pyhä urho

Overlooking the possibly fictional but actually assigned patron Bishop Henrik (martyred and fêted on 19 January with a well-articulated legendarium of his own), a department store clerk of Finnish-extraction in the confusingly named town of Virginia, Minnesota lamenting that his homeland did not have a figure like Saint Patrick to celebrate their heritage and as a source of shared cultural cohesion and as an excuse to extend the general revelry (this year especially, please drink responsibly by staying at home or forever forfeit the right to be around other people hereafter) invented Saint Urho (hero) in 1956. Only known to diaspora (with the exception of the folklore and ethnography department at the University of Turku), Urho is variously credited with driving out the frogs (see also) or grasshoppers (with the command Heinäsirkka, heinäsirkka, mene täältä hiiteen! – Grasshopper, grasshopper, go back to Hell!—thus saving the grape harvest but inspiring acts that seem suspiciously like Springfield’s Whacking Day, incidentally on 10 May) and one is to regale themselves in royal purple and enjoy wine and/or purple beer so as to not mix one’s beverages.

fra banc to banc, fra wod to wod

Scotland’s new twenty pound note, printed on durable paper-like polymer continues the series the Fabric of Nature and as a security feature, the frolicking red squirrels’ fur glows under an ultra-violet lamp and showcases an excerpt from the sixteenth century Sonnet of Venus and Cupid by native poet Mark Alexander Boyd (*1562 – †1601), which Ezra Pound declared the most beautiful in the language:

Fra banc to banc, fra wod to wod, I rin

Ourhailit with my feble fantasie,

Lyk til a leif that fallis from a trie

Or til a reid ourblawin with the wind.

Twa gods gyds me: the ane of tham is blind,

Ye, and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;

The nixt a wyf ingenrit of the se,

And lichter nor a dauphin with hir fin.

Unhappie is the man for evirmair

That teils the sand and sawis in the aire;

 Bot twyse unhappier is he, I lairn,

That feidis in his hairt a mad desyre,

And follows on a woman throw the fyre,

Led be a blind and teichit be a bairn.

graffito blasfemo

Believed to be among the earliest surviving depictions of Jesus was rediscovered in 1857 through excavation work on the Palatine Hill of Rome at a site that was the palace of Caligula prior to becoming a finishing school and it during this phase of the structure’s history some pupil presumably etched the graffiti into the wall plaster depicting a young man prostrating to a donkey-headed figure on a crucifix with the caption, apparently meant to mock a fellow student, ΑΛΕ ξΑΜΕΝΟϹ ϹΕΒΕΤΕ ϑΕΟΝ “Alexamos worships [his] god.” The standard method of execution until abolished by Constantine in the fourth century, Roman society found it incredulous that Christian would follow a figure so basely undone, conflated with the belief by contemporary Romans (around the second century) believed that Christians and other religious minorities practised onolatry—that is, donkey worship. In the next chamber, there is a seeming retort with no accompanying image but the inscription in Latin and by a different hand—presumably the victim of this ridicule: ΑΛΕξΑΜΕΝΟϹ FIDELIS—that is, Alexamenos is faithful.

all sales final

Via the inestimable Nag on the Lake (and a lot more to sample there), we were pleased to pour over and study this collection of ephemera of antique receipts, bills of sale and company letterhead from Whitechapel. Not only are the illustrations and typography and the use of pre-printed stock brilliant, it is amazing to note what detail and narrative is captured in these varied transactions, from the conventions of assigning telephone numbers and telegraphic addresses to book to wares purveyed.

zoonosis or jumping the shark

Though we would be wrong to blame bats or any other wildlife for bringing illness where it is our behaviours that invite in and exacerbate the spread of new disease, it is worth considering how our chiroptera friends have evolved an immune system parallel and attendant to the corona viruses that have accompanied them for countless generations.
As flying mammals, a lot of their metabolic processes are given over to keeping them aloft and because of the stress, wear and tear that come with it, their immune system is more tolerant of infections and endures them rather than reacting in a violent, exclusionary manner. Humans, on the other hand, with little exposure to such pathogens—bats being themselves nearly as mobile and wide-ranging as people—have a hyper-vigilant approach to combating contagion which has normally served us well but can result in a life-threating condition called sepsis when the immune response is pushed into overdrive and harms the internal organs and tissues. There isn’t much that one can do to alter those sorts of responses but there are a host of pre-emptive measures that are even more effective—like maintaining one’s distance and proper hand-washing that’s not a duck-and-cover exercise as a little soap and elbow grease and discipline out of the consideration of the wellbeing of others, especially for the vulnerable among us does chemically wreck the virus and commute it towards something harmless, keeping healthy in general and getting vaccinations and immunizations as prescribed even if the glamourous cure we are waiting for does not seem so commiserate with the chore of prevention. The inflammatory reaction that follow the onset of infection can result in pneumonia and low blood flow and proves fatal—from all causes of septic shock, for about ten million worldwide per year. A number far greater, like the pathology of season influenza often cited, than the number of case of the corona virus likely to prove deadly but maybe that signals that it is time that we find all these numbers unacceptable and work towards societal and medical interventions to reduce its occurrence.

satire x

First airing on this day in 1968, the penultimate episode of the second season of Star Trek: The Original Series “Bread and Circuses” takes its title from an eponymous satirical poem written by Juvenal that addresses how constituencies are easy led astray from weightier issues if their base needs are satisfied takes place on an alternate Earth (Magna Roma, 892-IV) where the Roman Empire never fell and in a twentieth century setting.

The landing party visit the planet after finding wreckage of a survey vessel without a trace of its crew and compliment, eventually realising that the former captain, now elevated to Princeps Civitatis (emperor and first citizen), went native and sacrificed his company to the gladiatorial games from a conviction that the civilization be shielded from cultural contamination (the Prime Directive), having not yet arrived at the technological threshold of interstellar travel, and tries to convince Kirk and Spock and the rest of the away team to do the same and abandon their Star Fleet careers. Resistant, Kirk and Spock are thrown into the melee and disappointing the audience by dispatching their opponent swiftly and non-bloodily with a Vulcan nerve pinch and then scheduled for execution—to be televised. Deus ex machina, Scotty causes a power disruption and beams them aboard just in time, the blackout preserving the Romans from potential future shock.

大阪万博

On this day fifty years ago, the World’s Fair Expo ‘70 (previously here and here) held its opening ceremonies in Suita, Osaka Japan.
Orchestrated by architects and civil engineers Kenzo Tange and Uzo Nishiyama, the overarching theme was to be strength in diversity and plurality, and the event that lasted through September was staged as more of a celebration rather than technical exhibition though there were plenty of innovative displays among the pavilions, including early mobile telephony, the first showing of an IMAX film and a maglev train. The area will once again be the venue for the 2025 World’s Fair.

white wilderness

Another instalment of Disney’s revisionist record (see previously here and here) and trying to prompt and preserve its wholesome image and promote its extensive and often problematic as worthy of our nostalgia wholesale comes to us courtesy of Hyperallergic in their staged series of nature documentaries with the particular cruelty of the Academy Award-winning White Wilderness, an exploration of our arctic animal friends that has been excised from available programming.
Though not the first time that the production company peddled a myth that was to awkward to otherwise own or disabuse, the film in question revived and reinforced the misconception that lemmings have the tendency to commit suicide en mass (the origins come from a pre-Enlightenment belief that the small hamster like rodents appeared during rain storms by spontaneous generation) by flinging the poor creatures rounded up and flung off cliffs at speed to portray this behaviour for entertainment value.