-¦ May 2021 ¦-

EPICENTER OF 1906 EARTHQUAKE

Defenestration

Defenestration tossing out of a window was a site-sepcific installation on two outside walls of a shuttered building in San Francisco, created by artist Brian Goggin with the help of volunteers. Knowing the dilapidated structure would face the wrecking ball sometime in the future, City Hall went ahead and commissioned Googin to bring into existence anthropomorphic furniture in the process of escaping the Hugo Hotel by jumping out of windows and ambling down on whichever legs the furniture maker gave them. This time-specific public art then spent sixteen years thrilling passersby until the building was torn down in 2014.

The Huge Hotel, corner of Sixth and Howard, was built as a four-storey rooming house, but deemed unsafe after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The opening day crowd in 1997 were greeted by a massive spider web made of robes tied to various parts of the building. Already a few pieces of furniture, chair, sidetable, lamp, are marching down the walls. The first to actually jump out of the windows was an acrobat, soon joined by a posse, all dressed in super-costumes, all climbing on the web and doing circus things for half an hour. Then one by one, they would ease out of windows more furniture: sofa, coffee tables, mirrored armoire, bed, ottoman, bathtub, stool, bench, a grandfather clock. More lamps, which at night were switched, cleverly illuminating this surreal spectacle 24 seven.

After weathering the years, the furniture were removed in spring 2014, crated to go to an art gallery. They had all been bought already by an art collector, but a week later the blue sofa jumping off the roof was still there, too fragile to be dismantled. The bathtub too, halfway leaning out against a window sill, was still hanging on.

The ground floor of the Hugo Hotel was a an old-world storefront with high ceilings, and slender pillars spaced across the space. From floor to ceiling, everything in this grocery store was handmade using wood products. There were large bins storing potatoes and onions. Carrying basic bodega items, there was only rudimentary refrigeration, but the hours of operation were generous.

| Back |

GREEN GODDESS

As his official residence was under construction, on a large parcel some 500 feet above Hong Kong harbor, governor John and Lady Bowring began to putter around in their backyard, a steep slope cresting straight up to the Peak. And what they accomplished, and passed on, has now become the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens (兵頭花園). A living laboratory, won in war, seeded by transplants who were assigned by the british government to administer -- or more like be marooned -- on this barren rock, a stone’s throw off the South China coast. |…| Children from a bygone age took to the young science of botany and re-imagined Eden. These studious observers of nature resolved to quantify history from the first day onwards, to quest and assign names, to design knowledge for mass consumption -- basic eminent victorian pursuits. |…|

In 1871, beginning its manicured existence as the backyard garden to a governor and his wife, a now public botanic garden has long ago tamed the unfriendly slope that it rests on, a slope which keeps rising. Teams of landscape engineers, masons and laborers introduced native plants to their tropical and sub-tropical selves. Banyans tucked together create backdrops. The only india rubber tree for many miles around lives here. Into the pampered soil went palm trees from near and far. Fern forests sheltered an undergrowth world.

The original garden had shady boulevards and extensive flowerbeds. There was an aviary and a green house filled w/ orchids, bromeliads, ferns and climbers. The main feature was a fifty-feet wide circular pond w/ a water feature on a fountain terrace. Home to water lilies, the lip of the pond was raised just so to allow for sitting.

British botanist Charles Ford was the first superintendent of gardens, and he began the documentation of local flora and fauna. -|- two whole gingsengs on a botanical drawing -|- water color of chinese clove w/ two branches -|- a sprig of the dawn redwood -|- cutting of chinese elm on a plate -|- framed drawing of a flowering chinese lantern

This public garden was deemed safe enough that, late into the evening, couples took to strolling between gas-lit walkways and holding hands in the shadows, serene in ordered nature. Scents from the orange-jassamine, white jade orchid tree, mock lime and sweet osmanthus, mingle w/ the heady kwai-fah and swirl the air. This open air conservatory soon turned into a paradise for adams wanting somewhere to take their eager Eves.

The animal house was first introduced in 1876, and though its inmates have rotated through the usual classifications over the years, it wasn’t until 1976 that beleaguered beasts were given new digs and more humane treatment by staff. Reptiles and mammals finally had separate quarters. The bird cage was moved to another part altogether. Today 900 species live side by side and learn how to get along in a very crowded city.

- Jules Verne was invited in 1865 to help document the life aquatic in the harbor. The author altogether spent six months researching this water world, picking up the local tongue, talking to folks who would know. Disgarding the bulk as a concoction, little made it into Verne’s final manuscript, yet he decided to send the cuts to a friend working at a magazine. In the June 15 1884 issue of L'Algerie are the rejected notes of Jules Verne, accompanied by illustrations from Alphonse de Neuville, Édouard Riou, and George Chinnery.

| Back |

WHAT HE SAID W.H. Auden quote: ...Ten thousand miles from home and What's-Her-Name. A bugle on this late Victorian hill puts out the soldier's lights; off-stage, a war thuds like the slamming of a distant door ...

W.H. Auden quote: ...Ten thousand miles from home and What's-Her-Name. A bugle on this late Victorian hill puts out the soldier's lights; off-stage, a war thuds like the slamming of a distant door ...

PSYCHEDELIC PARK

Built in 1932 as a vertical landscape to enhance the property of a Hong Kong tycoon’s mansion, the Tiger Balm Gardens of Aw Boon Haw is an over-the-top folly.

On the steepest hillside imaginable, inhospitable to real estate development, Aw Boon Haw envisioned a human-size depiction of a moral Chinese universe. The land was his, and he lived w/ his family next door. The garden was a grand retreat containing sculpted scenarios from daoist practices, w/ dollops of buddhist mindfulness swirling by mythologies of plaster-of-paris and confucian paint. At the apex of this miniature cosmology perches a seven-storey pagoda, and steps leading to the top.

A visitor to this psychedelic park can count on being ambused by deities and demons; also, phoenix, unicorn, gorilla, kangaroo, others. Historical tableaux seemingly trot out: Journey to the west; fairy scattering flowers on Buddha; others.

Staircases multiply and are passageways between locales -- these altitude adjustments then melt any sense of bearing. Natural ledges and spurs were leveraged for bridges, lookout points, nooks. Vistas start to appear then vanish; shortcuts and forks accrue. Destinations take on labyrinthean lengths. This garden of steep and narrow steps enhances mystical states of ascension and descension. The cloud caves of heaven above, below the stockades of hell. Both are bound to make your acquaintance.

The garden is built from several applications of plaster-of-paris shaped w/ chicken wire in wet cement. Cement staircases were created from buildouts and brackets enhance existing rock. Covered w/ paint, the Tiger Balm Gardens became incarnate – finished forms found only dreams. The gardens are from the imagination of Mr Aw Boon Haw; there were no plan drawings. Concocted by master craftsmen Kwek Hoon Sua and Kwek Choon Sua, bros from Swatow, abetted w/ a crew of workers.

|█ ⁕ █| The first steps to the garden already beguile.

| back |

UNIVERSITY TOWN Coimbra

⇞ CITY OF STUDENTS

Coimbra, a city in northern Portugal, is the see of a bishop, the capital of a province, and a center of learning. In 2013, UNESCO designated the University of Coimbra as a University Town Recipient for its World Heritage Sites, “… an integrated university city, w/ a specific urban typology, as well as its own ceremonial and cultural traditions.” The property consists of two areas: a hilltop complex of buildings, Uniersity Hill, and a series of scattered structures which all played a part in the university’s history.

