Wednesday 1 April 2015

per dexter, checky and fesse or worth 1000

 

Though we have already established that the arcane language of heraldry was constructed and preserved so as to transmit the design of emblems, devices and coats-of-arms accurately without necessitating drawing the whole pattern all over again, I am enjoying immensely looking through a pretty comprehensive handbook of heraldic design, researched and illustrated by one Hubert Allcock—who does not share his family’s crest. The above about not wasting time, ink and tincture on reproduction being true, the book’s one drawback is that it is rendered in black and white sketches, so one needs to colour by number.
 And maybe that’s the point, pouring over the descriptions and exacting terminology, I can remember how when I was young, I’d often return to the reference section of the school library and look through an encyclopedia of symbols with the objective of increasing the vocabulary of my own secret, coded short-hard. Now, I am finding myself just as enchanted with the descriptive words.
Maybe we ought to adopt the same naming-conventions when it comes to tagging the photos we share. Eagle, displayed—or spread-eagle.  Deer, at gaze—looking straight at the viewer, like a deer in headlights. Other common charges (poses) include caboshed or erased, headed with nothing else visible, rampant or segrรฉant, standing on its hindlegs rather than statant or on all fours, addorsed is back to back and regarding is eye to eye.
Blazonry—that is the background composition of the shield is told in even more fantastic ways. Figure 21 is instructed as Paly of six, argent and sable (silver and black), a fesse counter-charged. 34 is Lozengy, argent and azure. 42 is patterned as Gyronny of eight, or (gold) and azure. 47 is per pily barwise, reversed pall (white) and azure. Of course, every design in this retinue was chosen to impart specific and readily recognisable virtues of its standard-bearer and the symbolism is nearly itself inscrutable.

monotheism or my way or the highway

King Hezekiah, son of Ahaz and father of Manasseh, of Judah may not immediately conjure up any associations from the Bible or history, but his contribution to the manner in which future has unfolded is perhaps unmatched in its significance. Having witnessed the destruction of Samaria in the seventh century BC by the Assyrians, and fearing the same fate for Jerusalem and his southerly kingdom once it too came under siege, Hezekiah pledged to make the faith of the Judeans an exclusive one in exchange for deliverance. The king ordered the Temple Mount to be cleared of pagan paraphernalia and purged of altars (bamot, the high places) to all other gods save for their patriotic champion YHWY.
Jerusalem did not fall, thanks to the Angel of the Lord massacring a hundred thousand Assyrian soldiers and the clever underground sewer systems that Hezekiah had installed to allow the city to wait out a lengthy siege with a fresh water supply, and henceforth the Abrahamic religions were monotheistic ones—not implying that God had consorts and side-kicks before had that went suddenly out of fashion but that polytheistic traditions were generally much more tolerant and accepting of diversity and peaceable. A transitional term called henotheism (from the Greek for one God, as opposed to single, coined by theologist Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling) holds that while one community worships a single, omnipotent being, the possibility of other deities, worthy of worship, is also acknowledged as well as the notion of divinity bounded by Fate or the laws as created—as opposed to the religious chauvinism and exceptionalism that Hezekiah’s deal-making gave us.

five-by-five

gallery sans grains: there’s an online museum of iconic artwork with gluten containing foodstuffs excised


lounge lizard: enjoy the space-age bachelor pad music of Juan Garcia Esquivel  the matter of

gallifrey: in the tradition of the Bayeux Tapestry, here is the continuum of the Time Lord, known as Doctor Who

merry pranksters: calendar reform was at the root of the tradition of hoaxes and pranks

