Minta

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.

The village of Roecken, Germany, [this week] debated moving Friedrich Nietzsche's grave in order to extract the coal underneath his remains.

-from Harper's Weekly

The 10-second recording was made by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on April 9 1860, when Emperor Napoleon III, the last monarch of France, was on the throne.

It was made a whole 17 years before Thomas Edison made his historic message, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a phonograph, which is the landmark event in the history of recorded sound.

Scott de Martinville's gadget, a "phonautograph", was a device that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke from an oil lamp.

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"When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical, so ethereal," audio historian David Giovannoni, who found the recording, told AP.

"The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke."

On March 23, 2006 the Federal Reserve ceased publication of the M3 monetary aggregate, in line with an announcement it made in November, 2005. The M3 is a measure of money supply in the United States.

The M3 is most general of the many measures of money supply, the quantity of money available within the economy for purchasing goods, services, and securities. The money supply is monitored and adjusted by a central bank, to keep inflation in check, because money supply has to change in tune with real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to prevent inflation (or deflation).

In November 2005, the US Federal Reserve announced that it would cease publishing M3 data, saying, "[the] M3 does not appear to convey any additional information about economic activity that is not already embodied in M2 and has not played a role in the monetary policy process for many years", adding that the costs of collecting the data required for the index outweighed its benefits.

Some commentators have questioned this decision and have speculated that this would allow the Federal Reserve to covertly fund the US budget deficit and its negative balance of trade or hide the fall in international demand for the US dollar. In March, 2006, Rep. Ron Paul introduced a bill (HR 4892) requiring the Federal Reserve to reverse its decision.

British researchers determined that children universally dislike clowns, finding them "unknowable." It was observed that Tahina spectabilis, a giant palm tree of Madagascar, commits suicide when it flowers at the end of its century-long lifespan, and Hungarian scientists created a computer program that, based on its analysis of 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs, can exceed human capability in accurately classifying sheepdog barks.

-from Harper's Weekly

Got obsessed by The Wire earlier this year- and by creator David Simon's bleak take on urban life, drugs, etc. Couldn't recommend the show more highly, but it's not garden-variety dark, it's 91% cacao dark - that is to say, bitter. And it offers few answers. Every time someone tries to make things better, the law of cosmic redress (in the form of irony, fate, human nature, what have you) leaves things the same afterward - or just that little bit more fucked up.

Simon was asked what the solution might be:

Look. For 35 years, you've systematically deindustrialized these cities. You've rendered them inhospitable to the working class, economically. You have marginalized a certain percentage of your population, most of them minority, and placed them in a situation where the only viable economic engine in their hypersegregated neighborhoods is the drug trade. Then you've alienated them further by fighting this draconian war in their neighborhoods, and not being able to distinguish between friend or foe and between that which is truly dangerous or that which is just illegal. And you want to sit across the table from me and say 'What's the solution?' and get it in a paragraph? The solution is to undo the last 35 years, brick by brick. How long is that going to take?

Charlie Brooker's still got it:

This time it had lost part of its face. More blood, but still no body. Clearly, this wasn't a rat trap. It was a rat whittling machine.

What a difference a month makes! Well, you may see no difference, but it's there, all the same. She's plumper, more alert, and almost certainly blue-eyed. She can almost always hold her head up now (she forgets sometimes), and if she's not sitting up, you'd better get her sitting up. She retails for $49,995 and easy payments can be arranged.

Well, papa takes a little mess. He wipes it off with a warm washcloth, re-diapers, and swaddles to the best of his ability.

Her name is Florie, and she couldn't be any better.

Some shitwit set the Cutty Sark on fire last night.

A tea-clipper; frequent sight in the South China Sea in the days of Jack Tar; in dry dock now and forever more; a reminder of things lost, a symbol of things vital to be preserved.

Some photos taken there July, 2004 follow. Last shot is of the creepy eyeless man they keep (kept?) in one of the cabins. Love to Doug and Kat, who were on that expedition- and also to Ellen, who worked there for a long while and who must be even more angry about this than I am.

Labels: cutty sark

The idea that the human race is going anywhere is a childhood myth, like Santa Claus.

- Kurt Vonnegut

With a lead like that, who needs a post?

It wouldn't be difficult to rant against this particular transgression of the natural order, this mixture of the sublime and the insipid- but nature, one should remember, orders herself variously.

In my preferred version, Cormac McCarthy isn't aware that Oprah Winfrey or her fans exist. His novels have readers who understand and sympathize with the essence of his texts - a necessarily small grouping in which I do not automatically include myself.