There is a 12th century Augustinian monastery which was the first school, and the original library.

The Inquisition swept into Portugal in 1567, and Coimbra was one of the three local centers tasked to conduct it. Outlasting these strictures, the university bounced back, w/ strengthened statutes, a reorganized syllabus of studies, greater emphasis on education in the vernacular, and the re-establishment of freeom of research. The old castle on the hilltop was finally pulled down to make way for new buildings.

A seal was then struck, a praxe, consisting of a spoon (symbol of punishment), scissors (symbol of unruliness), and a stick (symbol of self-defense).

University of Coimbra

Founded in 1290, the University of Coimbra is the second oldest continuous institution of higher learning in Europe (the University of Paris is older), and the first university town in the world. In this northern Portuguese city, a world treasure become sited inside a national treasure, the school moved into a former royal palace on the summit of the hill, and grew to become a gathering spot for academics, writers, artists, who nicknamed this the Lusitanian Athens, ‘Lusa Atenas’.

⇞ CAMPUS

An early champion of the new science of circumnavigation, an observatory was built to make spatial sense of the stars.

Investitures and major events take place in the ‘Sala Grande dos Actos,‘ below portraits of kings and queens. A cathedral, already there when the university arrived, was gifted by Jesuits. The throne room is now used for PhD candidate examinations, and nothing else.

The four rooms of the ‘Museu de Arte Sacra’ contain, among holy habits and chalices, books of early sacred music. There is a museum of natural history. A colonnaded walkway by the grand patio was added in the 18th century, the ‘Via Latina.’ The campus chapel, ‘Capela de Sao Miguel’, means that no student need run downhill to another one.

A Botanical Garden blossomed in 1772, that delightful Victorian experiment of Eden on earth, sprouting wherever colonialism circled.

There are five faculties (‘theologia’, ‘direito’, ‘medicina’, ‘mathematica’, ‘philosophia’) w/ disciplines in judicial and European court systems, interdisciplinary nuclear science, and the arts. (The university had begun by teaching law, rhetoric, mathematics, theology, medicine, grammar and Greek.) The teaching staff consisits of some 70 professors and lecturers. Semester is from autumn to the start of summer, when two months of exams take place. The ordinary degree resulting in the title ‘licenciado’ lasts five years. The degree of ‘doutor’ takes another year and another examination. Medical students study eight years.

The university has a digital repositorium inside a tech park involved in research and incubation. There is a repository for the project April 25, documenting the toppling of a dictatorship. Auxiliaries of the city-wide university system take on citizen practices such as sports, theater, and botany and preservation; there are several kindergartens and nurseries under its wing.

⇞ LIBRARY

When the university outgrew the original city library, a second one was built in the 18th century, on University Hill, the ‘Biblioteca Joanina’, the oldest university library in continuous use in the world, and housed in three large and resplendent Baroque rooms w/ painted ceilings.

The first room has a light green palette, the second a darker green, and the third room has a “… shade like that of orange Niger leather”; rich in gilt and exotic wood, lined w/ 300,000 volumes in galleries runing around the walls, incl. arguably the most valuable collection of Bibles in the world.

There are unpublished manuscripts of Domenico Scarlatti, thought lost but rediscovered in the 20th century, because they were incorrectly catalogued. By the front door, a passageway can take one down to the river, the ‘Palacios Confusos’, by a series of steps posing as alleys, past houses of different styles and years.

⇞ STUDENT BODY

The student body numbers about 25,000, and the dress code is a black Prince Albert coat, worn w/ black trousers, black cape batina, black dress tie; generally students go bareheaded. A military hospital happens to be located nearby, because.

Freshmen may not be on the street after the bell has rung at 6pm, on penalty of being shaved bald, if caught. Another form of punishment is to measure the long bridge over the Modego w/ a match, and it must be done w/ meticulous accuracy.

Even a good and sinless freshman must be prepared to run errands whenever required to do so by a sophomore or junior, but he may be “protected,” and the errand countermanded, by a friendly senior (‘quartanista’).

In turn a sophomore and a junior are known as a semi-harlot (‘mejo prostituo / prostituta’) and a total harlot (‘total prostituo / prostituta’) respectively.

These ‘estudantes’ make up about a third of the town’s inhabitants. Their graduation ceremonies take place in May. It’s then that a localized form of ‘fado’ is sung, by male students only, and only on the steps of the old cathedral when 10pm comes around, w/ lyrics more intellectual and romantic than the genre asks for, love songs tuned to the passions and sentiments of the students, who perfume the air w/ their lamentations until dawn.

⇞ STUDENT REPUBLICS

In the mid-1950s there were eleven “republics” or student organizations, active in the university.

One of them is ‘Pra-kys-tao‘ (Here We Are), a fraternity of ten students for the mutual benefit of themselves and their always-slender budgets, and to satisfy wants such as traditional evenings of wine and shrimps in town. Membership was open, upon unanimous favorable vote, to students of any race, color, religion or political creed except, during that period, communism. In the most pratical way, the student who had been a member longest is automatically president. Using a rotation system, two students, followed by two more then two more, serve as executive officers for fifteen days.

They run the republic and must explain and justify all outlays of money, and a debate on this topic may be opened at any time, all decisions being made by majority vote, and to be taken at the dinner table. Freshmen may not vote on money matters but on anything else.

This particular republic had only 13 electric light bulbs for 15 rooms, incl. the dining room, kitchen and hallway. Pin-up girls papered over every wallspace, the harem of the eye (‘Harem do Olho’). One wall had graffiti: “Artillery Exported to Pra-kys-tao for the Protection of the Marshall Plan.”

Certain campus traditions take place to mark the academic seasons, involving parades through the city, each rife w/ its own occult rituals. The noisy Latada - Festa das Latas (celebration of end of class), and the older Queima das Fitas (burning of the ribbons), which goes on for eight days, involving light blue ribbons for the Sciences, dark blue for Letters, yellow for Medicine and purple for Pharmacy.

⇞ CITY OF CULTURE

The original footprint of Coimbra has spilled downhil, and locals distinguish between the older Upper Town and the Lower Town.

The area bordering the Modego River is Cicade Baixa, downtown, where commerce happens amid Romanesque, early Baroque, Rococco, and Gothic structures, sporting Moorish shadows and sucumbing to the nautical notions of the Manueline style.

A Portuguese queen is buried downtown, in a silver tomb housed in the convent of ‘Santa Ciara-a-Nova’. The Fountain of Life, waiting for you since the 14th century, is behind this church.

Unto the 1920s Coimbra was all but inaccessible by road to travellers, not to mention damp beds and dangerous foods. Sacheverell Sitwell visited in the 1950s:

“… At Coimbra not only has there been wanton and appalling destruction of what was old and beautiful, but new University buildings have been erected which are really shaming in their blatant ugliness. The sculptures, particularly, are of an insulting hideousness. …

Not that there is anything in the least Portuguese about these abominable buildings of Coimbra. But it is sad, too, because, Coimbra being the university town of Portugal, so many Portuguese retain memories of Coimbra and an affection for it all through their lives, and those memories will now forever more be tinged and coloured by the ugly buildings. There is no possible excuse for hideousness upon this scale; but it might, at least, be practised elsewhere and not in Coimbra.”

