smaller, they wouldn't have been given much attention. Bit of a difficult one - damn dams displacing people and submurging stuff vs hydro electricity which is gonna be better than coal. Sure you have a well thought out opinion Loiterer.
Quite right Mr Sembrono - of course I have an opinion - they are free and can be changed whenever circumstances require !!
Personally I think that it looks as though we, collectively, have dilly-dallied so long re cutting carbon omissions, that unless we have some catastrophic event that involves massive economic contraction (something like the collapse of the Soviet Union on a global scale) then we are going to have a catastrophic series of events involving massive economic contraction. Damned if we do and damned if we don't !11
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