In the consensus natural order, McCarthy is a peddlar of tales, a little different than others, but with mouths to feed - and, hey, even Faulkner wrote for Hollywood. This is where his novels are moderate bestsellers and the inspiration for mediocre movies.

In Oprahstan, the natural order revolves around shallow consumption - housewives and others who, by the twitching of their little whiskers, sometimes catch intimations of the vast dark universe - but then the commercial break ends, and Oprah's back on. What does she want us to buy now?

The first version is silly and romantic, the second depressing and pedestrian. The third, going beyond mere banality (witness irrelevancies such as, "How old do you think the boy is?") clearly devolves periodically into absurdity and delusion. The questions put before Oprah's club seem designed to steer her readers (for they are surely hers and not McCarthy's) away from the more troubling aspects of the novel - a novel that is in no part not troubling. Imagine the non-conversations her readers will have about it - desperately staving off the void that is its heart.

The part of me which prefers that first order imagines that reading this book will spark a wave of suicides among her readership; that McCarthy, when the time comes for his televised interview (his first, and only the third interview of his career), serves up the same bleakness which constitutes the skeletal framework of all his novels - serves up such a portion that... but that's a silly, romantic fantasy. He's a southern boy with good manners, and he wants to sell books - yet I can't shake the feeling that the first two worlds can live side by side but that an alliance cannot be made with the third. I'm sure the world will one day cure me of these romantic notions.

I hope McCarthy sells a million books.

Decline is hard to define. There are usually countervailing trends — we grow older but also smarter. Right now we clearly are not living in as brilliant an age as classical Greece, the 18th century or even the turn of the 20th century.

(1890-1910 was an enormously creative period of Western civilization: in science, art, performing arts and respectable literature. In fact, nearly all the technological advances made in the last century were based on basic discoveries from that era. And although fine design and beautiful buildings still flourished until 1940, there's been nothing comparable since. Of course, most art and literature produced in any age is trash, so we need some perspective for true judgment.)

The trashiness of our times might have happened without the calamities of the world wars. The Romans noted that ages of brilliance cannot be sustained.

However, it's hard to envision the triumph of the totalitarian brutalities of fascism and communism or the successful revolt of the masses without the seminal disaster of 1914, which uprooted an imperfect but stable and, in many ways, magnificent old order.

Morally and morale-wise, the world has never returned to that Indian summer nor transcended it. The material quality of life has improved immensely since 1900. I know no one who argues that society is not more cynical, less hopeful and vastly coarser.

Thomas Jefferson used chamber pots. But will you argue that people who have flush toilets today are more civilized?

-T.R. Fehrenbach

When the three had eaten food, the boy said to the old woman:

"Grandmother, cut me in two!"

But she demurred, saying that she did not wish to kill one whom she loved so dearly.

"Cut me in two!" demanded the boy; and he gave her a stone ax, which he had brought from a distant country, and with a manner of great authority he again commanded her to cut him in two. So she stood before him and severed him in twain and fled in terror. And lo! each part took the form of an entire man, and the one beautiful boy appeared as two, and they were so much alike no one could tell them apart.

When the people or natives whom the boy had enlisted came pouring into the camp, Shinau'av and Togo'av were engaged in telling them of the wonderful thing that had happened to the boy, and that now there were two; and they all held it to be an augury of a successful expedition to the land of Stone Shirt.


-J.W. Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons

Some Sphex wasps drop a paralyzed insect near the opening of the nest. Before taking provisions into the nest, the Sphex first inspects the nest, leaving the prey outside. During the wasp's inspection of the nest an experimenter can move the prey a few inches away from the opening of the nest. When the Sphex emerges from the nest ready to drag in the prey, it finds the prey missing. The Sphex quickly locates the moved prey, but now its behavioral "program" has been reset. After dragging the prey back to the opening of the nest, once again the Sphex is compelled to inspect the nest, so the prey is again dropped and left outside during another stereotypical inspection of the nest. This iteration can be repeated again and again, with the Sphex never seeming to notice what is going on, never able to escape from its genetically-programmed sequence of behaviors.

The instinct of its behavior even goes so far that if it catches a bee and then is caught moments later by a preying mantis, it will continue to chomp onto its prey until it is no longer able.

Among the unpleasant scents often reported by those suffering from parosmia or phantosmia are the smells of death (rotting flesh), feces, vomit, garbage, and smoke. Research done at the Monell Chemical Senses Center has identified the smell of rotting flesh as the worst scent in the world, across cultures. Interestingly, the United States Department of Defense has a stake in this research, for the purpose of creating stink bombs.

