Budapest, Saturday afternoon. Bodyworlds, which exams prevented me from seeing in London, has spawned copycats, such as Bodies. I imagine the original to be a lot more artistic and somehow more neatly executed, but maybe they just have better lighting and more expensive photographers doing their promotional stuff.

But it was wicked to see all the muscley bits and a diaphragm, an omentum and so on. And foetuses in jars at a load of gestative stages (digestation = twins?), which look shockingly like they might grow up to be humans... Arteries are much thinner than I had thought. Through Galen's broken foot I came across Jonathan Monks' uncanny ability to suggest what is wrong with you and how to fix yourself: pain in the calf? Press here in the armpit and see how that feels, etc. Then you look at these long nerves and multilapping muscles and begin to see how it all might work.

When the proud fennel citadel finally weakens and falls:

Knees and a nose, a nose and knees

Bodies tells us that there are arteries not far behind.

And I suppose I should also feature the proud fennel citadel in its glory days, but I don't seem to have that picture here sad face

Currently reading: Antal Szerb's short story about a king, Oliver VII. I like his style. I understand that none of the several people (minimum) to whom I recommended The Pendragon Legend has dropped by number 88 to pick it up. What a waste! Still, it will sit and wait, books are nice like that. Not like blogs.

audiences

(because i'm feeling lazy, perhaps, and becuase i reckon people don't read comments on several day old posts, this was a comment responding to this on an earlier post)

Goosey, I find your example very odd - what's strange about fans at a gig raising their arms and cheering for the band on stage? I'm well up for making people consider their actions in a different light, martian's-eye views and all. (Although it seems a little risky when those in question aren't just cheering but are pushing you toward stardom!) When at rallies, I feel a bit uncomfortable looking at people chant about whatever they chant about. Or rather, the most striking aspect is always the similarity between war-stopping or World Bank bashing protests and rallies on other, mutually exclusive activities, NF or whatever, football chants, the bits in church services where everyone mumbles the same thing. They all have something sinister and disappointing about them. In true bio-structuralist form(!), I guess it says that people and social organisms are very similar undearneath, only distinguished by the window-dressing of allegiances or agendas.

Audiences are oppressive, and they have codes of behaviour. Seeing Wynton Marsalis at the Royal Albert Hall was (great, but also) very frustrating: an RAH audience Does Not move. At all. the very occasional nodding head, and goodness knows how many tensed up buttocks and silenced hips dying to show that they can hear the music.

The time I most hated audiences was at the end of "Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder", a dance piece by Yasmeen Godder. She is an Israeli choreographer and this piece had a major theme of the suffereing and humiliation of life with checkpoints. Of course it was much deeper than that, with a lot of references to pain within individual relatinoships as well as the larger scale, and all delivered with maybe the most precise, smooth dancing I have ever seen. In short, both form and content were captivating and moving. It ended with a woman crying-scraming very loud and hysterically with her boyfriend dying in her arms. A very strong climax, the stage dark apart from the two of them, all other dancers gone - it was 'over', except that she was continuing this incredible grief. In that moment, there was no wronger audience reaction than to start clapping and whistling. We should have all left quietly, or what. But they clapped and cheered and I couldn't fathom that we had just spent an hour watching the same thing. Maybe I'm snobbishly projecting, but pretty much everyone else had missed the point.

Green blues

Our office received a 'Green office award' from the UNDP administrator some time, last year or this. I just did a study on the tap in the bathroom near my office. This tap is left running, as the only way to turn it off is to do yourself an injury. Once I managed to get it down to maybe two drips a second, causing greater physical pain than the soul-pain of leaving it running. The people who mostly use that bathroom are the security guards and the woman who mans reception, and me. It isn't laziness, it's simply unreasonable to expect anyone to turn that tap off. I mentioned it to the building manager several weeks ago (he of the fridge). Apparently, taps are difficult to replace and expensive. He is pathetic. I wonder whether it was also him who decided the best place for a fire escape is out the back of the stairs...

