TINA PICOTES VISITS THE REPUBLIC OF INDIA

Tina Picotes in the Vitthala Temple Hampi

Tina Picotes has just visited the Republic of India. Tina wants to explain some interesting things about this big country and its ancient culture, cradle of our modern civilization.

India, officially the Republic of India, Bhārat Gaṇarājya, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast. It shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the northeast; and Myanmar (Burma) and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives. India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.

More information: National Portal of India

The Indian subcontinent was home to the urban Indus Valley Civilisation of the 3rd millennium BCE. In the following millennium, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism began to be composed. Social stratification, based on caste, emerged in the first millennium BCE, and Buddhism and Jainism arose. Early political consolidations took place under the Maurya and Gupta empires; the later peninsular Middle Kingdoms influenced cultures as far as southeast Asia. In the medieval era, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived, and Sikhism emerged, all adding to the region's diverse culture. Much of the north fell to the Delhi sultanate; the south was united under the Vijayanagara Empire. The economy expanded in the 17th century in the Mughal Empire. 

In the mid-18th century, the subcontinent came under British East India Company rule, and in the mid-19th under British crown rule. A nationalist movement emerged in the late 19th century, which later, under Mahatma Gandhi, was noted for nonviolent resistance and led to India's independence in 1947.

More information: History.com

Tina Picotes in the Lakshmana Temple

In 2015, the Indian economy was the world's seventh largest by nominal GDP and third largest by purchasing power parity. Following market-based economic reforms in 1991, India became one of the fastest-growing major economies and is considered a newly industrialised country. However, it continues to face the challenges of poverty, corruption, malnutrition, and inadequate public healthcare. A nuclear weapons state and regional power, it has the third largest standing army in the world and ranks fifth in military expenditure among nations. India is a federal republic governed under a parliamentary system and consists of 29 states and 7 union territories. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society and is also home to a diversity of wildlife in a variety of protected habitats.

The name India is derived from Indus, which originates from the Old Persian word Hindu. The latter term stems from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which was the historical local appellation for the Indus River. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi (Ἰνδοί), which translates as The people of the Indus.

The geographical term Bharat, which is recognised by the Constitution of India as an official name for the country, is used by many Indian languages in its variations. It is a modernisation of the historical name Bharatavarsha, which traditionally referred to the Indian subcontinent and gained increasing currency from the mid-19th century as a native name for India.

More information: BBC India

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, 

then they fight you, then you win.

Mahatma Gandhi

JOSEPH DE CA'TH LON & THE HOMO NALEDI IN GAUTENG

Lee Berger and the Homo naledi's skull

Joseph de Ca'th Lon is visiting the Rising Star Cave in South Africa. Today, he wants to talk about Homo naledi an amazing homo species.

Homo naledi is an extinct species of hominin, which anthropologists first described in 2015 and have assigned to the genus Homo. In 2013, fossil skeletons were found in South Africa's Gauteng province, in the Rising Star Cave system, part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site about 50 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg. 

As of 10 September 2015, fossils of at least fifteen individuals, amounting to more than 1550 specimens, have been excavated from the cave. Newer findings, remains of at least three individuals: two adults and a child, in a second chamber, known as Lesedi, light in the Sotho-Tswana languages, were reported by Hawks et alii in 2017.

More information: Newscientist

The species is characterised by a body mass and stature similar to small-bodied human populations, a smaller endocranial volume similar to Australopithecus, and a skull shape similar to early Homo species. The skeletal anatomy presents ancestral features known from australopithecines with more recent features associated with later hominins. Prior to dating, initial judgement based on anatomy favoured an age of roughly two million years old. Dirks et alii in 2017, using a variety of dating techniques obtained a much younger age range of between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago.

Joseph de Ca'th Lon in the Rising Star Cave

The fossils were discovered by recreational cavers Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker in 2013. Homo naledi was formally described in September 2015 by a 47-member international team of authors led by American-born South African paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, who proposed the bones represent a new Homo species. Other experts contend more analyses are needed to support this classification. There are some indications that the individuals may have been deliberately placed in the cave near the time of their death.

