State of Mac - Phillipsović Report

The State of Mac is serious, irreversible and only downhill from here.
First, the numbers, as of January 29, 2025:

The platelets range from 28 to 46 to 64.  Normal range       140-400
White cells, 1.2,                                                Normal        3.7-11.1
Red cells 3.3 down to 2.76 in the last week,     Normal       4.1-5.7
Hemoglobin 8.9 down to 8.1 in half a week,    Normal       8.1-13.7,
        Below 8 Mac gets a transfusion of unit of blood, below 7, 2 or 3 units.

No hemoglobin means no oxygen distributed by blood, makes one weak and tired. Transfusions keeps him alive. His weekly pill box is amazing, has more pills than what I have consumed in my lifetime, so it's hard to figure out what is affecting what. Mac is in one chronic pain, followed by another. Chemo is brutal. He does not drink enough water, for so many poisons flowing through his body. Mac is depressed. But then, not really, as surrounded by love from all directions. 

[Guapo]

He's fighting the cancer. He is not ready to die. He is his lovely usual Mac self, kind and enjoying chatting and reminiscing.

[Chanda and Mac]

Over recent months (says Chanda) or over the past year (says Amani, The Boyfriend) Mac has gone downhill, and is wobbly, especially in the mornings. He's gone from the Michigan normal man size to the California normal men size by losing 50-60 lb, which makes him handsome, 

[Mac & Guapo, by Chanda]

but the muscle-tone is gone...

No white cells means that if Mac gets if an infection, any infection, he's in a very serious trouble. This being America that learned nothing from having 1/2 million Americans killed, millions crippled by pandemic and a bad government, everybody in the house except Mac navigates world outside as full, unmasked, unsanitized life.

Doctors do not know how long he will live.

Should you visit?

Chanda would love you to come and visit. Mac will firmly say no. He will say he is depressed much of the time, he has no strength to be a good host.

Ignore him. If you can just show up. Chanda is from the old country, where every guest is welcome, hosted and feasted. LisaBeth and Amani are the sweetest young folks you ever will meet. So, instead of brooding over Mac in his suspension bed, we were taken to very tasty Kampuchean, Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants, to a reggae festival, to a modern (post-)ballet performance, to a tour of Berkeley Hills.

[Guapo will love you]

Probably best to do what we did, find another place nearby to stay, to give the family space. We stayed at Hilton 10 min walk away,

[Hilton hotel room window]

[with beautiful San Francisco sunsets]

but that was needed as Sara can only walk short stretches, you can loan Mac's car and stay someplace else.

[map]

Now, there is one thing you should be aware of: out there, Guapo's arch enemy,

[The Turkey, lurking at the entrance door]

[The Turkey attacks]

is laying in wait, ready to attack Guapo's defender at any time: here he's rushing at me, nipping at my pants.

How I got my unpronouncable name?

(see also ChaosBook.blogspot.com/2010/10/whuz-yr-name.html )

Zu meinem Nachnamen: Der Name meines Adoptivvaters Cvitanović (Cvit = Blume, tanov = Sohn von, ić = Kleiner) ist ein verbreiteter kroatischer Bauern- und Fischername. Mein Name (Pre = zu viel, drag = wertvoll) stammt aus einem serbischen Epos über zwei Straßenräuber „Predrag und Nenad“, einer Nacherzählung der Geschichte von Kain und Abel. Nenad („unerwartet“, auch „Keine Hoffnung“) stammt von meinem kroatischen leiblichen Vater, der seine Studentenkollegin, die Tochter eines serbisch-orthodoxen Priesters, unerwartet schwängerte; das Ergebnis war mein älterer Halbbruder Nenad Belić. Daher wird der 2. Sohn „Predrag“ genannt. Die beiden Väter haben sich also verschworen, um meinen Namen für fast jeden auf der Welt unaussprechlich zu machen.

