Nobel Prize for Literature, 2007

It went to Dorrs Lessing, the 88-year-old British writer.
It's time to enrich my lybrary with a new author (new for me).
Lessing is the second British writer to win the prize in three years. In 2005, Harold Pinter received the award. Last year, the academy gave the prize to Turkey's Orhan Pamuk.
"When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s," she told The Associated Press in an interview last year ago. "What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?"


The literature award was the fourth of this year's Nobel Prizes to be announced. On Wednesday, Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding such questions as why the ozone layer is thinning.
Tuesday, France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg won the physics award for discovering a phenomenon that lets computers and digital music players store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.
Americans Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.
Prizes for peace and economics will be announced through Oct. 15.
The awards -- each worth $1.5 million -- will be handed out by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

It's St George's day here. And as my name comes from George, I celebrate. It's good, most people remember my name day, because it's a national holiday too, but few people know my birthday.

I spent the afternoon at my grandparents', eating lamb (tradition!) and drinking old alcohol drinks, not to say ancient. My grandpa keeps them for years - today's wine was from 1972, for instance. And there were so many horses in the green sad field outside. Most of the people in the village are relatives of ours but I still cannot manage to make someone give me a horse to ride. So I'll have to go riding here, in the big city. Modern times...

Speaking (writing) of which, in a minute ago I wrote to my brother, who is in the next room, to turn the volume up, because I heard the beginning of "High Hopes". Not that I couldn't shout and he couldn't hear me through the door, but technologies are much better...

I don't want to do the lot of work I had and I want to learn my Finnish grammar instead, but I cannot because of all the work that had to be done. So I'd better start with doing something useful...

Stuff

For every body's surprise (and mine too) I guessed correctly the score of Liverpool - Chelsea football game this Tuesday. And knowing that I bet on Liverpool only because I'm huge Beatles fan...

I was given a flower - very spontaneously and although it was small wild one, this was a very beautiful thing.

There are some things that perplex me at last.fm. How doest it exactly work... I'll find put some day :)

RIP

Well, I was missing more than a week, indeed, but today I've got a lot to write about. I just wish it wasn't so sad news...
Kurt Vonnegut died last night, at the age of 84.
Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.
I can never forget a chapter from "Cat's Cradle", the chapter about the duprass. "Horlick Minton, the New American Ambassador to the Republic of San Lorenzo, and his wife, Claire...They were lovebirds. They entertained each other with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed only of two persons." The members of a duprass die within a week of each other. A true duprass can't be invaded, not even by children born of such a union.
It reflects part of my understanding of relationships.
I think it's time for me to read Vonnegut again. It's just a pity that the occasion is so sad.

Space Flight

Last year I was teaching my students about stars and planet and rockets. The Lebanese book wasn't very interesting indeed so I told the kids additional facts, first man in space included. But I realize I've never known the exact date of Gagarin's flight. Thank you, Google - the search engine is celebrating 12 April with a special logo
There are a lot of speculations about the flight, Gagarin's death etc., but I have keen memories from my childhood - we knew songs and poems about him and I suppose this day was celebrated as a holiday. I was always passionate about the outer space, maybe that's why I'm a big SciFi fan.
I will not put links to sites with information about this day - there are plenty and Google helps a lot ;) I just feel spacey today.