Supercell

Severe thunderstorms yesterday and this past night in Ile-de-France, but not in Paris. On Sunday I took a lovely photo of a supercell just in the Northwest of my flat, but yesterday it was night when the supercell appeared. Beside, I think it was too close to me and to my East to be photographed. We had a bit of hail Sunday night, but not much. It hailed some monsters in the East of Paris last night.

Look at that lovely supercell just in front of my windows! And not a drop of rain, no wind, no hail at the place where I was. Supercells are highly local thunderstorms. They can be deadly.They are the stuff from where the tornadoes are born. I'm proud of this snapshot, taken with my iPhone.

I spent parts of the day listening to Orly Approach on LiveATC.net. Landing was disturbed by thunderstorms and they had to change the configuration in the middle of the afternoon after an Air France aircraft had to go around two times on runway 26 and 24. They switched to runway 06 and the Air France flight landed safely. The pilot complained of severe rear drafts when landing on 26, prompting the go around. An Easy arriving from Nice decided to divert to Brussel without even trying to land.

Interestingly I listened in to the arrival of a COTAM Unité at Villacoublay. COTAM Unité is any aircraft where the President of the Republic is in, it can be an A300 or a Falcon, most likely a Falcon in this case.

A simple blog

This exactly what I need. A very simple blog, written in a nice monospace font, minimalist, to publish some ideas on the fly and in English (and sometimes in French).

The near enemy

Oliver Burkemann on the "near enemy" :

One of the most insightful bits of Buddhist psychology has yet to reach a widespread modern audience: the notion of the "near enemy". According to this way of thinking, for every desirable habit or state of mind, there's a "far enemy", which is its obvious antithesis. Thus hatred, it won't surprise you to learn, is the far enemy of love. Near enemies, on the other hand, are much sneakier and harder to spot, because they so closely resemble the thing they're the enemy of. Needy, possessive co-dependency can look and feel a lot like love, when really it corrodes it.
(..)
It's ironic that you're as likely to enounter near enemies in "spiritual" circles – including Buddhist ones – as anywhere else. Meditation can be a path to calm and clarity. But hang around meditators for a while and you're sure to run into a few who seem to be using it to smother issues they should probably see a therapist about; on closer inspection, what they exude isn't calm so much as an eerie sort of blankness. The American psychologist John Welwood called this "spiritual bypassing": the tendency "to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues". Not even the most apparently enlightened, it seems, are immune to confusing a fake for the real thing. All anyone can do is to be constantly aware of the risk.

On Nigel Farage

Charlie Brooker disparages Nigel Farage :

Farage says the unsayable. He says things so unsayable they’re said nigh-on constantly, often in large letters, on the front page of a newspaper. The sayable. He says the sayable. ROMANIAN STEALS WAR MEMORIAL. ONE IN THREE FOREIGNERS ISN’T BRITISH. NOW IT’S HALAL SMARTPHONES. That’s what he says. All of which means that, as well as being a bit of sore thumb stunt casting, he simultaneously represents familiarity; specifically the cosy familiarity of a world in which you could walk down an English high street without your ears getting bunged up with foreign accents, unless someone was doing a hilarious Gunga Din voice in order to mock the waiter in a curry house. That world is a corpse, but it’s a corpse that many want to revive…

There's no hope

Robert Crumb … ‘Proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s No Hope!’

Via BoingBoing

Aller au vert

Manque de nature, manque de calme, envie de forêts, d’arbres et de mousses.
Désir d’herbe, de feuilles, de branches. Toucher le tronc humide d’un arbre. Humer l’odeur des feuilles mortes qui pourrissent dans le sous-bois.
Envie d’écouter le son du vent dans les pins, le chant des oiseaux, le son de l’eau qui coule dans le ruisseau, sur les cailloux.
Écouter les craquements et les pétillements du bois qui brule dans la cheminée, sentir l’odeur du feu de bois, admirer la danse des flammes.
Écouter le son des gouttes de pluie qui battent le toit. Les chiens qui aboient au loin dans les fermes quand tombe la nuit.
Marcher dans la forêt, respirer ses odeurs, écouter le calme des grands bois.
J’ai besoin de sortir, de prendre des vacances à la campagne, d’y être seul dans cet état d’euphorie tranquille qui caractérise mes séjours au vert. De ne rien faire que lire, écrire, boire du vin en rêvassant et marcher dans les bois ou dans les champs, le long des haies des chemins creux, jouer avec le chat et lui faire des câlins.

Huic Arabia

Huic Arabia est conserta, ex alio latere Nabataeis contigua; opima varietate conmerciorum castrisque oppleta validis et castellis, quae ad repellendos gentium vicinarum excursus sollicitudo pervigil veterum per oportunos saltus erexit et cautos. haec quoque civitates habet inter oppida quaedam ingentes Bostram et Gerasam atque Philadelphiam murorum firmitate cautissimas. hanc provinciae inposito nomine rectoreque adtributo obtemperare legibus nostris Traianus conpulit imperator incolarum tumore saepe contunso cum glorioso marte Mediam urgeret et Parthos.
Proinde concepta rabie saeviore, quam desperatio incendebat et fames, amplificatis viribus ardore incohibili in excidium urbium matris Seleuciae efferebantur, quam comes tuebatur Castricius tresque legiones bellicis sudoribus induratae.
Circa hos dies Lollianus primae lanuginis adulescens, Lampadi filius ex praefecto, exploratius causam Maximino spectante, convictus codicem noxiarum artium nondum per aetatem firmato consilio descripsisse, exulque mittendus, ut sperabatur, patris inpulsu provocavit ad principem, et iussus ad eius comitatum duci, de fumo, ut aiunt, in flammam traditus Phalangio Baeticae consulari cecidit funesti carnificis manu.