After getting completely lost on the tube I eventually made it to the Luvre.
After getting completely lost on the tube I eventually made it to the Luvre. | |
 | Ok, so this is Leonardo Da Vinci's John the Baptist. While the pose is mildly reminicient of the egyptian philosophers (who frequently held up their index fingers to signify that they had an idea) what is really impressive about this piece is the background and the awareness of light as it cascades over John's body. The way in which John bleeds into the darkness of the hill behind him is similar to the technique used frequently by the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt Van Rijn... of course, if the technique was stolen it was Rembrandt that did the stealing since this was painted nearly two hundred year before he was even born! Anyhow, a fantastic painting, one of Da Vinci's best in my humble opinion. Any guesses as to how many people actually stopped to look at it whilst I was standing there? Try none, zero, zilch. All anyone cared about was the Mona Lisa, which is really just peanuts compared to a masterpiece like this. |
Paris at night. Ah.... |  |
 | Versailles... Everyone always talks about the complexity of the architecture and how "indescribable" it is. Well they are wrong. Versailles can be very easily described with one word "MEGALOMANIA"! Jeez, talk about being full of yourself, Louis the XIV was one of the most disgustingly spoilt peole to have ever lived. And to make matters worse, while he was living in this oppulence more than 85% of the population in France was bloody starving to death! So in short, neat castle, bad king. We complain about democracy all the time, but honestly, all you need to do is travel to Versailles to realize how much better even malfunctioning representative democracy is than monarchy. |
Brilliant gardens though. |  |
 | And fantastic fountains. The weather was crap, and all of the fountains were off. But even so, they were still very creatively designed and impressive. This one is of a giant that has fallen under the collapse of a mountain. I am certain this is tightly linked to a myth about the titans, but I just cannot identify which one. |
And the dragon fountain. Oh, I wish I could have seen this one on! |  |
 | The gardens at versailles are huge, and the further you go, the more relaxing they become. They also lose some of their Roccoco feel and become a bit more neo-classical in style. The grotto was lovely. |
Ok, this is not Paris. This actually the weekend after. Neil Calder, my supervisor at CERN, is leaving in a month and a half to start work as the director of communications at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). He threw a big going away party and all the keen people I work with were there. The fellow standing to my left is Robert Calliau, inventor of the Web. He and I go for our morning tea together every day... really is good fun. It amazes me that someone thirty years older than me can be so clearly on the same wavelength. He is constantly thinking about information architecture and integration of technology old style culture based communication. More importantly he is an avid fan of the Myst computer games. We talk about the way in which these games are essentially the "novels" of the new media and have been studying their structure to better understand how they tell their stories and why they have not overtaken traditional novels. Anyhow, he has loaned me the latest in the Myst series, Exile. Like it ancestors Myst and Riven, Exile's puzzles and storyline are highly addictive and have completely wiped out my past three evenings. |  |
 | The day after the party I felt the need to just get the hell out of civilization, so I made a run for the mountains and went walking with my buddy Nick from Imperial. We did the typical wandering thing, got ourselves suitably lost, walked into plenty of boggy bits, and then got rained on. |