transumanza

The Local’s Italian edition reports that the country is seeking to add the traditional nomadic herding practise of transhumance to the UNESCO register of intangible cultural heritage—following the successful bid to have Neapolitan pizza included last December. Ultimately derived from the Latin for crossing ground, the term includes herding-customs and the season driving of flocks of livestock to greener pastures. Of course, the profession of shepherds is not exclusive to Italy but central and southern regions of the country have preserved much of the ancient networks of herding routes—referred to as tratturi, some of which are still in use.

7x7

the man in the linen suit: a look at the iconic J. Peterman catalogue and how its attire is modeled, via Coudal Partners

kingpin: in-house board games of the US Central Intelligence Agency revealed thanks to a FOIA-filing

crystalline entity: tracing down the probable origins of an usual meteorite

a show about nothing: the theme music for Seinfeld was improvised for every episode

ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: Charles Darwin’s children drew doodles on his original manuscript for the Origin of Species, via Everlasting Blört

👏: a look into the as-seen-on-tv marketeering and technology behind the Clapper, inculcating the population to the idea of domestic automation

containment field: a web browser offers to quarantine one’s social media presence from prying third-parties, via Waxy  

legendary creatures

Miss Cellania introduces us to a Japanese yōkai, a menagerie of supernatural monsters, called Ashiarai Yashiki who manifests herself as a hoovering apparition that appears in the form of a giant dirty disembodied foot that barnstorms her way inside and will stamp about the place unless appeased by a thorough washing.  Many Japanese monster stories are so singularly odd that it is sometimes hard to distinguish the stuff of legend and folklore from modern fables.  Apparently people were content to allow the nature and motive of this unwanted guest to pass without explanation as the dealings of the gods and spirits surpassed human understanding and most likely could never be adequately related. 

homer, i can honestly say that was the best episode of impy & chimpy i’ve ever seen

New to the Maximum Fun network of podcasts is the show Everything’s Coming Up Simpsons with weekly panel reminiscences among hosts Allie Goertz and Julia Prescott and writers, animators, voice-artists or generally Springfield-adjacent guests talk about the favourite episodes.
It’s always a funny and literate appreciation of the culture moments and influences both on stage and behind the scenes, and I would recommend, as an introduction, first listening to a March 2016 podcast (caution: autoplay) with television writer Josh Weinstein when they review The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show (which is twenty-one years old at the time of this taping), which debuted among other catch-phrases and tropes Comic Book Guy’s “Worse. Episode. Ever.”

6x6

coif: a collection of headshots of alpacas with good hair, via Everlasting Blört 

boring bricks: Elon Musk tunneling operation to sell interlocking building materials made out of excavated dirt

elevation: a documentary from architecture magazine Dezeen on how drones will change urban dwelling

whiter-than-white: chemists engineer a ultra-white non-toxic coating based on the scales of a ghostly scarab, which could make painting roofs and roads white environmentally sensible

pulp fiction: a digital archive of over eleven thousand vintage fantasy, science-fiction and true crime magazines

the fourth plinth: Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz recreates the winged bull-human chimera that guarded the ancient city of Nineveh destroyed by ISIS to be showcased in Trafalgar Square, via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake

λ

Prior to 1917, it was generally accepted that the Universe was in the big picture at least in a static state, infinite in both time and space and ageless until Albert Einstein equations governing General Relativity imitated that the Universe was expanding. To preserve the appearance of an eternal Universe that would not either collapse under its own weight or keep on growing more and more rarefied forever, Einstein fiddled with his own math a bit by inserting a cosmological constant to compensate.
Designated by the Greek letter lambda (before it came to symbolise wavelength), it would counteract the attractive force of gravity to avoid a Big Crunch before the idea of a Big Bang was proposed. The paradigm shifted a decade later with the proofs of astronomer and priest (whom one would think to be partial to a static-state) from Leuven called Georges Lemaître that showed that the Universe was expanding—two years prior to Edwin Hubble’s observational evidence with the red-shift. Einstein recanted and went on to nominate Lemaître for a prestigious science prize. Father Lemaître passed away in 1966, shortly after the detection of cosmic background radiation, the afterglow of the Big Bang, which reaffirmed his conjecture that the Universe was not ageless. Elegant as they were, the mathematics formulae did not quite dispense with the fact that the Universe was not as disperse as it ought to be and another contrivance like the cosmological constant or epicycles before had to be invoked or inveigled in order to account for the rate of expansion: dark energy.

de americaensche zee-roovers

Without the contributions of a Flemish chronicler and ship’s surgeon Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, our pirate lore and tales of swash-buckling would be rather impoverished.
Having himself enlisted as a privateer with the buccaneering Sir Henry Morgan, later reformed as the lieutenant governor of Jamaica, Exquemelin appeared on the muster rolls of several vessels operating in the Caribbean over a period of several years, with a significant hiatus before retiring around 1670 to commit his pirate biographies to paper. The Buccaneers of America includes some pretty fantastic accounts and recalls stories of the daring raids by Captain Bartholomew Sharp, the demented treatment of prisoners by Alexandre Bras-de-Fer (Iron Arms) and the infamous cannibal François Lolonois whose conceits inform our own ideas of how pirates ought to behave. The urge for embellishment and mythologizing becomes appear almost right away with subsequent printings and translations betraying a complex bibliographic history and wild tales of adventure on the high sea being inserted on the foundation of Exquemelin’s reported experience.