Somewhere Else

If you like straight lines, you will find plenty of them in the modern skyscrapers of Singapore. But between the skyscrapers there is another world. Singapore has temples from many different faiths, and one thing that they all have in common is a tendency to use curved lines.

The Chinese ancestral temple above is Tan Si Chong Su, in the central business district near Raffles Place. The roof is curved and convoluted, the lanterns are cylindrical and the hanging coils of incense helixes. Even the trees seem to avoid being straight!

The incense is interesting because it seems to mock the old adage that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. If the coils were straightened out, they would become very long sticks of incense – but since they are curved, they are much shorter and more compact. Something to ponder.

 By now you will have noticed that we like unusual lines. But of course, lines don’t have to be straight or restricted to two dimensions. The decorative columns on the church of Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo Italy (above) are interesting precisely because they aren’t straight. Maybe the stonemasons got bored with making normal columns and decided to do something outrageous for a change.

Spirals and helixes are very interesting curved lines that just go round ’round. You will find them in many places, especially in spiral staircases like this remarkable one in the Vatican Museum.

Italy is famous for its frescoes, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. But of course, there are still plenty of people painting pictures on walls in Italy today. Many of them are unofficial artists, but sometimes their work raises a smile anyway.

We saw the two dogs above hiding on semi-derelict walls in Rome and Pisa. Even some of the great artists failed to catch the concentrated dogginess of these amusing portraits – one dog showing a mean streak of canine confidence and the other looking decidedly downhearted. The sad one seems to think we should have more dogs and less TV.

According to Oscar Wilde, when good Americans die they go to Paris – though he wasn’t quite so complimentary about where the bad ones go. But here’s a question for you: Where do good dogs go when they die?

The answer has to be the small country town of Corrigin in Western Australia, which has a dog cemetery. This unusual tourist attraction was opened in 1974 and is now home to 80 dogs. The town has several other doggy statues and banners as well.

Here’s a little puzzle for you: What language does the expression “Etaoin Shrdlu” come from? Believe it or not, it is English! You can find it in larger dictionaries. Normally written all in capital letters, ETAOIN SHRDLU is roughly the decreasing order of frequency of letters in English words. So the letter E is used more often than any other letter.

The expression comes from the order of the top two rows of keys on a Linotype machine, which was used to produce type for printing before the advent of computerised typesetting. If an operator made an error, they just ran their finger along those top two rows to print ETAOIN SHRDLU at the end of the line. That meant something like “Oops, I made a mistake – discard this line”. But in a few instances, the mistake went right through into the final printing.

Of course, you might say “So what?” But this little oddity does have some use today. If you like to while away spare time doing clueless crosswords (as in crosswords that don’t have clues, not crosswords for clueless people), the frequency of letters is a very important help in identifying the letters. And it’s helpful if you play Scrabble too.

If you’re interested in Linotype machines, head for the Queanbeyan Printing Museum, near Canberra. The photo above shows Jim W demonstrating how this amazing machine works.

Today we take books and printing pretty much for granted. But it wasn’t always like that. Until Johannes Gutenberg perfected the art of printing with movable type in about 1439, books were very rare and expensive.

Gutenberg lived and worked in the historic German town of Mainz, just near Frankfurt. To honour his achievements, Mainz has erected many interesting monuments to Gutenberg. One of the main squares in the town is Gutenbergplatz, which has an impressive statue of Gutenberg standing on a pedestal. Around the base there are bas reliefs like the one above, which shows the famous printer at work.

There is also a Gutenberg Museum with many interesting displays of printing from different countries at different times. In the basement there are demonstrations of how hand printing works. Go along, you’ll be “impressed”.

Although we don’t think about it much, virtually all cities have sewers. They are generally hidden and we only notice them if something goes wrong. But in Paris the sewers are actually a macabre tourist attraction.

The sewers of Paris have been a popular with tourists since the 19th Century. You can visit a section of Les Égouts de Paris to see the sewers for yourself. There is a museum, with displays showing how the sewers were built and maintained. Amazingly, this is still a working sewer, with effluent running along concrete channels.

These sewers were used as the setting for part of Victor Hugo’s massive novel Les Miserables, and hence for the musical derived from it. The hero Jean Valjean walks through the sewers carrying his injured enemy to safety. That sounds like a noble deed, but a visit to Les Égouts shows that it was a brave one too.

One of the more unusual tourist sights of Rome is the Cloaca Maxima. This 2,000 year old sewer is an enduring testament to the engineering skills of the Romans. It is still an operating part of the city’s drainage system today.

You can see several parts of the Cloaca Maxima, if you know where to look. There is a locked entrance to the Cloaca Maxima in the Roman Forum. There is another entrance hidden down a barred alleyway opposite the church of San Giorgio in Velabro (see photo above), though it is guarded by a Cerberus-like dog that especially likes tormenting sightseers.

But the most visible site is the exit of the ancient sewer into the River Tiber (below), which is visible near the Insula Tiberina. This unlikely tourist attraction attracts a steady stream of visitors, who stop to admire its grim arch and then continue on their way.

If you are a fan of rock ‘n roll (and who isn’t?), you are probably a fan of AC/DC – the band that changed the world of rock ‘n roll in the 1970s when Bon Scott was lead singer. Bon was born in Scotland (he was both a Scot and a Scott), grew up in Fremantle, Western Australia, joined AC/DC in 1974 and met his untimely death on 19th February 1980.

The port city of Fremantle still honours the memory of its “local boy makes good”. At the boat harbour there is a statue of Bon belting out a song, while standing on his amplifier. And at the cemetery you can visit his grave to pay your respects.

But maybe the most fitting memorial to Bon is a huge mural painting of Bon Scott on a wall beneath the modern road bridge. It’s unauthorised art and probably has a short life expectancy, but it captures the essence of Bon perfectly. You can only believe that he would have appreciated this unofficial portrait.

Australia isn’t the only country where you can find interesting caravans. We saw this one in Paris. It isn’t a cute vintage like others that we have posted on this site, but it is still a time machine.

This caravan belongs to a fortune teller. The notices on the caravan advise that the owner is a medium who can read past, present and future, give tarot readings and calm the spirit. Vintage vans recreate the past, but this one roams much more widely in time.