Russian Sledges

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I can’t recall ever seeing the end of a tether so gracefully reached.

It's basically an audio time machine. Tech historian Emily Thompson, out of Princeton, has put together an interactive map of New York circa 1933, embedded with the old sounds of the city.

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Ryan Barone International Klein Blue (Google Monochromes)  ::  Jonas Lund Blue Crush (47 Shades of Blue)

Claire Watson Red  ::  BLESS Hairbrush

What happens when an intelligent, educated man takes high doses of psychedelics for fifteen straight years? Let’s start with “Two Human Species Exist: Their Hybrids Are Dyslexics, Homosexuals, Pedophiles, and Schizophrenics,” because then you’ll immediately understand why I was interested in Bruce Eldine Morton, Ph.D. This is clearly a nutcase book, and its premise, which is that left-brained and right-brained people are two separate human species, doesn’t even need to be specifically discredited. Research within the past few years has shown there is no “handedness” in brains, and that simple correlations of artistic or logical behavior with a particular side of the brain are not possible.

Dr. Bruce earned his Ph.D. in 1965, and completed his postdoctoral work at MIT and Harvard later in the 1960s. He worked professionally at several universities until his retirement in 1995. He clearly had his shit together, to some degree, to be able to do this. It wasn’t until I found his 2013 book “Psychedelic Visions From The Teacher” that I figured out how he came to the conclusion that homosexuals are from right-brained men having children with left-brained women: He tripped balls for 15 years straight. The description of the book describes how he “used psychedelic compounds to explore inner space” for fifteen years, which is also just about exactly the time period between when he retired and when he published this latest book.

It’s true that psychedelic experiences can give you a new perspective on life. But it’s also true that heavy use of serotonin receptor agonists, a class of drugs that encompasses nearly every known psychedelic compound, can permanently alter or diminish the brain’s cognitive ability. It’s not hard to imagine that fifteen years of constant use of illegal mental-powder has at least some chance of wrecking your ability to live in reality.

Or, as Dr. Bruce would put it, “Neuroreality: A Scientific Religion To Restore Meaning, Or How 7 Brain Elements Create 7 Minds And 7 Realities, Discoverer Of Triadism, Familial Polarity Galactic Big Bang Engines And The xDARP”, which also happens to be the title of his 2011 book.

ABC News

Police Officer Fatally Shoots Texas College Student WPRO (SAN ANTONIO) -- A police officer for a university in San Antonio, Texas has been put on administrative leave after the fatal shooting of a student Friday morning. Robert Cameron Redus, 23, was shot and killed by a University of the Incarnate Word police ... PHOTOS: Candlelight vigil pays tribute to slain UIW studentKENS 5 TV all 110 news articles »

At the end of a long day of work, Machiavelli liked to change into "regal and courtly garments" and spend hours reading his favorite authors. For Machiavelli, this reading was the highlight of his day, and it was not a passive activity but a form of conversation, even communion: "I no longer fear poverty, nor do I tremble at the thought of death," he wrote to his friend Francesco. "I become completely part of them."

We at The Appendix also believe in the power of the written word to bridge gaps, not only between people living today, but between the past and the present. This is the fourth installment of a new Appendix feature, Weekly Reading, that combines links to contemporary writing we enjoyed from the past week alongside extracts from authors who might be long dead.

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• NPR on "the devious cheesemakers of the 17th century".

• Why are turkeys called that?

• The New Yorker on the tireless search for a new nightly sleep aid.

• We found out that Harper's Weekly misprinted Mark Twain's name ("Mark Swain") when it published his first magazine article. He wasn't happy ("they put it 'Mike Swain' or 'MacSwain,' I do not remember which. At any rate, I was not celebrated"). h/t @AdrianChen.

• "Quantified Self is a passionate political 'movement' without concrete demands" argues The New Inquiry.

• The Sefer Raziel, an early medieval book of spells originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic. We came across a transcription of it written by an English lawyer in 1564 and it's utterly nuts ("drinketh the milke of a white or red or a black cowe, know thou that it maketh a man say things to come.")

• Vanity Fair wonders if David Hockney's famously controversial questions about Vermeer's use of optics have been solved (answer: not really).

• Scientific American: "Life does not really exist."

