Chat?

Let's say you're super busy and work insane hours preparing an important project for work. 

When you get really tired, on a Saturday evening, you ask Chat GPT to create an overview scheme illustrating the project content for the cover page.

And Chat delivers a lovely sketch. Of course. 

It's just that the project is about experimental fundamental physics :-)

Hmmm...

Just watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

And reading Green's Paper Towns.

And there I go and buy a book on houseplants.

Must. Do. Something. About. It.

Just for Q's and old time's sake some photos from Everglades.

Everglades, about 10 years ago

An alligator we accidentally ran into

PS. Paper towns are very (too?) similar to Finding Alaska, but since I liked Alaska, I also liked Paper Towns. Even more so.

Leopard Kimono

When I started this blog, I said I'd show "an occasional penguin". I promise there will be more penguins coming soon but now it's time for an occasional leopard.

Not just an ordinary leopard - a leopard kimono!

Made as a birthday present for a friend of mine.

Elephant is in the house

Mr. Mojcek's friend was getting married and the invitation clearly stated that he didn't want to get any elephants.

So of course we got him an elephant :-)

First I wanted to make one from scratch but really didn't have the time. So I bought a hand puppet elephant and altered it. Of course.

I went to a specialised laboratory equipment shop and a bricolage:

The elephant on the operating table:

And the elephant in action. He sucks the water in ... and then sqirts it around!

Giving money - Euro chess

Sooner or later it happens to everyone that one is asked to give money as a present. I really don't feel like giving just an envelope with money in it - it has to be something slightly different. That's why I/we made a Euro chess!

You know, different Euro coins for different chess pieces.


Our pieces were:


king: Belgian 2 € - with King Albert II
queen: Dutch 2 € - Queen Beatrix
rook: German 2 € - an eagle
bishop: French 2 € - a tree with Liberté, égalité, fraternité
knight: Slovenian 2 € - France Prešeren
pawn: German 1 € - an eagle


king: Spanish 2 € - with King Juan Carlos I
queen: A commemorative coin 2 € - Treaty of Rome
rook: Greek 2 € - Europa and a bull
bishop: Italian 2 € - Dante Alighieri
knight: Austrian 2 € - Bertha von Suttner
pawn: Austrian 1 € - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The board is simply a piece of cardboard with black self-adhesive paper squares on top.

Now, I don't know if the recipient ever played a game, but it was great fun going through all the pockets, backpacks, drawers, bags looking for different coins.

Peut-être we can ignore ziss Abwesenheit

I grew up in a country where people are used to watching films with subtitles. So I don't mind them - I actually quite like having them especially if you cannot turn up the volume due to a sleeping kid in the room next door.

However, the subtitles one finds in the Internet are often quite crappy. Painful to watch to the point where I decided they need to be improved. So I chose one of the films with the worst subtitle/film quality ratio and started correcting it.

Did you guess which film it was from the title of this post?
La Grande Vadrouille!
Aber natürlisch.



And yes, it is challenging to translate this tri-lingual film. Here some examples:

"Do you promise me que if I bring ici the Big Moustache, you partez avec lui ?"

- Qui êtes-vous ?
- Ich bin mari de la patronne, ich bin maître d’hôtel.
- Ah, comestible, gut, gut « guénéral »
- Non, non, non, je pas essen officier allemand.

The funny this is that after reading this melange of French, English and German, it takes me a few seconsd to realise which language I'm currently translating from. So confusing.

Not a penny more...

...not a penny less by Jeffrey Archer.

I first read it probably twenty years ago (oh, dear!) and loved it! And then I recently watched the BBC documentary the Coast, where they talk about the discovery of oil in the North Sea and that reminded me of the book so I decided to re-read it.

With one sentence - I still love it. It is such an enjoying book and although I knew the final outcome (which is a bit predictable, I must confess), I enjoyed reading it a lot. The end is a bit abrupt though.


What I do not understand, why hasn't Hollywood tuned it into a film? Something like Ocean's 11 or the Italian Job? Surely I'm not the only one who loves the wittiness of con films, right?

PS. Notice my reflection in the cover of the book?

French Revolutions

I'll discuss a book "French Revolutions" by Tim Moore that has a lot to do with revolutions but nothing with the Revolution. In fact, it deals with around 60 revolutions per minute...

Yes, the book is about cycling. About an amateur who decides to ride the same track as the riders of Tour de France. Well, almost. He starts cheating almost as soon as he starts riding but nevertheless he manages to make 3000 km in a month! Chapeau! I wish I had the time to do this!

I found the book quite entertaining and enjoyable to read, especially as I know the places he writes about: Col d'Izoard, Col d'Aravis, Col du Lautaret, Col du Galibier. Yes, I know these places. And I know them pretty well:


A few years ago we even managed to follow two stages of the Tour: Les Deux Alps and Col du Galibier:


A crappy photograph but you can surely spot Lance Armstrong in yellow!

I'll finish with some interesting or funny random quotes from the book:

About France:
The surprise wasn't that there'd been a revolution, but that they'd waited until 1789 to have it.

[Talking about Loudun] A place where there was nothing to do and yet so much to be done.

Any place with "haut" in its name was to be avoided on gradient grounds.

One of the most unfortunate things about being an unfit Englishman cycling long distances in France is the number of signs that yell PAIN down every high street.

I had learned that Dax had paid the Societe du Tour de France one million francs to be a ville d'etape.

About heroes:
I learned about Wim van Est and his fall... They used spare tubes knotted together to rescue him! (source)



I learned about Eugene Christophe and the famous Tourmalet incident when he had to weld his bicycle together (the riders were responsible for their own repairs!) and was penalised because a boy pumped the bellows for him!

I'm very curious about how today's riders would cope with the Tour rules from over fifty years ago. That would be fun!

More reading

I guess I must have fallen in the summer-laziness mood. Instead of actually doing something, I admire things that were done by others. So I just finished reading "Die Leber wächst mit ihren Aufgaben" by Eckart von Hirschhausen (no joke, this is his real name) and quite liked it. I'll roughly translate and describe some of the ideas given in this book.



1) I've learned that Aspirin is of natural origin - the salicylic acid can be found for example in willow bark. I learned later from Wikipedia that in 1853, acetylsalicylic acid was synthesized, which was less irritating than the original acid and just as effective. The compound was patented in 1899 under the name Aspirin.

2) The monks live in average five years longer than men outside of monasteries, living actually just as long as women.

3) I love this one: The best entertainer in the world is our own cerebral cortex.

4) I have to agree with the author when he claims that in the good ol' days of snail mail, we checked the mailbox once a day - and were disappointed once a day for not getting anything we hoped for. Now we constantly check our email mailbox - and get to live in constant disappointment.

So, drop me a line, reader, and make me happier :-)