dugong show

Despite rejection by the scientific and curatorial community as hoaxes, the manufactured chimera known as Fiji mermaids are stubborn objects of fascination and still prized acquisitions in serious collections, as Hyperallergic contributor Allison Meier experienced.
Marketed to the public like sea-monkeys, perhaps some of that enduring celebrity and academic interest can be sourced to that dissonance between expectation and reality. Specimens are even subjected to a rigorous battery of testing, including DNA and x-rays. What do you think? Plenty of reliquaries have sideshow status as well but we wonder if such spectacles and mascots aren’t contributing to the idea of museums as backdrops over places of scholarship and learning. Perhaps the sense of balance is most important.

hallstattzeit

No plunder and tomb-raiding for us of course, but we were taken aback to discover rather casually that there is an ancient Celtic ensemble of burial mounds (Hügelgra- bernfeld) to explore essentially in our backyard. The substantial artefacts and grave-goods recovered here are late iron age and correspond to the ascendency of the Frankish Merovingian dynasty. Apparently this one site is part of a larger trail that extends over sixty kilometres through the region and once the weather turns fairer, I think that that’s a path we’ll embark on.

we have thought proper by these presents, to notify the good citizens of these united states

Though preliminary articles of peace were drawn up by the Continental Congress the previous April, the American Revolutionary War did not officially end until this day in 1784 with the ratification of the Treaty of Paris by the colonies’ assent in the Maryland State House in Annapolis, the then capitol. According to the rules on entering into treaties and accords established in the Articles of Confederation, delegates from at least nine colonies (states) were needed to comprise a quorum but due to the severity of the winter weather, only seven were present and it seemed unlikely any more could make the arduous journey.
The reason that more than a simple majority was stipulated and the cause for Thomas Jefferson’s insistence was that with only a bald majority’s acquiescing, Britain could later reasonably declare the terms of the treaty invalid and renege on the deal. Going ahead with just seven and compromising constitutional law this early on in the nation’s history was, according to Jefferson, a dishonourable prostitution of the Great Seal of the United States. Finally, a deal was reached whereby a stay of three months would be requested until such time as other representatives could arrive, or that if Great Britain were to sue for immediate resolution, that the matter be agreed to with seven members but without the competency of precedence nor of the legislature.

orange julius

It’s true what they say about history repeating—the first time as tragedy and then as farce what with the US and the rest of the world being terrorised now by another soi-disant intellectual-heir and all around hate-mongerer it might be profitable to inspect another Federal Bureau of Investigations casefile that documents the rise and fall of Fritz Julius Kuhn, the would-be American Fuhrer, steadfast despite a tepid reception by the actual Führer of Nazi Germany who wanted nothing to do with him. Founder of the explicitly fascist political organisation called the German-American Bund, Fritz went on to in 1939 make arrangements for and headline that terrifying and infamous rally at Madison Square Garden.
Hoping to avoid further demonstrations, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia enlisted the help of the bureau to look into the already suspect finances of the Bund and found that Kuhn had not only embezzled and absconded with a rather paltry portion of the organisation’s funds to retain the affections of his mistress, Kuhn also used it as a vehicle for tax avoidance and tax evasion. Kuhn was sent to Ossining Correctional Facility (Sing Sing prison) for a two-year stint, which was extended after a genius but unrealised plan of his to extort money from a wealthy toiletries heiress (who happened to be Jewish with family in Germany) was discovered. In 1943 while still behind bars, Kuhn was stripped of his American citizenship and repatriated to West Germany in 1945, dying obscure and forgotten in 1951 in Munich.

keep moving from this mountain

This coming Monday—for the first time in nearly five decades since the civil rights reformer’s assassination, the city of Biloxi, Mississippi will officially observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day under the name it goes by across the United States rather than “Great Americans Day,” as Sarah Holder reports for Citylab. I wonder if the addition or omission of a plural apostrophe carries a significance—like with Presidents’ Day.
The choice of name was a compromise and a way to distance the holiday from conflating it with Confederate General Robert E Lee—as other neighbouring municipalities had done—and illustrates how fraught with controversy that the occasion has been since declared a federal holiday in 1986 with universal adoption being a slow and contentious battle. The spectre of the Confederacy and the attitudes and values it enshrined still haunting the present and frustration those dreams and visions that we fight for and uphold, it seems counter to the adage that history is something inscribed by the winners—lest we concede all is lost to the forces of hate and regression—but perhaps now because at least all places across that country (it’s also celebrated internationally in Toronto, Hiroshima and the Hague) can share the same celebration, we will have the strength to fight another day.

mot-clic francophone

Not only do we learn that rather than surrender to the hegemon of the English language, the French speaking world ought to meditate on their mobile multifonction rather than their smart phone and have a critical eye open for so called infox or faux info (fake news), we find that to varying public reception and adoption that the Journal Officiel has added to its register several pernicious tech terms that French has found preferred substitute for. A hacker, for instance, would be un fouineur, crowdfunding and derivatives become financement participatif, and an emoji is more properly une frimousse, a sweet little face.