The word naledi means star in the Sotho-Tswana languages. It, and the corresponding name Dinaledi Chamber, chamber of stars, were chosen to reference the Rising Star cave system where the fossils were found.

More information: National Geographic

 It just shows that you can never stop looking. 

Just because something has been studied for years doesn't mean that 

it can't still tell us new things.

Lee Berger

PERE QUART & CLAIRE FONTAINE: METRICS AND WORDS

Joan Oliver / Pere Quart

Claire Fontaine is a great follower of Pere Quart, one of the most important Catalan writers of the 20th century. She wants to talk about the poet and about metrics in poetry which are so important as metrics in internet.

Joan Oliver i Sallarès, who used as a poetry-writer the pseudonym Pere Quart, (1899-1986) is considered one of the most important writers in Catalonia, specially because of his rebelliousness and social commitment.

He was born in 1899, the member of an outstanding family of the industrial bourgeoisie of Sabadell. He was the fourth of eleven brothers; he was the only survivor. He took the pseudonym with which he would sign his poetic work: Pere Quart. He studied Law. In year 1919, he formed the Group of Sabadell with the novelist Francesc Trabal and the poet Armand Obiols. In this group the influence of vanguardism was combined with local humor.

More information: Joan Oliver (Catalan Version)

During the Civil War he engaged politically with the republican side. He was nominated president of the Association of Catalan Writers and leader of Generalitat's Ministry of Culture publications. Moreover he was co-founder and headleader of Institution of the Catalan Letters publications, and author of the Catalan popular army hymn's letter. All this means a definite break with his bourgeois past and the birth of a strong political, ethical and social commitment. 

In this context he created Oda a Barcelona and the play La fam. At the end of the war, the Republican Generalitat will order him the task of evacuating all the intellectuals. Finished the war will exile first in France, embark towards Buenos Aires and establish definitively in Santiago of Chile, where he will live for eight years. During the exile, he continued his task of intellectual compromised with his time and his country. He collaborated with Catalonia, edited in Buenos Aires, and directed Germanor, edited in Chile. He set up the collection The pine of the three branches along Xavier Benguerel.

More information: Lletra UOC (Catalan Version)

In 1948 Joan Oliver came back to Barcelona, where Franco's dictatorship was characterized by authoritarianism and repression. He was imprisoned for three months in the Model prison of Barcelona. Three years later he received the Prize of the French Republic President in the floral games of Paris, for the translation into Catalan of The Misanthrope by Molière. He translated and adapted works of several authors like Anton Chekhov. 

Pere Quart / Joan Oliver

In 1960 his more emblematic work appeared: Vacances Pagades. It is a skeptical work, sarcastic too, where a great appointment with the social and political reality of the country is shown. Oliver makes an acid crictisim to the capitalism, the consumer society and the Franco dictatorship. 

With the death of the dictator and democracy entry, he was especially displeased with the dominant politicians, denouncing the betrayal that meant the transition. In year 1982 he rejected the Cross of Saint George. He became an uncomfortable character for the politicians, who was necessary to corner. 

Nothing of all this, however, prevented him from being considered one of the five best Catalan poets of the 20th century. In 1986 he died in Barcelona and was buried in his natal city, Sabadell.

The metric is a necessary and fundamental work in any web analytics. The web allows us to measure metrics that can extract data from a webpage. Choose the parameters studied, read and analyze them carefully allow us to improve the performance of this.

Pere Quart composed couplets, sonnets, glosses, rooms and songs while respecting the standards set for metric creation -number of syllables and rhyme- and web analysts today, analyze visits -exclusive or recurring-, the length of connecting users or bounce rates and conversion. Pere Quart wanted to transmit feelings through poems. Analysts studying how to make certain information available to the largest number of people possible. 

More information: Forbes 

Avui en terres de França
i demà més lluny potser,
no em moriré d'enyorança
ans d'enyorança viuré.

