The Grandma has returned to Barcelona.
She has visited the City Hall today for two reasons: one of them, searching
information about the recent history of Sants,
a Barcelona's suburb, and the subterranean refuges built in it during the Spanish Civil
War (1936-39); and another, demanding permissions to create a new business. The
Grandma wants to create a winery.
September is
a new reborn for lots of people. It’s like January when you try to promise to
yourself thousands of things to do in the New Year, although you know that you’re
going to do nothing. Then, the most important is to not regret about this and
continue doing this kind of things that you did before.
In the case of The
Grandma, she started to read a new book some days ago. It’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
and she offers to all her families two new chapters. Enjoy them
José
Rubianes Alegret, better known as Pepe Rubianes (2 September 1947 - 1 March
2009) was a Spanish actor and theater director, born in Galicia and brought up
in Catalonia, specializing in mime, imitation and monologues.
He was known for
his irony, his sharp sense of humor and verbal torrents sprinkled with swear
words, and rigorously dressing in black clothes when acting in dramatic scenes.
He defined himself as a "Galician-Catalan actor: Galician because I was
born in Galicia although I hardly ever lived there, and Catalan because I have
always lived in Catalonia although I was never born here."
He used to
act both in Castilian and in Catalan, but most often performed in both
languages at once, alternating unexpectedly, introducing odd sentences in
Galician.
Pepe died in Barcelona after offering lots of good performances and
years of commitment and defence of free opinion.
Pepe had lots of skills. One of them was his facility to speak English. You can check it in this video (minute 1:55:00).
Australopithecus Afarensis is one of the best known of our ancestors due to a number of
major discoveries including a set of fossil footprints and a fairly complete
fossil skeleton of a female nicknamed 'Lucy'.This species lived between 3.9 and 2.8
million years ago.Australopithecus means ‘southern
ape’ and was originally developed for a species found in South Africa. This is the genus or
group name and several closely related species now share this name.
The word afarensis is based on
the location where some of the first fossils for this species were discovered –
the Afar Depression in Ethiopia,
Africa.
During the 1970s, two fossil hunting teams began uncovering evidence of ancient human
ancestors in east Africa. One team, co-led by Donald Johanson, was working at
Hadar in Ethiopia. The other team led by Mary Leakey, was over 1,500 kilometres
away at Laetoli in Tanzania. Fossils discovered at the two sites were found to
have very similar features and ages but they did not match the fossils of any
species known at that time. A new species name, Australopithecus
afarensis, was therefore created for them in 1978.
This species is now
represented by several hundred fossils from east Africa like ‘Lucy’AL 288-1, Knee
AL 129 1a + 1b, LH 4, The ‘First Family’, ‘Selam’ or ‘Lucy’s baby and ‘Lucy's
big brother'.
Australopithecus
afarensis is usually considered to be a direct ancestor of humans. It is also considered to be a direct
ancestor of later species of Australopithecus
and all species in the Paranthropus
genus.
The names Praeanthropus africanus
and Praeanthropus
afarensis have been suggested as alternatives by researchers who
believe this species does not belong in the genus Australopithecus.
Fossils show this
species was bipedal (able to walk on
two legs) but still retained many ape-like features including adaptations for
tree climbing, a small brain, and a long jaw.
This species
probably used simple tools that may
have included sticks and other non-durable plant materials found in the
immediate surroundings.
Stones may also have been used as tools, but there is
no evidence that stones were shaped or modified in any way.
It seems likely
that they lived in small social groups containing a mixture of males and
females, children and adults. Females were much smaller than males.
This species
occupied a range of environments. Some populations lived in savannah or sparse woodland; others
lived in denser forests beside lakes. Analysis of their teeth, skull and body
shape indicates a diet that consisted mainly of plants. However, fossil animal
bones with cut marks found in Dikika in 2010 have been attributed to this
species, suggesting they may have included significant amounts of meat in their
diets.
Microscopic analysis of their tooth enamel shows that they mostly ate
fruits and leaves rather than seeds and other hard plant material. Their
cone-shaped rib cage indicates they had large bellies adapted to a relatively
low quality and high bulk diet. The position of the sagittal crest toward the
back of the skull indicates that the front teeth processed most of the food.
If you were to
go to the National Museum in Addis Ababa,you would walk
into a huge room filled with literally tens of tons of fossils, and most of
them would be elephants and rhinos and hippopotamusand monkeys and
giraffes and antelopes and so on.Hominids are
very rare in the landscape,and it's very
rare to find them.
On 1 September 1939, Germanyinvaded Poland under the false
pretext that the Poles had carried out a series of sabotage operations against
German targets near the border. Two days later, on 3 September, after a British
ultimatum to Germany to cease military operations was ignored, Britain and France, followed by the fully independent Dominions of the British
Commonwealth—Australia (3 September), Canada (10 September), New Zealand (3
September), and South Africa (6 September)—declared war on Germany. However,
initially the alliance provided limited direct military support to Poland,
consisting of a cautious, half-hearted French probe into the Saarland. The
Western Allies also began a naval blockade of Germany, which aimed to damage
the country's economy and war effort. Germany responded by ordering U-boat
warfare against Allied merchant and warships, which was to later escalate into
the Battle of the Atlantic.
