calvisson-leblon

At the outset, let’s focus on shelf-life.   I am not writing about a fresh-baked French baguette carried under an armpit, but about the lot of actresses on both sides of the Atlantic.   Male actors have no expiry dates as exposed by the 2020 Academy Awards nominations.   Four of the ten nominated actors are septuagenarians.   On the other hand, the oldest female nominee is 72-year-old Kathy Bates in the best supporting actress category.   As a result, the median age difference between men and women nominees is a whopping 21 years!   At the Oscars, age bias has been a constant [1] , but in this period of Time’s Up , 21 years seem to be a provocation.   If the male actor geriatric club is alive and kicking, leading roles for actresses over 70 are few and far between.   Only Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren and Catherine Deneuve get a chance. Last week, on friends’ recommendations, I went to see the film Judy .   As the name indicates, it is a...

Although Cyprus is a popular tourist destination, it is not your typical pleasure island.   Its claim to fame is not limited to sandy beaches and golden visas for rich investors.   Four important features have attracted my attention: Cyprus is the birth place of Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of love; within an 800 year-period the island was twice colonized by English rulers; it is the only European country divided and illegally occupied by a NATO Member state; and Cypriots have befriended cats longer than any other people, beginning some 9,500 years ago.                                                                        9,500 years cat skeleton Aphrodite, also known as Venus, whose Latin name symbolizes love, sex, beauty and fertility as well as prostitution.   Legend has it tha...

I was in Manhattan during the Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday period.   I enjoyed Thanksgiving, took a limited advantage of Black Friday and avoided Cyber Monday all together.   Although, many shoppers stayed home to shop online, the city was more gridlocked than usual!   The streets were jammed by thousands of double-parked parcel delivery trucks, and building lobbies looked like warehouses!   In the United States, an estimated 2.45 billion E-commerce parcels were delivered over this period last year [1] .   By riding the subway, I survived the street congestion, the rain and the sleet.   My Thanksgiving was an intergenerational family feast.   Thanksgiving is the second oldest American celebration, after Independence Day on July 4 th .   It was observed even before President Lincoln proclaimed it a national holiday.   My friends cooked a traditional meal with a juicy roasted turkey, and seasonal vegetables, sweet pota...

November, 2019. If Portugal ranks as the 4 th most peaceful country in the world (my previous blog), Bolivia must rank at the bottom of the list.   On the other hand, the country is a leader in violent military coups, or golpes are they are known in Latin America.   Golpes in Bolivia are rather straightforward, case book scenarios whereby an existing government, democratic or not, is overthrown by non-democratic forces, such as a military putsch , a dictator or a political faction.   This time around, Bolivia over did it: two golpes took place consecutively.   By tinkering with the Constitution and then rigging the ballot box, Evo Morales, the president, resorted to a political golpe to stay in power.   Street protests and bloodshed followed.   With the objective of restoring order, the military forced Morales to resign, an ultimatum which looks like a military golpe.   Morales fled into exile in Mexico.         ...

Have you heard someone deriding Portugal lately?   Probably not; for various reasons, this country seems to be everybody’s darling. Last week I went to a dinner party and the guests did not stop raving about Lisboa, as Lisbon is known in Portuguese, and Portugal in general.   They had either returned from an enchanted stay in the city or could not wait to go back there to escape the rough and tumble of Carioca life.   I am also fond of Portugal, but I do not get emotional about the country.    As a fish eater, I like Lisbon, renowned for its fantastic seafood restaurants.   Lisbon is charming, human-sized but tiring to explore because it is not flat.   I can understand my friends’ attachment to Portugal; a large number of Brazilians have Portuguese relatives or ancestors and never cut the umbilical cord with the former colonial power.   A visit to a terrinha , an affectionate Brazilian term to describe tiny Portugal, is a time-honored pil...

But in style. Travelling to the Kimberley region in Western Australia (WA) has been on my bucket list for decades.   Since I was unable to explore it as a geologist, I decided to visit it as a tourist [1] .   This fascination began in the early 1970s when I worked as a junior geologist in Australia.   I was dispatched to the outback of Northern Queensland to prospect for mundane commodities such as zinc and copper but envied my colleagues who were exploring for diamonds in the remote Kimberley.   Are not diamonds a girl’s best friend?   My boss should have taken the song seriously, and sent me to the Kimberley with the boys.   At the time I was probably mixing up the Kimberley names.   Diamonds mostly occur in a rock called kimberlite, which was named after the town of Kimberley in South Africa [2] and not in Australia.   Coincidentally, the two Kimberley names derived from the same person, British foreign secretary John Wodehous...

There is an old saying in Scotland: "If you like the weather, wait half an hour and it will change".  Scots coined hundreds of names to define their pesky dank weather, Dreich is the most used as it defines a wet, chilly and grey sort of weather, mainly rainy.   Unfortunately, but predictably, this unfriendly dreich stayed with us for most of our eight-day visit (Edinburgh, Isle of Sky, and the Highlands).   A decade ago, I spent four sunny days in the eastern part of Scotland, and I was foolish enough to expect similar weather conditions this time around.     Dreich is no impediment to Scottish tourism; for many visitors it is actually part and parcel of their Scottish experience.   I convinced myself to take a backpack exclusively to carry indispensable waterproofed clothing.   Nowadays, my idea of tourism is comfort, dry weather forecast and contingency planning to avoid stress and disappointment.   My English fellow travele...