Thursday 11 March 2021

8x8

topsy-turvy: the architecture of the upside-down  

forever blowing bubbles: the symbols of Wall Street, capitalism protest art  

hashtag hastings: remix your own Bayeux Tapestry (previously)—via Kottke 

sit, ubu, sit: Pablo Picasso called the injured owl he discovered and nursed back to health by that name partly out of assonance with ‘hibou,’ French for hoot, and the obnoxious Alfred Jarry character  

voyager station: orbiting cruise ship set to open as early as 2027—via the always excellent Nag on the Lake 

0 bby or star wars retrofitted: remastering the franchise with references to what’s been revealed in the past four decades  

tailpipe: visualising carbon dioxide emissions through a driving game—via Waxy  

bright and airy: an inside-out concept residential project with lots of ventilation

Wednesday 17 February 2021

zea mays

Having recently posted about the original by the Hot Butter ensemble, we quite enjoyed discovering—courtesy of Pasa Bon!—this clever, well-arranged medieval cover (see previously) of Pop Corn. Many more covers versions to be found clicking through at the link up top or by letting the play-list cycle through below.

Wednesday 10 February 2021

the riot between town and gown on saint scholastica’s day

A dispute over some supposed subpar wine served in an Oxford tavern erupted into a violent and deadly unrest on this day in 1355 with some thirty townspeople and sixty students and professors dead by the end, testing the protected status of the benefit of the clergy and authentica habita—that is, the rules, rights and privileges of universities in medieval Europe, institutions that enforced a trial by one’s peers with punishment for infractions far less severe than in civil courts, which the was the jurisdiction of the ordinary public, and carceral facilities.

The bar brawl quickly escalated with armed gangs coming into the countryside to aid the townsfolk in overcoming the university, with king and commission (oyer and terminer) siding with the institution of higher learning, placing religious interdict on the town and an annual penance payable each year on the anniversary—Saint Scholastica’s Feast Day, the fifth century Italian nun who founded the Benedictine order and whose patronage includes reading, quizzes and book fairs, which was kept until 1825. On the six hundredth anniversary in 1955, with an act of reconciliation, the mayor was given an honourary degree from Oxford and the university chancellor was bestowed with the freedom of the city—equivalent to being given the key.

Tuesday 2 February 2021

x/1106 c1

First observed on this evening in 1106 and visible in the night sky for six weeks before fragmenting into many smaller pieces and heading back out into the Solar System, corroborated by astronomers in China, Japan, Korea, Continental Europe, Wales and England, the Great Comet was regarded as a highly portentous omen. Returning in 1882, it is now classified as a member of the Kreutz Group of sungrazing comets (Sonnenstreifer, Sonnenkratzer, namesake of Heinrich Carl Friedrich Kreutz who studying their orbit and periodicity, determined that they were all related phenomenon), approaching close enough to the Sun at perihelion that they are prone to being broken up or made to evaporate entirely. Though no particular boon nor doom is directly associated with the Great Comet’s appearance, such documented observances synchronise and coordinate ancient calendars.

Saturday 23 January 2021

7x7

dog and ferret sundries, etc: a fantastic hardware catalogue from the 1930s 

the roaring twenties: the Sea Shanty craze of a century before—via Strange Company 

midori: the relatively modern distinction between blue and green in Japan—see previously 

tag yourself: medieval owl alignment chart 

arkaphones: a resounding retrospective to artist Terry Adkins, who created sonic monuments  

for all the latest medical poop, call surgeon general c. everett koop: the fortune and failure of the post executive branch career of the doctor’s branded medical advice website  

ghost signs: self-appointed guardian of fading signage, collecting it before it vanishes altogether—we can all do this

Thursday 14 January 2021

festum asinorum

On this day, medieval Christendom—though most popular in France—commemorated the Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt to with a celebration to honour all beasts-of-burden and donkey-related stories in the Bible, possibly as an extension of a Roman holiday called Cervula which had similar themes of inversion.

There were processions and plays including portrayals of Balaam and his Ass and associated prophesies, as well as general praise and reward for our asses—our friends’ obscure etymology in donkey and jenny likely an American aversion from the nineteenth century to say anything untoward and made up substitutions, see also. The day’s mass was concluded with the priest declaring instead of the customary Ite, misse est—it is done, you are dismissed to which the congregation replied Deo Gratias, from the pulpit the priest would bray, hinhannabit, three times with the response “Hinham, hinham, hinham.”

