A renaissance man for the twenty-first century!
I’m not saying it’s bad – so don’t get me wrong. But when a market doesn’t smell – when it doesn’t have dirty floors – when you can’t hear animals wailing – somehow that’s more of a grocery store to me than a real market. This place was so clean you could eat off the floors!
Scientists have examined the storks in Europe and have said there are two categories, often living side-by-side: the storks that fly to Spain in the winter, and the storks that fly to Africa in the winter. Apparently, what they do is influenced by their families. And amazingly, the storks fly differently: if a scientist can measure how a stork flies, even for a few seconds, they can tell to which category the stork belongs!
Sadly, I don’t have these skills. Are the storks here Spain-flyers, preferring to drink Xeres and enjoy tapas over the winter? Or are they African-flyers, preferring baba ganoush and hot black tea over the winter? Or . . . maybe these are just LAS (Lazy-Ass Storks) that don’t fly anywhere for the winter?
Life really has too many mysteries!
Tourism is one thing – but I think it can be taken a bit too far. I wonder what Alsacians think when they see something like this?
I spotted this at Marché Couvert de Colmar. In economics there is a good concept known as opportunity cost.
Interestingly, all these little people are not just little people but figures from the Bible. And from what I’ve read, they date back to the 19th century.
OK, biologists could spend hours discussing the in’s and out’s of slimes vs algae vs moss. All I know is this snap is a thing of beauty and I could hardly resist capturing it when I walked by! It is jewels of beauty like this that ensure Alsace in France is always worth returning to!
A lot of people would look at a snap like this and not really think about it. But I think about these things – a lot. The pattern of stork poop on the left is perfectly reasonable. It’s what you’d expect because stork butts are fairly big, and the storks need to hang their big, fat stork butts quite far outside their nest in order to take a poop.
But the stork poop on the right is harder to understand. I really have no good theories to explain this.
Continuing the series, this snap is from Colmar
Unbelievably, the renovation is scheduled to continue until 2030!
BTW, that figure is one of the Popes Leo – but obviously not the one from today, who is from Chicago and does not have a beard!
This is Pope Leo IX, or at least a statute of him, in downtown Eguisheim in Alsace, France:
And thirteen popes later we have Pope Leo XIV,
Clearly, both of them are wielding big sceptors – call a ferula. The one on the statute has three bars – which differentiates itself from those from archbishops (two bars) or bishops (1 bar). But . . . it raises an interesting question: when did popes stop sporting beards?