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For more links to good writing and interesting discoveries, follow us on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

Charles Fréger Babugeri, Bansko, Bulgaria  ::  Nick Cave Soundsuits

Turkey doesn't exactly give off an exotic aura today. But four hundred years ago, the North American native was the talk of Europe and Asia. The above image is from seventeenth-century India - 1612 in Agra, to be precise. The Mughal Emperor Jahangir ordered it painted because he found his new pet to be so "extremely strange" that it warranted extensive description in the official chronicle of his reign:

Sometimes when it displays itself during mating it spreads its tail and its other feathers like a peacock and dances. Its beak and legs are like a rooster's. Its head, neck and wattle constantly change color. When it is mating they are as red as can be. You'd think it had all been set with coral. After awhile these same places become white and look like cotton. Sometimes they look like turquoise. It keeps changing color like a chameleon.

The opium-addicted, artistically inclined emperor was an animal lover, and he kept this turkey (a gift from the Portuguese viceroy) in his private bestiary. Judging from his detailed appreciation of the turkey's aesthetic virtues, we can guess that it numbered among Jahangir's favorite exotic beasts.

Around sixty years later, the bird had become familiar enough to appear in an English cookbook with the wonderful title The Way to Get Wealth. "Slice good store of Onions," add "good sore of Gravy that comes from the Turky, and boyl them very well together" with water, pepper, salt, breadcrumbs, sugar, and vinegar, the book advised. "And so serve it up with the Turky." Alternately, you could mix "the blood of a Swan" with "stewed Prunes," then boil it with sugar and cinnamon and serve.

A 1791 book called The Honours of the Table had moved toward a more modern approach to turkey consumption, advising that it be "roasted or boiled," then "trussed up and set up to table like a fowl... The best parts are the white ones, the breast, wings and neckbones."

The original exotica nature of the American turkey in the Old World is retained in its name, however. It is so called in English because British consumers guessed that the strange new bird might hail from the Islamic east, which was usually lumped together under the generic name "Turkey" in the seventeenth century. (That's my theory, at least - linguistics professor Mario Pei raised the possibility in discussion with Radiolab's Robert Krulwich that the birds may have been shipped to London via Istanbul, hence the name). At any rate, a similar phenomenon is at work in the French name for the bird, dinde, short for "coq d'Inde" or "Indian rooster." Things get even more complicated in Portuguese, where the bird is simply called "Peru"! This, however, is closer to being on the right track: the turkey's native range extends from the Valley of Mexico to New England and Canada.

In other words, its clear that early modern eaters developed a taste for the bird's flesh well before they had any real clue where it came from. Maybe there's a commonality there - because we don't really know where our factory-farmed turkeys come from either.

More on the fuller import of Jahangir's turkey to come (you can read my preliminary thoughts about what the story can tell us about globalization at my blog, Res Obscura. But for now, happy Thanksgiving.

“…trolling used to be pretty funny and almost entirely harmless. Trolling, despite the modern usage, does not mean “the act of pissing somebody off and laughing about their anger.” It is “the act of pissing somebody off BASED ON SOMETHING COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS and laughing about their MISPLACED anger.” It isn’t considered trolling to leave a comment full of racial epithets and laugh when people “don’t get it.” It is trolling if you leave a comment insisting on the wrong information about something irrelevant – how many runes are on a Stargate, for example (everybody knows its 12) – and wait for the ONE guy that just can’t let the transgression pass. If you start a fake fight with Prof. Stargate, dragging him deeper and deeper until hopefully, finally, even he has to stop and think “wait a minute, this is ridiculous,” that is trolling. That’s the difference: No actual harm is caused, and even the victim can eventually get in on the joke. “Trolling” isn’t referring to hiding behind a fortification and trying to hurt people like the mythical creature. It’s referring to the style of fishing – you drag bait across the bottom hoping to get a rare bite. It’s not ‘bait’ if you’re earnestly spouting your misogynistic beliefs and somebody gets upset. There’s nothing funny about entirely justified anger.”

- Robert Brockway, http://www.robertbrockway.net/2013/07/18/its-not-a-game-if-you-cant-lose/ (via pelikinesis)

Apparently Feedly is changing links to content on blogs and news sources to point at their own pages. I want Scripting News readers to know, if they use Feedly, they will be missing all kinds of good stuff we're doing here.

If that's what they (people reading my site through Feedly) want, then it's okay with me. What's not okay is if Feedly somehow represents their pages as mine. If that's what they're doing, or planning on doing, then I ask you to find another way of reading my site.

