Historic meeting: Are we ready for a new world?

The historic meeting and the follow up signing is nothing short of a miracle considering the events that preceded the meeting.

Ok, the meeting is over, the deal is done. What is the deal? It is heavily discussed in the media. It was surprising that at the time it was signed very little was known about the contents and the TV announcers were using words like 'something' was signed.

It appears the wording is still broad, and it is said to be 'Complete'. One must wait and see how it turns out. Our hopes are, that it will result in lasting peace and scenes of Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Fukushima are just nightmares from which we woke up

Here are some pictures taken on that day from a TV screen with a Microsoft Lumia phone. Watch the body language and the emotions on the faces.

 If you missed the signing, here it is. Must see video.

The Signing

How do you write the Kannada word ಅರಮನೆ using Python?

Kannada (South Indian language) characters have the Unicode range from 0C80-0CCF 

UTF-8 is Python's default encoding.

 Let us take a simple word:

ಕಲಹ

Which means 'quarrel'. The letters are simple and you could use their Unicode equivalents

using this chunk of code block.

To form the word we concatenate the characters as shown,

What about a word such as this, ಅರಮನೆ? (means Palace)

The first three letters are simple but the fourth letter is a rendering with a diacritic of a simple letter 'ನ'. The fourth letter requires concatenating the two shown above:

In order to form the word ಅರಮನೆ we need to do the following:

Blackrot on the lovely Catteleya Persepolis Orchid

We bought a beautiful Cattleya Persepolis Orchid from the famous Akatsuka orchid gardens in Hawaii, aka Big Island.

The plant had beautiful leaves and we were looking forward to growing it. It took us two more days to return to Honolulu and the as-purchased plant was in a plastic bag and the intervening days were hot and humid.

When we returned to Honolulu we noticed there was a big black spot in the largest of the leaves.

Th rot had not propagated beyond a certain point; after browsing the Internet we decided to slice off that leaf up to the pseudo bud and then packed the cut-end with cinnamon powder.

Hope this will let the rest of the plant to a healthy future. May be we get the flower but the morning sun does not come to our balcony (lanai) and may be, we will be lucky.


Here are videos of our visit to Akatsuka:

https://youtu.be/rRo220s2qHA

https://youtu.be/oBTkxusfBKo

Miracles do happen

The historic meeting and the follow up signing is nothing short of a miracle considering the events that preceded the meeting.

Ok, the meeting is over, the deal is done. What is the deal? It is heavily discussed in the media. It was surprising that at the time it was signed very little was known about the contents and the TV announcers were using words like 'something' was signed.

It appears the wording is still broad, and it is said to be 'Complete'. One must wait and see how it turns out. Our hopes are that it will result in lasting peace and scenes of Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Fukushima are just nightmares from which we woke up.

Here are some pictures taken on that day from a TV screen with a Microsoft Lumia phone. Watch the body language and the emotions on the faces.

 If you missed the signing, here it is.

The Signing

Borghese Museum with Bernini master pieces

This is the final part of our visit to Rome. With this we will have seen the major attractions of Rome. We left out hotel after the lunch and rest.

The visitors are scheduled with assigned time slots and ours was 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM. We could walk to Borghese from our hotel. It took perhaps 20 minutes. Our local guide in Rome met us at the entrance which is the center door at the façade of the gallery.

Galleria Borghese once called the 'Elysium of delights' is truly a delightful place, especially the vast and beautiful garden. The gallery houses paintings by Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian and others. The most outstanding sculptures are of Bernini, quite a few of them in one place. The Rape of Proserpina; Apollo and Daphne and David are more well-known sculptures of Bernini. One must go around and round these sculptures to appreciate these Baroque masterpieces from different angles as the related story slowly unfolds.

You will also find the beautiful sculpture of sister of Napoleon 1 reclining on a divan.

The garden surrounding the gallery is quite extensive which also includes the aviary and the secret gardens. We did not try to enter the secret gardens but the English style garden at the rear of the gallery was very nice despite the lack of flowers. We could see the lime bushes and citrus plants heavy with limes.

The Venus fountain placed central to the garden behind the gallery provided the perfect backdrop for the gallery.

YouTube Video has more details:

https://youtu.be/LcX0rhe9gf4

Here are some pictures of our visit to the Borghese.

Picture on the right : Bernini

We were quite tired and we wanted to try a different place to eat. we chose 44 Osteria which was right next to the hotel. As I entered I knew we made a mistake. There is very little vegetarian on the menu. Our Middle east server tried his level best to accommodate but it was not a place to eat. Since I was not having wine, the whole thing started looking ludicrous.  However, the restaurant had good reviews although quite pricey.

Source: Copied from TripAdvisor site

We continue our journey tomorrow to Orvieto in south western Umbria.