Quotes that made me laugh #22

This quote is one that I heard a long time ago when I first saw the movie The Third Man. It’s probably the best known quote from the film and as our recent trip to Vienna brought a lot of the Third Man sequences to mind it seems timely to post it here.

Unfortunately our arrival in Vienna was one day too late to take advantage of the Third Man ‘sewer tour’, a promenade through the tunnels that allowed the films eponymous character to move surreptitiously between the ‘controlled zones’ of post-war Vienna. It had closed for the season so we’ll just have to go back again when it’s open!

This is a still from the closing scene of the film as Anna walks away from Harry Lime’s funeral and towards Holly “I haven’t got a sensible name” Martins:

No happy ending ...
A long, slow walk to the accompaniment of the haunting refrains of Anton Karas’ zither as Anna decides that a happy ending is far too bourgeois for one of the 20th century’s most pivotal films noir …

… and this is a not too dissimilar pic taken on our recent trip to Vienna:

prater1
The Hauptallee of the Wiener Prater in autumn – another of Vienna’s fabulously long, tree-lined avenues. Unlike Anna we decided to be extremely bourgeois and left for an altogether happier ending at a favoured cafe in the Naschmarkt.

Finally, the quote. When Holly and Harry eventually meet on the Wiener Riesenrad (the Prater’s giant ferris wheel) Harry seeks to justify his black market sales of watered-down and ineffective penicillin that had led to the deaths of sick children:

…in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Arise fair sun …

Aberdeen in June:

dreich driːx/ adjectiveSCOTTISH (especially of weather) dreary; bleak. "a cold, dreich early April day"
dreich
driːx/
adjectiveSCOTTISH
(especially of weather) dreary; bleak.
“a cold, dreich early April day”

… and why we go on holiday:

'Roastit' 😊
‘Roastit’ 😊

I struggled to find an appropriate word or phrase for ‘warm and sunny’ in an online Scots dictionary. ‘Roastit’, ‘swealtry’ and ‘cosie’ were the only three words on offer, but note that the latter implies being wrapped up warm and not just warm per se! I found them on the ‘RampantScotland’ website and this is how it introduced them:

Here are a few Scots words about being warm. Since there were so few such words (!) there are also words about being cold too …

Enough said, so here is a pic of our pool instead!

Villa Yesero, Pollença
Villa Yesero, Pollença

Me and Aphrodite #2

Well, the sun finally came out for the last couple of days of our trip to Aphrodite’s Isle so, having visited the Baths of Aphrodite on a previous visit, this time we headed to the Sanctuary of Aphrodite at Kouklia and the nearby ‘birthplace’ of Aphrodite at Petra tou Romiou (Rock of the Greeks, aka Aphrodite’s Rock).

From all accounts the cult of Aphrodite was a fairly salacious forerunner of the 1960s summer of love (not that I personally witnessed the former and was too young to be a participant in the latter!) and Aphrodite was not actually born at her ‘rock’, but merely made landfall there, apparently carried ashore on a turtle shell.

The beach at her birthplace is shingle and very painful to walk upon barefooted. Still, I paddled there in the Med and made landfall myself, sadly not as Adonis, but as a late-middle-age Brit with his jeans rolled up to his knees.

This is the coastline with the furthermost sea stacks identifying the ‘birthplace’:

Petra tou Romiou
Distant view of Aphrodite’s Rock

… and this is where she made landfall:

Aphrodite's landfall and my paddling pool
Aphrodite’s landfall and my paddling pool

The cult of Aphrodite on Cyprus really took off around the 12th century BC so it was no surprise on our earlier visit to discover that the Baths of Aphrodite is actually a rather attractive freshwater pool fed by a small waterfall and not what we would recognise today as a proper bathtub. More of a surprise, then, on our current visit to discover it could well have been a ‘proper’ bath. The Palaepaphos museum at the Sanctuary of Aphrodite has a terrific carved limestone bathtub on display at the Sanctuary dating from the 12th century BC, inclusive of an inner seat and a sponge holder:

12th century BC carved limestone bath, Palaepaphos
12th century BC carved limestone bath, Palaepaphos showing the raised inner seat. The sponge-holder is out of view.

Anyone old enough to remember the 1979 TV mini-series ‘The Aphrodite Inheritance’, itself set in Cyprus, will probably recall that Alexandra Bastedo played the role of a mythological goddess in human form. I don’t think her character was supposed to represent Aphrodite per se despite the fact that she had developed her own cult-following after playing Sharron Macready in the late 60s TV series ‘The Champions’ . Maybe that is what piqued my interest in Cyprus and the Aphrodite connection, or maybe it was because a young Greek woman called Afrodite once thought me good-looking 😉