Sweet Home Alabama

No, not really Alabama, not even on the same continent. Here are some pictures from near where I live.

I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

Currently I am in a sort of "Film Noir"-mood, so I have been watching "Sunset Boulevard", "The Third Man" and "Double Indemnity".

The Cuckoo Clock

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

"Harry Lime" in "The Third Man"

Wonderful World of Movie Parodies

From the wonderful world of movie parodies, this is one of those which deserves attention. It's is an hommage to the SciFi-classic "Alien" in which animated vegetables and fruit have to experience that nightmare ..

Paradise Lost

Gustave Dore's illustration of Lucifer in John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Sweeney Todd

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.
His skin was pale and his eye was odd.
He shaved the faces of gentlemen
who never thereafter were heard of again.
He trod a path that few have trod
did Sweeney Todd
the demon barber of fleet street.
He kept a shop in London town.
Of fancy clients and good renown
and what if none of their souls were saved
they went to their maker impecably shaved.
By Sweeney,
by Sweeney Todd
the demon barber of fleet street.

"The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" by Stephen Sondheim

The wallpaper was composed by sajwest.

Neuschwanstein Castle

Science-fiction Cradlesong

Most people know C.S Lewis by his magnus opus "The Chronicles of Narnia". Some more interessted may also know that he's was part of the literary discussion group The Inklings (together with J.R.R. Tolkien).

But I never thought that C.S. Lewis would write something like this poem:

By and by Man will try
To get out into the sky,
Sailing far beyond the air
From Down and Here to Up and There.
Stars and sky, sky and stars
Make us feel the prison bars.

Suppose it done. Now we ride
Closed in steel, up there, outside
Through our port-holes see the vast
Heaven-scape go rushing past.
Shall we? All that meets the eye
Is sky and stars, stars and sky.

Points of light with black between
Hang like a painted scene
Motionless, no nearer there
Than on Earth, everywhere
Equidistant from our ship.
Heaven has given us the slip.

Hush, be still. Outer space
Is a concept, not a place.
Try no more. Where we are
Never can be sky or star.
From prison, in a prison, we fly;
There's no way into the sky.

"Science-fiction Cradlesong" by C.S Lewis