Colours of the Past

A great post at Poemas del Río Wang about colour photos shot by Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky in imperial Russia before the First World War. I didn't know that colour photgraphy did even exist back then, all I had seen from that period were originally black-and-white photographs that have been coloured by hand. These photographs make the time look so much nearer and closer! Thinking of that period, I would normally have Sepia toned images in my head, or maybe simple black-and white, but these photographs have the look and feel of photographs taken in the 1950 or 60s, like the slides of trips across Germany and Italy that my father used to show to us.
The surviving collection can be found at the U.S. library of congress.

Chocolate museum / Schokoladenmuseum / Музей шоколада

On Friday I went to the Chocolate Museum in Cologne with my ladies.  Very nicely located on the Rhine, near the customs port, it informs about the production of chocolate, from the cocoa tree to the packaged chocolate, and about the history of cocoa and chocolate cultivation, production, and consumption, from its Mesoamerican beginnings to modern times. As befits a chocolate museum, it also has a café (with a view on the Rhine) serving hot chocolate and sweets, as well as the usual hot drinks and, during noontime, a small, but tasty, selection of hot dishes; it also has a shop selling chocolates and sweets. We spent about 3 hours there, including lunch at the café. As I'm the kind of person who looks at every exhibit and reads all the informatory signs, I was about 2/3 through the exhibition when my ladies finished, so I didn't see the exhibition on the 3rd floor, which, as my daughter told me, was about chocolate producers and brands.
It's a well-done exhibition, and has some nice attractions, like a hothouse with tropical plants, working machines producing chocolate that feed a chocolate fountain where you can taste said chocolate, a stand where you can design and buy your own chocolate bar, puzzles and games dispersed through the exhibition. We spent 80 € on that outing - 25 € for a family ticket, 40 € for food and drinks for three at the café, and 15 € for chocolates. I can recommend it as a place to spend an educational and fun afternoon, both for families as well as for adults.
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Am letzten Freitag war ich mit meinen Damen im Schokoladenmuseum. Interessante Ausstellung und ein nettes Café mit Blick auf den Rhein und gutem Essen. Ich kann's empfehlen.
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В пятницу мы с семьей посетили Музей шоколада в Кёльне. Там экспонаты объясняют происхождение и производство шоколада и историю распространения и употребления этого продукта. Имеются, конечно, и кафе (с видом на Рейн и вкусной едой) и магазин шоколада. Интересное место, стоящее посещения.   

Continuity?

This blog is about when I find things, not about when they happen. Sorry, but you'll have to get used to that. Christopher Hitchens, as usual mixing up the essential with the circumstantial, notices life through the lense of literature, making his own quirky sense of it. Spengler would have liked this (the fact, not the sentiment):

If there was one thing on which I would have wagered a good deal, it was the impossi­bility of Britain’s ever again being governed by a waistcoated charmer from that particular school. Yet here we are 70 years on, and the British Conservatives are led by an old Etonian named David Cameron, who was also a member of a Brideshead-type dining club at Oxford. And all the indications are that he could oust “New Labour” from power. I dare say you could call that promising.

Mr. Grumpy Future was always convinced that British democracy was a charade played by the Etonian elites for public consumption*1). I, for my part, go with this quote from Conolly:

In spite of the slow conversion of progressive ideas into the fact of history, the Dark Ages have a way of coming back. Civilisation—the world of affection and reason and freedom and justice—is a luxury which must be fought for, as dangerous to possess as an oil-field or an unlucky diamond.

What can I do? I'm a child of my times!

*1) Note added June 16th: Just in case anyone gets me wrong, I think Spengler's conception of English democracy was already barely tenable when he wrote "Decline of the West". The 20th century opened even the top jobs to a much wider range of backgrounds. But, as we see, that doesn't mean that someone of the old elites will never again get a chance.