Russian Sledges

watchdog 85 has added a photo to the pool:

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watchdog 85 has added a photo to the pool:

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Because sometimes your cocktail enthusiast side and your college junior side want to party together.

I remain mystified why The New York Times continues to use Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University, as a regular op-ed columnist. Although she may not be a believer, when she writes about religion she is devoted to explaining why faith is good or useful.  When she says anything else, it’s mundane.  But one thing she rarely does is to point out the dangers of faith.

There’s a small exception to this in her December 28 column, “When demons are real,” about African Pentecostal Christians’ belief in demons, but the bad stuff is outweighed by her explanation of why those beliefs are useful psychological tools.

Her subject is Ghana, the world’s most religious country (the Christian Science Monitor reports a poll showing that the percentage of nonbelievers is zero), with 70% of the inhabitants Christian and the rest of other faiths.  Luhrmann attended one of the many all-night “revivals”  in Accra, much of which involved excoriating demons, which those in attendance consider real. (Luhmann adds the frightening statistic that 57% of Americans also believe in demons.)

(By the way, if one included sub-Saharan African countries like Ghana in the worldwide positive correlation between religiosity and social dysfunctionality, the correlation would be even more striking, for sub-Saharan countries are both highly religious and highly dysfunctional.)

Luhrmann’s title should have been “When demons seem real,” but of course she doesn’t want to judge them as illusory. She is, after all, an anthropologist, and it’s presumably not kosher to pass judgment on such things. And besides, belief in demons serves a useful purpose (Luhrmann’s metier is always to point out the utility of faith).

J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, a professor at Trinity Theological Seminary in Legon, Ghana, argues that these churches have spread so rapidly because African traditional religion envisions a world dense with dark spirits from which people must protect themselves, and these new churches take this evil seriously in a way that many earlier missionizing Christianities did not. Indeed, I have been at a Christian service in Accra with thousands of people shouting: “The witches will die! They will die! Die! Die!” With the pastor roaring, “This is a war zone!”

Most of us know what this “demonizing” has resulted in: horrible killings, expulsion of children from homes, and so on, but Luhrmann barely mentions this. All she says is this:

But it is also true that an external agent gives you something — and often, someone — to identify as nonhuman. In West Africa, witches are people, and sometimes, other people kill them or drive them from their homes.

Yes, “sometimes” other people kill them or drive them from their homes. “Sometimes.” This is about as much of a downside as Lurhmann can muster (the other downsides of African Pentecostal Christianity include helping spread HIV and AIDS by urging the afflicted to go off their drugs, for God will cure them, and, in the past, encouraging the genocide in Rwanda).

Luhrmann goes on, helpfully, to tell us how demons can be useful even if we don’t believe that they’re real. The following lame discussion is unworthy of an undergraduate paper, much less a column by a professional anthropologist.

. . . One way to think about demons (if you happen not to believe in supernatural evil) is that they are a way of representing human hatred, rage and failure — the stuff we all set out to exorcize in our New Year’s resolutions. The anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, who grew up in Sri Lanka, got a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and, eventually, a job at Princeton, once remarked that all humans deal with demons. (He was quoting Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” — “In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden.”) The only question, he said, was whether the demons were located in the mind, where Freud placed them, or in the world. It is possible that identifying your envy as external and alien makes it easier to quell.

Do Luhrmann or Obeyeskere really think that the presence of real demons in the world is a viable question?

Finally, after downplaying the hundreds of murders and child expulsions done under a false belief in demons, Luhrmann raises what she sees as the really serious problems of such belief:

In an April poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, over one in 10 Americans were confident that Barack Obama was the Antichrist — and the Antichrist is, as it happens, associated with war in the Middle East. If those people think that demons are real, they don’t mean that Obama is misguided, confused or mistaken. They mean that he is real, inhuman evil.

That is a terrifying thought.

