NB!
Alexandr Radayev
Observations · People · Humour
Can we agree that the American swimmer and twenty-three-time Olympic champion Michael Phelps, upon receiving his thirteenth gold medal back in 2016, broke the absolute Olympic record of the ancient Greek athlete Leonidas…
Can we agree that the American swimmer and twenty-three-time Olympic champion Michael Phelps, upon receiving his thirteenth gold medal back in 2016, broke the absolute Olympic record of the ancient Greek athlete Leonidas of Rhodes, who over four Olympic Games (164 to 152 BC) emerged the victor twelve
Art · Monarchies · Paris · Saint Petersburg
Porphyry and gilt-bronze ewers by Gouthière
Porphyry and gilt-bronze ewers by Gouthière. Paul I acquired them in Paris in 1799 and placed them in his bedchamber in the Mikhailovsky Castle in Saint Petersburg. These vases stood in the Emperor's bedchamber on the night of his murder, between 23 and 24 March 1801. No,
NB! · Humour
Are You Quite Sure You're the Traffic Police Chief?
NB! · Observations · Humour
Congratulations to all forty-year-olds on the birthday of Carl Jung, who reassuringly declared that life truly begins only at forty; until then you are merely conducting research
NB! · Observations · Humour
When You Grasp the Futility of Being on a Monday Morning on the Metro
Coming Up · Architecture · Art · Moscow · Museums
Francisco Infante's Red Square lighting project at the Garage Museum exhibition
Francisco Infante's plan for the illumination of Red Square. Among much else, it contains a most intriguing proposal: a dynamic lighting scheme for the Kremlin wall, in which a white light would "march" along the wall itself in step with the honour guard. Regrettably, the idea
Observations · Science · People
Svetlana Savitskaya made the first spacewalk by a woman in July 1984
On 25 July 1984 Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman on planet Earth to walk in open space, for 3 hours 34 minutes. The flight itself, in July 1984, lasted 11 days 19 hours 14 minutes 36 seconds. She returned from space with a second Gold Star of a Hero
NB! · Art · Observations · Humour
Winged creature in a detail of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch
A winged creature waits for you to open the window with no mosquito net. Hieronymus Bosch
Observations · Palaeontology · Nature · Ethnography
I read a post on an anthropology channel about Elliot Smith and hyperdiffusionism, which among other things hints at the penetration of Egyptian culture into America, explained by the presence of images of elephants in Mesoamerican art…
I shall not hold forth at length on Mesoamerican art and Egypt, still less on the views of Elliot Smith. I will say only that there were, of course, elephants in America. And of the most various kinds. If we speak of the family Elephantidae proper, America was widely populated
Interviews · Books · London · Monarchies · Observations · People
Sarah, Duchess of York, interviewed about her first adult novel Heart for a Compass
Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, photographed by Holly Fernando for The Telegraph. From the interview we learn that she is now the author of 77 books (for children) and has at last written a novel for adults, Heart for a Compass, about the vicissitudes of court life in the Victorian
Geography · Maps · Books · Monarchies
Sergey Nikitin, in his book "The Land of Names" (NLO, 2020) on historical onomastics in Russia, relates, for example, that Paul I, soon after his accession, renamed Yekaterinoslav, Feodosia and Sevastopol, all named under Catherine the Great, to…
Novorossiysk is, in principle, clear enough: the new name was tied to that of the whole region, Russia's southern Russian acquisitions. But Kafa and Akhtiar? The former is found as early as Afanasy Nikitin; it was what the Genoese called Feodosia, and after them the Turks who seized