⇞ LUIS DE CAMõES

The Lusiads Arguably the most famous student of the University of Coimbra is Luis de Camões, who (might have been) born in Coimbra in 1524 but known to have passed age 56 in Lisbon. His fame is partly based on supreme mastery of the Portuguese language and is its lyric poet, and his most famous work is a tour de force recounting the tragedy of Indes de Castro of Spain and her love Prince Pedro of Portugal, and her murder by jealous courtiers. She was killed by a fountain in the Garden of Tears (‘Quinta das Lagrimas’) in the convent of Santa Clara; where pond lilies are have been known to flower red.

A stone slab by the fountain bears the following verse by Luís Vaz de Camões (Lusiads, Ill, 135), here in a translation by Lord Byron:

Mondego’s Daughter-Nymphs the death obscure Wept many a year, with wails of woe exceeding; And for long memory changed to fountain pure, The floods of grief their eyes were ever feeding; The name they gave it, which doth still endure, Revived Ignez, whose murdered love lies bleeding. See yon fresh fountain flowing ‘mid the flowers, Tears are its water, and its name ‘Amores.’

⇞ MANUELINE STYLE

Flush w/ wealth from the Spice Trade, Portugal experienced a brief period where money became as abundant as sea water, and lavished it on an indigenous artform.

The discoveries brought back by the sea voyages Pedro Alvares Cabral and Vasco da Gama aroused the already composite Portuguese style, toying w/ Flemish, Italian and Late Gothic elements. The newly rich gathered the bounties of the sea trade and repurposed them an architectural vocabulary in churches, monasteries, palaces and castles, and a maritime motif applied to furniture, sculpture and painting. The style was given a name in 1842 by the Viscount Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, in his description of the Jeronimos Monastery. The characteristics of this Manueline style, named for King Manuel I (1495-1521), resulted in ornate portals, bevelled crenellations, conical pinnacles, and eight-sided capitals.

There were semicircular arches on doors and windows, columns of carved rope, and a wanton disregard for symmetry. There were symbols of Christianity and latter-day Templars, botanical flourishes, artifacts found on ships, all garlanded by Islamic filigree work and Moorish traceries.

⇞ AEMINIUM

▶ SOURCES: [1] California and the Portuguese by Celestino Soares, SPN Books Lisbon 1939. [2] Eyewitness Travel Guides: Portugal w/ Madeira & the Azores, DK Publishing Inc London 1997. [3] The Finest Castles in Portugal, text Julio Gil, photographs Augusto Cabrita, Verbo 1996. [4] A History of Spain and Portugal in two volumes, by Stanley G. Payne, The University of Wisconsin Press 1973. [5] The Nagel Travel Guide Series : Portugal, Nagel Publishers Geneva 1956. [6] A New History of Portugal 2nd Edition by H.V. Livermore, Cambridge University Press London 1976. [7] Portugal and Madeira by Sacheverell Sitwell, William Clowes and Sons London 1954. [8] Portugal the Pathfinder: Journeys from the Medieval toward the Modern World 1300-ca.1600, edited by George D. Winius, The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies Ltd, The University of Wisconsin Press 1995. [9] Port and the Douro by Richard Mayson, Faber and Faber London 1999. [10] Portuguese Concise Dictionary 2nd edition, Harper Collins 2001. [11] Spain and Protugal, Handbook for Travellers by Karl Bedacker, fourth edition. Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, publisher. London: George Allen & Unwini Ltd., New York: Chas. Scribner’s Sons. 1913. [12] A Traveller's History of Portugal by Ian C. Robertson, line drawings by John Hoste, Interlink Books New York 2002. [13] World Food by Lynelle Scott-Aitken and Clara Vitorino, Lonely Planet 2002.

▶ CREDITS Culled from reporting by Tim Pozzi,the University of Coimbra website, the Internet, and guide books. Photographers incl., among others, Francisco Antunes.

▶ STREET NAMES [ 14 ] Some Coimbra street names include: Rua Anthero de Quental, Alameda do Jardin Bot, Estrada da Beira, Rua do Loureira, Couraca dos Apostolos, Rua das Padeiras, Rua das Solas, Rua da Moeda, Rua da Louca, Rua do Corvo, Rua do Joao Cabreira, Rua da Sophia, Rua de Mont’arroio, Rua do Corpo de Deus, Rua do Borralho, Rua dos Estudos, Rua Lourenco d’Almcida, Rua Venancio Rodriguez, Rua Garrett, Rua do Thomar, Rua de Alex Herculano, Rua Ferreira Borges, Rua do Visconde da Luz, Rua da Sophia, Rua de Castro Mattoso, Rua de Oliveira Mattos.

| Back|

TEA TIME

The Teapot

That morning I heard water being poured into a teapot. The sound was an ordinary, daily, cluffy sound. But all at once, I knew you loved me. An unheard-of-thing, love audible in water falling.

Robert Bly b.1926

One Lump or Two

The must-dos for brewing a proper pot of tea, and how a constitutional drinking game, made palatable w/ sugar and milk, calmed a nation’s nerves.

Cream or Lemon A steadfastness in dutiful habiting is a core definition of Britishness in all matters related to tea, and in 2013 was due for a review: ❝ … the official six-page specification for how to make a cup of tea, is officially “under review”. But don’t panic. It is standard procedure for the British Standards Institution (BSI) to do a “systematic periodic review” of each of its many specifications which, piecemeal, define nearly everything British.

|- ¶ -| Belying stereotypes of peremptory rigidity in anyone or anything that officially tells the populace what’s what, the BSI is nice about what it does”. British Standards are voluntary in that there is no obligation to apply them or comply with them, it says. The standards are “devised for the convenience of those who wish to use them”. That sentiment appears in the 44-page specification, copies of which are available free of charge.❞

In 2013, Christopher Hitchens gave an account of George Orwell making tea:

Just after World War II, during a period of acute food rationing in England, George Orwell wrote an article on the making of a decent cup of tea that insisted on the observing of eleven different “golden” rules. Some of these (always use Indian or Ceylonese—i.e., Sri Lankan—tea; make tea only in small quantities; avoid silverware pots) may be considered optional or outmoded. But the essential ones are easily committed to memory, and they are simple to put into practice.

If you use a pot at all, make sure it is pre-warmed. (I would add that you should do the same thing even if you are only using a cup or a mug.) Stir the tea before letting it steep. But this above all: “ [O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours.”

This isn’t hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle. It’s not quite over yet. If you use milk, use the least creamy type or the tea will acquire a sickly taste.

George Orwell

And do not put the milk in the cup first – family feuds have lasted generations over this – because you will almost certainly put in too much. Add it later, and be very careful when you pour.

Finally, a decent cylindrical mug will preserve the needful heat and flavor for longer than will a shallow and wide-mouthed – how often those attributes seem to go together – teacup.

Orwell thought that sugar overwhelmed the taste, but brown sugar or honey are, I believe, permissible and sometimes necessary.

Manchester, England – November 13 2015

Middleton officer Andy Richardson: “Just dealt w/ a 95 year old couple, called and said they were lonely. What else could we do?”

He and a fellow officer ended up going over to the couple’s house and sharing a cup of tea over a 30 minute visit, and later tweeted about the call.

“We’ve got to look after people as well. It’s not just fighting crime, it’s protecting people in whatever situation they find themselves.”

Fred Thompson, the elderly man who made the call: “You feel somebody cares and oh that does matter … simple things they talk about, nothing very special but they showed that they cared by being there and talking to you.”

In the 1935 movie Ruggles of Red Gap, Charles Laughton is a british butler transplanted to America, where he instructs the town spinster on the importance of making tea properly:

She: (looking at water) It’s hot! ... He: Can I be of any assistance?