Anyway, now the Green Office Team (which I guess doesn't include him) knows that we are wasting about 730 litres of water a day, and have agreed to do something about it. In an email.

That's the fuel capacity of a Panzer tank, or (more relevantly?) the average annual drinking-water intake of a Canadian.

Further to Geneva, some photos

On offer at the Red Cross museum, which is an alright museum, but their mazelike layout is a bit effective. At the beginning they have a section about protecting life, with extracts from various ancient cultural-religious texts purporting to support the idea of humanity in warfare. However, at least in the case of the extracts from Sun Tzu and the Hadith, they say 'treat prisoners well, as they will then be more effective slave labour.' This lays the basis for humanitarian law...

Over at the museum of human perfection, they had pretty things to entice the eye.

Even Geneva has panelaky

Public art by the Palace of the Nations

Heaven's Gate

They take their food seriously (it seems, though I didn't eat particularly well).
They even fly-post invitations to cutlery events:

from the cote du rhone

It's all over, and I am back in Pressburg. We stumbled across a horse race this afternoon. Ilona bet on Senita, who came first. My Kragulec came fourth. In no particular order:

Geneva has a big fountain in its lake, which has been running for a hundred something years and which is a very pleasant feature. Like many lovely things, it started life as a mistake.

Attending a technical UN conference was predictably an experience which broadened my mind. Maybe not in ways I would have expected - by far the most attractive aspect was the jolly academic cameraderie of the demographic experts, which maybe bodes well since I will study Demography and Health in the autumn. The subtitle of the Generations and Gender Programme conference was "Towards Policies Based on Better Knowledge", but there was a lot on knowledge and not so much on policy. Their potential to come across as a navel-gazing group with no values was tempered by the impassioned call during the closing session from the very impressive John Hobcraft for the scientific community to remember their role as providing a basis for valuable social policy making; given the large-scale disinterest of the policy community, they could be forgiven for treating the event as a chance merely to talk among themselves, but thankfully this closing comment and that from the UNECE's director or general secretary, following that from the UNFPA representative, suggested that the estrangement of the policy and data aspects of the conference might be addressed in the design of future events.

My presentation went okay. The previous midnight, at home, it went better, but no matter. I learned a great deal in the process (this has to happen in a real forum because I failed to get involved in a debating group at university - word to anyone in the position not to make that mistake), not least that I may fluster myself by trying to respond to the chair's joke in his introduction. But maybe a bit of humour is worth a bit of fluster. In all, the attempt to get policy makers to include young people in developing policy which targets them fell a little foul of the aforementioned lack of interest from the national delegates (although the woman from the Council of Europe was sincerely interested and had some good ideas). Which means if anything happens in the continuing saga of UNFPA's youth policy review, it will probably be led from the international technical support side rather than the national

All the above is academic though, as I am embarking someday soon on a new life as a particle physicist - the proper tour of CERN wasn't even available, but the standing exhibition was enough. The joys of maths and the immensity of scale (large and small), the beauty of the precision of the engineering, the sound of cow-bells clanging in the field opposite Site B. And the distance (measured, of course, in light years) from the frustrations of trying to make social policy. So yes, any day now...

Any suggestions welcome as to how a prospective country director for Amnesty International could propose to spend 4000 euros on a one-year project. It seems rather a little to me...

Photos soon.

At the CERN bus stop

Uncompromisingly stood up; headache moved in to stay.


"Are you a particle physicist?"
"Yes."

And so on - all woes forgotten, headache marginalised for a while, he was even interested in youth policy. The only thing missing was the Higgs boson.

And later, lost on my way in the dark to my host's home, I got a ride in a 2CV. What a way for things to work out.

This was quite amusing, if disappointing in answering its question at 2:58 and in this post and comments.

I was also delighted to remember about Jen's (sadly radical) blog,
which is not so frequently updated but well worth a read, especially if you are too attached to all that gender rubbish you were socialised into.