This bottle has a long history, both as a brand (google it :), but personally. I bought a case in Klein Constantia near Cape Town in January 2005, and carried it around South Africa for about 2 weeks before bringing it back home.
Why ? not only is it a delicious liquor wine, but it carries the first name of girls in my family. Hence, I thought, I would only open a bottle when my first daughter would be born, and only if she carried at least Constance in her names.
We had a starter last night, with Roquefort. A perfect combination. And my daughter Cléophée Anne Constance was born a couple of weeks ago.
Time to uncork a bottle.
This is a very unusual video, that I taped in SPANISH (listen to our beautiful Chilean accent) about 6 weeks ago, when the famous Pablo BLANCO TRAVERSO, a famous geenalogist from Chile was on a professional visit in Paris. I had been chatting with Pablo for many years without ever meeting him in person. Magic of the Internet ! I even spent a whole day driving to small villages in Italy last summer looking for data for him.
Pablo is the co-founder with Santiago SCHULER of [ChileGenea], the Chilean genealogy mailing list on Yahoo! groups, one of the only place where you will find useful help on Chilean families on the web. We have about 250 subscribers, asking for very specific data, or more novice users. Another good pointer is Mauricio PILLEUX’s page and ApellidosItalianos (an Argentian site!)
Pablo tells us that genealogy is a very rare occupation in Chile, with probably only 25 “serious” people involved (and of course we all know them). In terms of books, we only have about 10 reference books (+ the excellent yearly – or so – magazine from the Chilean Genealogy Association; I just bought the whole collection!!!) split in 3 main zones:
Remember I do genealogy as a hobby ? Indeed I seldom talk about it, because that’s where I get a break in my mind.
And if you listen carefully, this interview wouldn’t have been complete without a few “huevaditas” 
Every year, I commemorate in silence the night of August 24th. For 2 reasons: it was the birthday of my first girlfriend in high school 
, and more seriously because it is a very important day in European history and one of the worst massacres on religious grounds. More background on the night of Saint-Barthelemew on August 24th, 1572 here (in French) and here (in English); you may also rent “la Reine Margot” with Isabelle Adjani for a historic recount on that terrible night.
If you ever drop by Paris, you can visit the church of St-Germain l’Auxerrois just in front of the Louvre, where it all started. And there is a lovely statue of admiral Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the hugenots, very close by under the arches of the rue de Rivoli.
Religion wars should by all means be a thing of the past. I forgot to blog it, but IRA decided to drop military action, and pursue peace through Sinn Fein. One of the last war zones between Catholics and Protestants is now gone. Amen.
Most of us have gazillion of old pictures at home that we rarely look at or share with family. By us, I mean genealogists who collect all family documents from all family members (photocopies, pictures, etc.).
I started uploading some pictures recently on Flickr where the note-on-a-picture is a wonder to help identify who's who. On this picture for instance, you see my great-great-grandparents Stanislaus HANNIG and Berta ULRIKSEN SIEMSEN on a boat crossing the Atlantic between Germany and Chile, with their 5 kids. I don't remember the exact date of the trip off the tip of my head, but it should be around 1905 or so.
Have a look, I uploaded about 380 pictures on this set, and it includes also lots of old pictures of Chile that were used in postcards used between my family members.
Amazing piece of news. One of my all time favourite movies is All the President's Men (1976) with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, on the Watergate scandal that brought down former US president Dick Nixon. I've seen it probably more than 10 times. It has all the drama of a fantastic script (although the end is a bit too short), and the great character, Deep Throat.
"follow the money": wasn't this one of the greatest lines with "make my day Punk!" and "you talkin' to me? you talkin' to me you ****" ?
and that fantastic scene about double checking a fact: "if I count until ten and you don't hang up, can I publish the story?"
"hello...? hello... ? are you still there? "
"yes"
Tonight, I discover on Russ' blog that the identity of the man is finally uncovered this week. What ? I thought I'd never read about this in my life time. I'll let you follow the links.
Next: who killed JFK?
