Record Monet

A Claude Monet painting, Le Bassin Aux Nympheas, has fetched a record £40.9m for the artist's work at auction.

The identity of the victorious bidder at Christie's, London, has not been made public. The painting had been expected to fetch £24m.

Painted in 1919 in Giverny in France it has been seen in public just once in the past 80 years.

Monet's 1873 Le Pont du chemin de fer a Argenteuil, which sold in May, had held the previous record of £20.9m.

From the BBC.

The end of the banana as we know it

Is the era of cheap bananas coming to an end?

That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They're grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they're cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and keep for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas.

Three to four times, around here -- at least if you want decent apples.

Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined, which is especially amazing when you consider that not so long ago, bananas were virtually unknown here.

I've been eating a lot more apples over the past few years, however -- which I'm convinced has helped me lose weight over the same period.

Unlike apple and orange growers, banana importers sell only a single variety of their fruit, the Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas -- most of them in Africa and Asia -- but except for an occasional exotic, the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. . .

But there's a difference between a banana and a Big Mac: The banana is a living organism. It can get sick, and since bananas all come from the same gene pool, a virulent enough malady could wipe out the world's commercial banana crop in a matter of years.

This has happened before. Our great-grandparents grew up eating not the Cavendish but the Gros Michel banana, a variety that everyone agreed was tastier. But starting in the early 1900s, banana plantations were invaded by a fungus called Panama disease and vanished one by one. . .

By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt. It was saved at the last minute by the Cavendish, a Chinese variety that had been considered something close to junk: inferior in taste, easy to bruise (and therefore hard to ship) and too small to appeal to consumers. But it did resist the blight.

And now a new strain of the blight threatens the Cavendish. From the NY Times.

ADDENDUM: Visiting Australia several years ago, I sampled some different varieties of bananas. I confess they weren't so much more flavorful than the standard Cavendish that the experience was transforming, but perhaps I didn't get the really good ones. Another question is if the more flavorful varieties are also more nutritious, as in general, more flavor goes with more nutritional value.

Another reason to stay at home

As if the cancelled and delayed flights, the awful service, and the general hassle weren't enough! Now US Customs agents are seizing and copying digital devices and media, apparently without cause:

The extent of the program to confiscate electronics at customs points is unclear. A hearing Wednesday before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on the Constitution hopes to learn more about the extent of the program and safeguards to traveler's privacy. Lawsuits have also been filed, challenging how the program selects travelers for inspection. Citing those lawsuits, Customs and Border Protection, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, refuses to say exactly how common the practice is, how many computers, portable storage drives, and BlackBerries have been inspected and confiscated, or what happens to the devices once they are seized. Congressional investigators and plaintiffs involved in lawsuits believe that digital copies -- so-called "mirror images" of drives -- are sometimes made of materials after they are seized by customs. . .

The security value of the program is unclear, critics say, while the threats to business and privacy are substantial. If drives are being copied, customs officials are potentially duplicating corporate secrets, legal records, financial data, medical files, and personal E-mails and photographs as well as stored passwords for accounts from Netflix to Bank of America. DHS contends that travelers' computers can also contain child pornography, intellectual property offenses, or terrorist secrets.

So airports are now rights-free zones? And as this US News article points out,

More troubling is what could happen if other countries follow the lead of the United States. Imagine, for instance, if China or Russia began a program to seize and duplicate the contents of traveler's laptops. "We wouldn't be in a position to strongly object to that type of behavior," Rotenberg says.

ADDENDUM: This makes the purchase of an ASUS EEE or the like very tempting. Light and compact, and cheap enough that it can be set aside for travel use only.

Missing airmen sought -- from WW2

A US team is visiting the remote state of Arunachal Pradesh in north-east India to search for the remains of US pilots who crashed during WWII. . .

It is thought the remains of up to 400 Americans could still be in Arunachal Pradesh, which borders Burma and China.

This is only one part of a long-running and much larger operation, however.

More than 78,000 Americans are unaccounted for from World War II, with the remains of about 35,000 deemed recoverable. . .

There are more than 1,300 individuals missing - primarily from aircraft crashes - in and around the border area between India, Burma and China, an area known to pilots as "the Hump".

From the BBC.

Anger at closed, neglected, Greek archeological sites

Extra staff have been dispatched to guard the great cultural gems of Greece as the government in Athens tries to deflect growing criticism of its handling of national treasures.

Amid unprecedented protests from tour guides, travel companies and tourists irritated by conditions at prime archaeological sites, the ruling conservatives last week rushed hundreds of additional personnel to staff museums and open-air antiquities. . .

The move follows embarrassing revelations over the upkeep of Greece's ancient wonders and mounting public disquiet, voiced mostly by foreigners in the local press, over visitor access to them.