Der Familienname meiner Mutter, Golmajer (früher Gollmayer / Gollmayr geschrieben), macht mich zu einem Österreicher: Die Gollmayers waren Leibeigene, die von ihrem deutschen Herrn im frühen XVII Jahrhundert nach Slowenien gebracht wurden. Jahrhundert nach Slowenien gebracht wurden. Es gibt auch Ungarn in der Mischung, insbesondere die Familie Esterházy und auch General Josip Filipović, der die österreichisch-ungarische Besetzung von Bosnien und Herzegowina im Jahr 1878 leitete. Die Folgen kennen Sie.

[Übersetzt mit DeepL.com]

About my surname: my adoptive father's name Cvitanović (Cvit = flower, tanov = son of, ić = little one) is a common Croatian peasant and fisherman name. My name (Pre= too much, drag=precious) comes from a Serbian epic about two highway robber men "Predrag and Nenad", a retelling of the Cain and Abel story. Nenad ("unexpected", also "No hope") comes from my Croatian biological father, who got his university student colleague, daughter of a Serbian orthodox priest, unexpectedly pregnant, result being my older half-brother Nenad Belić. Hence the 2nd son gets to be "Predrag". Thus the two fathers conspired to make my name unpronounceable to almost anybody on the planet.

My mother's family name Golmajer (previously spelled Gollmayer / Gollmayr) makes me Austrian: Gollmayers were serfs, brought to Slovenia by their German lord in early XVII century. There are also Hungarians in the mix, in particular, the family Esterházy, and also general Josip Filipović who led the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878. The consequences you know.

The History of Byzantium

 

I'm back to where I was in November 2016. Now (and then) I've deleted my account in the fascist cesspool of X, and my Washington Post subscription. On YouTube I only watch my moron physics colleagues pine that the Nobel Prize in Physics was this year given to computer programmers. This, after they had given one to that weatherman Parisi.

The only podcast I listen to is "The History of Byzantium" . He is now at the year 1328, with episode 311. Only 125 years to go. They are typically 25 min each, my ride back or to work. But I've forgotten everything I had learned back in November of 2016,  so I'm restarting with the prelude to the year 476 episodes.

Other than that, inspired by certain Vattay's contribution to ChaosBook.org, I have discovered that the PhD theses of certain Artuso and Aurell are wrong in a subtle way (see p. 42 here, or listen to yet another bombastic video here). I do not know how to have these faulty PhD titles revoked, so I'm forced to labor alone on the correct theory . It would be fun to do this together, but all of the above have tenure, so... (see Not-Jamie Dimon's conjectures here).

As long as they do not come for me, I'll be OK.

Alberto Martínez "Beyond 1905: Einstein's Light, Love, and Lies"

(Alberto Martínez gave us a fascinating history of science lecture with above title)

Liebe Albert(o)

I think your combination of human miseries of young Einstein and what really took to get to relativity is just wonderful. Thanks for a great lecture!

I bow my head in shame. In spite of being friends with Abraham Pais and Engelbert Schuking, I knew nothing of what you taught us. I teach relativity like a late 20th century barbarian, as a triviality, first teach them SO(n) and then SO(4)=SU(2) x SU(2), then confuse them a bit with SO(1,3) and spinors. Done.
Life is even easier for Dr. Zangwill whose happy life never required learning any gruppenpest. He takes time to be pure imaginary. Done. Legitimized by real menschen, Pauli and t'Hooft.

I think why someone like Bram Pais would not bother including into a scientific biography of Einstein his "Die Leiden des jungen Alberts" sexual triumphs, pregnancies and miseries, as they were standard for any educated bourgeois male of late 19th, early 20th century. Bram's own biography would be like that - who saved him from Nazis and Dutch collaborators through the 2nd WW? And this misery might be standard again, if our crypto-fascist christian ayatollah succeed returning this country to pre-French Revolution feudalism.

A book that might be helpful in capturing the zeitgeist of pre-Nazi takeover Mittel Europa / central Europe is Margaret MacMillan, Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. I recommend it as a true Oyropeen intellectual (AKA, I have not yet read it myself): YouTube.com/watch?v=T7iXNZJsa6s&t=4s.

