AELIAN - Historical Miscellany, Chapter III

So then, a clever creature was a kind of Egyptian frog, which surpassed other frogs by far. For if a frog encounters a water snake in the Nile, placing a piece of reed in its mouth sideways, it carries it and clamps its mouth shut (lit: holds its mouth closed) and, by its strength, does not let go. So the snake is at a loss as to how to swallow the frog with the reed itself. For the snakes can not get their mouths around so great a thing by themselves, so great is the reed that lies between. And because of this, the frogs prevail over the bodily strength of the snakes by their intelligence.

Note the moral of this story. It reminds me of the theme song of one of my favourite cartoons, 'Madeline'. 'I'm Madeline, I'm Madeline, I may be very small, I'm Madeline, I'm Madeline, but insiiiiide, I'm tall!' OK, so maybe the link is tenuous at best.

Anyhow, today I had another lovely day... I went to see this: [link]

It was marvellous. Lils, there were Dali sketches there!! In fact, I enjoyed seeing pieces by some of my favourite artists eg Renoir, Matisse, Dali and, especially, Marie Laurencin, more than I enjoyed a lot of the Picasso pieces. Laurencin is wonderful. I bought a postcard of this piece: [link]

I learnt that 'Nature Morte' is French for 'still life', which is funny because my friend and I thought it would translate literally as 'dead nature'.

Something else I learnt... Has anyone ever played that game where you draw part of a body eg the head, then fold your part over and get a friend to draw the torso then another friend to draw the legs etc? I never knew this but that game is called 'exquisite corpse'!

After Picasso, I visited my friend at her work, which was very nice. I could talk to her a lot, since there weren't many people around.

Clubs