The last picture of Lorenzo?

Today I went skiing with Lorenzo. Actually, we went photo shooting – wie immer with him. When we go somewhere we go to take pictures, mainly. We don’t go to visit a place, to relax together, to have fun… we just go to take pictures to be uploaded on flickr or in the blog. Always the same verflucht story. From six, long years … and since he got that verdammt Canon D450 it is even worst!!!

He took me pictures with mountains in the background from the West seite of Lenzerheide (click for zooming in).

He took me pictures with mountains in the background from the Ost seite of Lenzerheide (click for zooming in).

I had time just to shoot him once … and forever (click for zooming in)! Auf Wiedersehen meine liebe!

From Tomorrow – Loranablog changes into Anastasia’s blog. Somebody’s against it ?

Barack Hussein Obama “Santo subito!”

The first week of Obama presidency:

- He spoke on Arabian television declaring USA has nothing against Islam

- He spoke with Putin and Russian rockets were not delivered to Kaliningrad anymore

- He gave freedom of support to NGOs pro abortion

- He declared a green revolution for auto production and pollution control

- He gave new support to research on stem cells

Did I miss something? Is Obama the new Messiah?

Masturbation makes you dead of prostate cancer

What a unlucky generation I belong to. When we were teenager, sex and lust where always together with condoms and HIV.

Just one year ago we were informed that oral sex is a open door for throat tumors.

Today it was published that frequent sex (and even masturbation by itself) before being 20 years old causes higher possibilities of prostate cancer at older ages.

I am practically a dead man walking …

Lorana Blog goes Schmap!

Well well. I am really glad Schmap included in its digital maps one of my Wien pictures from Flickr. It’s not with Stasia Watch here how does it look like on a Iphone, for example. The picture is the one with written Lorana Blog at the bottom.

Guess and win !

What is the object in the picture? We found it today visiting a place in Switzerland. This place exists from 800 years. The object is not in use anymore. What can you win? Uhm … let’s see if you guess before what is that “stuff”!

Where are people coming to Loranablog from?

In bold the countries where I know to have some friends (contacts above 1,000 in the last 3 months):

United States (US)    41,380
Italy (IT)        10,031
United Kingdom (GB)    9,229
Canada (CA)        5,559
Germany (DE)        4,651
Australia (AU)        2,580
Netherlands (NL)    2,076
France (FR)        1,859
Switzerland (CH)    1,667
Spain (ES)        1,614
India (IN)        1,366
Sweden (SE)        1,307
Poland (PL)        1,196
Saudi Arabia (SA)    1,117
Turkey (TR)        1,042
Norway (NO)        1,007

Where are you, my Russian friends? “Russian Federation (RU) 511″ . Uhm… does Stasia have to write more often in Cyrillic ?

Vals Im Bashir: Israel propaganda?

Finally we managed to watch this movie. It is a really good piece of art. Flash animations and psychological backgrounds kept us away from the scary feelings provoked by the butchery going on during the movie. How couldn’t we like a movie shouting so loud how pointless is war?

However, something that has nothing to do with the style of the movie disturbed us. Are we the only one finding this movie a way for Israel soldiers to wash away their guiltiness? I mean, memories are put together at the end to show how guilty could Israel soldiers feel for not having avoided a massacre of Palestinians. But this massacre was practically operated by Christian Lebanese, not by Israel. Full stop.

Ok, Sharon is not coming out good from this movie. Who could anyway direct an apology of that murderer? But what about all the Lebanese civilians killed or left without a house BECAUSE OF Israel attacks on Lebanon during that war?
Maybe we’re just “influenced” by having had Lebanese friends. But for us this movie tells us only a part of the story, the part Israel likes to show to the world.

Deep Red 6 years later

So long I had to wait to show my wife THE horror movie from Dario Argento, as we never found Deep Red with German subtitles. Now she can speak Italian and she could appreciate this movie masterpiece. I really enjoyed watching it again. I had again cold thrills down my back when the killer identity was shown. I really love this movie, for the music made by Goblin, for the pictures and for the story. If you’ve never watched Deep Red, go and rent the DVD asap!

The tree of life and the tree of information: blogs are evolution best friends

The tree of life is not a tree any more. “Web of life” seems a more appropriate definition.

Ideas generated by Darwin were based on vertical gene transfer, from parents to progenies. However, horizontal gene transfer (HGT), among different or same species is not as rare as presumed, and not only in bacteria. It seems that in low eukaryotes (like amoebas) horizontal gene transfer takes place for 80% of the genes. In higher eukaryotes (like us), hybridizations and virus driven HGT seems to happen more often than what we previously thought. Viruses, for example, carry around genes from the different species they infect and insert those genes in new host genomes.

Thus, we self are the product of transgenic (!) steps operated, for example, by viruses.

Nothing really new, but this nice article on the New scientist points out that the winning evolution strategy is based on gene exchange at every level, both vertical and horizontal. The best adapting mix of genes (the Homo sapiens) won the Planet! That’s not a miserable result.

Could multi-directional information exchange be as successful as multi-directional gene exchange?

Maroni e le manifestazioni sgradite

Maroni, che stupido non e’, prende un’ altra palla al balzo (nomen omen). Con la scusa del gravissimo disturbo arrecato dai Palestinesi alle migliaia di fedeli cristiani in piazza del Duomo a Milano, Maroni di fatto vieta il diritto a manifestare.

Dal momento che persino al Maroni non deve essere sfuggito che i fedeli erano li’ per fare shopping, e non per andare a messa, Maroni propone nuove direttive alle prefetture. Tali direttive dovranno in futuro evitare manifestazioni vicino a:

luoghi di culto /supermercati / centri commerciali / monumenti / siti di “interesse pubblico”.

Italiani: manifestate in tinello

Nella foto: scena di un passato che fortunatamente verra’ presto proibito.