poissons d’avril: a listing of the most epic stunts throughout the ages

Tuesday 31 March 2015

indistinguishable from magic

ร†on Magazine has an excellent reflection on how automata slowly infiltrated Western Europe thought, through accounts of ambassadors to far-off lands to the East and South and curious, remarkable gifts given to comparably dull European sovereigns by potentates of unbelievable wealth and learning, but rather than immediately try to reverse-engineer what wonders they’d seen or heard of, that thought veered towards the preternatural, an aberration with esoteric causes.  Albeit the spectacle of the courts of the Near East with animatronic menageries and mechanised stages sound a little like an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, it was sure to impress visitors and it seems that Europe, even the educated caste, reaffirmed the maxim of author and inventor Arthur C. Clarke that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic many times over. Though I suppose innovative craftsmanship and technical knowledge was never completely ruled out, rather than cogs and gears, witnesses were at a loss to account for these displays and resorted to the usual quiver of superstitious explanations, demonic possession, planetary alignment, necromancy.
Once the forgotten industrial prowess of Antiquity was rediscovered in the late Middle Ages, clockwork and associated applications began to promulgate slowly—however, European courts also were big for the theatrical, special effects. It strikes us as rather naรฏve and unreasonable to think anyone could be so primitive to mistake robotics for magic, like the cargo-cults that pray to air-traffic overhead to bring more humanitarian aid, but I suppose it is quite a bit similar to the modern phenomena of readily attributing past human achievement and future direction to extra-terrestrials or conspiracy. What do you think? Is technology demystified the closer in comes to appearing like actual magic? Maybe so long as we’re privy to the research-and-development phase, we won’t cower in fear and awe.

arsenal and armoury

Though medieval times are known—particularly in Europe, for violence and brutality and tactical sophistication does not exactly leap out, there were a few rather interesting innovations that were given exposure during the Crusades and contributed to the arsenal of exchange of destructive play-things among the East and West—arsenal itself coming from the Arabic word, dฤr as-sinฤรงa, a workshop.
The mainstay of the European Crusaders was the siege engine or the catapult (battering rams and siege towers included), which although refined and improved, was a technology already known and utilised during antiquity—and that was really the West’s best game. They were skilled at building secure fortifications that would repel attacks but were also good an undermining defenses. The Seljuk Turks were highly skilled archers and were more mobile than European warhorses at staging ambushes however they were also in possession of a secret weapon, inspired by the so called Greek fire of the Byzantines.  Still a mystery as to the exact formula, this was an incendiary substance, and like napalm, once aflame it was impossible to extinguish and would burn even across the surface of water or could be used like a flame-thrower.

The Muslims also expertly utilised messenger pigeons to quickly relay reports and commands across vast distances, a sorcery that the Europeans had never seen before and could not hope to compete with. It was, however, the armies of the khan from the far distant Mongolian steppe encroaching on Persia and on Transylvania to the north that brought to the battlefield the most volatile new weapon. The Mongols were able to ransack Baghdad and suppress nearly an entire continent through gun-powder, but once witnessing the power of explosives, the Muslims and then the Europeans alchemists were quick to harness it for themselves.

Monday 30 March 2015

five-by-five

tron, troff: vector map that renders cities as if out of the film Tron 

milk’s for babies: a look how cheese and tolerance to dairy changed the world

sky hostess: gorgeous vintage collection of stewardesses in uniform, via Neat-o-Rama

phoenix: from out of the rubble, a show-and-tell of San Francisco rebuilding and reinvention after the great quake

digital syndicate: a roundup of podcasts to peruse

lexeme oder news you can use

Before the Norman Conquest and the explosion of French borrowings that displaced many but certainly not all Germanic roots—at least the straightforward ones, of the language, the word for news was tidings—frozen in biblical verse and carols—news coming from the Latin by way of the French term nouvelles, the latest. I had always thought that the German Nachrichten or Neuigkeit was the German equivalent, though these words refer more to the broadcast, presentation and the quality of being hitherto unknown and novel, whereas Zeitung, associated with newspapers, only refers to the medium by convention and rather means the news in the immediate sense. In the adjacent Dutch, it is rendered tijding and from there, just a hop over the sea to tidings. Comfort and joy.