Yup i'm another old school muscle car guy. Love the GM's the best but the Buick's are my passion. Daily drove from 79 to 86 a 66 GS starting in high school. Now I have a 70 455 Stage 1 thats been garaged from the 90's. Not a show queen but with a new trunk floor and left front fender it would be a super driver car. Modding Star Trek TOS phaser toy's with high power lasers is my latest hobby but getting tired of it by now. So I went to penny role hunting again for now..
Besides coins I have two other hobbies. I like to read books especially books about history but also novels. My other hobby is classical baroque music. I find it interesting to read about this and of course listen to the music. The composers I listen to most are: Vivaldi and Bach, followed by Handel and Telemann. Some music I now listen to: The music above is from a recent reconstruction of Jordi Savall of Bach's lost Markus passion. The first is the opening choir, the second is one of my favorite arias. Other music I also like: I wanted to add more but it is not allowed
This letter have a great story as it was sent by an English gentlemen in Paris during the 1870 187 between France and Germany, the guy relate very difficult time as the German military were around Paris to starve the people that couldn’t enter or go out of Paris. The letter was sent by an air balloon and after by boat up to London. This English gentleman was meeting people like Thiers a famous politician and wrotte to his girlfriend in London about politics and also how people survive in Paris at this key historic time. It is an important postal history in my postal history collection
I own a few different interpretations of Misere mei Deustransferred by Gregorio Allegri One of my favorites is by the Tallis Scholars in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican. The singers are in different locations in the chapel so it's a very spacious recording. Beautiful. It sounds terrific on my old school Vandersteen speakers Miserere has a very interesting history: "Allegri wrote the Miserere to be sung in the Sistine Chapel during the Easter celebrations. During the service, which started at 3.00am, there would be 27 candles burning. The Pope would gradually extinguish the candles until there was only one left burning. The Miserere was performed as the pope prayed at the altar with the single candle. This piece of music became very popular, and the Vatican did not want anyone else to perform it. No one was allowed to take the music away from the chapel or make copies of it. The Vatican called for excommunication of anyone trying to make a copy. However, by 1770 there were three known copies of the music. One of these was given to Emperor Leopold I by the pope. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visited the Sistine Chapel during a tour of Europe with his father in 1770. He was just 14 years old, but heard the piece and wrote all the music out from memory later the same day. A second visit enabled him to check that he had it written correctly. It is believed that Mozart's copy of the music was sent to England where it was published by Dr Charles Burney. It would be assumed that Mozart would have written the improvisations in his copy. Burney's version lacks the improvisations, so it possible that he removed them, and destroyed Mozart's copy to avoid trouble with the church. There were no copyright laws in those days, so there was nothing that the Vatican could do about it."
Nice as you know each air balloon have a name and a crew. The Gutenberg was one of these balloon I can if you want have more information about it on one of my book about 1870 war time and postal history ?
I constructed a motorized model of Isambard Kingdom Brunel´s gigantic 1859 steamship, the "Great Eastern", in 1:150 scale: It is built out of 100 % LEGO
They have in fact been doing so for a couple of decades now: https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?catType=P&catString=231