Regarding our conversation about Einsteins human rights activism in 1931: Albert Einstein and Heinrich Mann sent a letter to the International League for Human Rights in Paris to protest the murder of Milan Šufflay, appealing for protection of Croatian people from the oppression of Yugoslav regime.

New York Times.com 1931/05/06 article

A series of such high profile political assassinations, as well as murders of ordinary Croats, eventually led to horrific, Hitler-Mussolini sponsored civil war, a war within the 2nd World War, and then to the second, post-communist 1991-1995 war, a preview of the current Russian assault on Ukraine.

How you can do all this  without speaking German of Goethe, Heine and Kafka is beyond my ken. Should I mention that young Šufflay spoke French, German, Italian, English, all the Slavic languages, as well as Latin, old Greek, and middle Greek? Before his assassination by Serbian police, he had also learned modern Greek, Albanian, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. 

Fortunately, with AS (Artificial Stupidity) no one will ever have to waste time on learning a foreign language again. Or learning anything at all 🙂

 

"This is not physics!" or "Why did the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics go to two computer scientists"

Wonderful prize! I totally agree with the choice and reasoning for the choice.

 

My "fundamental" physics colleagues (particle physics, general relativity, strings, ...) have been more idiotic than usual. 

The funniest thing is the chorus of particle  physicists and such,   croaking

  "That's not physics!"

Sabine Hossenfelder is under impression that Hopfield is a computer scientist:)  But what for did he get the Buckley Prize, the Dirac Medal, the Boltzmann prize, was a President of APS, what for, then? Couldn't they, like, check the wiki before dismissing as prominent a physicist as Hopfield for the sin of having opened a new path forward?

 

October 18th klogW (APS GSNP and GDS) virtual seminar on the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics is excellent, especially in emphasizing the importance of this work for the development of contemporary computational neuroscience (not Large Language Models). About minute 43 into the video, Sara A. Solla tells the story of Hopfield 's 1983 APS March Meeting plenary talk, and how the work was received by Hopfield 's colleagues:

  "Very interesting. But. It's not physics, is it?"

 

There are some well based considerations about who should have also been included. I've been told Daniel Amit, but he had already committed suicide. Some people think Amari:

 

F writes: Amari in 1977 introduced the Hebbian learning and thus the 1982 Hopfield Network. Go figure what's going on! There are similar issues with the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The wife of one of the Nobel laureates is the first author, along with her husband, on the key paper that led to him receiving the prize.  

For this, the required viewing is The Wife, with Glenn Close. Amazing movie. Especially for me, as S is taking me to the Nobel festivities in Stockholm as her spouse. Though, she did all her work with no interference from me 🙂.

S had been Amari's guest at RIKEN, and has fun stories to tell about what is it to be a famed physicist visitor from Bell Labs (while visiting as a woman 🙂)

Shun-ichi Amari is universally respected, cited by Hopfield in The Paper, and I am not  aware of any contentious Nobel Prize priority claims from him.

Benny Lautrup: Så megen venlighed 1953

 Bennys erindringer: 

"Min mor gled i en hundelort på Vesterbrogade i København, da min far tilfældigvis kom gående forbi. Han hjalp hende op, og derfor er jeg."

Fra yumpu.com - fra Benny's nbi.dk konto
Benny Lautrup - populære artikler, anmeldelser og foredrag
bibliotek.dk articles - da.wiki

Benny died age 85, on January 3, 2025. Alzheimer was the cause.
NBIA obituary

Birthe: "Benny har de sidste måneder oplevet alvorlige skred i sin sygdom. Og især inden for de sidste to uger er det gået drastisk ned ad bakke, hvor han så yderligere pådrog sig en lungebetændelse, mistede sin bedste ven på plejehjemmet, og holdt op med at spise og indtage væske. I formiddags kl. 11 døde han fredfyldt, efter jeg og hans drenge havde haft to vågenætter hos ham. Hvor meget jeg end vil savne ham, er jeg glad for, han nu har fået ro, for han var så stærkt svækket af sin sygdom, at livskvaliteten var forsvundet.