If those people think that demons are real.  We don’t know that, but Luhrmann makes the assumption. But I seriously doubt that more than 10% of American think that Obama is “inhuman.” This is simply a lame segue between African demons and the President, a way to say something when you have nothing to say.

But at last we have an editorial comment by anthropologist Luhrmann! How terrifying it is that 10% of American think that Obama is the Antichrist! If the murder of large groups of Africans is as terrifying as Obama’s demonization, Luhrmann doesn’t tell us; she says onl that y ”sometimes, other people kill them or drive them from their homes”

This is writing and thinking at its most mundane.  Luhrmann’s analysis is superficial and her writing wooden. There is nothing in her piece that makes you think, and that’s because she really has nothing to say.

Why on earth does the New York Times pay her to churn out stuff like this? And why, if she’s an objective anthropologist who does not judge the social phenomena she observes, why does she pronounce the demonization of Obama “terrifying” but says nothing about the genuine harm that comes to demonized Africans? Does her moral relativism begin only at the U.S. border?

The commenters on Lurhmann’s piece are in fact much savvier than she is. Many of them point out the connection between poverty and superstition; even more note that demon-belief is one of the great evils of modern religion.

Here are three such comments:

The Harvard Theatre Collection has recently acquired a sensational annotated Jean Baptiste Lully score of Proserpine. Printed in 1680, this score was the second partition générale (full orchestra score) printed by Christophe Ballard (1641-1715), following Bellérophon, which was printed in 1679. These luxurious large folio scores broke out of the previous French printing tradition of reduced, oblong scores, and presented “full” scores of operas for the first time in a format that musicians today would recognize as orchestra scores.

This particular score is additionally exciting due to the extensive annotations, some of which may belong to François Fossard, violinist and member of Lully’s group of Petits Violons (as well as music librarian to King Louis XIV). You can see the name “Fossard” signed quite clearly on the title page above.

There are performance annotations and corrections in a similar ink throughout, including a French text added to the prologue on pages 1-6, part of which you can see on the first page of music, above. The stamp you see by the title, which also appears on the title page and occasionally throughout the score, is that of another former owner, the Société Chorale des Amateurs de Versailles, dated 22 Mai 1868. The interlaced stamp at the foot of the page is Lully’s own: the Ballards were contractually obligated to allow Lully (or an agent or relative of his) to inspect every printed score which was to be sold, after which it received this stamp of approval.

On page 6 of the prologue above, you catch a flavor of the performance annotations: turns and appoggiaturas that one so rarely sees in opera scores from this time period. Elsewhere, dance “genres” are identified, which would give the performer an idea of the tempo of the piece. Etc. etc. Most of the Lully scores in the French portion of the Ward Collection (for instance) are pristine, and while to a certain extent this reflects the preference of earlier generations of collectors for clean scores, in my experience these full scores simply don’t seem to have been annotated as much as other printed or manuscript scores of the time. I have wondered who was actually buying (or receiving) these scores: were they even used by professional musicians, or were they printed for the Court, to learn the works and sing at home? To glorify Louis’ Court performances, and reinforce their cultural (and therefore political) importance around the world? Were the scores treated as treasured belongings, and never defaced? Or were musicians’ memories better at the time, not requiring annotations to remember changes, additions, or corrections?

But these traces on page 116 certainly suggest performance: musicians in Lully’s era played from music on wooden stands, often with candlesticks set on either side. There is a later example on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boson, which will give you an idea of the set-up. Wax spillage was common, as can be seen on page 116. There are wax spills of this nature throughout the score.

In addition to the ink annotations, there are some later pencil annotations, as well as extensive annotations in rust-red crayon as seen above on pages 184-185. While I have never seen crayon like this used before the later 18th century, the dealer cites correspondence with Lully specialist Herbert Schneider: “It is very difficult to estimate the date of the red pencil [sic] since it was used … at about 1700 and in all of the scores by Rameau used in the Académie royal de musique …” Examining this score has been such a learning experience.

