Nasrudin was caught in the act and sentenced to die. Hauled up before the king, he was asked by the Royal Presence: "Is there any reason at all why I shouldn't have your head off right now?" To which he replied: "Oh, King, live forever! Know that I, the mullah Nasrudin, am the greatest teacher in your kingdom, and it would surely be a waste to kill such a great teacher. So skilled am I that I could even teach your favorite horse to sing, given a year to work on it." The king was amused, and said: "Very well then, you move into the stable immediately, and if the horse isn't singing a year from now, we'll think of something interesting to do with you."

As he was returning to his cell to pick up his spare rags, his cellmate remonstrated with him: "Now that was really stupid. You know you can't teach that horse to sing, no matter how long you try." Nasrudin's response: "Not at all. I have a year now that I didn't have before. And a lot of things can happen in a year. The king might die. The horse might die. I might die.

"And, who knows? Maybe the horse will sing."

Categorieën: Cultuur ICT

A daguerreotype from 1846

2009-02-05 23:20

This evening there was a news item about a daguerreotype from 1846 from Surinam.

He is called Johannes Ellis, her name is Maria Louisa de Hart. He is born in 1812 in the Ghanese town Elmina, as the son of the Dutch governor and a Ghanese woman.

She is born in 1826 on the plantation Sardam on the Cotticariver in Surinam. Her father is a Jew from Amsterdam: Mozes Meyer de Hart. The planter has twelve children with the freed slave Carolina Petronella van de Hart. Maria is one of those children.

Maria is pregnant on this picture.
The Ellis couple departs for The Netherlands in 1860.

Their unborn son of the picture, Abraham George Ellis joins the Dutch Navy, fights in Atjeh in the Dutch East Indies, lives a while in South America and becomes Minister of the Navy in the Dutch government from 1902 to 1905.

He died in 1916 and was buried by a big crowd, among which the husband of the Dutch Queen.