Thursday 24 December 2020

nittel nacht

Observed in some Jewish communities dating back as far as the late seventeen-hundreds with scholastic reinforcement in the following century, the Yiddish term (ื ื™ื˜ืœ ื ืַื›ื˜) for Christmas Eve likely comes from natalis but may also refer to the hanged one, nitleh, an epithet for Jesus during the Middle Ages. In medieval Europe, non-observers were often forbidden from being seen in public—with Yuletide often signalling the beginning of attacks on Jewish neighbours by Christians—so this was a good excuse to staying in and specifically not studying the Torah and abstaining from enjoyment so as not to give any glory to the day, though for some, reading the Sefer Toledot Yeshu (an alternate hagiography that portrays Jesus as a womanising charlatan though possibly accounts themselves are exaggerated as another excuse to label people as blasphemers—that is, megadef) as an acceptable activity to engage in. Chess and card games became a tradition, in lieu of other pastimes, and children were apprehensive about being snatched away on this night by demon Jesus.

Friday 18 December 2020

saint sebastian

Definitely the saint portrayed as the thirstiest, this captain of the Praetorian guard that prudently, sensibly hid his Christianity from Diocletian is venerated on this day in the Orthodox Church on the occasion of his martyrdom in 288, born around 256. Once his faith was revealed, the emperor (previously) ordered him lashed to a tree and shot with arrows. The firing squad departed, leaving Sebastian for dead, but he was able to miraculously recover—with the help of Saint Irene, widow of one of his previously martyred companions. Later Sebastian ambushed and berated Diocletian for his sinful ways and petitioned for better treatment for the Christian community. 

The emperor was first taken aback by such open and direct criticisms, especially from one who was supposed to be dead but soon regained his composure and ordered the saint to be cudgelled to death—probably not as pretty of a picture. Patron of the persecuted, archers and athletes, this Apollonian figure is also the protector of the plague stricken, due to a conflation with Hermes during medieval times, whom was said to deal diseased arrows from on high, and possibly because of his initial recovery which granted him a second martyrdom (called a sagittation and a fairly common theme) and that the wounds resembled the pox and buboes, whose appearance was alarming but not always a sign of certain death.

Wednesday 16 December 2020

adelheid von burgund

Venerated on this day, on the occasion of her death in 999 (*931), the feast of Saint Adelaide (Adรฉlaรฏde, see more on her namesakes) celebrates her involvement with palace intrigues and the complicated power struggle for Lombardy and Burgundy. A strategic first marriage saw Adelaide wed to Lothar II of Italy, producing a daughter, Emma who went on to become queen of Western France. Quite the soap opera to follow, Lothar was poisoned in 950 by rival for the throne Berengar II while visiting Turin.

Widowed Adelaide intended to rule in her murdered husband’s stead and her subjects seemed amenable to that arrangement but Berengar wanted to assert his legitimacy by arranging Adelaide’s marriage morganatic marriage to his son Aldabert. Adelaide wasn’t having this as it would mean forfeiting her territorial-holdings and so fled to Como to seek refuge in her stronghold there. Captured and imprisoned in Garda, a priest helped her escape to Canossa and sought sanctuary with Otto I, King of East Francia. The two eventually married and having secured dominion over a large swath of land with his wife’s contribution and a decisive victory against Hungarian incursions at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, extending his control all the way to the Elbe and thus established the Ottonian dynasty of The Holy and Roman Empire of the Germans, crowned emperor and empress (a significant break with tradition in acknowledgement of Adelaide’s standing and respect) by the pope in 962. After her husband died, Adelaide was regent to two generations of Ottos to follow, and once her grandson was able to rule in his own right, she devoted herself to acts of charity, founding and restoring religious communities. Their daughter Matilda was also a regent and first princess-abbess of Quedlinburg, the convent founded by her grandmother, also called Matilda, in 936. Because of her long, colourful court life, Adelaide is designated, among other things, patron and protector of in-laws, exiles, empresses and step-parents.

Monday 14 December 2020

bring a pitchfork and a torch

Our thanks to Cory Doctorow for directing our attention to more bardcore musical stylings with this delightful Old English tribute to a safe-for-work Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B with Well-Armed Peasants, including some deserved swipes and disses at the shortcomings of the massively overrated Magna Carta and the necessity of revolt and revolution.  Much more to explore at Pluralistic at the link above, including some choice lyrics.

รฉvรชque de reims

Credited with prophesizing the invasion and saving a significant number of the city’s citizens—depending on one’s sources of either the Vandals in 407 or the Huns fifty years later—Bishop Nicasius (Nicaise) who established the first cathedral of Rheims lured the marauders to the church as the main repository of plunder, affording more people the chance to escape is venerated on this day. Along with some faithful companions, Nicasius was beheaded at the altar, his matyrdom grouping him with the cephalophores—head-bearers, praying as the ax came for him, reportedly from Psalm 119, finishing the verse after being decapitated and frightening the attackers into temporary retreat. Having earlier in his career, survived a bout of smallpox and attributing his recovery to piety and prayer, the Church made him patron and protector of the disease.