Pages 235-236 provide the juicy addition of three bars of full score in act IV, scene ii, which appears to be more than just a facilitation of the page turn.

And as always, this score provides a glimpse of the printing processes which we at Houghton strive to document. The Ballards employed the diamond-shaped movable type music notes designed and cast in the 1550s by Guillame Le Bé (approximately 1565-1645) right into the 18th century, and throughout this score we have a chance to see quite clearly how movable type functioned in music. These empty bars are all quite obviously individually set, but can you see how the clefs, accidentals, and notes are individually set as well? While the Ballards are justly criticized for resisting the engraving techniques which were flourishing in Italy and other countries throughout the 17th century, their four-century printing firm must still be considered one of the most important music publishers in history. And this score, with its rare annotations, provides us with valuable evidence why.

[Thanks to Andrea Cawelti, Ward Music Cataloger, for contributing this post.]

One of our favorite beverages around the Serious Eats office is bitters and soda. We’ve got a good dozen types of bitters in the Serious Eats liquor shelves—cranberry! Peychaud’s! black walnut!—and just a few dashes can turn plain ol’ soda water into something much more exciting.

Love this idea and look forward to trying through the combinations (and coming up with more!)

via Add Bitters To Your Soda! 12 Combos We Love | Serious Eats: Drinks.

In 1908, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his British Polar Expedition made publication history: they created the first book ever produced on the continent of Antarctica.

Produced “at the Sign of the Penguins” while the team overwintered at Cape Royds before attempting the South Pole, Aurora Australis consists of about one hundred and twenty unnumbered loose sheets laced in wooden covers and bound in seal skin.

Its ten pieces of writing make up a serious anthology with surprising literary merit. There is a poem by Shackleton, attributed to Nemo in the table of contents and to Veritas at the end of the text (this poem is also signed “Veritas” in some copies).

Petty officer Frank Wild, under the pseudonym Wand Erer, wrote an essay in the style of the King James Bible.

And there is a fanciful short story by geologist Douglas Mawson, “Bathybia,” proposing that the South Pole, still unseen in 1908, might in fact be a deep crater filled with giant insects and luxuriant plant life, including a forest of toadstools into which an unsuspecting polar explorer might tumble.

Immediately before the expedition set sail in 1907, Wild and another petty officer, Ernest Joyce, took a crash course in typesetting and letterpress printing. A traditional seven-year apprenticeship was compressed into three weeks’ intense training by the renowned London firm of Sir Joseph Causton and Sons Ltd., who equipped Shackleton with a miniature printing plant: two presses (a 10′ x 7′ Albion and a small etching press, labelled “printing machine” and “printing press” in the hut plan below), high-quality handmade paper with handsome deckle edges and a generous supply of ink.

The ingenuity of Aurora Australis is apparent in Shackleton’s clever scheme to furnish the book with covers by repurposing the crates in which the team’s perishables had been imported from Europe and New Zealand.

Aurora Australis is richly illustrated with etchings and watercolors by the expedition’s official artist, George “Putty” Marston. These depict daily life in close quarters as well as the natural wonders of the antarctic landscape.

Marston’s style is spare and somewhat workmanlike. When he used color he did so flamboyantly, as in this frontispiece showing the southern lights of the book’s title.

Marston also created the book’s design. It is a pleasure to read and features suitably vast expanses of blank white space.

In The Heart of the Antarctic, Being the Story of the British Antarctic Expedition 1907-1909, Shackleton tells of two purposes behind Aurora Australis: to create a unique record of the moments before his first ascent of the South Pole plateau (this mission was not quite achieved, in part because the expedition had insufficient food and no skis), and as one of many cultural activities intended to keep the men occupied for four long, cold, dark months.

From Shackleton’s description, the print shop in the hut at Cape Royds sounds like a constant source of fascination and frustration: Joyce and Wild were inexperienced, the ink froze, the plates were sensitive to the salt in the water and of course the hut was very cramped and dark.

