ouroboros

A poor python at a reptile centre in Australia was captured on camera having managed to moult its scales (ecdysis) perfectly within itself and capturing itself in its own skin. The snake eventually freed itself, none the worse for the experience, and its moment of fame recalls the ancient symbol of the ouroboros (literally, serpent eating its own tail), interpreted as a primal force in both philosophy and later psychology, but maybe that is what these pursuits can lead to.

so dark the con of man

Though perhaps the more cynical readers will interpret this magnanimous gesture as some kind of karmic penance for either plagiarism or promoting a hoax as academics (or both), but we nonetheless thought that this news item was pretty keen: one popular author is commissioning the digitalisation of some of the rarest manuscripts on esoterica and early incunabula of holy scriptures in order to donate them to the on-line world, including the definitive authority on Hermetic wisdom. Check out the article from Quartz magazine to find out more about these precious documents and their historic context.

fesche may never happen

Though we don’t reside in the deepest heart of stereotypical Bavaria (wir sind Franke danke) and try not to employee too many regionalisms, I found that I had encountered beforehand every one of these words and phrases—with the exceptions of “pfiat di”—an abbreviation of “behüt dich Gott,” bye-bye from God be with thee, and fesch, meaning chic, appealing. I was not able to learn much more about the etymology of the Bavarian term (although it was a lyric in a song sung by Marlene Dietrich in 1930) but did make me think about fetch from Mean Girls, when one character is accused of trying to start a trend by making up slang. I wonder if fetch was not completely fabricated, after all. “Stop trying to make fetch happen; it’s not going to happen.” Check out the whole list from the Local, Germany’s English daily.

transposed and truncated

Seeing these reclaimed fragments of porcelain transformed into a line of “translated vases” by Korean artist Yee Sookyung struck me too as a contrast to the Japanese tradition called kintsugi (金継ぎ)—the golden repair, wherein prized pottery is not discarded but rather elevated like a reliquary and enshrined with precious joinery and whose battle-damage is highlighted as sound beautiful and proud. Yee drew her inspiration for this series, whose forms evoke to me the notion of ancient fetish figurines, from the practise of her native potters of tossing out the factory-seconds or pieces deemed otherwise imperfect. In a disposable world, even if one cannot tease out the æsthetic, one can reliably find at least the therapeutic and the venerating in bothering to mend something. One can find out more about the artist and both these traditions at Colossal.

numeracy or oh, throw me a bone

At a recent BREXIT debate, one young audience member posed a clever but rather straightforward to the interlocutors, which of course left both parties baffled and stammering: to paraphrase—when politicians and pundits speak of billions (in whatever denomination) in costs or potential economic losses, are we using the long-scale or the short-scale (échelle longue et échelle courte) of a billion?
One million—universally, is ten to the sixth power, but the word billion can either be understood as one thousand millions or, in accordance with its original etymology as bi + million, the second power of a million, one followed by thirteen zeros (10¹²). Like America, England and Ireland use the short-scale most of the time—but not always and quite different from the convention on the continent that employs the long-scale, for the most part, but the distinction is not like driving on one side of the road versus another, as the distribution is more equally spread and not necessarily rooted in colonialism or empire. Most languages other than English don’t use the terms interchangeably or loosely and a billion (or some cognate) means a trillion—like the German words Millionen, Milliarden, Billionen, and it certainly is more heated and anchoring to speak of trade deficits and debt in terms of run-away trillions—rather than in more manageable and meagre billions.

prayer circle

When I first saw this little video game reminder making the rounds that we can do better than to recuse ourselves, saying that a change in legislation could not have prevented yet another abject tragedy in the only Western country where this regularly happens, I did agree with the message, though thought it was perhaps overly cynical.
After learning, however, that one powerful doyen and determinant of lifestyle and communication used its leverage to excise gun emojis from its platform and vocabulary (a symbol of a gun is not a gun, of course, but like an assault weapon who legitimately needs that in any circumstance?) and that the US Senate failed to enact any meaningful reforms to gun-control, I think that these elected representative, in hock to the firearms lobby, deserve every bit of contempt and ridicule that not only their constituents but also the whole world can muster.

wedge-wood

The always brilliant Nag on the Lake shares the time when Sir Edward Rayne, designer of couture shoes for the well-heeled and fashion ambassador at large, was inspired by the signature blue jasper and cameo earthenware of Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, a fellow royal warrant holder.

Wedgwood’s jasperware line was in turn inspired by an ancient Roman bas-relief glass urn, called the Portland Vase, which was lent to the porcelain company’s founder as the paradigm of what the artist was struggling to create in his workshop—and then went on more or less permanent loan to the generations of this family, whose branches include naturalist Charles Darwin, economist John Maynard Keynes and writer Thomas Huxley. Those are quite some taxonomic credentials, but even though elevated footwear might seem unnatural and impractical, this type of shoe underwent a process of evolution as well—originally contrived to help keep Persian warriors in the saddle. I wonder what other cross-over collaborations have taken place between fashion and homeware in the past and what pairings would make potentially good candidates in the future.