Han holdt meget af dig, og så ofte på jeres fælles 2005 billede."

Translated with DeepL.com :

In recent months, Benny has experienced serious slips in his illness. Especially in the last two weeks, he went drastically downhill, contracting pneumonia, losing his best friend at the nursing home, and stopping eating and drinking.

This morning at 11am, he died peacefully after his boys and I had spent two nights awake with him. As much as I will miss him, I am glad that he is now at peace, because he was so weakened by his illness that the quality of his life had disappeared.

He loved you very much and often looked at your picture together.

Søren Brunak: Mindeord for fysikprofessor Benny Lautrup       25. februar, 2025

Benny was one of the institute's most colorful employees, a formidable researcher, teacher and public debater.

Against all odds, a boy born to a single mother in Istedgade, he became a trailblazer and in 1965 earned a master's degree from the country's most prestigious academic institution, the Niels Bohr Institute. His career took him to the US  Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and later to CERN in Geneva and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifique. In 1974 he returned to the Niels Bohr Institute as an associate professor of theoretical physics and later used his supercomputing skills to research artificial neural networks and contributed his physics toolbox to the development of artificial intelligence.

However, Benny came home to a Denmark in crisis, and this also applied to universities. It was a time when people were very stingy about promoting associate professors to professors. Despite the fact that people could be professors, associate professors had to take lessons in chair dancing to be able to boast about the professional level they had reached. At one point, there was an official announcement from the management that lecturers could call themselves “professors abroad”. Associate Professor Lautrup, who had an international background, found this ridiculous and started answering phone calls by saying “It's Benny Lautrup, professor abroad”.

He was not shy about criticizing the system - or his colleagues for that matter. In 1975, after Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, the idea arose that the institute's old tandem accelerator (which can accelerate charged particles) should be replaced with a new version at a cost in the three-digit millions.

The new machine would advance the institute's research in nuclear physics. Benny's view was that the investment would be backward-looking and that it would be much more offensive to boost other under-funded areas of the time, such as high-energy physics and complex systems physics.

Benny's critical outspokenness led to him being invited for a stroll in Bernstorffsparken, where Aage Bohr tried to convince him of the merits of the plan. Aage had been so eager in his argument that he forgot to look where he was going and inadvertently stepped on an elderly lady's small dog. It howled wildly - after which the lady called the Nobel laureate a boor. Benny was later amused by how an associate professor and an elderly lady in a park had jointly tried to resist a tandem accelerator. 

Benny was hard to mess with. I thought of him recently when I heard about the death of DR journalist Jens Olaf Jersild. In connection with the publication of Benny's and my joint book Neural Networks - Computers with Intuition in 1988, Jersild interviewed us on TV Avisen.

Benny demonstrated our artificial neural network, which was trained to find syllables in Danish words and insert hypen-dashes in the right places in the words. A hyphenation problem had arisen in the newspapers when they had fired the language-competent typographers and left the task to stupid computers. The result was quite comical mistakes.

Jens Olaf Jersild asked Benny to type the words “kvalitetsfjernsyn” and “Kvægtorvet” into the program on the screen, and the correct answers came back immediately. Jens Olaf Jersild suggested that the latter was the opposite of the former, but Benny stuck to the science and didn't get involved in the TV host's little vendetta against the newly launched competing channel TV2, which was based at Kvægtorvet.

We were very proud that our network split both the words grill-bar and jazz-festival correctly, even though it had never before seen a single example of a word with a double consonant where word sharing was not allowed. Benny's sense of language was close to reality and life, which could otherwise slip into the background in all the physics theory, which he also mastered sublimely.

Ironically, the American physicist John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for his neural network model, which we described in detail in the book.

Benny was a very charming man who was not uninterested in women. He had the advantage in city life that, due to his upbringing in Vesterbro, he rarely drank alcohol in large quantities. He was therefore able to stay attractive throughout the evening when the competition had long since gone under the table.