Tuesday 8 December 2020

6x6

message in a bottle: researchers tagged plastic waste with electronic trackers to monitor their journey—from the same team that brought us Mister Trash Wheel 

pfizer-biontech: British nonagenarian first to receive the coronavirus vaccine  

wunderpus photogenicus: deep sea diver photographs an incredible infant octopus with a transparent head

toot your own horn: more butt trumpets and other bizarre imagery in manuscript marginalia 

catsa lander mark-1: a gorgeous space-age cat bed—though our feline friends would be more pleased with a shoebox

2014-076a: Hayabusa2 (previously) successfully returns its asteroid sample to Earth

Monday 30 November 2020

this article contains weasel words

Having been informed that the proper collective noun for a pack of ferrets (Mustela putorius furo, whose common name is from the Latin for furuttus, “a little thief whose males are called hobs and jills—with neutered and spayed equivalents jib, or hoblet, and sprite) is a “busyness” (see also), we are more delighted with an bonus lesson on ghost words and transmission errors. From the very real and well-documented examples of Merriam-Webster’s dord—given the definition with the utmost earnestness of density whereas it was D or d, the typesetter’s note abbreviation for the measure of said term and the spurious testentry said to rhyme ironically with pedantry and the more speculative examples of o.k. or the etymology of pumpernickel with Napoleon proclaiming a loaf as fit only for his favourite horse “C’est pain pour Nicole,” the venery term for the name of a group of ferrets devolved from busyness to fesynes to feamyng. Presented first in a public form during a presentation to the Philological Society of London, Professor Watler William Skeat coined the phrase ghost word and elucidated the audience with an example line from Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Monastery: “…dost thou so soon morse thoughts of slaughter?” A typographical, transcription error made the question more poetic than the author intended and this happy misprint of the intended word nurse prompting quite a bit of scholarship, variously explaining the use as an occurrence of verbification, anthimeria or that it was a case of a New Latin false friend, namely—mordere to bite—that is to indulge and placate those thoughts by gnawing at what’s gnawing at the character.

Wednesday 18 November 2020

let me reach, let me beach, far beyond the baltic sea

Via Miss Cellania, we are directed to one of the more recent renditions from bardcore band Hildegard von Blingin’ (previously here and here), Enya’s Orinoco Flow, reworked with medieval instrumental as a sort of sea shanty—which Sail Away kind of always was. Geography and locations mentioned are altered to mostly align with the boundaries of Western Europe during the Middle Ages.  More of these covers at the links above.

Sunday 11 October 2020

gummarus of lier

Cousin to Pepin the Short, Carolingian king of the Franks, and entrusted with responsibility over several offices of the royal court, the saint hailing from a town outside of Antwerp is venerated on this day, on the occasion of his peaceful death in 774 (*717).

Regrettably Pepin had arranged the marriage of Gummarus to a noble woman called Guinmarie, whose relationship was not the happiest and to make amends, Pepin allowed Gummarus to accompany the king and his retinue on several military campaigns. Looking forward to a quiet retirement, Gummarus built a hermitage in the woods at Nivesdunc, now consecrated as a chapel to Saint Peter with the city having grown around the site. Beatified after a number of miracles were attributed to his intercession, Gummarus was given the patronage over difficult marriages, courtiers, separated couples, lumberjacks and invoked against bone fractures (having been associated with miraculous mending a damaged tree) and with no explanation—glove makers (gantiers) and hernia sufferers.

Thursday 8 October 2020

aberdeen bestiary

Reminiscent of this project that examined how Western medieval scholars depicted the exotic elephant without a frame of reference, we rather enjoyed this growing dialogue, via Super Punch, of heroically bad portrayals of animals, started out by Danny Dutch presenting The Oyster.  This round guy looks more like a birb to us.  Scrolling through, we especially liked the owl, bees and bat with human features.

Saturday 3 October 2020

zwiebelzopf

Visiting a small harvest festival nearby held on Germany Unity Day, H and I looked for some autumn accents for the house and found several stalls selling traditional onion braids (Zwiebelzรถpfe). 

Sometimes also incorporating garlic bulbs, the braids adorned craftily with dried wild flowers were not customarily only for decorative and storage, preservative purposes but moreover for the notion that the power of the talisman would stave off illness and harm from hearth and home. Right now we can all use all the help we can muster. Singly, onions were worn as amulets in medieval times to ward off the plague, and a New Year’s Eve custom (divination from onions is called cromniomancysee also) in various regions, especially in the Erzgebirge, called for the dicing of an onion into twelve sections and sprinkling each bowl with salt to forecast the precipitation for each month of the year to come as the moisture drawn out of each section by the next morning would predict that month’s rainfall.

