Month: July 2024

A pleasant mansion and garden in Sintra: Biester

by philg

Elon Musk frets about our planet being underpopulated, a point of view likely to be confusing to anyone who has visited Sintra, Portugal. A garden built for quiet reflection, such as Quinta da Regaleira, will be packed with more than 1,000 tourists at a time in the shoulder seasons. It looks good from some angles, e.g.,

but to get into the most famous part, the “Initiation Well” (an underground tower), it was a 1.5-hour wait on June 12, 2024, less than two hours after the attraction opened:

How typical is this degree of crowding? Google said that we visited on an unusually quiet day:

Unless the city starts charging a $200 per person daily decongestion fee, there is no way to recreate the experience for which these palaces and gardens were built. You’ll be sitting in traffic and/or walking long distances up and down hills and waiting in line to get into even the smallest garden feature.

We found an exception to the above rules.. Biester Palace, the mansion that tourists haven’t learned about yet. Built with a banking fortune at the end of the 19th century, the palace appears to be in shabby condition in The Ninth Gate, a 1999 Roman Polanski (pregnant wife killed by Manson family) film starring Johnny Depp (future cash cow for Amber Heard until she made the mistake of partnering with the ACLU). There’s an entrance right next to Quinta da Regaleira and if you do decide to brave the Pena Palace you can exit via the top entrance to catch the bus there.

Here’s the view from the top of the park (mansion on the right side of the frame):

The interior hasn’t been redecorated to its former glory, but the rooms aren’t bare:

There are some great views of the Moorish castle above Sintra (Muslims controlled and colonized Sintra from about 722 AD until 1147):

Stop at the tea house for a friendly service, almost-free prices (about 1 euro for a coffee; 3.5 euros for a massive fresh-squeezed orange juice), and delicious pastry.

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A Constitutional amendment to impose an age limit of 67 on the President?

by philg

An immigrant physician friend, simply based on videos that she watched in 2020, diagnosed Joe Biden with dementia four years ago and referred to him as “the senile puppet” long before the New York Times editorial board noticed that anything was wrong. Democrats now believe that Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities are insufficient to handle the job of U.S. President. Democrats also hate Donald Trump and there are at least some Republicans who prefer Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley to Mr. Trump.

I wonder if these groups could get together and do a quickie amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would impose a mandatory retirement age of 67 (the current Social Security full retirement age for those born after 1960) on the job. We need three-fourths of the states to ratify such an amendment and then both the Republicans and Democrats would have to nominate younger politicians for the November election.

We’ve already got a minimum of 35:

Why not a maximum?

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Maintainability of cork seats on subway trains?

by philg

Here’s something that I wouldn’t have expected to work: cork seats on subway trains. The Lisbon Metro, June 2024:

Apparently, the seats used to be covered in cloth and they started a mass conversion about four years ago (“Lisbon Metro already running 100% coated with cork” (2022)).

By Palm Beach County standards, at least, Lisbon is plagued with graffiti. The Metro, however, seems to be an exception. I didn’t see any evidence of vandalism.

How long would cork seats last in the NYC subway system? Would every seat be defaced with carved initials within a few days of installation?

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