Carnivore Day Two

To all the abstainers out there, I'm sooo sorry.

Actually, this one might actually make me want to abstain myself. I'm feeling peckish for a bit of leafy green.

Anyhow. Here you go: The horror! The horror!

...The acute angina pectoris!  This seems like something my mother's family would enjoy.  Possibly my father's father as well, although his wife - my lovely grandmother - would have something to say about it.

For the Carnivores...

Just so you don't blow steak day...

And if you were curious, filet mignon is also known as a tenderloin or a medallion.

*Dream Car*

Not to be disrespecting Myles (that darlink Mini Cooper)...but look at this totally wicked automobile.

Yes it is for real.

I wants it.

Green Man

More mythology!

So.  While the Green Man exists across many eras - pre-Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance - as well as, it is speculated, in cultures both within and without western Europe, the figure is most often found (and overlooked) in churches of the British Isles.  Strangely, for as prevalent as the Green Man is, the precise mythology surrounding him is shrouded in the pre-literary mists of time.  He is likely tied to rebirth and fertility in the same way ancient kings were.  (I now have a vivid image of Mr. Moxie from 11th grade standing majestically at the front of the class, arms outstretched over his high-fastening pants, and sonorously proclaiming that, in order for the spring to come again, we would have to flay the living skin off of his body and sacrifice it to the earth.)  Regardless...parallels have been drawn between this figure and everyone from the Celtic God Cern and Jesus to Robin Goodfellow and even Peter Pan.

But I haven't told you what the Green Man looks like!  Well, next time you are in an old English cathedral, look for a figure peering out of a leafy border, a face with vines for hair, or merely an expression sprouting foliage, and remember this post.

Steampunk

Steampunk is weird.

That is all.

Sita Sings the Blues

This one might not be for everyone (but then, when were they ever?)...but if you like flash animation, Hindu mythology, jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, or are just looking for a free feature-length film to watch, I'd advise you to give it a go.  Personally, I found the semi-autobiographical story both amusing and touching (and finally, thought-provoking), loved the narrators, and got drawn into a Wikipedia rabbit-hole on Sita and Shiva and Rama and a host of other figures I hadn't though about or properly investigated in ages and ages.  If you're looking for a serious telling of the Ramayana, perhaps you ought to look elsewhere, but for a lovely (cross-cultural) time, watch Sita Sings the Blues.

Watch This

Look at my newly-purchased, historically-relevant time-keeping machine!

...Isn't it amazing??!?!  Objects shouldn't make me so happy...but I think that watches can be an exception, as they are functional and also beautiful.  Also, this one can be considered "green", yeah, because it is a mechanical wind-y one, and not a quartz battery one.  Dad told me that when he was a kid, he got his first watch at 6 or 7 years old, and he remembers going to sleep listening to it ticking away.  And I shall do the same.  :3

To Mrs. Reynold's Cat

I have a document full of poems, and most of them seem to be about love (O_o) or war (O_O)...

except this one, by Keats:

Cat! who hast pass'd thy grand climacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy'd? -- How many tidbits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears -- but pr'ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me -- and upraise
Thy gentle mew -- and tell me all thy frays
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists --
For all the wheezy asthma, -- and for all
Thy tail's tip is nick'd off -- and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
In youth thou enter'dst on glass-bottled wall.

Scrollwork

(I hate that I never write down where these images come from...If by some chance you know, let me know.)

It's getting to be that time when a person is on the lookout for every possible way of making a cheap apartment look less...flat...without having to spend any money.  Although I'm not sure the supervisor will allow stenciling.  And actually...first thing I have to do is simply find an affordable apartment, flat or otherwise.

Torte!

Happy Birthday, mine sister Bess!

We had an epic cake for dessert - and look! we can order it online! and have it shipped! to anywhere in the world!  It is so so delicious - almonds and cream and light, fluffy cake and I can't say any more about it just now because I have to go get another slice.  And maybe some tea.

Meme Time

Okay, for real...what is this phenomenon???





...(and do I support it?)

Life is Beautiful

Watch this film!

It will make you laugh while breaking your heart.  Very very good.  And (yet again) this isn't much of a review, but...

Save Ferris

This is a photo of George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., who invented the first official Ferris (duh) wheel for the 1893 Chicago World Exhibition.  He also founded a steel company for bridge builders and railroad contractors in Pittsburgh, PA (represent!).  And now, the really depressing part: he died in 1896 of typhoid fever... :( ...and his ashes waited in a crematorium for someone to claim them for over a year.  Boo. 

But thanks, GW , for bringing us your fabulous wheel!

Neckclothitania

Thatsss right...all my favorite cravat styles.  I hope you're taking notes.

Grammar is for Nerds

Pop quiz!  Is it...

lighted or lit?
weaved or wove?
dived or dove?
sneaked or snuck?
hanged or hung?
waked or woke?
thrived or throve?

Hm, "simple" past tense, my eye.

