Hpeckerbased on the "women should" ad
(1) President Abraham Lincoln, who had depression
(2) Writer Virginia Woolf, who had bipolar disorder
(3) Artist Vincent Van Gogh, who had bipolar disorder
(4) Writer Sylvia Plath, who had depression
(5) Mathematician John Nash (from A Brilliant Mind), who had schizophreniaInspired by this post
In 1680 Robert Hooke sprinkled a plate with flour, drew a violin bow across its edge, and saw the flour spring into surprising geometric shapes. The plate was resonating, driving the flour into invisible nodal lines on its surface that were not vibrating.
German physicist Ernst Chladni pursued these experiments in the 18th century and published his results in Discoveries in the Theory of Sound in 1787. Today they’re known as Chladni figures.
“The universe is full of magical things,” wrote Eden Phillpotts, “patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
Hpecker"In 1519 a group of field mice in Stelvio, Italy, were charged with damaging crops by burrowing. The prosecutor argued that the loss of income prevented local tenants from paying their rents. The mice were assigned a defense attorney, Hans Grinebner, who claimed that his clients aided society by eating insects and enriching the soil. The judge banished the mice but promised them safe conduct and “an additional respite of fourteen days … to all those which are with young and to such as are yet in their infancy.”"
In the fifth century B.C., a storm upset the pontoon bridges by which Xerxes’ armies were crossing from Persia into Greece. Xerxes punished the strait with three hundred lashes. (Herodotus called this a “highly presumptuous way to address the Hellespont.”)
In the ancient Athenian summer festival known as Buphonia, an ox was slain with an ax, which was then charged with murder and thrown into the sea.
In 1428 Pope Martin V ordered English theologian John Wycliffe’s 44-years-dead body to be dug up and burned for heresy.
In 1519 a group of field mice in Stelvio, Italy, were charged with damaging crops by burrowing. The prosecutor argued that the loss of income prevented local tenants from paying their rents. The mice were assigned a defense attorney, Hans Grinebner, who claimed that his clients aided society by eating insects and enriching the soil. The judge banished the mice but promised them safe conduct and “an additional respite of fourteen days … to all those which are with young and to such as are yet in their infancy.”
In 1685, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Protestant chapel at La Rochelle, France, was condemned to be demolished. Its bell was spared, with a condition:
To expiate the crime of having rung heretics to prayers, it was sentenced to be first whipped, and then buried and disinterred, by way symbolizing its new birth at passing into Catholic hands. Thereafter it was catechized, and obliged to recant and promise that it would never again relapse into sin. Having made this ample and honourable amends, the bell was reconciled, baptized, and given, or rather sold, to the parish of St. Bartholomew.
– James George Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, 1918
(Thanks, Brody.)
Hpeckermaybe this is too math nerdy to share, oh well
Somewhat like Shigeo Fukuda, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute art professor Larry Kagan “hides” two-dimensional images in seemingly chaotic three-dimensional sculptures. The images are revealed when light is applied from the right angle.
“The shadows are a condensation of something that exists in more dimensions,” he says. “Behind them, there can be an awful lot going on.”
A few more playful sculptures from Fukuda:
On May 23, 1964, Cumberland firefighter Jim Templeton was visiting Burgh Marsh in Cumbria, England, when he snapped three photos of his 5-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. When the pictures were developed, he was surprised to see what looked like a spaceman in the background of one of them.
Templeton told reporters, “I took the picture to the police in Carlisle, who, after many doubts, examined it and stated there was nothing suspicious about it. The local newspaper, the Cumberland News, picked up the story, and within hours it was all over the world. The picture is certainly not a fake, and I am as bemused as anyone else as to how this figure appeared in the background. Over the four decades the photo has been in the public domain, I have had many thousands of letters from all over the world with various ideas or possibilities — most of which make little sense to me.”
The best guess seems to be that the figure is Templeton’s wife, Annie, who had dark bobbed hair and was wearing a pale blue dress that appeared white in other photos taken that day. The camera’s viewfinder obscured part of the image area, so it would have been possible for him to take the photo without realizing that Annie was in the shot. But who knows?