There's no excuse for representing links to other people's writing as your own. It's one of the ugliest sides of the web. That Feedly, which has up to now been a fairly classy company, would contemplate this, makes me think they must not understand.

Carrie Underwood has responded to the harsh public reaction to her less-than-impressive performance in the deeply unimpressive Sound of Music, Live!: "Plain and simple: Mean people need Jesus," she Tweeted. "They will be in my prayers tonight... 1 Peter 2:1-25."

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the-midnight-sky:

A rare triple eclipse on Jupiter (source)

Richard Beck ponders Caravaggio’s intentions:

Most think Matthew is the bearded man. It appears that he’s pointing to himself as if to say “Me?” in response to Jesus’s call. This theory is supported by two others works of which The Calling is a part, The Inspiration of St. Matthew and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew. In those paintings St. Matthew looks similar to the bearded man who is pointing to himself in The Calling.

And yet, some think Matthew is the young man on the far left of the painting, the one at the table hanging his head. The gesture of the bearded man, if you look at it, is plausibly pointing to the young man with the unspoken question now being “Him?”. If the young man is Matthew the painting is capturing the moment just before Matthew lifts his head from the table to look at Jesus.

Beck goes on to write that he believes Matthew is the bearded man, but prefers the “drama” of imagining it to be the young man, about to look up and meet the eyes of Jesus. Pope Francis’s perspective on the painting, which he discussed in an interview with America in September:

“That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew.” Here the pope becomes determined, as if he had finally found the image he was looking for: “It is the gesture of Matthew that strikes me: he holds on to his money as if to say, ‘No, not me! No, this money is mine.’ Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff.” Then the pope whispers in Latin: “I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.”

(Image of The Calling of St. Matthew by Caravaggio, c. 1600, via Wikimedia Commons)

Me: I require a 50% deposit to begin, with the remainder due upon completion.

Client: But what if I don’t like the design - will you refund my money?

Me: I’m sure you’ll like the design if we work together on it. 

Client: But how do you KNOW I will like it?

Me: Well, if there’s something about the design that you don’t like, we will discuss it, and I will revise it to your tastes.

Client: But what if you do everything I ask and I still don’t like it?

Me: Then that’s on you.

Sarah Palin's new book is, more or less, a long-winded, nonsensical rant from someone who has absolutely no idea what she's talking about.

I'll pause to let the shock sink in.

The book is largely driven by a pervasive misunderstanding of the war on Christmas, who's fighting it, and what it's over.

In her worldview, those fighting Christmas are offended atheists who want to push Christ out of Christmas and replace it with a Solstice festival, ceremonies venerating sun gods, and even Islamic holidays. She doesn't mention push from Jewish households - both liberal and conservative - who are bothered by the holiday's status in schools, nor does she acknowledge the sizable numbers of conservative Christians who boycott the holiday because of its pagan roots.

She seems to have at least a passing familiarity with those roots. There's a brief mention that Jesus probably wasn't born on 12/25, and that the holiday's date was likely co-opted from Saturnalia, but she underplays the importance of this. As she puts it, "But over time those old pagan celebrations faded into obscurity because they weren't grounded in much of anything but myth, while Christmas gained ever more prominence and meaning."

Interesting. But wrong. To the extent the Roman Solstice celebrations died out, they did so because the religions they were founded on where systematically eradicated by Christians. To be fair, the pagans had tried to do the same to the Christians first.

But, in a real sense, those celebrations didn't really die: they evolved and changed their name to "Christmas." Many of the trappings survived, including elements of the decorations and even the central narrative of a god being born on the Solstice. They simply traded out the old gods for the new one, warping the nativity into a myth that fit the holiday.

As Christianity spread, it incorporated elements from other cultures' Solstice celebrations - almost every culture had one, since almost every culture was conscious of the changing length of the day and had attributed some meaning to it.

So Sarah Palin doesn't understand Christmas. She doesn't understand her opponents, either. She devotes a chapter to speculating on where the War on Christmas is going. This is presented as a riff on the "Ghost of Christmas Future" trope, and features two possible futures. She describes two imaginary trips to the University of Alaska - Anchorage, one where  "the Militant Atheists and Secular Liberals Have Their Way", and one showcasing "true religious freedom."

Needless to say, these don't shed any real insight into the future of this country. They do, however, provide us with a stark and disturbing look into the head of Sarah Palin.

