point nemo

Mental Floss features an interesting article on a collection of the most remote human settlements. I always enjoy perusing such profiles of remote and lonely places and despite the forlorn familiarity, it’s always fun to learn more.
The list’s ostensibly top of the pole of inaccessibility is Tristan da Cunha—which is far closer to South Africa than the Island of Saint Helena, where Napoleon spent his exile, that it’s administratively coupled with—the British having bought the archipelago from Dutch Cape, first evicting a trio of American squatters who claimed the Refreshment Islands as their own, of Good Hope so the French might not use it as a staging platform for a rescue operation. Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, the main village, was evacuated in the early 1960s when a volcanic eruption threatened to engulf the whole island, and when residents returned to find a city-limits sign installed on a path leading into town, I recall reading once, there was a minor clamour over this bureaucratic insistence, as no one happen there without great determination.

trivium and hoi polloi

I’ve really been enthralled with my latest podcast discovery in Doctor William Webb’s Heritage Podcast project (thanks to a hale and hearty recommendation by Sharyn Eastaugh, creator and hostess of The History of the Crusades, to get on board with the syllabus before the ambitious project gets too expansive to catch up on back episodes) and had a welcome reminder on the virtue of a Liberal Arts degree—not just one in name but one that’s true to original core curricula as it was expounded in ancient times.
With participatory democracy burgeoning and society becoming more hierarchical but also urban, leaders of the Polis recognised the need for a basic civics education requirement to attract and retain individuals with the ability to distinguish philosophy from sophistry and developed a three-pronged prospectus called the trivia—grammar (the basic rules of communication—stringing together λογος), rhetoric (the art of persuasion and articulacy and perhaps the training to wield it for one’s own ends) and logic (the faculty to soberly judge the validity and truth of argument and perhaps keenly peer beyond grandiloquence). Once the tradition of active and engaged citizens started to be supplanted by feudalism and the fealty of labourers and the political man became a subject, his affairs rarefied and to be managed by hereditary kings, as the Classical World came to an end, basic education was something seditious and there was no demand for an informed and potentially rebellious under-class. Of course, the institution of the Church—with its own vested interests in sustaining a community of inquisitive and engaged members—was the mainstay of continuing-education—augmenting the trivium with four additional disciplines: mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy.
Perhaps these subjects smack of something a bent a bit toward the practical and vocational, their coursework—as with the unfolding of word, language—however, can be expressed as the germination of number, leading to number in space, number in time and then with astronomy, number in time and space. Perhaps we’ve again entered a time when a liberal education (the motto of my alma mater—which evolved out of a preparatory school and is rather a singular beast in higher-education is a Latin malapropism “facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque”—I make free men from children by means of books and a balance) is something to be disdained as a superfluous luxury or even a liability when the plebiscite is expected to keep its collective head down and not stint the ceremony of elections with engagement and activism that goes beyond party-membership and reinforced believes. Being schooled in a little bit of logic seems especially vital now for countering the techniques in the media and politics that present the fallacious and specious as something incontrovertible, and something (regardless whether one becomes a charismatic or not—I think one can’t truly start believing his or her own deceits if discovered through honest means) for disabusing ourselves of our own biases. Despite the tenor of the age, there’s no excuse for letting one’s faculties atrophy. Don’t let it rest on the President’s desk. Q.E.D.

5x5

over-extended: the Swiss will vote to effectively ban banks from creating money by lending more than they have in reserve

noch einen koffer: chilling contingency plans to destroy East Berlin in the event the Cold War turned hot

superlatives: the top fifteen Colossal vignettes of the year

360°: Slate has a whole uplifting calendar of daily goodness for the past year

port-of-call: these giant, wanton cruise ships look like Star Destroyers trawling the canals of Venice

hey mister tally man

Via the inestimable The Browser comes a really fascinating piece on the supply chain logistics of the banana trade and the demands it manufactured to satisfy. Like the Egg Council, Juan Valdez and the California Raisins, who really can be bullies and not just advocates for farmers, Big Fruit created various banana republics in the process of perfecting its delivery techniques, inciting coups throughout Central America and even precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis and enduring tensions, all in the name of ripeness and minimal flecking.