He had three lovely children, each with their own mother. Very surprisingly and fortunately, what physicists call a “phase transition” occurred in the middle of his life: He met Birthe, and the city life was exchanged for a quieter life with a cottage on Falster and flowers in a vase.

It was his fortune that Birthe and his children gathered around him for 30 years. The circle of friends was large, and Benny's funeral was, in Bent Fabricius Bjerre's words, “a success”: A packed church and a wake where people stood like herring in a barrel.

  

Adrian Belic : Na vesla oko Raba

 

Ante Matijević, Radio Rab 92,6MHz         08.05.2025

Vidio sam jednog č𝐮𝐝𝐧𝐨𝐠 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐚 koji se nespretno okretao kod novoizgrađenog mula na ulazu u rapsku luku te se provom skoro i zabio u njega. Stvar su spasili neki ljudi na mulu, vjerojatno neka njegova ekipa. I zapitah se tada, onako rapski, gledajući ga s rive u prolazu - 𝐌𝐚 č𝐚 𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐣 š𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐨 č𝐢𝐧𝐢?

Došle su i te godine, pomalo pozne za ulazak u ozbiljnije avanture, no odlučio sam nastaviti tradiciju svojih predaka i veslima oploviti Rab - započeo je svoju priču Adrian Belic, Amerikanac rapskih korijena s kojim sam popričao jednog toplog rujanskog dana 2024. godine. Pomalo iznenađen i zatečen zbog neznanja o rapskoj obitelji Belić, koja posjeduje kuću u Gornjoj ulici u gradu Rabu kao i zanimljivim avanturama kojima su svjedočili. Zapravo i ne čudi jer, kako sam kasnije u razgovoru doznao, obitelj je emigrirala u Ameriku, točnije u Sjedinjene Američke Države još 50-tih godina prošlog stoljeća te se radi o jednoj, bez ikakve uvrede, čudnovatoj obitelji.

Adrianov otac Nenad (Neno) zaputio se prema američkom kontinentu i nastanio u Chicagu, državi Illinois, gdje su se rodili sinovi Adrian i Roko. Tamo su proveli rano djetinjstvo, a kasnije su se preselili na zapadnu obalu u Kaliforniju, grad anđela - Los Angeles. Adrian je filmski redatelj, snimatelj i producent, a 2000-te godine film pod nazivom „Beyond the Call“ bio je nominiran za Oscara kao najbolji dugometražni dokumentarni film.

 

𝐊𝐚𝐤𝐨 𝐣𝐞 𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐣𝐬𝐤𝐚 𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐞š𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐯𝐢𝐣𝐚 𝐳𝐚𝐩𝐨č𝐞𝐥𝐚

Pradjed Radovan (Radoje) Belic, rođen u 19. stoljeću, došao je na ludu ideju, prepričava mi sugovornik, da od ribara čiji su čamci bili privezani u rapskoj luci posudi barku na vesla, nakrca je alkoholom, sardinama, vodom i cigarama, i na tom malom kaiću na vesla oplovi otok Rab. I stvarno, pošlo mu je za rukom. Slijedio ga je Živan, moj djed, koji je ponovio plovidbu 70-tih godina 20. stoljeća, a 1989. godine došao je red na mog oca Nenada koji je također s uspjehom odveslao zacrtanu rutu predaka. Napomenimo kako je dr. Nenad Belic, kardiolog, bio šef kardiološkog odjela Čikaške bolnice, a poginuo u oluji u blizini engleske obale 2001. godine u pokušaju da s malim čamcem prevesla Atlantik.

