endonymy

From one of our favourite weekly features, Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links, we are invited to ruminate over the fact that while most countries are named after one of four things—often tautologically, especially in translation—that are sometimes not very consequential to present geopolitics, there are some notable mavericks that defy or really lean into categorisation.
With nearly all countries named in deference to either a cardinal direction, a distinguishing geographical feature, a tribe or clan or an important personage, we’d wish that the campaign to make America great again was an effort to improve scholarship on the Latinised name of a fifteenth century Florentine cartographer from the Vespucci family but alas and alack.  There are nonetheless some notable (and notably disputed too) outliers as well. Our favouites being Malta named for bees (Μελίτη, honey-sweet), Mexico after a simplification of an Aztec city (Mēxihtli) that meant in the navel of the Moon and the Pacific island nation of Nauru, possibly derived from the native conjugation anáoero, I go to the beach.

чеховское жвачка

Our thanks to Memo of the Air for referring us to this low-stakes version of the dramatic principle of narrative parsimony and the clearing away of MacGuffins and red-herrings that’s come to be known as Chekhov’s Gun—appearing in the collected correspondence of the renowned Russian playwright.
Like the host not wanting to presume that we need the joke explained to us, but as Anton Chekhov implored his interlocutor, fellow author A. S. Gruzinsky, to “remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter [act] that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third it absolutely must go off. If it is not going to be fired, it should not be hanging there.” Contrarily, other writers—like Ernest Hemingway—have put extra stock in these incidental details, insisting that the reader wants and deserves a subject to read into even if there’s no payoff, like bottle-episodes and (see above) Monster-of-the-Week.  Read the rest of the comics from Ruben Bolling (previously) at the link above. 

half-staff

We enjoyed this informative graphic by xkcd (aka Randall Munroe, previously) on flag interpretation and special hoisting protocols to signal distress, mourning, respect and apparently also bewilderment—the flag lowered, at least in accordance with some traditions, to make room for an “invisible flag of death” on the flagpole to fly above it. Visit the link above to see all the panels and discover more of Munroe’s comics.

gouden eeuw

Similar to an ongoing restoration of a Johannes Vermeer work in line with the artist’s intent, Cynical-C directs our attention to a work by Dutch Golden Age painter Judith Jans Leyster (*1609 – †1660), an avowed talent among her peers and accepted into the Haarlem Guild but rather tragically forgotten after her death, called The Last Drop.
Somewhat rehabilitated and recognised as a pioneer among her cohort around the turn of the last century (though this painting was still misattributed until a keen observer noticed her JL* monogram on the tipped tankard), it is thought that a dealer committed the act of overpainting the skeletal figure brandishing an hourglass—which surely held significance as the dissolution that revelry ultimately brings as there was an accompanying genre piece called the Merry Trio (one dropped out apparently) that depicts an earlier phase of drinking, to make the work more marketable and less moralising when it was acquired by the Guildhall gallery in London in 1908. After extensive research and x-ray analysis, curators were able to bring back the original scene in the 1990s.

manhattanhenge

Because the concrete and steel canyons of New York City follow a grid that’s offset from true West by twenty-nine degrees, the sunset does not align with the summer and winter solstices but rather on dates spread out evenly around them, namely 31 May, 12 – 13 July and on 22 December, drifting slightly from year to year. Here is a picture courtesy of Space Weather from last evening taken from one of the best vantage points in the city, looking down 34th Street. Relatedly, when planning the layout of Milton Keynes in the early 1960s, developers consulted Greenwich Observatory to arrange the corridors of the town centre to frame the rising sun on Midsummer and sunset on Midwinter

7x7

fly me to the moons: an interactive atlas of the Solar System’s two hundred known natural satellites—via Maps Mania

favourite things: ten things beloved by US president John Quincy Adams

canopies: stunning forest photography from Manueli Bececco—see also

placă ceramică: an introduction to the incredible geometries of Romanian socialist era tilework

fine deerscald: a neural network brews up a cuppa—previously

sinistral teichopsia: antique illustrations of aura signatures (scintillating scotoma) that precede the onset of a migraine

republic of minerva: how an utopian micronation and sea-steading caused an international incident in the early 1970s

orrery: four thousand confirmed exoplanets charted in sight and sound