Those overwintering in Antarctica today must still labor to fend off “polar ennui.” The U.S. Antarctic Program Participant Guide, 2013-2014 promises “radio programming from volunteer DJs, a library, clubs, climbing wall, gymnasium, weight room, aerobics room, art shows, chili cook-offs, running races, yoga classes, dances, league play, lessons, lectures, etc.”

Copies of Aurora Australis are not numbered. It is believed that no more than a hundred were manufactured, possibly intended for sale but in the end distributed as gifts to the expedition’s friends and financial supporters. There was no institutional or governmental support for the British Polar Expedition; Shackleton was entirely reliant on private loans and gifts and returned to England with heavy debts.

The seventy or so copies whose present whereabouts are known can be identified by the words stencilled on their boards, as the packing crates could be cut, cleaned and polished but were indelibly stamped with their original labels: there are Petit Pois, Stewed Kidneys and Chocolate copies, for example.

Houghton’s Aurora Australis is stencilled “[J & T B]AYLEY Ltd [Exp]ORT [Pac]KERS [Lon]DON E C” on the inside front board, and “[Brit]ISH [Antar]CTIC [Exped]ITION [19]07 on the inside back board. It was a gift of Donald McKay Frost (1877-1958), a Back Bay attorney and noted book collector with a strong interest in the history and settlement of western America. The Houghton collections also contain a copy of the Julienne Soup facsimile.

[Thanks to Christina Linklater, Project Music Cataloger, for contributing this post.]

BOSTON (AP) — Police say a woman had her toe bitten off at a New Year's Eve party in Boston.

A growing number of high-end restaurant staffers are toting degrees from Ivy Leagues and top culinary schools, The Wall Street Journal reports. Head waiters at restaurants like Per Se, Eleven Madison Park and Le Bernardin "can earn from $80,000 to as much as $150,000 a year including tips." [WSJ][Photo: Tyler Olson/Shutterstock]

Did you know the Western US was once strewn with barbed-wire telephone networks?

Getting connected could be a big problem in North America in the 1890s, especially in the vast open spaces of the rural west. You could buy a telephone set from a mail-order catalogue, but what about the phone line itself? The Bell Telephone system was putting all its effort into connecting urban areas and had little interest in stringing wires to remote communities.

It didn’t take long for a few enterprising ranchers to notice, though, that the west was already covered with wire – the barbed-wire fences that divided the range to keep each rancher’s stock separate. At its peak, more than a million kilometers of the stuff was being laid each year. Why not just let it do double duty as a phone line? After all, they figured, wire is wire, and the ranchers were eager to communicate with their cowpokes working at outlying camps.

heaveninawildflower:

Plate of Hemiptera taken from ‘An Epitome of the Natural History of the insects of India’ (1800) by Edward Donovan.

Wikimedia.

Canadian lifestyle site The Loop in association with TV Guide Canada is looking forward to the TV highlights of 2014 and they select David Tennant as one of the names  to watch in . David will shortly begin work on Gracepoint, the American adaptation of hit ITV series Broadchurch which is due to air on Fox later this year. They say:

Apparently, the South Korean government has decided that kimchi 김치 should no longer be referred to just as pàocài 泡菜 ("pickled vegetables") in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but should have its own name to distinguish it from other types of pickled vegetables.  (There's a November 17 news article about it here.)

The Koreans are very proud of kimchi, and it may be referred to as the Korean national dish.  Kimjang, the tradition of making and sharing kimchi that usually is done in winter, has recently been added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list.

My brother Thomas, who served in the Marines during the Vietnam War and fought alongside Korean soldiers, told me he was amazed that, when the Koreans opened their K-rations, there was kimchee inside.  Thus it is obvious that kimchee is extremely important to the Koreans, and it is indeed different from Chinese fermented vegetables.  But, if it's no longer to be referred to as pàocài 泡菜 ("pickled vegetables") in Chinese, what to call it?

