br23 blog - minsk, belarus

On Saturday we visited Lobkowicz’s castle near Prague, saw the original paintings of Lucas Cranach, Rubens, Breugel, and many other famous painters, including unique paintings of Spanish artists from 15th and 16th century. Walking through the castle rooms I felt awed and even subdued by the weight of this centuries-old art and European civilization. And this is all just a private collection of one man, prince Lobkowicz who lives in the States.

Lucas Cranach (1472-1553). Nelahozeves
Wer unter euch ohne Sünde ist, werfe den ersten Stein
(WER • VNTER • EVCH• ONE• SVNDE• IST • DER• WERFFE• DEN• EHRSTEN• STEIN• AVF•SIE.IO.VIII.)

It really amazed me how little the German language has changed in the last 500 years, at least, according to this inscription by Lucas Cranach.

And on Friday I bought a fossil shark tooth at the National museum gift shop in Prague:

The big tooth supposedly belongs to an extinct shark Otodus obliquus, the Great Grandmother of the Megalodon, and is one of the earliest mackerel sharks. Otodus obliquus was the king of the early Eocene, approximately 50-55 million years ago. This tooth comes from Morocco.

The smaller tooth belongs to Odontaspis substriata, some obscure small sand shark that is also now extinct. There’s very little information about it on the Internet.

After our field trips we came home and I immediately went online (of course), to my usual places of interest, but seeing all those trifle, insignificant news and raging “flame wars”, I suddenly felt how meaningless and futile is all this blogging “activity” on the Belarusian Internet.

I lie down on the floor, touch the shark tooth and try to imagine that this shark was alive 50 million years ago, and then I try to visualize my own life span on that time scale.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 1:02 am and is filed under Personal, Czech, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.