Oh no. Men are so helpless in the kitchen. (Picks up kettle, proceeds to pour into teapot.) Oh no. Always bring pot to the kettle, never bring the kettle to the pot.

Well listen –I’ve been making tea for longer than I can remember– Don’t let’s get into difficulties about this. But you must listen to an Englishman about tea. When making tea, always bring the pot to the kettle and never the kettle to the pot. Oh, your knowledge is surprising. ...

Don’t see why you should say surprising. The best cooks have always been men. I myself have pronounced views on the preparations and servings of food. Have you? ... Oh yes. You know something nice that would go w/ tea? ... Eh yes, yes. The ingredients are quite simple. Do you have a little flour? Oh would you? ... Flour, butter, milk and salt. Oh you seem so at home in the kitchen. ... Ah it would be difficult to describe the intense satisfaction that I’ve always derived from cooking.

In 1997, Morrissey was asked in a sit-down interview: Do you ever get sick of drinking tea? Given the moment, the former singer for The Smiths expounded on how this custom is practised in his home: ... I absolutely never get sick of drinking tea. It’s a psychological thing really, it’s just very composing and makes me relax. It’s just so much a part of your culture. ... ‘Oh yes yes, I’m very avid, I have to have at least four pots a day. For those of us who don’t know how to make a pot of tea, what do you do?

Well I would do that without even thinking about it. ... Right and also you have to use real milk you can’t use the UHT fake stuff, you have to use proper milk. ... Well you really have to put the milk in first which many people don’t. Put the milk in with the water, before you boil the water? ... No, you’re confused already no, you put the milk in before you pour the water in or the tea, whichever.

Okay, so what about the actual brewing of the tea? ... The brewing of the tea, it’s very important that you heat the pot before you put the water in, if you use a pot. I know most people who just throw a teabag into a cup but in England of course you have to make a pot of tea and you have to heat the pot first w/ hot water and then put the teabags in – I can’t believe I’m saying this – and then put the hot water in and then just throw it all over yourself, rush to Out Patients and write a really good song.

❝The popularity of tea in England ... was due to a Portuguese infante, Queen Catherine, whose predilection for that beverage rendered it fashionable. In an ode to her, Waller sings: The best of queens and best of herbs we owe / To that bold nation who the way did show / To the fair region where the sun doth rise, / Whose rich productions we so justly prize.❞

Historic Macao by C. A. Montalto de Jesus 1984. Oxford University Press.

| Back |

ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE RECIPIENT

Al-Zubarah, Qatar

Buried under sand for hundreds of years, slowly being dug up going on years now, is Qatar’s largest archaeological dig, and a very fine example, preserved, of a merchant town c.1800s. This site is the ruined coastal port famous for its walls and known as Al-Zubarah. Founded by merchants in the late 1700s, this settlement had thrived as a pearl-fishery industry and also as a trading post — it is centrally positioned on the main sea route in the Persian Gulf.	In 1811 there was a successful siege and what remained was abandoned and eventually was covered by sand. The property Al Zubarah Archaeological Site which comprises the 2013 UNESCO World Heritage Site is a fortified town, built w/ traditional Arab technqiues, that faces a harbor, w/ an original sea wall (exists still in part). A second, inner wall came later. The original fort still stands, there is another fort, two more walls, and a canal to the sea.	The largest domestic structure dug up gives a sense of the wealth enjoyed by the town’s richest, and why so coveted by its attackers: Nine inter-connected courtyards inside a building complex, surrounded by a high wall and having corner defense towers. Water fountain features are to be found, incl. ponds where a game played by children, called turtles-&-pearls, takes place underwater. Using a pet turtle, each player attempts to shoot a colored pearl into a row of different-colored pearls, w/ an aim of hitting out another pearl of the same color, all the while not disturbing the rest.

| Back |

UNESCO ::: 2013 SACRED SPACE RECIPIENT

Mount Fuji

Blessed by superb symmetry, taking on its shape five thousand years ago, locus for ascetic buddhism of the shinto blend, standing alone in the center of the country, source of artistic inspiration since the 11th century, Mount Fuji’s conic silhouette has been copied by Japanese potters down through history and in due course has left blueprints on mid-century kitchen gadget design, chockful with its ergonomic effortlessness and sensuous surfaces. The designation by UNESCO of this mountain as the 2013 World Heritage Site Sacred Space Recipient consists of 25 properties including the mountain itself, shinto shrines, five lakes, and a haunted forest.

Shinto has been practised in Japan since at least the 7th century, and its cosmos is populated by a kami (diety) living in every imaginable natural formation unto a blade of grass. Mount Fuji’s kami is the Princess Konohana-sakuya, the shinto embodiment of nature, and you will know of her presence by the sight of cherry blossoms on the way up a very attractive mountain. The fujiko school of shinto adds a soul and believes the mountain to be a being. While all this bonding is going on, the buddhists sit back and regard the mountain as a gateway to another world. The crater is ringed w/ eight peaks and a walk all around takes a couple of hours, could this be what the buddhists had in mind?

The area around Fujisan-konohana-sakuahime (“Fuji causing the blossom to brightly bloom”) also contains other mystical marvels. Five lakes, the Fuji-goko, ring the mountain. The northwest quadrant is a 14-square mile pine forest, the Aoki-ga-hara-jukai (Sea of Trees), which can be alarmingly dark during the day, forming a half moon around the base. This forest is home to goblins, demons, ghosts, and has been a destination suicide spot for many years.

It has come to pass and for as long as anyone can remember, there is and always has been a choice of only four trails leading pilgrims to the summit. All things here being of a magical quality, these four paths might very well allude to the Four Elements in a cosmic setting: rarefied Air at the summit, plentiful fresh Water within reach, Earth in its proudest seasonal garbs are all visited by the fire goddess Fuchi once a year, taking off her buddhist beads for a powwow w/ the princess. This takes place end of summer at a trail stop in the village of Yoshida, rife w/ rustic rumors insisting on a peculiar religiousity shared by fire festivals everywhere including the most famous, Burning Man, although it must be noted that the Yoshida Fire Festival is done and over with in a night and the following day, involving ceremonies to conclude the climbing season.

Sunrise as seen at the summit by all-night climbers has its own dedicated name, goraiko, as in “my goraiko was obscured by clouds with rain blotting out the horizon.” For the fortunate ones, though, words like "awesome" and "bright red" and "a figure" readily roll off their tongues when recalling the alpine sight of the sun peeking over a watery horizon, the shedding of darkness around the self, the wonderment that immortals are hovering nearby, a palpable sense of alignment with gravity again, maybe even new eyes for the descent. It has been likened to something we all know happens regularly and “see” but not see; kind of shinto. It is one of Japan’s three Holy Mountains, together with Mount Haku and Mount Tate, and is on the island of Honshu.