Update on 9/6/05: Boing Boing has links to MP3 audio tracks of conversations between Nixon & Deep Throat.
Tim Berners-Lee, was knighted today by ERII (Elizabeta Regina v.2). He is the father of the modern Internet as we know it (not the network which dates back to the end of the 1960s at DARPA), since he wrote the first HTML server and browser in 1989 and is credited for having invented the World Wide Web the year before. You can check a number of sites on the web for more history, including at the World Wide Web Consortium.
What caught my eye, is the guidelines that Sir Tim gives for sending him email. Simple and effective.
Add them and the netiquette to your preferred bookmarks. :
"What not to email
Email is safe unless it contains programs. (Data and documents are fine, programs are not). If you send me a program, I will not run it, as it could damage my system and could be a virus.
* Note: Documents for Microsoft word, Excel, and possibly other Office programs tend to execute programs (scripts) in what you would expect to be harmless documents. These can expose my machine to viruses, because these programs do not (it seems) prevent scripts from running within a document when it received by email. Please do not send me Microsoft Office documents.
* If you are sending text, please send it as plain text or HTML. If you use your favorite word process, slide tool, etc, and send it in that program's format, then you are forcing me install proprietary software on whatever machine I read them on. .
* If your email is sent from Microsoft Outlook, and contains an attachment, I will be more likely to discard it as I understand that a famous series of viruses in 2001 resulted from Outlook's tendency to execute scripts in email, and used up a huge amount of my and my colleague's time.
What you can email
* These are all good document standards: Plain text messages, HTML (sometimes called rich text) pages without scripts, Photos (JPEG files, PNG, GIF), SMIL, RDF/XML N3 and so on. All these can be sent as messages or as attachments to messages. I can read them with a variety of software programs, and they cannot contain viruses. If you don't need anything else, then use plain text.
These are good rules when emailing anyone."
Pablo Neruda (real name: Ricardo Eliacer Neftali REYES BASOALTO), the great Chilean poet and 1971 Litterature Nobel Prize winner, would have turned a 100 years old on Monday. The New York Times run a story this week of course.
One of Chile's major newspaper has an online biography, and you will find an extract of his family tree on my genealogy site sepulveda.org (with some luck also my remote link to him or his link to Chile's President Ricardo LAGOS ESCOBAR;).
Universidad de Chile has a site on Neruda, and there is also an official site on the centennial. Finally, the Pablo Neruda Foundation is also online.
I seldom get the impression of reading the same book again. Even weirder when you read the 'sequel' before the current book.
Half-way into one of Dan Brown's (the author of the Da Vinci code) other opuses, Angels & Demons, and into 3 murders already (out of 5 supposedly), the similarities are striking:
And if you are into conspiracy theories, a very similar story can be found in the cartoon series "Le Triangle Secret" (8 volumes). Another very disturbing book is close to the plot in this story: 'In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I' - many unswered questions and details with a background of conspiracy by Banco Ambrosiano, Masonic Lodge P2, Opus Dei, etc...
I am sure these stories are going to make great action/suspense fiction films. I understand from the web that the Da Vinci Code is already being planned; the books have a fantastic kind of ambiance, such as those found in the great 'Silence of the Lambs' or the less good but still interesting 'Seven'.
Has anyone read both books ?
Don't get me wrong. Even this one is VERY entertaining (give it a try Pascal !)...
Probably found my summer beach reading in today's sunday edition of the NYT: in particular 'Birth oF the Chess Queen seems (link here for it on amazon.com): sounds like a great read. Excerpt of the article:
"In ''Birth of the Chess Queen,'' a wide-ranging exploration of the origins of chess and of its most powerful piece -- the queen -- the Stanford gender scholar Marilyn Yalom, author of ''A History of the Wife,'' ''A History of the Breast'' and other record-correctors, has rattled the vaults of Europe to shake out the missing-link chess pieces that show the game's evolution on the Continent. Her fossil record is chessmen made of marble, crystal, bone and jewel-encrusted gold, and in these relics' changing contours she traces the rise and spread of female power and prestige across Europe in the Middle Ages."