Usually the Chinese refer to foreign things however they jolly well please.  Niǔyuē 紐約 (lit., "button; knob; handle; wrench; turn" + "approximately; agreement; appointment", etc.) in Mandarin neither sounds like "New York" (it sounds much closer in Cantonese) nor does it mean what that name does, but that doesn't stop Chinese from calling the Big Apple that way.  It is interesting, however, that lately the South Koreans have been winning some battles with the Chinese over how to refer to things that mean a lot to them, even when the Chinese aren't very happy about making the requested (demanded) changes.

One of the biggest victories was getting the Chinese to accept Shǒu'ěr 首爾 as the Chinese way to refer to Seoul instead of Hànchéng 漢城 ("Han City").  Naturally, calling their capital "Han City" rankled, since "Han" is the name of the main Chinese ethnic group.  In contrast, Shǒu'ěr 首爾 both sounds like "Seoul" and has a felicitous, appropriate meaning (viz., "head [shǒudū 首都 means "capital"]) + "thus; so").

For kimchee, the Koreans have decided that the new Chinese name is going to be xīnqí 辛奇.  The Chinese are not accustomed to this and some people have complained that it doesn't make sense to them, since xīn 辛 is usually construed as meaning ("bitter; suffering; laborious") and qí 奇 (means "strange; odd; queer; rare").  As for the sound, although the qí 奇 part is close enough to the second syllable of "kimchee", the initial of the xīn 辛 part is pronounced as x-, s-, or z- in most Sinitic topolects that I know of.

Furthermore, it would seem that the word kimchee is derived from the pre-modern term chimchae 沉菜 (lit., "soaked vegetables"), so there is a ready-made, etymologically exact Sinographic written form available for use.  {If I'm wrong about this derivation, I hope that a Korean specialist will correct me.)  But perhaps the Koreans do not want the Chinese to be thinking of their national dish as "soaked / submerged vegetables")

Upon reflection, however, xīnqí 辛奇 may not be such a bad choice after all, since xīn 辛 is often used to describe the spicy/sour flavor of foods like kimchee.  For example, it may be seen on packages for Korean instant noodles.  Moreover, qí 奇 may be thought of  not merely as "strange; odd", etc., but also as "wonderful; marvelous; mysterious".  So maybe the person(s) who came up with xīnqí 辛奇 wanted to convey the idea that kimchee is spicy / sour and mystical, which is not far from how I think of this fantastic side dish.

[Thanks to Joyce H. Wu]

Melting Gold in The Hobbit:

By Rhett Allain, at Wired.

There’s a cool interactive graph, too.

Chibber’s book makes it clear (once again) that the real problem with respect for the particular is infinite regress. Is it the peasant as such who is the Other of the bourgeois? Or just the Indian peasant? Why are generalizations about the Indian peasant not guilty of ignoring the specificity of the Bihari peasant, or of peasants from the Bihari town of Bhagalpur, or of the Bhagalpuris last Tuesday? Once the anti-generalization machine gets going, there is no stopping it. Better to bite the bullet: understanding entails generalizing. If you don’t like it, you can take a time-out in the corner. But don’t complain that you feel misunderstood.

Three Pieces.

David Bowie.

An anonymous reader writes "What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2014? Under the law that existed until 1978.... Works from 1957. The books On The Road, Atlas Shrugged, Empire of the Atom, and The Cat in the Hat, the films The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and 12 Angry Men, the article "Theory of Superconductivity," the songs "All Shook Up" and "Great Balls of Fire," and more.... What is entering the public domain this January 1? Not a single published work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Rose of Versailles's wine. pic.twitter.com/EeoQz6lRAw

Menswear Emergencies.

David Bowie.

“How can a place this big have food this good?”

Pope Francis has surprised some with his outspoken views on inequality and injustice, but his message is also a return to traditional Catholic social teaching.