The darkest time-line demonstrates just how little Palin actually knows about her enemy. In her example, the college has effectively outlawed Christianity and embraced pagan festivals, as well as other religious festivals. In the best-of-all-possible worlds, atheists and theists are sharing the same campus, placing their displays beside each other, and debating the merits of Christianity.

It's odd she'd describe the first as an atheist victory. By and large, atheists oppose other religions to the same degree they oppose Christianity. Replacing Christmas with pagan ceremonies wouldn't appeal to them. Nor, for most, would forcing religion out of view. It would be disingenuous of me to claim there weren't any atheists out there who'd like to see all religion pushed out of the public eye, but that's a pretty extreme position (akin to the small percent of extreme Christians who want to outlaw non-Christian religions). Most atheists just want it divorced from government.

Sarah Palin doesn't just build a straw-man argument here. She names her straw-man "Joe McScrooge" and uses him throughout the book.

Regardless, Palin can rest assured that a future where festivals glorifying sun gods are supported by colleges while Christian groups are outlawed isn't remotely plausible.

In addition, the left isn't entirely made up of atheists. A lot of liberals are Christian, and they want to celebrate Christmas as much as the right. They just tend to be more understanding of those who don't.

Bizarrely enough, Palin's "best case scenario" more or less describes what's occurring at colleges all over the country now as a result of liberal pressure to include other groups. Atheist organizations are now able to display their message beside Christians, as well as other religions. Free debate is welcome: that's what secularists are after.
Can you cherry pick examples from around the country that sound extreme? Sure, though I noticed that a large number of the ones Palin uses originate at private colleges, which have the right to set their own rules about groups, just as private religious colleges do.

All of Palin's talk about the War on Christmas is laid out as evidence for a larger assault on religion, freedom, and democracy. Palin writes, "Again and again, secular leftists complain that religion - especially Christianity - is a source of violence and repression, but in this country our Judeo-Christian heritage is the source of the very freedoms they so angrily use to denounce Christ and rid his very mention from the public square."

A good reminder that Sarah Palin doesn't understand history. Of course, the primary source of the freedoms laid out by American's founders was Greek philosophy, not Christian theology, which actually served as the justification for systems of European monarchy the colonists were rebelling against.

Regardless, liberals aren't trying to rid anyone from the public square. However, we do want the government's involvement to be neutral in matters of religion, and we want to ensure that public schools aren't pushing any kind of religious indoctrination. That doesn't mean we want them to teach that Christianity is bad - in fact, that's just as bad.

To put it simply, we don't think government - and that includes local - should be able to dedicate land or money to display a nativity scene, unless other groups - religious and otherwise - have an equal right to the same resources. Because there's at least one quote in Palin's book I do agree with: "A democracy without respect for individual liberty is just a tyranny of the majority."

There's a lot more I could go into: her mangled attempts to combat the phrase "Happy Holidays" as an attack on Christmas, her tedious accounts of her family's boring holiday traditions, the completely out-of-place snipes at Obamacare, the utterly random recipes wedged in the back... but I think I've gone on long enough. This thing is badly written, badly argued, and badly researched. It displays a profoundly idiotic point-of-view that's lacking even a basic understanding of history and culture. It wasn't even good for a laugh. The best aspect is it's length: I can't find an official word count, but I'd estimate around 55,000 words. I can't imagine trying to get through a 100k version of this tripe.

Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, I got this out of the library. No way in hell I'd risk a penny in royalties getting to Palin.

Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell on life inside “The Room,” the greatest bad movie ever made

• Laugh in the face of chocolate advent calendars

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?” – Cicero

Thankfully, there are modern day custodians of history keeping the past alive and well, presenting long-silenced voices in time and framing the act of rediscovery as an innovative art. Such is the case with magazines like Lapham’s Quarterly, podcasts like Hard Core History, and Dogfish Head’s Ancient Ales series.

Working in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Director of Biomolecular Archaeology for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages and Health Dr. Patrick McGovern, Dogfish CEO Sam Calagione revives long lost recipes and brings to light traditional beermaking methods that folks in the United States would consider highly exotic (you can see their discovery and process in action on their reality show Brewmasters, now streaming on Netflix). More often than not though, the efforts pay off.

Chateau Jiahu – A variation on the world’s oldest fermented beverage recipe, this is an incredibly sweet beer made with hawthorn fruit, sake, barley, rice and honey. The majority of these ingredients are more than evident throughout the experience. Took a bit to get used to, but once invested, I thoroughly enjoyed it. 10% abv. A- / $12 (25.4 oz.)