Tuesday 29 September 2020

1q or the feast of the archangels

Venerating Saint Michael and companions, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel in honour of their victory of Lucifer and the rebel angels in the angelomachy, Michaelmas (previously) is observed on the penultimate day of September—in some traditions, the feast extending into the next day—and has also come to one of the four quarter dates of the financial year, kept since at least medieval times to mark when school and court terms were to commence and the accounting was due to ensure that debts and unresolved cases didn’t linger (see also) into the next season.

Though the customary hiring fairs and local elections do not necessarily adhere (the tradition is retained for the election of London’s lord mayor, just as peasants during the Middle Ages would appoint a reeve from among their peers to represent their interests to the manor) to the same calendars, this time of year—still referred to as the Michaelmas term for matriculating students in England, Scotland and Ireland and for the US Supreme Court’s and the English bar’s Inns of the Court’s fall sessions and of course it marks the end and beginning of the fiscal year for budget purposes. Asters or the Michaelmas daisy are one of the few flowering plants left at the beginning of autumn, and thus inspiring the rhyme and invocation: “Michaelmas daisies among dead weeds, bloom for Saint Michael’s valorous deeds.”

Sunday 20 September 2020

zwei kleiner jรคgermeister

Today marks the veneration of Saint Eustace (Eustachius) on the occasion of his martyrdom in 118 AD, whose life and legend were limned out and elaborated by medieval troubadours—beginning with a Roman General called Placidus separated in a wood from the rest of his hunting party while pursuing a stag. The deer at first gives chase but then charges back and leaves the hunter awestruck by a vision of the Cross in the antlers of the deer, followed by a booming commandment that Placidus and his family are to be baptised by the bishop of Rome. Placidus complies and takes the name of Eustace (from the Greek for “steadfast”). Soon afterwards, Eustace receives a second message that he and his family—much like Job—will be made to suffer a series of ordeals including loss of property and status.

Eustace contrives a plan to escape this fate and requests to resign his military commission to move out to the provinces—to which his superiors are amenable. Upon arriving at the first ferry crossing, however, they find that they don’t have sufficient fare and the boat’s pilot abducts Eustace’s wife Theopista and abandons Eustace and his four children. They are compelled to continue travelling on foot but have to cross the river at some point. Eustace successfully manages with the two unnamed children and attempts to do so with Agapius and Theopistus but fails and losses them to the swift current. Rather broken and alone, Eustace is employed tending a farmstead and protecting the fields for fifteen years when two envoys of the emperor find Eustace and summon him back to Rome to suppress an uprising, offering him back his former rank and position. The unrest is not started by those upstart Christians as one might suspect and might make for a better narrative but rather a run-of-the-mill skirmish at the frontier. Eustace is dispatched back to the ferry-point and puts down the rebellion and his reunited with his wife—sort of like Penelope and Odysseus, who recognises him after all these years, and with word spreading about the happy coincidence two soldiers come forward who were separated from their father while crossing the river but were rescued and raised respectively by a lion and a wolf and the parents realise it’s their children Agapius and Theopistus. Liking a good reunion story, the whole family is feted once they return to Rome by Emperor Hadrian (presumably the unnamed ones as well—let’s call them Barron and Tiffany) and after their lavish celebratory dinner and asked to make propitation to the pagan gods. Speaking for his whole entire family whom had yet to be consulted on their father’s plan for immortality, Eustace refused and Hadrian had them thrown to the lions, who declined to pounce. Frustrated, Hadian had Eustace and his family put in a brazen bull. They all expired this time but their bodies were uncorrupted by the heat and flames. With several miracles and interventions attributed to him, Eustace is considered the patron saint of firefighters and along with his co-patron Hubertus who had a similar, transformative vision the protector of huntsmen.

Thursday 17 September 2020

umbra viventis lucis

Venerated on this day, the occasion of her death in 1179 (*1098), as one of the most accomplished and prolific scholars of the Middle Ages, Hildegard von Bingen (see also, the saint and song-writer also being one of the most recorded artists in modern times), recognised for her mysticism, scientific curiosity, leadership and musical virtuosity as a Doctor of the Church.

In addition to her numerous treaties on theology, history and botany, Hildegard also invented a constructed, auxiliary language (previously) called Lingua Ignota—that is, the unknown language written in twenty-three stylised glyphs (see also) and translated mostly by the large lexical volume of her notes and the occasional Latin or German parallel gloss.
Albeit much of this interpretation is a matter of conjecture, it further was unclear if anyone else could read her writings and whether she intended the script to be a universal and ideal one or a secret, holy language.