Sleepy Head by Les Piccolo [flickr] [h/t: wonderous-world]

Police: Woman crushed to death while walking across Boston drawbridge as it ... Minneapolis Star Tribune BOSTON — Authorities say a woman was killed after the Boston drawbridge she was walking on started to go up and she was crushed between the bridge plates when the operator lowered it to help her. Investigators call the death on the Meridian Street ... and more »

Please check the size of the book before ordering. I was shocked at how small it was.

“I don’t believe in men’s wear or women’s wear, I just like what I like.”

This is a great story to end the year on. Ken Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot (nice place, I've shopped there), says Pope Francis is bumming out the tycoon class by giving all the love to the poors. (I mean, Langone doesn't seem to be a big Matthew 19:21 kinda guy, does he?) And if it keeps up, they may cut off their contributions for things like restoring St. Patrick's Cathedral.

This reminded me of when Jesus said, "It is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than for a Pope to understand complex financial instruments or the challenges faced by those who labor with them."

To ring in the New Year, what's your Matthew 19:24 riff to honor Ken Langone?

Boujemaa Razgui, a flute virtuoso who lives in New York and works with many US ensembles, was returning to base over the holiday when Customs officials at Kennedy Airport asked to see his instruments.

Bourjemaa carries a variety of flutes of varying ethnicity, each made by himself over years for specific types of ancient and modern performance. He is a regular guest with the diverse and enterprising Boston Camerata.

At JFK, the officials removed and smashed each and every one of his instruments. No reason was given.

We have been unable to reach the distressed Boujemaa but a swell of outrage is rising among his musician friends. One ensemble director tells us: ‘I can’t think of an uglier, stupider thing for the U.S. government to do than to deprive this man of the tools of his art and a big piece of his livelihood.’

Boujemaa needs all the support he can get. Messages of sympathy on Slipped Disc will reach him one way or other.

 

UPDATE: We have just managed to reach Boudemaa by phone. His ordeal may have been worse than described above. Report here.

Original Source

For the past couple of weeks, we've all been wondering why Google bought Boston Dynamics, the company that makes those creepy Big Dog and PETMAN robots for the military. This comes after the company announced a project to eliminate death, and after building a secret installation out of cargo crates on a barge in San Francisco Bay. It's as if Google is in the early stages of building a city state.

Read more...

At a recent presentation, I asked all of the gay male students in the room to raise their hand if in the past week they touched a woman’s body without her consent. After a moment of hesitation, all of the hands of the gay men in the room went up. I then asked the same gay men to raise their hand if in the past week they offered a woman unsolicited advice about how to “improve” her body or her fashion. Once again, after a moment of hesitation, all of the hands in the room went up.

Grunge speak was a hoax created by Megan Jasper, receptionist for Sub Pop Records. Under pressure from a reporter for The New York Times who wanted to know if grunge fans had their own slang, Jasper, 25 at the time, told the reporter a set of slang terms that she claimed were associated with the Seattle grunge scene in the early 1990s, but which she had in fact invented on the spot. The information given by Jasper appeared in the sidebar of a November 15, 1992 feature article of the New York Times.[1] The sidebar, titled "Lexicon of Grunge: Breaking the Code", mistakenly said that Jasper was working for Caroline Records.[2] In truth, there was no particular slang language used in the Seattle grunge scene. Many had in fact resented the assumption by the Times that they even had a slang, as well as the claim that it was "coming soon to a high school or mall near you". Thomas Frank of The Baffler, a journal of cultural criticism, demonstrated that the list was a hoax. He revealed that Jasper had purposely misled the Times as well as the British magazine SKY magazine as a prank.[3] Jasper had been sick of the attention that reporters were paying to people involved in the Seattle grunge scene, and thus pulled the prank to get back at them for their relentless fascination. The Times demanded that Frank fax over an apology for claiming it had printed false information, believing that it was Frank who was the hoaxer. Frank instead sent a letter standing by the story. "When The Newspaper of Record goes searching for the Next Big Thing and the Next Big Thing piddles on its leg," he wrote, "we think that's funny."