Douglas McDougal, from the NEAS, said: "We received a call stating there was a male who had a firework in his bottom and it was bleeding."

From IMDB news:

R. Lee Ermey, the actor who played the menacing drill instructor in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), says that two weeks before his death, Kubrick phoned him to express his despondency over Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, which reportedly had taken longer than any film in history to film and which was only in a rough-cut state. "He told me it was a piece of shit," Ermey said in an interview with the online Radar magazine, "and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him -- exactly the words he used." Ermey did not explain what he thought Kubrick may have meant by the expression, except to remark, "He was kind of a shy little timid guy. He wasn't real forceful. That's why he didn't appreciate working with big, high-powered actors. ... He would lose control."

Kirk Douglas reportedly bucked Kubrick's authority on the set of Spartacus, up to and including a mounted Douglas knocking Kubrick down with his horse. This incident is what caused Kubrick to leave Hollywood (and America), never to return. Kidman and Cruise aggressively pursued their parts in Eyes Wide shut, flying unannounced onto Kubrick's UK estate by helicopter to petition for the roles.

Kubrick was finished with Hollywood, but it seems Hollywood wasn't finished with him.

Air crash survival! Have you heard a funnier one-liner recently? Because I haven't. There are a million reasons this is a knee-slapper, but to pick just one, there's the life preserver under your seat. Why is this funny? Because there's not a single documented case of a wide-body jet (the kind most of us fly in) landing successfully on water, as a recent Economist article pointed out. Not to get all Fight Club on you, but that life jacket is only there to make you feel better - or in the insanely improbable case of splashing down in water at the end of the runway (which has happened once or twice). But there's no profit in reminding people that jet travel is essentially the loading of an aluminum canister with a bunch of meat pellets and flinging it through the air at just barely sub-sonic speeds. Which ain't natural.

If the human frame were built for this sort of travel, we'd have diamond bones and skin that puffed up like an airbag when hit by anything more substantial than a misting rain. Since this is not the case, and since no one has yet invented a GPS-beaconed oxygen-gel-filled kevlar bag which can instantly envelope me the moment the plane's nose dips that little bit too far downward, then I must conclude that when meat pellets- sorry, people- consent to jet air travel they have entered the realm of lunacy.

Why all this fuss? Just a little puff-piece in the BBC News magazine about how to survive an air crash. The article reads like common sense and leaves you feeling just a tiny bit better about the chances of coming out of the aluminum tube alive... unless you bother to think about what's you've just read.

For instance:

In the US alone, between 1983 and 2000, there were 568 plane crashes. Out of the collective 53,487 people onboard, 51,207 survived.

But what counts as a plane crash? And what kind of plane? If you're in a Piper Cub, you can probably just glide to a bumpy but walk-awayable landing (which the FAA will count as a crash) in any plowed field. Can a DC-10 pull that off? A 747? Statistics speak with forked tongue - yet again.

The most interesting thing in this piece is what it reveals about the BBC. Being a public corporation means that it owes no alliegence to business interests - but the air travel industry is so large, its welfare is intimately linked to the public welfare - and public welfare is the remit of the BBC. Thus this seemingly innocuous puff-piece. Why would anyone at the BBC feel the need to ease our minds about air travel? Doesn't make any sense to me - I mean, air travel's safer and more convenient now than ever, right?

The best bits are the reader comments, which range from hard-edged sanity to the absolutely cracked. Most of what falls between those poles proves that Pollyanna is alive and well. Sanity, please!

The safest place to sit? At home of course!

It was the first time I had seen him since 1927 when I covered his arrival at Le Bourget. Surprised how little he had changed, except that he seemed more self-confident. Later we went for a ride in Germany's largest land plane, the Field-Marshal von Hindenburg. Somewhere over Wannsee Lindbergh took the controls himself and treated us to some very steep banks, considering the size of the plane, and other little manoeuvres, which terrified most of the passengers. The talk is that the Lindberghs have been favourably impressed by what the Nazis have shown them. He has shown no enthusiasm for meeting the foreign correspondents, who have a perverse liking for enlightening visitors on the Third Reich, as they see it, and we have not pressed for an interview.

-William Shirer,
Berlin Diary

... is cockney.

Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have suggested.

The farmers in Somerset who noticed the phenomenon said it may have been the result of the close bond between them and their animals.

Farmer Lloyd Green, from Glastonbury, said: "I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl.

Follow the link and hear the cows moooooo!