Have you ever had legs like a pharoah? Put the…. well, put your legs in a sarcophagus.
When pianist Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm in World War I, he commissioned a “concerto for the left hand” from Maurice Ravel.
When his friend Dick Smolens had a cerebral episode in the early 1960s that impaired the use of his left hand, William Zinsser remembered Ravel and composed a “fantasia for the left hand” that Smolens could type as a recovery exercise:
crazed zebras craved egress
at a garage
scared bats vacated
watered carafe
begat a gaffe
at a cafe
a wet sweater starts a stagger
devastates a swagger
vexed rex
deferred sex
rested testes
ragtag beggars
degraded a revered settee
a reader dazed a referee
drab cad dabbed at a cravat
bad dad
treed a deaf cat
a fezzed Arab
razzed a verger
at Qatar
retarded gaffer basted a stag
braggart ate a garbage bag
crass bastard
cadged faxes
at a data base
saber castrated
sex exerted Exeter cadets
sad tads
saxes reverberate
cabbages vegetate
taxes wax
aged drag star
segregated a sextet
exaggerated breeze
ravaged trees
wafted bees
afar
"Right-Wing Asshole Is Super Racist" - top story of the No Shit section in this weekend’s Oh Word Herald Tribune Magazine.
I’ve never been evicted, and that’s because I’ve never had an apartment. I’m living off the grid, baby! A wandering website-running vagabond. Pretty sure there was a Neil Young song about that. I think it was called, “Kickass Vagabond Tony, What a Handsome Dude, I’d Kiss Him If I Could, But It Would Never Happen Because He’s Too Busy Being His Own Multinational Enterprise of Babe-a-Licious Attraction, How *Does* He Do It? (Parts 1 & 2) ”
You’re probably thinking, “Isn’t it a little backwards to be running a website if you’re trying to live off the grid?” Well, smarty-pants, the answer is a big, obese, Cheeto-munching “NO.” I’m hiding in plain sight! The internet is the new norm; everyone’s on it. Only outliers avoid being on the internet, and you could easily find and kill ‘em all by setting fire to the dumb woods in Montana that they’re all hiding in! I’m the Where’s Waldo of the crowded fairgrounds that is the internet. AmazingSuperPowers is the Wizard! And Wes, well, he’s like one of the scrolls I guess.
Anyone who searches for me or the site is going to get distracted and wind up somewhere else! Search for “AmazingSuperPowers” and you’ll only get as far as “Ama” before accidentally going to Amazon or an Ask Me Anything with Dink Flurtman, creator of some crappy pandering BBC show, who will only spend a single sentence hastily answering your question before spending a paragraph trying to sell you the special edition Blu Ray of his *other* crappy pandering show. Or if search for “Tony” you only get as far as “To” before you start writing “To my One True Love, Dink Flurtman” because you really, really love that guy and can’t wait to buy all the things he’s trying to sell you. Thanks, Dink, for being my human shield in this modern technological warzone. You die so that I may live another day. Rule of the jungle, baby.
T
In the old times these isles lay there as they do now, with the wild sea round them. The men who had their homes there knew naught of the rest of the world and none knew of them. The storms of years beat on the high white cliffs, and the wild beasts had their lairs in the woods, and the birds built in trees or reeds with no one to fright them. A large part of the land was in woods and swamps. There were no roads, no streets, not a bridge or a house to be seen. The homes of these wild tribes were mere huts with roofs of straw. They hid them in thick woods, and made a ditch round them and a low wall of mud or the trunks of trees. They ate the flesh of their flocks for food, for they did not know how to raise corn or wheat. They knew how to weave the reeds that grew in their swamps, and they could make a coarse kind of cloth, and a rude sort of ware out of the clay of the earth. From their rush work they made boats, and put the skins of beasts on them to make them tight and strong. They had swords made from tin and a red ore. But these swords were of a queer shape and so soft that they could be bent with a hard blow.
– Helen W. Pierson, History of England in Words of One Syllable, 1884
In 1975, artist Richard Haas renewed the building at 112 Prince Street in Manhattan by covering its blank brick side with a five-story mural emulating the cast-iron architecture of its facade. Only two of the windows are real.
Hpeckernot sure why i like this
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