 

 

𝐃𝐨š𝐚𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐢 𝐧𝐚 𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐞

Od svog djetinjstva Adrian je slušao o pričama i avanturama svoga djeda i pradjeda. Iako je rođen u Americi kao dijete posjećivao je Rab gotovo svake godine i uživao u blagodatima ljetnih praznika. Ovdje se odlično osjećam, pun sam prekrasnih sjećanja, odlazaka na plivanje, u restorane, turista. Djed Živan imao je u luci vezanu barku kojom smo odlazili na plaže i susjedne otoke. Zaista, zapadna obala Raba, prekrasan šumovit Kalifront, Cres, Lošinj, Silba, Lun na Pagu bile su Adrianovo prošireno dvorište. Obožavam more, jedrio sam kao dijete i više sam jedriličar nego veslač - posebno je naglasio. I tako je došao moj red. Kako brzo prođe 50 godina - sa sjetom i pomalo zamišljen konstatira Adrian. Obiteljska je to tradicija, doduše malo uvrnuta, neobična. Ne čudi jer, ispričao mi je Adrian, kako je njegova obitelj pomalo ekscentrična, a k tome i raštrkana po cijelome svijetu.

 

𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐣𝐚 𝐤𝐨𝐣𝐚 𝐣𝐞 𝐳𝐚𝐡𝐭𝐢𝐣𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐚 𝐮𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐨𝐬𝐭, 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐩𝐥𝐣𝐞𝐧𝐣𝐞 𝐢 𝐩𝐬𝐢𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐨š𝐤𝐨 𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐦𝐮𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐣𝐞

Prvi problem koji se nametnuo bio je pronalazak pogodne malene drvene barčice na vesla s kojom bi bilo sigurno oploviti Rab. Da skratimo priču oko traženja kaića, Adrian je naposljetku bio upućen na poznatog rapskog brodograditelja i zaljubljenika u drvenu brodogradnju i jedrenje, Petra Španjola - Penku. Tu je naišao na tvrd orah. Penka, uvijek u poslu, pomalo zamišljen, ne rječit i s pomalo odmjeravajućim pogledom i mišlju “ Ča sad ovaj oće?” kad se netko zatekne kod njegove dizalice (op. a.). U jednoj rečenici karakterni opis našeg meštra od driva slagao se s dojmom koji je Adrian na prvu o njemu stekao. Vidio sam da me gleda kao nekog ludog Amerikanca s glupom idejom. Čudno me gledao - s osmjehom govori. I tako su počeli dani nadmudrivanja, ali i zbližavanja Adriana i Penke. Pustolovac je svakog dana dolazio kod Penke, započinjao razgovor, gledao barčicu i malo po malo, nakon nekoliko dana zaveslao, ali u vidokrugu oštrog Penkinog oka. Nisam ga htio iznevjeriti i znao sam da će me promatrati dok se budem upoznavao s barkom i pokušavao veslati. Uslijedili su treninzi do rapske luke, uvale sv. Eufemije i Ćifnate uz podršku prolazećih barkarijola i brodskih truba lokalnih turističkih brodova. Savjetovao mi je Petar da idem u pratnji još jedne barke, ali to nije bio dio mog plana. Provjerio sam vremensku prognozu koja je bila OK i upitao ga - Mogu li solo? Na to je Penka odgovorio - A OK. Idi sam! Blagoslov je pao i od tada sve je bilo, gotovo doslovno, u Adrianovim rukama.

 

𝐎 𝐝𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐣 𝐥𝐣𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐢 𝐧𝐚 𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐮𝐧

Na prvi pogled Adrian se zaljubio u drvenu ljepoticu, a nakon oplovljavanja kao da se rodila posebna ljubav prema njoj, vezanost. Gledao ju je drugim očima. Tako to biva s čovjekom i brodom. Drvena barka dužine 4 metra porinuta je u more davne 1962. godine. Da nije bilo brodograditelja Petra Španjola Penke, ova jedinstvena ljepotica, zapostavljena i načeta zubom vremena, zasigurno bi propala. Upravo te skladne linije nisu promakle izučenom brodograditeljskom oku. Penka je s restauracijom započeo početkom 2023. godine, a moja je malenkost tome svjedočila i pokojom slikom ovjekovječila. Sveobuhvatni remont, tekao je bez većih poteškoća, makar iz moje perspektive, a kolumba je zabrazdila površinom već 2024. godine. Građena i obnovljena prvenstveno za jedrenje, skladnih linija i krme “na limun”. (op.a.)