Fuji is an active and relatively young volcano 62 miles south-west of Tokyo. It sits on a “triple junction” radiating techtonically down to the Filipino Plate, west to the Eurasian Plate, and east towards the North American Plate, the Okhotsk. It has erupted 21 times, the last was on October 26, 1707 (an 8.4), and destroyed 72 houses and three buddhist temples. It was powerful enough to blow a scoop out at the tip, becoming an actual new crater on the eastern flank. On February 4, 2013, a metereological ticker tape came through the wires:

The volcano remains calm. However, an increased number of small quakes near and under Mt Fuji are visible on our latest data plot of nearby earthquakes (within 30 km radius). While all of these are very small and the number is certainly not alarming, the volcano remains interesting to watch….

| MT FUJI NOTES: [1] Four views of Mt. Fuji. [2] The Princess Konohana-sakuya is patiently gazing around wondering what is taking so long for her date Fuchi forever to arrive. [3] (top left) The Sea of Trees. [4] Four photographs taken from the summit at sunrise – a goraiko; anime of a sun goddess by Jayne Aw. [5] Mt Fuji in fact and fiction. | Fujisan (富士山). Names of the five lakes: Kawaguchi, Motosu, Sai, Shoji, Yamanaka. The four trails are Yoshidaguchi, Subashiri, Gotemba, Fujinomiya. Photos by Brian Chu, Daisaku Ikeda + screen captures.

| Back |

CORNERS OF H.K.

The first road built in Kowloon was in 1904 by governor Sir Matthew Nathan. Beginning harborside at Tsim Sar Tsui, the boulevard ran just over two miles north to Sum Sui Po and Boundary St, where the New Territories begin.

•

HK residents can travel to the portuguese port by ferryboat, hydrofoil or amhibian plane; the former takes an hour, the others are faster. In 20th-c. Macao, the only means for its residence to catch an airplane was first travel to HK. Both ways, the traveler crosses the Pearl river delta while skirting the South China sea.

•

A commercial venture next to Ma Tau Gok went bust when entrepreneurs Mr Kai and Mr Tak could not develop the land they had reclaimed from Kowloon Bay. This prompted the HK government to purchase the waterfront property and, in 1912, build an airfield. |- ¶ -| Decommissioned in 1998, Kai Tak Airport will no longer offer arriving airplanes a careening welcome onto a harbor runway when pilots need to perform demanding and exacting maneuvers each and every time. (Photo by Christian Hanuise)

•

The english bridge connects the isle of Shameen (left) w/ Canton on the right. There is also a french bridge. A sandbar in the Pearl river was reclaimed and built upon by british and french merchants wanting residences in town.

•

The 1958 cha-cha-cha champions of HK Bruce Lee and his dance partner. A dance craze emanating from Cuba in the early 1950s, swept HK youth into dance classes to learn how to execute two consecutive quick steps.

•

When the british government conducted the first census, Sek Pei Wan (Aberdeen) had zero population; at the time it was just a pirate’s cove. Graced w/ a tiny yet excellent harbor. Tanka (boat people) eventually made it a homeport, an important one among many dotted along the coastline.

•

| Back |

OBIT

76 | Pamela Rita de Oliveira Mattos Zauberer

|- 5.2.1940 – 5.3.2016

❝Great cook, talented at crochet, creative, child-like, excruciatingly honest, tenacious, compassionate and sensitive; my mother was all these things.❞
— Jasmine

Pam led a glamorous life as a 1960s airline stewardessfor Cathay Pacific Airways, based in Hong Kong, where she was born and raised. At work she would be pulled into photo shoots when film and television stars flew in.

| Chosen to represent the airline, she participated in fashion shows, ad campaigns, and public relations as the face of flight. She traveled around the world, accruing trinkets from all cultures and a lifelong admiration of all cuisines. She traveled to all the airports in Asia, and in her suitcase out would pop magazines from everywhere else.

| After landing in America, she struck out to be on her own and moved to New York, abandoning us all here in California. She dated the house photographer at Mad magazine, and lived a stone’s throw from Maxwell’s Plum, a “…flamboyant restaurant and singles bar that, more than any place of its kind, symbolized two social revolutions of the 1960s — sex and food,” located at 64th and First Avenue in Manhattan. Her walk up had a bathtub in the kitchen, sharing a hot faucet w/ the sink.

| While helping a friend help sell at her friend's street-fair booth, Pam met many folks, including a man who immediately offered some helpful advice. Pam shot back and challenged him to come around to the other side and manage the booth himself, since he “...clearly knew what to do.” Laszlo disappeared and came back w/ two hot dogs and a lemonade, walked around the booth, and sat down next to her; two weeks later they were married.

| Laszlo Zauberer, native of Hungary, was driving a cab in NYC when he met Pam on his one day off. An accomplished painter of diverse subjects, and the love of her life, they remained inseparable for the next 40 years.

| After the birth of their daughter, Pam and Laszlo made the move to upstate New York. Never one to shy away from conflict, her generosity, thoughts and sometimes vengeance were doled out as she saw fit to those who crossed her path. Whether it was redeeming a raincheck at a grocery store or haggling over an item at a yard sale, her sense of fairness and authority got her into heated debates.

| On the night of May 3 2016, Pamela Rita de Oliveira Mattos Zauberer passed away at home and in her bed w/ Laszlo and Jasmine by her side. In true stoic fashion, she had no complaints of pain. She had just celebrated her birthday the day before, and ate carrot cake, her favorite. She was 76 years old.

69 | Benjamin Leung Gok Wing

|- 2.7.1944 – 9.4.2013 -| Ben visited Hong Kong at the beginning of 2013. What he must have thought about his hometown he is not aorund to tell me, but I know it’s the first vacation he’s had in a while. | It was there that Ben met my sister Sylvia, when they were both young and working in the same office. At that time my sister was learning to drive a stick-shift car and for hours and hours after dinner she would be out taking driving lessons w/ an instructor to god knows where. | Ben would also go off on his own as a young man, but where he went you can always find on a map: a local swimming pool, or the nearby basketball court. He left these pursuits behind when he came to San Francisco, and eventually took up gardening: on 44th Avenue, and later out on Bay Farm Island. Both had sandy soil, hard to take care of. | On Bay Farm he had a wisteria in ground next to a loquat tree in a pot. Ben was fearless and grew everything. And those that took to his care, he made green.

93 | Regina Maria de Oliveira Mattos DaSilva

|- 2.28.1921 – 11.28.2013 -| My father’s youngest sister. She ran the concession stand on the Peak, and took the Peak Tram to work everyday, after crossing the harbour by ferry from Kowloon side.

87 | Renee Lym Robertson

|- 8.4.1928 – 1.4.2015 -| ❝I bowed 3 times at the casket of Renée Lym Robertson. Auntie Renée died at the age of 87 in her stunning Nob Hill apartment. She was the daughter of Art Lym, the founder and head of the Chinese Air Force under the Nationalist government. She was born in Shanghai and fled to Hong Kong in 1949 as a refugee after the Communist Revolution. She was a noted beauty in her day and was a fixture in the international Hong Kong society that centered on the Peninsula Hotel; where she caught the eye of Clark Gable and became his girlfriend and lover. I will miss her beauty, her style, those jungle red nails and lips, the jade and diamonds, her stories and her wicked wit and wisdom. Auntie Renée was my Auntie Mame.❞ – Wylie Wong

33 | George Choy

|- 2.6.1960 – 9.10.1993 -| George was rocking a mohawk, so I took a pix, to remember our Passage through a rather brief moment in time. He now has one of the many plaques lining Castro Street.

| Back |

| Top |

-| May 2021 |-

EPICENTER OF 1906 EARTHQUAKE

Defenestration

| Back |

GREEN GODDESS

	- Jules Verne was invited in 1865 to help document the life aquatic in the harbor. The author altogether spent six months researching this water world, picking up the local tongue, talking to folks who would know. Disgarding the bulk as a concoction, little made it into Verne’s final manuscript, yet he decided to send the cuts to a friend working at a magazine. In the June 15 1884 issue of L'Algerie are the rejected notes of Jules Verne, accompanied by illustrations from Alphonse de Neuville, Édouard Riou, and George Chinnery.

| Back |

WHAT HE SAID
W.H. Auden quote: ...Ten thousand miles from home and What's-Her-Name. A bugle on this late Victorian hill puts out the soldier's lights; off-stage, a war thuds like the slamming of a distant door ...