Old Emotions

In Greek, as you're probably aware, there are multiple words in place of the single verb we English-speakers use when we're talking about love.  Which is really fantastic and, I imagine, cuts down on those awkwardly ambiguous conversations like the one in which so-and-so supposedly hooked up with so-and-so and what does that even mean?  (Although I guess, if we're continuing along that train of thought, so-and-so number one would probably have been an old politician, while so-and-so number two would probably have been a young boy...and so what we end up with is simply replacing one awkward situation for another.)

Regardless. 

We've got the undervalued and overlooked philia, which implies the virtuous love that accompanies loyalty and friendship.  Then there's agápe, a sense of deep, true, stable affection and regard - in the New Testament, this is a kind of sacrificial love.  And don't forget bad-boy éros...that's sexy, passionate love, although Plato also said it also had to do with a more general spiritual appreciation of beauty.  Lastly, storge, which tends to be left off these sorts of lists, and seems to be used exclusively within the family to mean affection, tolerance, and acceptance.

I was wondering, though, if Latin had a similar subdivision of the sentiment commonly known as love.  Well...not really, as it turns out.  The Latin distinction is basically equivalent, as near as I can tell, to the English distinction between 'like' and 'love'...although, upon further reflection, this isn't totally surprising, given that Hellenic (Greek) and Italic (Latin) come off different branches of the Proto-Indo-European language tree.

Phew!

Did you knowwwwwwww...

That body odor is an evolutionary deterrent against inbreeding and incest?  I believe the founding study indicating this can be found in a paper by Wedekind et al. (1995) entitled "MHC-dependent mate preferences in humans." If you don't feel like reading up, essentially what happens is that women prefer the b.o. of men who are less genetically similar to themselves. (The study is, however, pretty interesting, both in specific conclusions and inferences as well as in experimental design, so if you've got the time, do a quick Google Scholar search.) Intriguingly, this preference seems to reverse when women are on birth control, a fact which some scientists interpret by saying that the hormonal changes induced mimic pregnancy, which is a time where human females benefit most from being in a protected family group. ...At this point, the feminists are starting to take up arms, so I'll just stop here with a warning about defining motives behind apparent evolutionary trends.

Anyway, if you're interested in human sexual attraction, genetics, and evolutionary science, check out some of these related articles by Hedrick and Loeschcke 1996, Herz and Cahill (1997), Gangestad and Thornhill (1998), or do a search for more recent literature on PubMed or Google Scholar, or if you're feeling curious but overwhelmed, here's a decent (and much less scientific) introductory article.

Yoiks.

Here you go...I don't thiiink I've posted this yet (although, after half a year, I'm starting to lose track).

Souviens-toi

From the diary of an Allied soldier, upon entering a Nazi death camp:

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men, women and children collapse as you walked by them . . . One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it. One saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves . . . [a] dysentery tank in which the remains of a child floated.
...
It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Something less serious tomorrow.

Semi-Obscure Whatever

It's Thursday, and I haven't done one of those 80s vid posts in a while...but I'm not feeling particularly pop and wave today, so here's a list of seven songs I've recently (re)discovered.  We'll see if I still like them in a week.

1) Beirut - Nantes
       I like Beirut.  A lot.
2) Spoon - Me and the Bean
       Are these lyrics deep, or are they cheesy?  Or vaguely creepy?  What does this say about me?
3) Tiziano Ferro - Sere Nere
      Okay, definitely cheesy.  But summertime means time for some intense Italian guy singing in Italian intensely.
4) Theophilus London - Humdrum Town
      I came across this when I went to Boston and stayed with Drea - catchy, no?
5) Belle and Sebastian - Storytelling
      I've had this album for ages and ages, but just recently started listening to it...and the more I listen to Belle and Sebastian, the more I like them.
6) The Kinks - Sunny Afternoon
      A summery sort of song?  And a classic one at that?  The Kinks are excellent, no matter the season.
7) Harry and the Potters - Back to School
      No words...

In Space, Brett...In Space.

(That would be a quote from Flight of the Conchords, if you were curious.)

Now here's another photo of space.  On the right is the Keyhole Nebula...and smaller, on the left, the Finger of God.

Everything I Know About Geology

(Well practically)

Sedentary - loose sediment which gets compacted together to form ROCKS.

Igneous - ROCKS made from crystals that are formed from cooling lava/magma (not sure which).

Metamorphic - any kind of ROCK which then gets buried, boiled, and squeezed.

...So anyone have any additional insights?

A View of the Night Sky

I don't know what kind of camera (or exposure time) was used by Dan and Cindy Duriscoe when taking this photo over Flagstaff, AZ...but I like to think it gives an excellent idea of the brilliance of the night sky experienced by our ancestors.  It's not too far from what I experienced while in the New Mexico desert several years ago. 

Before things like air and light pollution, on a clear night, practically every person would have been able to step out into their backyard and view with the naked eye the Milky Way, various nebulae and Messier objects, and a whole host of constellations.  Today it seems that the majority of people will go their whole life without ever glimpsing the unspoiled night sky.

On Hybrids

You may possibly recall that I was taking a class on Darwin(ism) this last spring, in which I learned that species are difficult things to pin down.  On one hand there is a clear idea of discreteness - lions are lions and tigers are tigers, that sort of thing - but on the other hand, there's a clear picture of individual differences - for us, this is best illustrated by looking at the great differences in our species, Homo sapiens.