Yesterday, the authoritative newspaper Sunday Vima disclosed that the Cycladic isle of Delos - the site of Apollo's mythological sanctuary and one of Greece's most important ancient venues - resembled an "archaeological rubbish dump". Recently, it emerged that many sites, including Delphi, Mycenae and the spectacular Bronze Age settlement of Akrotiri on the popular island of Santorini, were only partially open or permanently closed.

From the Guardian. Interesting factoid:

While home to some of the western world's greatest monuments, Greece has fewer than 100,000 employees working in the cultural sector, an eighth of that in the UK.

Neanderthal tool hoard

Dozens of tools thought to have belonged to Neanderthals have been dug up at an archaeological site called Beedings in West Sussex.

Dr Matthew Pope, of University College London, said the discovery provided new insights into the life of a thriving community of hunters at the site.

The tools could have been used to hunt horses, mammoth and woolly rhinoceros.

Interestingly enough, the site had long been known, but not taken seriously:

Some 2,300 stone tools were first uncovered at the start of the 20th Century when the foundations were being dug for a huge new house to be built at Beedings.

But for many years, the tools were considered to be fakes. All but a few hundred of them were thrown down a well and never seen again.

Wonder if that well could be located? From the BBC.

Re-viewing Hadrian

A cherished image of the Roman emperor Hadrian as a gentle, philosophical man wearing the robes of a Greek citizen has been shattered with one blow of a conservator's chisel at the British Museum.

The head, with its neatly trimmed beard and fringe of exquisitely crimped curls, is certainly Hadrian but it seems the body it has been attached to for almost 150 years belongs to somebody else. The statue, a unique piece that has been cited in many biographies of Hadrian as proof of his love for Greek culture and customs, and illustrated countless times, is an ingenious Victorian confection.

Full story here. The restoration work was being undertaken in anticipation of the British Museum's exhibition, Hadrian: Empire and Conflict, opening in a month.

Sir Walter Scott's "Waterloo" standards

REGIMENTAL standards thought to have been found after the Battle of Waterloo by Sir Walter Scott have been dismissed as "tourist tat".

The four flags - described as three French and one Scottish - were heralded as an important discovery when they were found recently in a cupboard at Abbotsford House, the author's home near Melrose, Roxburghshire.

Full article here.

Telectroscope

If you believe artist and inventor Paul St George then his "Telectroscope" connects New York and London via a (very) long tunnel running through the earth's crust, with the images bouncing back and forth using mirrors. . .

One end of the "tunnel" emerges next to Tower Bridge on the banks of the Thames in London - the other is next to Brooklyn Bridge on the banks of New York's East River.

It looks like something HG Wells might have imagined.

Each end has a giant telescope-like construction which appears to punch its way out of the earth.

There are dials, and levers, and thermometer gauges on the side of the 20m long brass and wood construction.

Peer into it and you can see people on the other side of the Atlantic.

Sounds cool -- something that should be made a permanent installation. From the BBC (with video). Telectroscope website here; Wikipedia entry on the original telectroscopes here. Unfortunately, I seem to be a bit late to this story, as it appears the installation in New York and London was scheduled to be taken down last week. CNN had a good writeup back in May.

Raising Providence's Russian sub

Never did get to visit the submarine before it sank. Now it looks like it's museum days are over:

Juliett 484, a Soviet-era ballistic-missile submarine, is still stuck in the mud on the bottom of Providence harbor, flooded and rusting inside, and home to plants, crabs, and the few fish hardy enough to live in Providence's murky waters. The sub sank in April 2007 in a severe storm, and now rests on its side in 35 feet of water just off Collier Point Park.

With the museum that operates the submarine lacking the cash to raise it, the sub might have stayed there forever had the military not taken an interest in refloating the submarine as a training exercise. . .

While it's a great training exercise for the military's salvage divers, they may be among the last people who will ever set foot inside the Russian sub; its days as a museum boat are likely over, thanks to the rust and growth inside. They won't know for sure until the submarine is refloated.

"If it's in really bad shape, we have to be realistic, it's been underwater for a year," said Frank Lennon, president of the USS Saratoga Foundation, which operates the museum.

Full article in the Providence Journal.

Pen Room founder honored

The pen is mightier than the sword as they say, and it is the pen that ultimately helped one 71-year-old Sutton Coldfield man gain an MBE this week.

Brian Jones, who lives in Walmley, was honoured for his voluntary services to the Pen Room - a museum dedicated to the Birmingham's pen trade. . .

Brian's interest started when he wrote and researched a book on Josiah Mason - who made his own fortune through manufacturing pen nibs.

He became one of the driving forces behind the Birmingham Pen Trade Heritage Association, which was formed in 1996.

The group opened the volunteer-run Pen Room in 2001 and a learning centre was established the following year.

It now attracts up to 10,000 people a year from as far afield as China and the United States.

Full story here. More about the Pen Room here.