PSYCHEDELIC PARK

Built in 1932 as a vertical landscape to enhance the property of a Hong Kong tycoon’s mansion, the Tiger Balm Gardens of Aw Boon Haw is an over-the-top folly.

|█ ⁕ █| The first steps to the garden already beguile.

| back |

UNIVERSITY TOWN Coimbra

⇞ CITY OF STUDENTS

Coimbra, a city in northern Portugal, is the see of a bishop, the capital of a province, and a center of learning. In 2013, UNESCO designated the University of Coimbra as a University Town Recipient for its World Heritage Sites, “… an integrated university city, w/ a specific urban typology, as well as its own ceremonial and cultural traditions.” The property consists of two areas: a hilltop complex of buildings, Uniersity Hill, and a series of scattered structures which all played a part in the university’s history.	There is a 12th century Augustinian monastery which was the first school, and the original library. The Inquisition swept into Portugal in 1567, and Coimbra was one of the three local centers tasked to conduct it. Outlasting these strictures, the university bounced back, w/ strengthened statutes, a reorganized syllabus of studies, greater emphasis on education in the vernacular, and the re-establishment of freeom of research. The old castle on the hilltop was finally pulled down to make way for new buildings. A seal was then struck, a praxe, consisting of a spoon (symbol of punishment), scissors (symbol of unruliness), and a stick (symbol of self-defense).

Coimbra, a city in northern Portugal, is the see of a bishop, the capital of a province, and a center of learning. In 2013, UNESCO designated the University of Coimbra as a University Town Recipient for its World Heritage Sites, “… an integrated university city, w/ a specific urban typology, as well as its own ceremonial and cultural traditions.” The property consists of two areas: a hilltop complex of buildings, Uniersity Hill, and a series of scattered structures which all played a part in the university’s history.

University of Coimbra

Founded in 1290, the University of Coimbra is the second oldest continuous institution of higher learning in Europe (the University of Paris is older), and the first university town in the world. In this northern Portuguese city, a world treasure become sited inside a national treasure, the school moved into a former royal palace on the summit of the hill, and grew to become a gathering spot for academics, writers, artists, who nicknamed this the Lusitanian Athens, ‘Lusa Atenas’.

⇞ CAMPUS

An early champion of the new science of circumnavigation, an observatory was built to make spatial sense of the stars. Investitures and major events take place in the ‘Sala Grande dos Actos,‘ below portraits of kings and queens. A cathedral, already there when the university arrived, was gifted by Jesuits. The throne room is now used for PhD candidate examinations, and nothing else. The four rooms of the ‘Museu de Arte Sacra’ contain, among holy habits and chalices, books of early sacred music. There is a museum of natural history. A colonnaded walkway by the grand patio was added in the 18th century, the ‘Via Latina.’ The campus chapel, ‘Capela de Sao Miguel’, means that no student need run downhill to another one. A Botanical Garden blossomed in 1772, that delightful Victorian experiment of Eden on earth, sprouting wherever colonialism circled. Patio das Escolas Main gathering spot on campus, w/ its unparalleled vista view, the Great Courtyard, makes of the patio paving a virtual flying carpet, attitude mostly due to altitude.	The Bell Tower allows for vista views under cramped quarters, and can be seen from most anywhere in the city. The best known of its three bells is the goat (‘a cabra’), summoning generations to their studies since 1733. There are five faculties (‘theologia’, ‘direito’, ‘medicina’, ‘mathematica’, ‘philosophia’) w/ disciplines in judicial and European court systems, interdisciplinary nuclear science, and the arts. (The university had begun by teaching law, rhetoric, mathematics, theology, medicine, grammar and Greek.) The teaching staff consisits of some 70 professors and lecturers. Semester is from autumn to the start of summer, when two months of exams take place. The ordinary degree resulting in the title ‘licenciado’ lasts five years. The degree of ‘doutor’ takes another year and another examination. Medical students study eight years. The university has a digital repositorium inside a tech park involved in research and incubation. There is a repository for the project April 25, documenting the toppling of a dictatorship. Auxiliaries of the city-wide university system take on citizen practices such as sports, theater, and botany and preservation; there are several kindergartens and nurseries under its wing.

An early champion of the new science of circumnavigation, an observatory was built to make spatial sense of the stars.

⇞ LIBRARY

When the university outgrew the original city library, a second one was built in the 18th century, on University Hill, the ‘Biblioteca Joanina’, the oldest university library in continuous use in the world, and housed in three large and resplendent Baroque rooms w/ painted ceilings. The first room has a light green palette, the second a darker green, and the third room has a “… shade like that of orange Niger leather”; rich in gilt and exotic wood, lined w/ 300,000 volumes in galleries runing around the walls, incl. arguably the most valuable collection of Bibles in the world.	Main library on campus also acts as a zoo: in the wings there live a colony of bats, eating the grubs that eat its pages. There are unpublished manuscripts of Domenico Scarlatti, thought lost but rediscovered in the 20th century, because they were incorrectly catalogued. By the front door, a passageway can take one down to the river, the ‘Palacios Confusos’, by a series of steps posing as alleys, past houses of different styles and years.

When the university outgrew the original city library, a second one was built in the 18th century, on University Hill, the ‘Biblioteca Joanina’, the oldest university library in continuous use in the world, and housed in three large and resplendent Baroque rooms w/ painted ceilings.

⇞ STUDENT BODY

The student body numbers about 25,000, and the dress code is a black Prince Albert coat, worn w/ black trousers, black cape batina, black dress tie; generally students go bareheaded. A military hospital happens to be located nearby, because. Freshmen may not be on the street after the bell has rung at 6pm, on penalty of being shaved bald, if caught. Another form of punishment is to measure the long bridge over the Modego w/ a match, and it must be done w/ meticulous accuracy. Even a good and sinless freshman must be prepared to run errands whenever required to do so by a sophomore or junior, but he may be “protected,” and the errand countermanded, by a friendly senior (‘quartanista’). In turn a sophomore and a junior are known as a semi-harlot (‘mejo prostituo / prostituta’) and a total harlot (‘total prostituo / prostituta’) respectively.	These ‘estudantes’ make up about a third of the town’s inhabitants. Their graduation ceremonies take place in May. It’s then that a localized form of ‘fado’ is sung, by male students only, and only on the steps of the old cathedral when 10pm comes around, w/ lyrics more intellectual and romantic than the genre asks for, love songs tuned to the passions and sentiments of the students, who perfume the air w/ their lamentations until dawn. Fado ‘Ali, o lirio do scelestes vales, tendosen fim, terão a seu começo, para não mais findar, nossos amores.’ (Yonder, lily of celestial valleys, your end shall be their beginning, our loves ne’er more to perish.) — Antero de Quental

The student body numbers about 25,000, and the dress code is a black Prince Albert coat, worn w/ black trousers, black cape batina, black dress tie; generally students go bareheaded. A military hospital happens to be located nearby, because.

