bon mot

Although we have only last left our intrepid Language at the mercy of the Viking raiders and have not yet gotten to the Norman Invasion and that cliff-hanger for the Anglo-Saxons, which lent English fully one-third of its vocabulary and influenced grammar and orthography to a great deal, the Mental Floss list of French phrases that ought to be brought back into common-parlance was to good to wait on until the narrative catches up. There were quite a few priceless expressions that could easily be incorporated into everyday speech and it is pretty lamentable that lingual affinities are not as wide-spread as they once were. I especially like le roi fainéant, a do-nothing king and a term that could describe our friends the Merovingians or Charlemagne’s ineffectual issue, mise en abyme which describes something akin to the Droste effect, an image within its own image, and honi soit qui mal y pense—shame on him who thinks ill of it—do not jump to conclusions or talk something down prematurely, which was a quip by Edward III, the English courtly language being French in his day, which has a pretty interesting provenance.
Mad Princess Joan of Kent curried, unfairly, such a name because of eccentricities that were deemed unbecoming of the royal family, including eloping with a a young lover, a commoner, and subsequently also marrying the baron that her parents had arranged for her to and apparently unconcerned about bigamy or secret weddings. Although not the most conventional creatures of the court, the later mother to the unstable Richard II was still welcome at official functions. During a ball, Joan experienced a wardrobe malfunction while dancing with the king—who, suffering the snickers of some of his nobles and Joan’s withering humiliation, retrieved her fallen garter and adjusted her stocking. Presumably reserving this new honour for those who had not laughed at this act of chivalry, Edward III went on to establish the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the motto of the knights being the above phrase.

social committee

I had seen this playful casting-call, cat-walk circulating featured in Vanichi Magazine bz photographer and artist Viktorija Pashuta on the internet for several days but figured it was something swanky enough to go viral and then dank all on its own. In fact, the male line up dressed as social networking sites struck me as an extension of the so-called Gamergate controversy about misogyny in video games until BoingBoing revealed the full pageant with women posing as internet browsers.
I wholeheartedly agree that Firefox and Instagram ought to be dapper and dressed to the nines, but I think the other looks and personalities are spot-on as well. What do you think? Are these human mascots posh enough to capture what is characteristic about your favourite media tools?

hunting high and low

I had forgotten that the brilliant and quintessentially eighties band A-ha hail from Norway. Next summer, the performers will celebrate their thirty years as a group with a concert in Brazil, the Rock in Rio festival having been founded the same year as the band.

coolhunting or memetic

Via Kottke, Business Week magazine celebrates its eighty-fifth birthday with an articulated list of the eighty-five most troublesome concepts in the market-place.

The city-state of Singapore, mortgages, the interwebs, a coffee magnate, infant formula, out-sourcing, open-source, and global positioning among many others are included with detailed articles and charts that explain how each of these ideas changed the economy and society. For example, #75 is Jane Fonda’s Workout, which propelled both the VCR and the self-help industry, #84 is the Polaroid instant camera, which was a harbinger of social media and #25 is the decoding of the human genome that launched a mad-dash for Big Pharma and fostered an era of not scientific ignorance but rather scientific apathy as if anything that could be captive and quantified warranted no further curiosity. You ought to check out the entire listing of big ideas and maybe you’ll be the next innovative insurgent yourself.

peep-hole or desk-set

Not long after the invention of photography, thanks to the genius of the Earl of Stanhope in crafting a simple, tiny magnifying lens (which bears his name)—the public also developed quite a penchant for the novelty of microscopic pictures.

Collectors’ Weekly once again presents readers with a curious and curated trove that illustrates the development of this rage. Virtually invisible images could be embedded discretely in any number of everyday objects and people could steal a glance at a loved one, picture-postcard holiday scene, the royal family or a holy icon without worrying about people gawking over their shoulders. Quite a lot of that kind of memorabilia was produced and I remember having these neat little cone-shaped souvenirs from Carlsbad Caverns as a little kid and was amazing by how much depth these pictures of caves seemed to have, disorienting like looking up and over through a periscope—or looking up from a screen after staring at it for too long. It’s funny how those themselves screens are migrating from telephones to less conspicous watch-faces. The majority of miniscule pictures printed, however, were of an arguably less wholesome variety: Victorian ladies and gentlemen kept a stash of more intimate and erotic photos secreted away from prying-eyes in plain sight.  

herostratic fame

Naturally there is a big difference between street art and graffiti and senseless vandalism, and certain landmarks are particularly attractive targets for both rage and expression.

