Córdoba Plaque

kenritley

A sonnet by Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627), one of the great poets of the Spanish Golden Age and a native of Córdoba. The city places this poem on several buildings as a kind of literary homage:

¡Oh excelso muro, oh torres coronadas
de honor, de majestad, de gallardía!
¡Oh gran río, gran rey de Andalucía,
de arenas nobles, ya que no doradas!

¡Oh fértil llano, oh sierras levantadas
que privilegia el cielo y dora el día!
¡Oh siempre gloriosa patria mía,
tanto por plumas cuanto por espadas!

Si entre aquellos despojos y ruinas
que ennoblece el genio y dora el Baena,
tu memoria no fue alimento mío,

nunca merezcan mis ausentes ojos
ver tu muro, tus torres y tu río,
tu llano y sierra, ¡oh patria, oh flor de España!

Meaning

Góngora is lavishly praising Córdoba:

  • its walls and towers (Roman and medieval legacy),

  • the Guadalquivir River (“great river, great king of Andalusia”),

  • the fertile plains and surrounding sierras,

  • and Córdoba’s glory in culture and warfare (“by pens as much as by swords”).

 

Keeping shopping carts clean

kenritley

I spotted this at a L’Eclerc supermarket near Annecy, France. Open for use to the public – just pick your favorite shopping cart, wheel it in their, press the button – and presto!  Sanitized!  At least I assume so . . . I never actually tried it.  Wanted something for my bucket list and the next time I visit.

Then and Now – Spaghetti Westerns

kenritley

Somewhere deep in the deserts of Spain scenes like this were filmed,

Here, Lee Van Cleef was very upset and probably wanted to kill someone.

Today, the situation is hardly any different,

I took this snap on the “down low” because the Spanish lady who was drying her clothes SNARLED at me as I walked by.

Sadly, as far as I can tell, the residents of Los Albaricoques in Spain are NOT happy to have tourists in their town. It is a small town – and a poor one, by the looks of the infrastructure and tremendous trash all over the village. Oddly, there are new signs directing tourists to the key points where scenes in movies were shot. But I could see no benefits to the tourists, except for the many disruptions and “gawkers” this brought into their lives.

Business-Bytes 1 – 5

kenritley

–

BUSINESS-BYTES IS TAKING A HOLIDAY BREAK!

In the past few weeks I’ve been publishing around one “Business Byte” per week in LinkedIn – essentially, a very short post to explain something cool and important about the business world that new college graduates might not know. (Well, since I teach college graduates, I can confirm, a lot of what we take for granted in the business world is quite new to them.)

Amazingly, I’ve gotten over 30K views so far!

If you’d like to look at them during the holiday season, here’s a list!

graphical user interface, application

BB 05 – Dealing with executives from different generations

background pattern

BB04 – Chats and Emails

No alternative text description for this image

BB03 – Editing PowerPoints in a Group

No alternative text description for this image

BB02 – Name your files professionally

No alternative text description for this image

BB01 – Get a good bound notebook

 

Did I capture a UFO over Biel?

kenritley

I was trying out my new Tamron 18x400mm telephoto lens on my seagull Marvin, and his friend, perched on their usual perch, a base station across from my apartment:

That’s Marvin on the left. Anyway, I took another snap about 1 second later, and I saw this – which as you can see, also caught the attention of Marvin and his buddy:

As you can see a strange white ball in the sky.  Here is what it looks like when I zoomed in:

What I find amazing: I would have never seen this little white dot if it weren’t for my telephoto lens. So it makes me stop to think: all those videos that shows UFOs that the US Navy and US Air Force has recorded – maybe they are very same as the case here – without a telephoto lense, you just cannot see them?  

Alte Papierfabrik Biberist

kenritley

ChatGPT had the following to say about this place:

The paper factory in Biberist (just outside Solothurn) operated for over 150 years and supplied Switzerland with printing paper, packaging material, and later high-quality specialty papers. At its peak, it employed several hundred workers and shaped the entire region.

Shut down in 2011 — and slowly reborn
After the factory closed, the huge site didn’t vanish. Instead, it entered a long-term transformation into a new district for:

• guided industrial-heritage tours
• artist studios and creative spaces
• cultural events
• small tech and production companies
• exhibitions about the paper-making process

Visitors can now walk through parts of the old plant, see original machines, and get a sense of the enormous energy and water systems required to run a mill of this scale.

Amazing how time flies – 2

kenritley

Continuing the series, here’s a current lifetime snapshop of my scientific articles:

I guess I was never too keen on having a huge number of citations for any particular article – it makes me much more proud to see the staying power of some of these; that is, over 30 years have gone by since I started publishing, and over 20 years have gone by since I stopped – and still at least a handful of people find my little contributions to be useful enough to cite!