The other aspect to this drama lies in the monoculture of the produce—at least as it’s presented to shoppers in the West. Whereas we might have an embarrassment of choice when it comes to apples and oranges, exotic bananas are all clones of one cultivar—threatened with extinction with the irreversible march of one fungal disease. The way bananas are marketed and grown make them especially susceptible to being wiped out by pandemics, and interestingly the type of banana consumed just one human generations had vastly different characteristics—fruitier and creamier and with a much slicker peel, and hence all those jokes about slipping on a discarded skin that seems physically impossible in the supermarkets of today.

æon of horus or top row, from left to right

Just before Christmas (Sun in first Capricorn and Moon in ninth Gemini, just a day’s breadth from the Soltice), the historic Boleskin Manor on the shores of Loch Ness, owned by mystic Aleister Crowley and subsequently bought by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame (for its connection with majick) was partially destroyed by a fire that had broken out in the vacant residence.
Crowley choose this spot for its particular geographic resonance (appearances of the Loch Ness Monster could be attributed to certain demons and familiars from his pantheon) with his philosophy of Thelema and his mission of occult outreach and made some major modifications to the house to these ends. Ostracised as a traitor and corrupter of youth, Crowley repaired to a commune in Cefalù—by Palermo, Sicily—to establish his church, an anti-monestary in this ancient Greek outpost, until being banished under the same suspicions by Mussolini. Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same was filmed on the grounds of Boleskin and the motto “do what thou willst” features prominently in the band’s discography, as well as enjoying other pop culture appearances. The Sicilian abbey is currently on the market, though in grave disrepair.

pride of lions or queens and toms

As first seen on The Queen is not Amused, researchers have found lionesses in Botswana that have evolved to express more traits, like the mane, colouring and roar, of their male counterparts—perhaps to better protect their families from potential abusive mates or perhaps to sneak up on prey, since it is the females that do the lion’s share of the hunting and a lithe gazelle might not be so quick to react to a marauding but outwardly loutish lion.

The term evolution is put out there but it is more environmental influences in utero that is producing masculine cubs, so maybe cultivation is a better word. Nature is forever springing surprises and animal sexuality has been shown to be successively as varied and nuanced as our own, and many populations—under duress—have willed themselves gender-reassignments in order to continue the species. Who knew, however, that gender roles and those mantles of authority were just as variable and not well understood—even for creatures that we would not count as liberated? We’re not so clever as we’d like to believe—confident that a rooster would never allow a hen to crow at the sunrise, and I wonder if we’ll ever be compelled to drop gendered naming-conventions, as masters and husbanders, like lioness, nag, jack and jenny.

silk road or moshi moshi

Just to demonstrate that the Priory of Sion and associates do not have a controlling monopoly on the troupe of Jesus surviving (erm—or rather, skipping out on that whole ordeal) the Crucifixion and to later die in advanced old age after raising a family, Atlas Obscura explores an unlikely final resting place in a remote fishing village of Shingō/Aomori in northwest Japan that boasts the tomb of Christ—plus an adjacent burial mound with the ear of Jesus’ brother and a lock of hair of the Virgin Mary. There being no established account of Jesus’ adolescence, one creative gospel tells that Jesus sojourned to Japan for further instructions on the divine and returned to Israel to spread His message. Once realising that the message was not quiet resonate with the powers that be, Jesus’ brother (half-brother, I suppose) called Isukiri volunteered to be crucified in Jesus’ place...
Not that it is any less non-canonical, I think that name signifies “Jesus-brother” rather than a specific individual, and after all Jesus is really named Immanuel, God is with us. Fleeing the Holy Land, Jesus returned to Japan, carrying the only two relics that could be salvaged, a lock of His mother’s hair and Isukiri’s dismembered ear, to retire and become a rice-farmer. The family that claims descent from the Messiah are devout Buddhists.

velvet mafia

Dangerous Minds shares an interview with bon-viveur and iconic gadfly Quentin Crisp, wherein he reviews and rates his favourite gangster films, as the portrayal of violent death can be rather life-affirming.
Most of the movies that make Crisp’s top-ten list are classics from the Howard Hawks, Prohibition era (strange how most of the mob comes out of nannying) but interestingly also include a couple contemporary (to the time of the critique), like Millers’ Crossing and Reservoir Dogs. Mister Crisp (perhaps most unrecognised to modern audiences as Queen Elizabeth I in the adaptation of Virginia Woolfe’s—another poisoned-pen—Orlando) was himself celebrated as the titular character in the Sting song Legal Alien/Englishman in New York.