⇞ STUDENT REPUBLICS

In the mid-1950s there were eleven “republics” or student organizations, active in the university. One of them is ‘Pra-kys-tao‘ (Here We Are), a fraternity of ten students for the mutual benefit of themselves and their always-slender budgets, and to satisfy wants such as traditional evenings of wine and shrimps in town. Membership was open, upon unanimous favorable vote, to students of any race, color, religion or political creed except, during that period, communism. In the most pratical way, the student who had been a member longest is automatically president. Using a rotation system, two students, followed by two more then two more, serve as executive officers for fifteen days. They run the republic and must explain and justify all outlays of money, and a debate on this topic may be opened at any time, all decisions being made by majority vote, and to be taken at the dinner table. Freshmen may not vote on money matters but on anything else. This particular republic had only 13 electric light bulbs for 15 rooms, incl. the dining room, kitchen and hallway. Pin-up girls papered over every wallspace, the harem of the eye (‘Harem do Olho’). One wall had graffiti: “Artillery Exported to Pra-kys-tao for the Protection of the Marshall Plan.”	Certain campus traditions take place to mark the academic seasons, involving parades through the city, each rife w/ its own occult rituals. The noisy Latada - Festa das Latas (celebration of end of class), and the older Queima das Fitas (burning of the ribbons), which goes on for eight days, involving light blue ribbons for the Sciences, dark blue for Letters, yellow for Medicine and purple for Pharmacy. Rua de Quebra-Costas Arguably the steepest route to the academic world in the world, aka Backbreak Street.

In the mid-1950s there were eleven “republics” or student organizations, active in the university.

⇞ CITY OF CULTURE

The original footprint of Coimbra has spilled downhil, and locals distinguish between the older Upper Town and the Lower Town. Coimbra Upper Town surrounded by Lower Town and the banks of the Mondego. The area bordering the Modego River is Cicade Baixa, downtown, where commerce happens amid Romanesque, early Baroque, Rococco, and Gothic structures, sporting Moorish shadows and sucumbing to the nautical notions of the Manueline style. A Portuguese queen is buried downtown, in a silver tomb housed in the convent of ‘Santa Ciara-a-Nova’. The Fountain of Life, waiting for you since the 14th century, is behind this church.	Unto the 1920s Coimbra was all but inaccessible by road to travellers, not to mention damp beds and dangerous foods. Sacheverell Sitwell visited in the 1950s: “… At Coimbra not only has there been wanton and appalling destruction of what was old and beautiful, but new University buildings have been erected which are really shaming in their blatant ugliness. The sculptures, particularly, are of an insulting hideousness. … Not that there is anything in the least Portuguese about these abominable buildings of Coimbra. But it is sad, too, because, Coimbra being the university town of Portugal, so many Portuguese retain memories of Coimbra and an affection for it all through their lives, and those memories will now forever more be tinged and coloured by the ugly buildings. There is no possible excuse for hideousness upon this scale; but it might, at least, be practised elsewhere and not in Coimbra.”

The original footprint of Coimbra has spilled downhil, and locals distinguish between the older Upper Town and the Lower Town.

⇞ LUIS DE CAMõES

The Lusiads Arguably the most famous student of the University of Coimbra is Luis de Camões, who (might have been) born in Coimbra in 1524 but known to have passed age 56 in Lisbon. His fame is partly based on supreme mastery of the Portuguese language and is its lyric poet, and his most famous work is a tour de force recounting the tragedy of Indes de Castro of Spain and her love Prince Pedro of Portugal, and her murder by jealous courtiers. She was killed by a fountain in the Garden of Tears (‘Quinta das Lagrimas’) in the convent of Santa Clara; where pond lilies are have been known to flower red. A stone slab by the fountain bears the following verse by Luís Vaz de Camões (Lusiads, Ill, 135), here in a translation by Lord Byron:	Tomb of Luis de Camões in Lisbon. Mondego’s Daughter-Nymphs the death obscure Wept many a year, with wails of woe exceeding; And for long memory changed to fountain pure, The floods of grief their eyes were ever feeding; The name they gave it, which doth still endure, Revived Ignez, whose murdered love lies bleeding. See yon fresh fountain flowing ‘mid the flowers, Tears are its water, and its name ‘Amores.’

⇞ MANUELINE STYLE

Flush w/ wealth from the Spice Trade, Portugal experienced a brief period where money became as abundant as sea water, and lavished it on an indigenous artform. The discoveries brought back by the sea voyages Pedro Alvares Cabral and Vasco da Gama aroused the already composite Portuguese style, toying w/ Flemish, Italian and Late Gothic elements. The newly rich gathered the bounties of the sea trade and repurposed them an architectural vocabulary in churches, monasteries, palaces and castles, and a maritime motif applied to furniture, sculpture and painting. The style was given a name in 1842 by the Viscount Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, in his description of the Jeronimos Monastery. The characteristics of this Manueline style, named for King Manuel I (1495-1521), resulted in ornate portals, bevelled crenellations, conical pinnacles, and eight-sided capitals.	There were semicircular arches on doors and windows, columns of carved rope, and a wanton disregard for symmetry. There were symbols of Christianity and latter-day Templars, botanical flourishes, artifacts found on ships, all garlanded by Islamic filigree work and Moorish traceries. Davy Jones’s locker Detail of the Triton Gate, standing guard in Sintra. Nautical wonders like seaweed and barnacles added to the dense ornamentation. More.

Flush w/ wealth from the Spice Trade, Portugal experienced a brief period where money became as abundant as sea water, and lavished it on an indigenous artform.

⇞ AEMINIUM

The most important remains in Coimbra is an underground gallery of arches that once supported the Roman forum, and brimming w/ Visigothic artifacts, the Cryptoporticus da Anemium. For protection a tower, the Montemor, was built closer to the sea, allowing guarded access to estuary of the oxbow shape of the Mondego river, as well as nearby vineyards.	The original footprint of the city of Coimbra can be seen in map, top right. When Gaius Sevius Lupus was sent from Rome, he followed the common cruciform rule of Roman towns and cities, locating the cardo maximus where it crosses the decumanus maximus, and where this cruciform intersected he built the forum. This was an outpost fort, on the spurs of a hilly range, the Serra de Lavrao. An aqueduct was a standard feature, and it ruins can still be found.

| Back|

TEA TIME

The Teapot That morning I heard water being poured into a teapot. The sound was an ordinary, daily, cluffy sound. But all at once, I knew you loved me. An unheard-of-thing, love audible in water falling. Robert Bly b.1926	One Lump or Two The must-dos for brewing a proper pot of tea, and how a constitutional drinking game, made palatable w/ sugar and milk, calmed a nation’s nerves.

Robert Bly b.1926

One Lump or Two

The must-dos for brewing a proper pot of tea, and how a constitutional drinking game, made palatable w/ sugar and milk, calmed a nation’s nerves.

Cream or Lemon A steadfastness in dutiful habiting is a core definition of Britishness in all matters related to tea, and in 2013 was due for a review: ❝ … the official six-page specification for how to make a cup of tea, is officially “under review”. But don’t panic. It is standard procedure for the British Standards Institution (BSI) to do a “systematic periodic review” of each of its many specifications which, piecemeal, define nearly everything British.	\|- ¶ -\| Belying stereotypes of peremptory rigidity in anyone or anything that officially tells the populace what’s what, the BSI is nice about what it does”. British Standards are voluntary in that there is no obligation to apply them or comply with them, it says. The standards are “devised for the convenience of those who wish to use them”. That sentiment appears in the 44-page specification, copies of which are available free of charge.❞

Historic Macao by C. A. Montalto de Jesus 1984. Oxford University Press.

| Back |

UNESCO ::: 2013 SACRED SPACE RECIPIENT

Mount Fuji

The northwest quadrant is a 14-square mile pine forest, the Aoki-ga-hara-jukai (Sea of Trees), which can be alarmingly dark during the day, forming a half moon around the base. This forest is home to goblins, demons, ghosts, and has been a destination suicide spot for many years.