 

𝐈𝐬𝐩𝐮𝐧𝐣𝐞𝐧𝐣𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐣𝐞 𝐢 𝐬𝐧𝐚 𝐮 𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢č𝐤𝐨𝐦 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐮

Pustolovina je, prethodno utreniranim zaveslajima, krenula u subotu, 21. rujna 2024., nešto malo poslije 9:30 sati kada se Adrian otisnuo s Penkinog mula u Banju.

Otok Rab, karta

Vrijeme je bilo odlično. U Barbatskom kanalu bilo je predivno, po lijevom boku kod Mišnjaka prošao je trajekt, a zatim u Velebitskom kanalu spektakularno. More mirno, prefektno. Strme i gole padine rapskog masiva Kamenjaka, duboko i čisto modro more, bonaca, učinili su ovu dionicu, još uvijek po danu, prekrasnom. Kod Lopara Adrian se susreće sa zalazom. Vremenske se prilike mijenjaju. Postaje vjetrovito od bure i valovito, zaveslaji postaju teški, a držanje kursa izazovno. Sunce ubrzo zalazi i mala barčica ulazi u mrkli mrak. Dva sata čistoga mraka, no uz pratnju očaravajuće bioluminiscencije, plavo zelene boje kod svakog zaveslaja. Navigiram pomoću zvijezda. Mjesec proviruje negdje kod rta Stojan. Po lijevom boku ostavlja Sorinj, lovri rt Kalifront i laganim zaveslajima sjeverozapadnom obalom Kalifronta klizi sa svojom suputnicom prema gradu. Na ovoj dionici putovanja mjesec je bio gotovo pun, more mirno kao ulje. I čisto, kristalno čisto kao da plutaš svemirom. Vrlo romantično. Ubrzo se pojavilo svjetlo na Frkanju, a ranom zorom i gradski se zvonici pred pramcem pojavljuju. Znak je to bio da je potrebno odraditi još koji zaveslaj, ostaviti Dolin po desnom boku i uploviti u Penkinu lučicu. U 5 sati i 30ak minuta ruke pune žuljeva odlažu vesla na pajole barke, a stopala napokon dodiruju Penkin betonski pristan.

 

𝐑𝐞𝐳𝐢𝐦𝐞 - 𝐢𝐬𝐩𝐮𝐧𝐣𝐞𝐧𝐣𝐚 𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐣𝐬𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐣𝐞 + 𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐬𝐭

Tijekom veslačke avanture Adrian je malo jeo, svako malo pio vode, malo čak i halucinirao. U kratim se pauzama odmarao. Iako je bilo i bolno ovo je bilo predivno iskustvo. Ima uzbuđenja, slaviš uspjeh i ostavštinu njeguješ. Lijepo je imati korijenje i lijepo je biti odavde. Iz radosti to radim, čiste radosti! Iako su mnogi bili skeptični polako su popuštali i bili mi podrška, jedna zdrava lijepa zajednica. I za kraj, svakako moram zahvaliti svim ljudima koji su mi pomogli u ovom projektu jer bez njih ovo ne bi bilo moguće ostvariti.

 

𝐃𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐤 𝐳𝐚 𝐤𝐫𝐚𝐣

Plovidba na vesla oko otoka Raba trajala je 19 sati i 47 minuta, prijeđeno je 30 nautičkih milja, a prosječna brzina iznosila je 1,5 čvor.

Sara A Solla gets indicted

 Sara (at the far right signing podium), inducted.

Signing the book of Fellows, 

 

among the first of which were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, followed by …, Leonard Cohen, Joel E. Cohen, …, and this year, Laurence J. Fishburne, some handsome big guy that all beautiful women, especially Black women, buzzed around like flies.

Laurent: "lol, Morpheus from the Matrix is a fellow alongside Sara."