Midas Touch – “Indiana Calagione” and Dr. McGovern found the molecular evidence of this recipe in a Turkish tomb that was allegedly the property of one King Midas. Incredibly sweet, and as the story goes it’s actually somewhere on the scale between a wine and mead. I’m inclined to believe it. Leaves a bit of a dry finish with a few faint herb notes. 9% abv. B / $12 (12 oz. four-pack)

Theobroma – Wham bam, thank you ma’am! Taking its recipe cues from a chemical analysis of Honduran pottery over 3,000 years old (it feels kind of ridiculous just typing that), this is a chocolate beer recipe filled to the brim with cocoa, a bit of bitter honey, and a bit of chili spice on the back end. The deceptive light coloring (you’d think a chocolate beer would be a bit darker) teases and lets the chili and cocoa do their dance. Excellent stuff! 9% abv. A / $12 (25.4 oz)

Ta Henket – Bread bread and bread… which makes perfect sense because this recipe comes from Egyptian Hieroglyphics. The yeast stands out with traces of the chamomile and other herbs listed as secondary ingredients. Probably my least favorite of the bunch, but being the weak link in this chain could be the strongest on any other lineup. 4.5% abv. B- / $11 (25.4 oz)

The company also offers a variety of special brewpub only editions, including one involving a whole mess of human-masticated corn and saliva. Hopefully these other experiments will see mass production shortly, but given the time and effort it takes to make them happen, it may just require a visit to Delaware instead.

Dogfish Head has a tendency to sometimes enter the realm of the comically absurd. In keeping with the spirit of the company’s mantra, that’s a risk that unconventional brewing must take in order to stay innovative and interesting. For this series it’s an investment that pays off handsomely and provides an enjoyable education into the complexity of beer history for those willing to pay the cost of admission.

dogfish.com

Lorraine Daston, executive director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, has spent decades studying the emergence of modern science. One formative experience, she says, was a graduate-school seminar where she and fellow student Katharine Park noticed something strange. The philosophers they studied in their class on 17th century metaphysics—Bacon, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke—were obsessed with monstrous creatures. Their professor didn’t care, nor did the other students, so Daston and Park carved out their own intellectual turf and wrote a landmark scholarly article about monsters. Years later they expanded the study and in 1998 published the monumental history, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750.

Protests in Ukraine’s capital, which have grown steadily for weeks, reached new heights on Sunday when demonstrators toppled a statue of Vladimir Lenin.

Vendredi, l'association de défense des peuples aborigènes Survival International avait été déboutée par la justice française de sa demande de suspension de cette vente aux enchères de 25 masques hopis.

fuckyeahvintageillustration:

'The Tempest' by William Shakespeare; illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Published 1926 by William Heinemann Ltd., London and Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.

Source 1, Source 2

Simply some of his most beautiful work. Rackham was beyond mere genius.

lepreskil has added a photo to the pool:

Seoul has become a boomtown for American musicals, with Korean and Broadway producers tapping into an audience of young women raised on the bombast of Korean pop and the histrionics of television soap operas. Ticket sales to American and European musicals, as well as to a sprinkling of Korean originals, have grown from $9 million in 2000 to an estimated $300 million this year, and a frenzy of licensing deals is underway. Proven hits like “Wicked,” “Mamma Mia!” and “Grease” have opened here this fall, but so, too, have Broadway failures like “Ghost” and “Bonnie & Clyde,” challenging assumptions about taste, tolerance and translation. The quintessential New York story “Guys and Dolls,” it turns out, works in Korean, so long as Miss Adelaide is played by an actress nearly 10 years older than her Nathan Detroit, to reflect the trend of older women dating younger men in Seoul.

Bathtime Santa looks up to no good, what with the mischievous wink and thumbtacks. (Via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

A new shop opened in this New Leaf town ⊟

Wow, buying organic is really expensive. And you thought Tom Nook was the only guy you had to worry about ripping you off! S/o to Candace Crossing for the pics.

You know what’s not hella expensive right now? Animal Crossing: New Leaf! It’s back in stock with a big discount at Amazon, available for $24.99 — The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is still on sale too for $34.96.

BUY Animal Crossing: New Leaf, upcoming games, holiday gift guide

Dress

1950s

Timeless Vixen Vintage