Albert Uderzo, the artist that together with Renè Goscinny created Asterix in 1959, is an 84 year old gentleman who (so the story goes) recently bought a real military fighter plane and a Pharaoh-like mansion, following the advice from his “plumber” (heck, who’s this guy, SuperMario?). Due to these and similar facts, Asterix’s sister, that is Uderzo’s daughter Sylvie, went to court to have her father declared mentally incompetent and to accuse the plumber to abuse of his influence on Uderzo. That’s what I read on Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. If this were all the story, it would be a tragic or comic family fight, of little actual interest for everybody else.
Archives
Ancient Balinese scripts are incised with a sharp knife on both sides of lontar palm leaves that are then blackened with soot. The leaves are held and linked together by a string that passes through the central holes and knotted at the outer ends.
Today, many young people cannot read lontar inscriptions like this:
Today we have technology to make potentially every existing book accessible to vision-impaired people thanks to e-book readers (even if that technology is still badly (un) unsed very often, see these real world examples). There is, however, a refusal to use it in this way:
- When you are online all the time with a constant, public email address you get all the kinds of spam that exist or may exist. Or so I thought. Then, one week ago I really found in my spam folder the message quoted below. This is an absolute first for me: “Radiation levels are climbing in the USA and Canada from the devastation to the nuclear reactor in Fukushima Japan.. there is an easy way to protect yourself: I am personally using this product below.
In an interview released on March 26th, 2011, Lester Brown said says lots of interesting things, but the most urgent one is the current status of water supplies worldwide (emphasis mine):