It has come to pass and for as long as anyone can remember, there is and always has been a choice of only four trails leading pilgrims to the summit. All things here being of a magical quality, these four paths might very well allude to the Four Elements in a cosmic setting: rarefied Air at the summit, plentiful fresh Water within reach, Earth in its proudest seasonal garbs are all visited by the fire goddess Fuchi once a year, taking off her buddhist beads for a powwow w/ the princess. This takes place end of summer at a trail stop in the village of Yoshida, rife w/ rustic rumors insisting on a peculiar religiousity shared by fire festivals everywhere including the most famous, Burning Man, although it must be noted that the Yoshida Fire Festival is done and over with in a night and the following day, involving ceremonies to conclude the climbing season.

Sunrise as seen at the summit by all-night climbers has its own dedicated name, goraiko, as in “my goraiko was obscured by clouds with rain blotting out the horizon.” For the fortunate ones, though, words like "awesome" and "bright red" and "a figure" readily roll off their tongues when recalling the alpine sight of the sun peeking over a watery horizon, the shedding of darkness around the self, the wonderment that immortals are hovering nearby, a palpable sense of alignment with gravity again, maybe even new eyes for the descent. It has been likened to something we all know happens regularly and “see” but not see; kind of shinto. It is one of Japan’s three Holy Mountains, together with Mount Haku and Mount Tate, and is on the island of Honshu.

Fuji is an active and relatively young volcano 62 miles south-west of Tokyo. It sits on a “triple junction” radiating techtonically down to the Filipino Plate, west to the Eurasian Plate, and east towards the North American Plate, the Okhotsk. It has erupted 21 times, the last was on October 26, 1707 (an 8.4), and destroyed 72 houses and three buddhist temples. It was powerful enough to blow a scoop out at the tip, becoming an actual new crater on the eastern flank. On February 4, 2013, a metereological ticker tape came through the wires:

The volcano remains calm. However, an increased number of small quakes near and under Mt Fuji are visible on our latest data plot of nearby earthquakes (within 30 km radius). While all of these are very small and the number is certainly not alarming, the volcano remains interesting to watch….

| Back |

ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE RECIPIENT

Al-Zubarah, Qatar

Buried under sand for hundreds of years, slowly being dug up going on years now, is Qatar’s largest archaeological dig, and a very fine example, preserved, of a merchant town c.1800s. This site is the ruined coastal port famous for its walls and known as Al-Zubarah. Founded by merchants in the late 1700s, this settlement had thrived as a pearl-fishery industry and also as a trading post — it is centrally positioned on the main sea route in the Persian Gulf.	In 1811 there was a successful siege and what remained was abandoned and eventually was covered by sand. The property Al Zubarah Archaeological Site which comprises the 2013 UNESCO World Heritage Site is a fortified town, built w/ traditional Arab technqiues, that faces a harbor, w/ an original sea wall (exists still in part). A second, inner wall came later. The original fort still stands, there is another fort, two more walls, and a canal to the sea.	The largest domestic structure dug up gives a sense of the wealth enjoyed by the town’s richest, and why so coveted by its attackers: Nine inter-connected courtyards inside a building complex, surrounded by a high wall and having corner defense towers. Water fountain features are to be found, incl. ponds where a game played by children, called turtles-&-pearls, takes place underwater. Using a pet turtle, each player attempts to shoot a colored pearl into a row of different-colored pearls, w/ an aim of hitting out another pearl of the same color, all the while not disturbing the rest.

| Back |

≡| Motorist

≡| Heir

≡| Graduate

≡| Adult

≡| Witness

≡| Partisan

≡| Spouse

≡| Husband

≡| Electrician

≡| Petitioner

≡| Emigré

≡| Widower

≡| Paterfamilias

93 | Regina Maria de Oliveira Mattos DaSilva

69 | Benjamin Leung Gok Wing

87 | Renee Lym Robertson

76 | Pamela Rita de Oliveira Mattos Zauberer

33 | George Choy

≡| Motorist

≡| Heir

≡| Graduate

≡| Adult

≡| Witness

≡| Partisan

≡| Spouse

≡| Husband

≡| Electrician

≡| Petitioner

≡| Emigré

≡| Widower

≡| Paterfamilias

-¦ May 2021 ¦-

Defenestration

Built in 1932 as a vertical landscape to enhance the property of a Hong Kong tycoon’s mansion, the Tiger Balm Gardens of Aw Boon Haw is an over-the-top folly.

University of Coimbra

An early champion of the new science of circumnavigation, an observatory was built to make spatial sense of the stars.

When the university outgrew the original city library, a second one was built in the 18th century, on University Hill, the ‘Biblioteca Joanina’, the oldest university library in continuous use in the world, and housed in three large and resplendent Baroque rooms w/ painted ceilings.

The student body numbers about 25,000, and the dress code is a black Prince Albert coat, worn w/ black trousers, black cape batina, black dress tie; generally students go bareheaded. A military hospital happens to be located nearby, because.

In the mid-1950s there were eleven “republics” or student organizations, active in the university.

The original footprint of Coimbra has spilled downhil, and locals distinguish between the older Upper Town and the Lower Town.

Flush w/ wealth from the Spice Trade, Portugal experienced a brief period where money became as abundant as sea water, and lavished it on an indigenous artform.

One Lump or Two

The must-dos for brewing a proper pot of tea, and how a constitutional drinking game, made palatable w/ sugar and milk, calmed a nation’s nerves.

Al-Zubarah, Qatar

Mount Fuji

76 | Pamela Rita de Oliveira Mattos Zauberer

69 | Benjamin Leung Gok Wing

93 | Regina Maria de Oliveira Mattos DaSilva

87 | Renee Lym Robertson

33 | George Choy

-| May 2021 |-

Defenestration

Built in 1932 as a vertical landscape to enhance the property of a Hong Kong tycoon’s mansion, the Tiger Balm Gardens of Aw Boon Haw is an over-the-top folly.

University of Coimbra

An early champion of the new science of circumnavigation, an observatory was built to make spatial sense of the stars.

When the university outgrew the original city library, a second one was built in the 18th century, on University Hill, the ‘Biblioteca Joanina’, the oldest university library in continuous use in the world, and housed in three large and resplendent Baroque rooms w/ painted ceilings.

The student body numbers about 25,000, and the dress code is a black Prince Albert coat, worn w/ black trousers, black cape batina, black dress tie; generally students go bareheaded. A military hospital happens to be located nearby, because.

In the mid-1950s there were eleven “republics” or student organizations, active in the university.

The original footprint of Coimbra has spilled downhil, and locals distinguish between the older Upper Town and the Lower Town.

Flush w/ wealth from the Spice Trade, Portugal experienced a brief period where money became as abundant as sea water, and lavished it on an indigenous artform.

One Lump or Two

The must-dos for brewing a proper pot of tea, and how a constitutional drinking game, made palatable w/ sugar and milk, calmed a nation’s nerves.

Mount Fuji

Al-Zubarah, Qatar