Beautiful places, incredible nature, pure air, old, strong towers, history and a lot of great things u can find there ❤️#georgia #svaneti #news #opinion #goodplaces #goodvibes #photo #artTbilisi Samegrelo-Zemo Svaneti

Ever since JK Rowling first published her account of the “boy who lived”, theories about the inspirations for Harry Potter – and the magical world he inhabits – have abounded. Cafés and landmarks everywhere from Scotland to Portugal display signs claiming to have played host to the author while she wrote the novels – or, more boldly, to be the basis for the likes of Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, and Hogsmeade. Fortunately, one muggle plucked up the courage to ask Rowling about it on Twitter, and she obliged with a lengthy response. “If you define the birthplace of Harry Potter as the moment when I had the initial idea, then it was a Manchester-London train,” she wrote. “But I’m perennially amused by the idea that Hogwarts was directly inspired by beautiful places I saw or visited, because it’s so far from the truth.” She then contradicted assertions that she had used a 14th-century street known as the Shambles in York as a model for Diagon Alley, and that any of Edinburgh’s landmarks really shaped her conception of Hogwarts. “A truthful tour of HP ‘inspirations’ would involve a stationery guide pointing a stick at a picture of my head, which would be zero fun and nobody would buy tickets,” she quipped. “If I’d genuinely been inspired by every old building, creepy alleyway, pub, graveyard and underpass that’s claimed, I’d have spent my late twenties on a non-stop road trip between locations, and I promise I didn’t. I was mostly sitting in places I could get a cheap coffee/could afford the rent and making it all up.” As for where she wrote the first lines of The Philosopher’s Stone? “The first bricks of Hogwarts were laid in a flat in Clapham Junction,” she revealed, along with a photograph of the building where she was “renting a room” over “what was then a sports shop”. Slightly more romantically, she penned the chapter in which Harry gets his first wand from Ollivanders under a tree – even posting a photograph of it, although she neglected to reveal its exact location. “I can’t absolutely guarantee they haven’t taken away the old tree & planted a new one in the same corner of the field. I haven’t been there for nearly 30 years. But I think it’s this one.” #harrypotter #jkrowling #hpfuns #harrypottermovies Tbilisi

The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks. I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance. We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood. Coronavirus: the week explained - sign up for our email newsletter Read more As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that. First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do. You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days. You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it. You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy. You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom… Advertisement You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest. Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes. You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again. You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training. You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all. You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules. You will count all the things you do not need. The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises. Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant. Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2 emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month? You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair. You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.#Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce. Many children will be conceived. Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy. Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die. You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU. You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps. You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.#italyItaly

Happy Old New Year!

'It's a miracle': hundreds of thousands of bees🐝🐝🐝 survive Notre Dame fire👇🏻 - - - Following the tragedy of Monday’s fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, news came on Friday of a miracle as sweet as honey. The hundreds of thousands of bees that lived in hives inside Notre Dame’s roof are alive and well, according to the beekeeper, or apiculteur, that oversees them. “Thank goodness the flames didn’t touch them,” Nicolas Géant, the hives’ 51-year-old beekeeper, told CNN. “It’s a miracle.” Three hives that are home to an estimated 60,000 bees each – 180,000 bees in total – are located on a lower roof atop the cathedral’s first floor. The flames of Monday’s fire – which investigators say was probably caused by an electrical short circuit – took down the cathedral’s spire and a large portion of its roof. For a few days after the fire, Géant was worried about his beloved bees, and the French police and firefighters wouldn’t let him go up on the roof to check on them. Hopes that the bees survived rested on aerial photos of the cathedral’s roof, which showed the hives still intact. “You see that everything is burnt, there are holes in the roof, but you can still see the three beehives,” Géant told NBC News on Wednesday.

(CNN)Let's just call this reason No. 580 not to leave your kids alone with technology: They might lock you out of it. That's what happened over the weekend to Evan Osnos, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. He put out a tweet -- or a cry for help -- letting the world know of the little situation his toddler put him in. "Uh, this looks fake but, alas, it's our iPad today after 3-year-old tried (repeatedly) to unlock. Ideas?" Osnos tweeted. A photo of the iPad's screen noted the device was disabled. It also had this mind-blowing message: "Try again in 25,536,442 minutes."

“wait for me where the skies meet the sea the otherworld where our old souls will meet again for the very first time where our imagination takes flight and magic isn't a fairytale “#vintage #vintagespirit #fashion #fashionloverkeso #design #rain #rainnymood Tbilisi#ხელოვნება #მოდა

#photography #old #soviet #vs #new #europe