DAVID ADAMS provides a round-up of some stories on the odder side of life…
• An artwork by Dutch artist Mondrian has apparently been hanging upside down – for some 77 years. Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s abstract work New York City I – which uses red, yellow, blue and black adhesive strips – was created in 1941 and first hung on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1945. Since 1980 it’s been displayed at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen art collection in Dusseldorf, Germany. But experts now say that a photograph taken in 1944, just a few days after Mondrian’s death, shows the picture on an easel in his studio in a different orientation. Susanne Meyer-Buser, a curator at the Dusseldorf gallery, said that after she came across the photo from Mondrian’s studio showing the picture displayed differently, she told fellow curators. “Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realised it was very obvious,” she was reported as saying. “I am 100 per cent certain the picture is the wrong way around.” Despite this, the painting will remain in its current orientation in case the strips used in the artwork come loose.
The image NASA posted on Instagram. PICTURE: NASA
• It’s been compared to everything from the Teletubbies to the Stay Puft marshmallow man and the ancient Egyptian goddess Sekmet. NASA released an image of the sun which appears to show it “smiling”. The US space agency posted the images on social media, writing that: “Today, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the sun ‘smiling.’ Seen in ultraviolet light, these dark patches on the Sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space.”
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• It must have been a train spotters’ delight. A train measuring almost 2,000 metres-long set a new Guinness World Record on the weekend as the longest narrow gauge passenger train. The train consisted of 25 four-part Capricorn railcars from Swiss manufacturer Stadler which measured a total of 1,906 metres-long and weighed some 2,990 tonnes. Leaving on Saturday afternoon, it journeyed along the UNESCO World Heritage route from the Albula Tunnel in Preda to the Landwasser Viaduct, near Filisur, crossing 48 bridges and travelling through 22 tunnels along the way. Rhaetian Railway says several thousand people attended the event with railway director Renato Fasciati saying the company was “overjoyed to have achieved this world record”.