Anyway.  One way to define what makes a species a species is to look into whether two individuals are able to generate viable, fertile, offspring.  This isn't as foolproof as it sounds, unfortunately (a large number of living organisms don't reproduce sexually at all; individuals may never produce viable offspring because of reasons other than genetic ones...they may live on opposite sides of an ocean, have different mating seasons, etc., but that doesn't mean they couldn't)...but it's a good starting point.  American bison and domesticated cows, for instance, have recently been reclassified into one genus, due to the fact that when mated, they produce a fertile breed - the beefalo. 

So what other species have interesting hybrids? 
There is, as mentioned above: cow x bison = beefalo
and everyone is most likely aware of horse x donkey = mule.
What might seem surprising is that the reciprocal cross, donkey x horse = hinny.
There are ligers and tiglons, respectively reciprocal crosses of lions and tigers.
As to bears, there are a number of hybrids that can occur between black, brown, and polar bears.
And don't forget the zebroids: zebra x donkey = zonkey
sebra x horse = zorse
and zebra x Shetland pony = zetland.
There's the Cama, camel x llama...
one of my favorites is probably the bottlenose dolphin x false killer whale = wholphin.

Of course, most of those are infertile or sterile hybrids, intergeneric or interfamilial crosses. 

Plants can crossbreed too, you know, with more success than animals.  There's the limequat (lime x kumquat) and the tangelo (mandarine orange x pomelo)...but I was definitely unaware - and surprised to discover - that peppermint, grapefruit, and even wheat are all apparently hybrid species.  Who could have guessed it?

Berry Bad News

The botanical definition of a berry is a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary...seeds are usually embedded in the flesh.

Gross, right?  Although I don't like the word 'flesh.' 

Actually...this means we have some good news and some bad news both.  Bad news first.  The berries you thought you were eating just now weren't actually berries.

Blackberries and raspberries are aggregate fruits (comprised of many drupelets - and no, that isn't a typo), while strawberries are apparently an "aggregate accessory fruit."  Mulberries are multiple fruits, not berries.  And furthermore, blueberries, cranberries, and even huckleberries are, according to botanists, are merely false or epigynous berries rather than true berries.

Now, the good news!  The fruit - and alleged veg - you were just eating may actually have been a berry.  Rejoice!  In alphabetical order, a list of true berries (according to those in the know): avocados, chili peppers, currants, eggplants, grapes, guavas, persimmons, and tomatoes...yep, not only is the tomato a fruit, they're actually a berry.  And what true berries actually have the word 'berry' in the title? Edible ones appear to include the barberry, gooseberry, nannyberry, and wolfberry...although some of these sound less than delicious, and obviously it's never a good idea to eat plant bits, berry or plain old fruit, if you aren't sure about what it is.  Oldest error in the book.

Dolphins

As a followup to that shark piece...

And yesss I realize that dolphins are likely merely somewhere between gorillas and chimps in intelligence, and that they have been known to bludgeon porpoises to death in Ireland (but then, that's Ireland...).  Still.  Check out the superpod and the tricky tricks.

Roland the Farter

I am not making this up.

I apologize for the juvenile humor...but it appears that in days gone by, juvenile humor was the only kind of humor.  (And if you're wondering how I came across this little gem, it was in a book my dad was reading about the Battle of Agincourt).

And in the interest of accuracy, I'll just pull directly from Wikipedia:
Roland the Farter (also known in contemporary records as Roland le Fartere) was a medieval flatulist who held Hemingstone manor in Suffolk and 30 acres of land in return for his services as a jester for the king. Each year he was obliged to perform "Unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum" (one jump, one whistle, and one fart) in King Henry II's court at Christmas.

...Apparently this was the king's favorite party trick.  I repeat, I am not making this up.

Hmm, and perhaps later, if you're extra good, I will tell you about the king whose favorite party trick was to pretend to eat his court midget, Jeffrey, between two loaves of bread.  Those crazy dudes.

Eff Sharks

Okay, I've watched Shark Week on the Discovery Channel or whatever, and I get that they've got a bad reputation and are really just giant stately fishies operating in their environment, but...

eff sharks. 

I'm in New Jersey - not in Florida, where this FoxNews photo was taken - but New Jersey was where the whole story upon which Jaws was based actually happened.  If I don't get in the water beyond my ankles, I'm not going to be too upset about it.

Something to Puzzle Over Until I Post Again...

Lunar Whatsit

Here are the eight phases of the moon (for those of you who like trivia):

New Moon (the boring one)
Waxing Crescent (the one which, as a child, I called a fingernail)
First Quarter (also known as a waxing quarter)
Waxing Gibbous (the overlooked one)
Full Moon (the one you don't want to stargaze - or hide in the woods - under)
Waning Gibbous (similarly overlooked)
Last Quarter (also known as a waning quarter)
Waning Crescent (another fingernail)

...and to learn about why this happens, check out this website.

Nothing if Not Precise (or is it Accurate?)

...and I would cite this, but it's in practically every mathematics and statistics book ever, so who can say from whence the original illustration arose?