Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Rain and levities

The rain is back in London, now is falling heavily and soundly. The temperature dropped in the late evening significantly... . The night when the Titanic hit fatally the iceberg, the outside temperature was of about 12 C at 5 pm and in the course of the next two hours, the temperature dropped down to 1 C. The water temperature was recorded every two hours at ten minutes to the hour: at 9.50 pm, the water temperature was of -2 C.

The Titanic went down on 1912 and the spot of the wreckage was located in 1985. In the O2 Arena here in London some real objects -not that many- are being showed. The last survivor from the Titanic died last year; she was a just-born baby at the time of the tragedy.

Why is the story of Titanic so fascinating? And so fascinating to me? The ship had three huge impellers, being the one in the middle (the bigger) propelled by a turbine and the other two by standard reciprocating pistons. To maintain the massive structure in motion at 40 km/h (closed to top speed) during 2 seconds, they need to burn a 35-kg chunk of coal.

Do you know that the provost of the White Line company conceived the Titanic and two enormous brothers, "Olympic" and "Britannic" during the course of a summer dinner? Titanic was indeed Irish.

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As the rain falls, I am recalling a couple of days I spent in Midland, Texas in the course of an interview... Quite a desert, quite a peculiar hotel. The rooms were arranged around an inner patio, in three or four different levels, like a huge "corrala"... . A la recherche du temps perdu, the original title of Proust's work, perhaps encloses a much more intuitive idea than the entire collection of volumes. Could it be? No... I have not read it.

As the rain falls, bits of scattered memories come and go to the shore of my conscience, and "all time past seems to be better".

Ok,enough... . The laundry, the cat... And my sleep.

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