The Bluegrass Beans on October 10 at Sybille and Rolf Menzi’s Western saloon in Rottenswil. These guys are not merely good; they are seriously good.
Interesting things
Hidden canals #1: Rue de Zürich
It looks like an unkempt street fountain in the shape of a canal, here at the Place de Zürich, on the Rue de Zürich in the neighborhood of Krutenau, in Strasbourg. And that’s probably what most people would think it is. But they’d be wrong.
Strasbourg is a medieval city, many of whose streets date back 6 or 7 centuries. But the Rue de Zürich is a relatively modern street, created in 1872 by filling in the Rheingiessen Canal. I have not been able to find out exactly why they chose to eliminate this canal, but the timing corresponds to other major canal building efforts in France, most notably the Canal du Marne au Rhein.
Interestingly, there is a fountain just up the street, which celebrates the landing of a group of Swiss in the year 1576. Surely anyone who sees that fountain must be confused (well, I was, until I found out about the ancient canal), because there is otherwise no other indication that Rue de Zürich was once a famous canal!
There are a few other interesting examples of “hidden canals” I hope to share in the near future.
 |
 |
Food ideas #1
Useful matrix for ideas
I just saw this in the wonderful book by Randall Munroe entitled What If? Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions.
The garbage man always collects twice – in Texas
Twice per week, that is. Each garbage bin is much, much bigger than you’ll find anywhere in Europe. The contents of the bin are not regulated by law; anything from old boxes to old batteries to old bananas is ok. And the driver stays in the air conditioned cab and operates the controls remotely.
My first few hours with WordPress
A few days ago I installed WordPress, because I wanted to create a new personal homepage and start blogging. And to showcase some of my writing and my music.
WordPress is fairly self-explanatory so I didn’t need a manual. And after finding the Radiate theme I quickly got the “parallax” effect I always wanted to have – not the best parallax I’ve seen (no pun), but better than the old static web-pages. But I quickly hit a limit: I could find no easy and straightforward way to create a photo album I was happy with. The only solution seemed to be to download and use various freeware plug-ins, most of which overloaded my system with spam messages inviting me to upgrade to their “pro” version.
So I took a timeout, investigated a few other CMS systems, even installed Drupal – and after another hour gave up in frustration and returned to WordPress.
So far, WordPress seems to be a fine product. But it also seems to be a home for “bait-and-switch” theme and plug-in developers, promising you much but delivering next-to-nothing in their freeware version. And so far, I am seeing a few signs that my web-hoster might also be playing bait-and-switch, trying to get me to upgrade to the “high performance” version.