Today in French lands

tomorrow further perhaps,

I won't die by yearning

because I live of yearning. 

Pere Quart

MAY 16, 1929: 1st ACADEMY AWARDS IN HOLLYWOOD, LA

1st Academy Awards Ceremony, May 16 1929

The 1st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best films of 1927 and 1928 and took place on May 16, 1929, at a private dinner held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, California. AMPAS president Douglas Fairbanks hosted the show. Tickets cost $5, 270 people attended the event and the presentation ceremony lasted fifteen minutes. Awards were created by Louis B. Mayer, founder of Louis B. Mayer Pictures Corporation, at present merged into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It is the only Academy Awards ceremony not to be broadcast either on radio or television.

During the ceremony, the AMPAS presented Academy Awards, now commonly referred to as Oscars, in twelve categories. Winners were announced three months before the live event. Unlike later ceremonies, an actor or director could be awarded for multiple works within a calendar year. Emil Jannings, for example, was given the Best Actor award for his work in both The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command. Moreover, Charlie Chaplin and Warner Brothers each received an Honorary Award.

Major winners at the ceremony included 7th Heaven and Sunrise, which each received three awards, and Wings, receiving two awards. Among its honors, Sunrise won the award for Unique and Artistic Picture and Wings won the award for Outstanding Picture, now known as Best Picture. These two categories at the time were seen as equally the top award of the night intended to honor different and equally important aspects of superior film making. The next year, the Academy dropped the Unique and Artistic Picture award, and decided retroactively that the award won by Wings was the highest honor that could be awarded.

More information: Oscars

The most important thing is to continue to be yourself. 

The day after the Oscars, you have to get on with your life. 

To be honest and true to yourself. 

Roberto Benigni

EMILY DICKINSON: A GENIUS IN THE AMERICAN POETRY

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. With the possible exception of Walt Whitman, Dickinson is now recognized as the most important American poet of the 19th century.

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although part of a prominent family with strong ties to its community, Dickinson lived much of her life in reclusive isolation. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a noted penchant for white clothing and became known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence. Dickinson was a recluse for the later years of her life.

More information: Poets

While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

Although Dickinson's acquaintances were most likely aware of her writing, it was not until after her death in 1886, when Lavinia, Dickinson's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems, that the breadth of her work became apparent to the public. 

Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though both heavily edited the content. A complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955. Despite some unfavorable reception and skepticism over the late 19th and early 20th centuries regarding her literary prowess, Dickinson is now almost universally considered to be one of the most significant of all American poets.

More information: Poetry Fundation

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.

Emily Dickinson

THE LEGEND OF THE GHOST OF A GRANDMA IN SANT BOI

The ghost of The Grandma in Sant Boi

There's a legend, an ancient legend that people from Sant Boi tell from grandparents to grandsons. It's a story about a ghost of a mysterious woman who appears  in a roundabout, near the entrance to the city.

The legend says she's the spirit of a Grandma who had survived the most incredible events of the 20th century, even she had survived to die burnt but one day, meanwhile she was driving by car, she decided to jump out through the window and stay in Sant Boi forever and ever.

Nobody never knew why she did it but the legend says it was very difficult to her to live separated from their families: The Collins, The Addams, The Holmes, The Poppins and The Bonds and she decided to join her spirit to them for the rest of her days.

Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded. 

Hervey Allen

THE BONDS IN THEIR MOST IMPORTANT MISSION

The Bonds have returned to Barcelona after staying some weeks in Ireland. It has been difficult to leave the green country. The family has spent some incredible  days in the island knowing its culture and sharing unforgettable moments with its inhabitants. 

Today it's the D Day and the family goes to Sant Boi to do a B1 Cambridge Exam. It's an important day for the family because they have been working very hard to pass this exam but the most important is being ready to do it.

The Grandma has accompanied the family and, perhaps they don't know, but it could be the last time they see her.

There's more to life than passing exams, and paper qualifications can only take you so far. A lot depends on luck, and on being in the right place at the right time, which was certainly true in my case. 

Terry Wogan