Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

If you ever go to Madrid, eat at Casa Lucio–everyone else does, including the Spanish king.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez had eaten lunch there on May 10, so when Frank was dragooned to sign their “golden book” that night, his page is right after another Nobel laureate. All the staff made much of us–the owner and his daughter came over and got their photographs taken with Frank–it’s no wonder that celebrities like to go there!

After we finished our dinner (about half-past midnight) and were making our way to the door, with Frank being introduced to various patrons and shaking their hands, we met a second entourage of young jet-set types arriving for dinner.

Frank and young Mr. JetSet were urged to shake hands with each other, which they duly did, both smiling with baffled but friendly amiability. As the two entourages drew them apart in their different directions, one of our Spanish friends asked, “Do you know who that was? That was the goalkeeper for Madrid Real!”

Madrid Real is the local soccer team, and I have used Google to guess that the name right after Frank’s in the golden book is Iker Casillas. And I’m guessing his bafflement about being introduced to Frank was at least as great as Frank’s at being introduced to him.

Of course, food is the real reason to go to Casa Lucio –and the English menu dutifully and honestly translates its local specialties … “gills of hake” … “fat capon” …. “Gills of hake” is a kind of gray soup with fish gills floating in it–but since four out of the nine people at our table ordered it, it probably tastes better than it looks or sounds…

Time is starting to go by just too darn fast…

I’m sitting in St. Johns College in Oxford

…which I haven’t told you about yet

,

under a beautiful Murillo crescent moon

(which I learned about from visiting the Prado in Madrid, but I still haven’t told you about Madrid yet…)

Please, somebody stop things from happening long enough that I can blog them!

Too often modern “museology” is a smudge on the nose of a fine old museum collection. A few years ago, the big museology fad was that old-fashioned science museums were boring. Therefore every science museum, everywhere, cleared some big chunks of space for a show about ¨Sharks are scary!” or “Snakes are dangerous!”*

I understand that not everybody loves, as I do, the massed ranks of whitened skeletons that Paris displays (probably, just as Georges Cuvier organized them.)

But it is possible for museum displays to be fresh instead of stale without losing scientific value. The Barcelona science museum, under the direction of Jorge Wagensberg, is proof of this.

The display of 6 giant iguanodon skeletons amusingly shows the sequence of scientists´ideas about how to pose them. Did they walk on four legs or two? The huge thumb-claw was depicted as a nose-horn for many years, until intact skeletons made it clear where it went. Another sequence of signs talks about scientists´changing theories about the finding of 23 skeletons so close together, and talks about how evidence supports or contradicts each one.

In addition to big displays to ooh and ahhh over — let me re-mention the sunken Amazon rainforest — the interactive exhibits are clever, relevant, and in good repair. (Frank loved the Coriolis force machine and was delighted to find its twin in Madrid. Both museums are funded by CosmoCaixa Foundation, so they share inspirations back and forth.)

The CosomoCaixa Science Museums of Barcelona — it´s up near Tibidabo — and Madrid — go see them if you get a chance!

*You can see exactly the same effect when school curricula get re-written by people who hated school and thought all their subjects were boring or too hard. I was lucky enough to attend public school when some of the smartest and most ambitious career women in my home town were proud to teach kids the subjects they had learned and loved in those very same schools.

Heading for chilly Oxford this morning (must pack!)

Just quick miniblog on Barcelona–

• Wonderful science museum; we spent 6 hours exploring and could have spent more
• Wonderful Gaudi buildings and magnificent buildings created by his rivals
• Wonderful narrow cobbled streets near Cathedral get cleaned every single day
• Wonderful friendly people, even the extremely trendy looking young staff of the wonderful Hotel Neri
• Wonderful food, especially crema Catalana, an improved (if you can believe it) creme brulee with the custard less heavy and the sugar top thicker

The picture shows Gaudi’s hugely ambitious Sagrada Familia, still under construction, with a busker dressed as Barcelona’s Columbus statue, and two tourists enjoying it all.

The things you learn about your husband by reading pull quotes from newspaper interviews…these from La Vanguardia:

Tengo 53 años: menos memoria, pero mejor utilizada. Naci in Long Island y soy orgulloso fruto de la escuela pública de Nueva York. Casado, dos hijas…A veces me escuchan. No sé si Dios es; el de los humanos no lo he visto. No juzguen a EE.UU. por sus gubernantes: son mucho más mediocres que el pais.

Via Google language tools:I am 53 years old: less memory, but better used. I was born in Long Island and I am the proud fruit of the public schools of New York. Married, two daughters… Sometimes they listen to me. I do not know if God exists; the one of the humans I have not seen it. Do not judge the U.S.A. by its politicians: they are much more mediocre than the country.

I also discovered that the Spanish for “gluons” is “gluones.”

Cocoa beans, that is, and that´s just one of the things you can learn at Barcelona´s Museum of Chocolate :

• The Aztec word xocoatl means “bitter water” — lily-livered Europeans were the first to flavor it with milk and sugar.
• The scientific name Theobroma means “food of the gods” — an editorial comment by Linnaeus with which I thoroughly agree.
• In my childhood, chocolate was one of the treats young Catholics were urged to give up for Lent. But Medieval monks were allowed plenty of chocolate during their many religious fasts — IMO, a classic early example of the way technology creates new temptations much faster than bureaucrats can create new sins.

Time to get off this smoky cafe computer, so hasta la vista*! Oh, one more discovery today–Barcelona hot chocolate is thick and black, like melted Hershey bars or hot chocolate pudding. I drank half a demitasse and I won´t need any lunch–not that I´m complaining!

Frank and I got into the elevator and pushed a button for floor “-5”.

Barcelona’s science museum CosmoCaixa–which just reopened after a huge expansion–is
celebrating the World Year of Physics with lectures in praise of its most beautiful equations–That should give some idea of their energy and ambition.

And how about… A flooded Amazon jungle, on display from its rain-forest canopy to fish swimming in between tree-roots “Over 90 tons of rock in a single exhibition” (to quote their English website) Six iguanodon skeletons here on a road-trip from Belgium An enormous Foucault pendulum that knocks things over with satisfying clunks, which was built by the very kind man who also solved 97 computer complications for me. And 50,000 square meters of more of the same…

It’s more than enough to wake anyone up from jetlag!