The German
government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was responsible for the Holocaust, the killing of approximately
6 million Jews, as well as 2.7 million ethnic Poles, and 4 million others who were deemed
"unworthy of life" (including the disabled and mentally ill,
Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah's
Witnesses, and Romani) as part
of a programme of deliberate extermination. About 12 million, most of whom were
Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy as forced labourers.
The Catalan-French
border was witness of the Jewish exile. Thanks to the citizens of la Val d’Aran, els Pallars, l'Alt Urgell, la Cerdanya, el Ripollès, l'Alt Empordà and Andorra, thousands of people could save their lives and started new ones in other
countries.
It wasn’t an
exceptional case. This border was a route of exit during other conflicts: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Cathar exile in the 13th century.
Naturalist Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, on February 12, 1809. In 1831, he embarked on a five-year survey voyage around the world on the HMSBeagle. His studies of specimens around the globe led him to formulate his theory of evolution and his views on the process of natural selection. In 1859, he published On the Origin of Species. He died on April 19, 1882, in London. On December 27, 1831, the HMS Beagle launched its voyage around the world with Darwin in tow. Over the course of the trip, Darwin collected a variety of natural specimens, including birds, plants and fossils. Through hands-on research and experimentation, he had the unique opportunity to closely observe principles of botany, geology and zoology. The Pacific Islands and Galapagos Archipelago were of particular interest to Darwin, as was South America. Upon his return to
England in 1836, Darwin began to write up his findings in the Journal of Researches, published as
part of Captain FitzRoy's larger
narrative and later edited into the Zoology
of the Voyage of the Beagle. The trip had a monumental effect on Darwin’s
view of natural history. He began to develop a revolutionary theory about the
origin of living beings that was contrary to the popular view of other
naturalists at the time.
Darwin's exposure
to specimens all over the globe raised important questions. Other naturalists
believed that all species either came into being at the start of the world, or
were created over the course of natural history. In either case, the species
were believed to remain much the same throughout time.
Darwin, however, noticed
similarities among species all over the globe, along with variations based on
specific locations, leading him to believe that they had gradually evolved from
common ancestors. He came to believe that species survived through a process
called natural selection, where species that successfully adapted
to meet the changing requirements of their natural habitat thrived, while those
that failed to evolve and reproduce died off.
In 1858, after
years of further scientific investigation, Darwin publically introduced his
revolutionary theory of evolution in a letter read at a meeting of the Linnean Society.
Following a lifetime of devout research, Charles
Darwin died at his family home, Down House, in London, on April 19, 1882, and
was buried at Westminster Abbey.
During the next century, DNA studies
revealed evidence of his Theory of Evolution, although controversy surrounding
its conflict with Creationism—the religious view that all of nature was born of
God—still abounds today.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer,
and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel FrankensteinorThe Modern
Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband,
the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Her father was the
political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and
feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
She became
famous thanks to Frankenstein the
novel that she started to write in Switzerland.
In May 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and their son travelled to Geneva with
Claire Clairmont. They planned to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire
had left her pregnant. The party arrived at Geneva on 14 May 1816, where Mary
called herself "Mrs Shelley". Byron joined them on 25 May, with his
young physician, John William Polidori,
and rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny;
Percy Shelley rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront
nearby. They spent their time writing, boating on the lake, and talking late
into the night. It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep,
she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her
"waking dream", her ghost
story.
She began
writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's
encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. She later described that
summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood
into life". The story has been fictionalised several times and formed the
basis for a number of films.
In September
2011, the astronomer Donald Olson, after
a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year, and inspecting data about
the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her waking dream took place
"between 2am and 3am" 16 June 1816, several days after the initial
idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story.
Joseph de Ca’th Lon is an old Grandma’s
friend. He was born in Lon, a small village of Switzerland and spent his
youth in Finland where he discovered
his passion about science in all its aspects but especially in Astronomy,
Physics, Archaeology and Anthropology. Later, he stayed in Terrassa (Barcelona)
where he studied in the prestigious local university, UPC being a high level student in Technology. After that, he
returned to Switzerland where he was working in a historic bank following
the familiar tradition. His well-positioned economical status and his
cultural baggage offer him the possibility of travelling around the world in
his unfinished research of Science mysteries.
The Grandma met Joseph
in Saint-Tropez (France) where both of them enjoy their
money and prestigious social position every summer. Fans of little countries, Joseph and The Grandma didn’t hesitate of visiting not only their hometowns, Switzerland and Andorra, but Monaco, Vatican City, Caiman Islands, Jamaica or Liechtenstein.
As you have been able to discover all these countries have something in common:
the yellow colour in their flags!
Since today,
it’s a great honour to inform all the families that Joseph is going to join to The
Grandma’s Blog and we’re going to explain his incredible adventures plenty
of interesting stories about Science, Economy, Technology, History or
Astronomy. Prepare yourselves to travel above the stars, visit the most
incredible places, discover our past investigating some prehistorical bones
without forgetting the old Grandma’s
stories about our cultural past.
Put yourself
in upright position and fasten seat belts. We start…
For since
the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise Creator,
nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or
minimum does not appear.