It’s bad enough that Hans Christen Anderson’s Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen is routinely decapitated, I learnt that contrary to the popular account, the nose of the Sphinx was not accidentally damaged by stray canon fire from Napoleon’s advance on Egypt but was rather defaced by a religious zealot who wanted to put a stop to the idolatry (real or perceived) of the farmers along the flood plains of the Nile, who prayed to the colossus for a good harvest. Horrified, the farmers lynched the extremist for this act. These willfully destructive acts strike me as very sophomoric, something that ought be intolerable even among rival college sports teams. Herostratus (auf Deutsche, Herostrat is a criminal hunger for glory) is the name of the arsonist who infamously burned down the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus and proudly owed up to the act, hoping for immortal notoriety. Herostratus was immediately put to death for this heinous deed and decreed that his infamy never be mentioned again, but that did not quite work out according to plan as his example has not exactly gone unfollowed. One can hope, though, that tearing down is ultimately up-building.

carolus simplex ou roman-savon

Meanwhile back in France, the hopes pinned to Charlemagne soon faded as his children and his children’s children began to squabble over the right to rule and supremacy.
The Carolingian dynasty, named not for Charlemagne but his line’s founder majordomo and usurper Charles Martel (Karl der Hammer) who persuaded the Pope in Rome, wrestled his blessing away from the Merovingians by primarily sending in an army to liberate Rome from the Lombards—and secondarily, rebuffing the advance of the Islamic Caliphate in the year 732 after the Sack of Bordeaux in the Battle of Tours, but I believe Charles the Great (Karl der Grosse) was an honorific earned by this descendant rather than just another choice epithet to distinguish him from a number of similarly named male heirs, whom by all accounts lived up to their sobriquets.
Though called the Father of Europe, as emperor of much of France, Germany and Italy and instituting many social and educational reforms, his offspring could not live up to those high standards, and regressing towards the old Gallic custom of dividing up a land among the children, the kingdoms soon splintered among the slow and doltish with no allegiance on the part of the aristocracy—returning the lands of the Franks to the fractured environment it had under the impotent Merovingian kings. Charles the Fat, Louis the Stammerer, Charles the Bald, Louis the Pious and Louis the Blind vied over successive generations over control of a divided western France, the Middle Kingdom of Lorraine and eastern German lands—the region still called Franconia.
The parallels to the Roman problems with succession and stability are interesting, and there be an opposite antagonizing principle at work here: the Romans restored to adult-adoption to pick their beneficiary—not out of noble illusions of meritocracy over family, but rather, for those hundreds of years, incredibly none fathered a son that survived to rule, and contrarily, it seemed that the Franks were too prolific and produced sons that divided and sub-divided the realms.  It was not until the summer of the year 911 that events started to coalesce and reunited the lands of Western Europe. After having paid-off the Viking raiders to leave Frankish cities and ports alone and take their pillaging elsewhere, they stuck to the English coasts for a time until Alfred’s fortified cities and policies that led to cultural inclusion again made France the more attractive target. This beggar-thy-neighbour and bribery exacerbated the situation and the Vikings became bolder and more demanding.
This was another worse-practise tactic that the Franks took from the Roman playbook. Desperate and bankrupt, the French watched in horror as a raiding party made its way down the Seine to sack Paris with their monarch unable to raise an army. The city, however, mounted its own defenses and eventually, miraculously beat back the invaders. The monarch nearly snatched defeat from the clutches of a hard-won and tense victory by refusing to negotiate with the Vikings and just offering some more silver to make themselves scarce. Outraged, the aristocracy deposed the monarch, electing to install the hero of the Siege of Paris, Odo, who made a truce with the Viking commander Rollo (Hrólfr) and allowed his tribe to settle (in exchange for fending off attacks by any Norse brethren) in the area that would be called Normandy. Rollo, converting, to Christianity, was styled Robert I, Duke of Normandy. After the nobles grew weary with the worshipful Odo, they elevated another Carolingian to the throne, a son of the previous monarch called Charles the Simple. In this context, simple meant guileless and a straight-shooter but the elite soon tired of this frankness as well.