Tuesday, December 18, 2018

One week to Christmas Eve, December 18th, 2018

A truly mind opening web page. A life changing one. About one's beliefs and one's belief system. 
Very worth having a look.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe


Fascinating to know about how how having words to describe things enables 'seeing' those things.
When I first learned to speak Tibetan, I would ask Tibetans what colors such and such were called. I had no idea that the majority of Tibetans only knew 3 colors, red, black and white. That shocked me.
Decades later, I learned about how being able to name a color allows a person to see that color. How amazing is that.
I would speculate that the same concept works for many other things in life, like comprehending abuse, family dysfunction, trauma. Having the words to describe those emotional environments or experiences allows people to be able to 'see' those things in ways they may have been blind to in the past.

No one could see the colour blue until modern times


Whoa. One's own portable brain scanner:


The award-winning EMOTIV EPOC+ 14 channel mobile EEG is designed for scalable and contextual human brain research and advanced brain-computer interface applications and provides access to professional grade brain data with a quick and easy to use design. Access high-quality raw EEG data with a PRO license or conduct research leveraging our detections for mental commands, performance metrics or facial expressions.

New EEG reading device for personal consumption

Performance & Wellness

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Walk to the Mona Lisa in the Louvre


Leonardo da Vinci Bridge


How to make Leonardo Da Vinci's Bridge with popsicle sticks


https://youtu.be/glZWiw5liZA

1934 - Victorian couples married for 50+ years gather in Long Beach, CA

Aboriginal artist Louise Numina Napananka painting gorgeous patterns.

Numina Sisters

Selina Numina Napananka / Medicine Leaves


Louise Numina Napananka / Medicine Leaves



Sharon Numina Napanangka / Medicine Leaves













































































































Awesome site:
"I'm a backpacking ethnomusicologist traveling Indonesia researching and recording rare and endangered traditional music, then sharing it all for free online.
My name's Palmer Keen. I'm a guy who's obsessed with music in a corner of the world that most people never even think about, Indonesia. Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world and also perhaps the most musically diverse country on the planet, but so much of this music is unknown or unavailable outside the country. My mission is to share this stuff with the world.

For more than four years I've been traveling around Indonesia researching and recording dozens of Indonesian music styles and sharing it all for free on my website, Aural Archipelago. Without a formal background in ethnomusicology, I've figured it all out as I go: becoming fluent in Indonesian, learning how to do fieldwork, and making connections with musicians and communities across the thousands of islands in the archipelago. I travel with all my gear in a backpack, staying with musicians in their homes, going to remote villages that have never seen foreigners, and finding music that's never been heard outside of these islands. There have been lots of adventures along the way and so, so much great music."

aural archipelago

field recordings from around Indonesia

The Aural Archipelago on FaceBook

Handy free Japanese lessons online. Simple and practical.

How to solve peg solitaire


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Sunday, October 14, 2018

art wanderings. October 14th 2018

So beautiful, meaningful and uplifting


The wonderful carved sculptures by Hsu Tung Han. His website.

 


A little time travel


The melodious call of many birds comes from a mysterious organ buried deep within their chests: a one-of-a-kind voice box called a syrinx. Now, scientists have concluded that this voice box evolved only once, and that it represents a rare example of a true evolutionary novelty.

 Wow.

The mushroom dream of a ‘long-haired hippie’ could help save the world’s bees By EVAN BUSH THE SEATTLE TIMES

Sat., Oct. 6, 2018


Waking up one morning, “I connected the dots,” he said. “Mycelium have sugars and antiviral properties,” he said. What if it wasn’t just sugar that was useful to those mushroom-suckling bees so long ago?

 The paper describes how bees given a small amount of his mushroom mycelia extract exhibited remarkable reductions in the presence of viruses associated with parasitic mites that have been attacking, and infecting, bee colonies for decades.

The woman who cleans up after 'lonely deaths' in Japan

When somebody dies lonely and alone, Miyu Kojima steps in to clean their home and organise the mementos of their life.
kodokushi, Japanese for "lonely death".

 Her name is Miyu Kojima, she makes incredible artworks, miniature assemblages of the dead people's apartments.

Miyu Kojima Creates Miniature Replicas of Lonely Deaths
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Wednesday, September 5, 2018

The Nelong Valley in India on the Tibetan border

From 1975 to 1981 I lived in the northwestern Himalayas in India. I was a student of Buddhism there, studying with various Tibetan lamas. During that time I lived on and off in the Manali area for 4 years and took long walks, hikes in the mountains. I came to really love walking there, eye level with birds flying over the river valleys below. There were huge views of mountains and valleys, I savored the sounds of the rivers, birdsong, watching langur monkeys, ibex, flying squirrels, pikas, all kinds of butterflies, being on the alert for bears and mountain wild cats. I loved picking wild strawberries, wild rhubarb, thyme, sage, the air aromatic with herbs and the smell of cedar trees, wild irises, rock roses, all the hillsides covered in apple, plum, peach, apricot trees.

I came to love the local hill people, the paharis, with their hand woven wool traditional clothing, their tanned and wrinkled faces, talking with locals while they stood there spinning wool on the hillside. 

 The northwestern Himalayas in India, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakand, is an especially beautiful part of this wonderful world. 

 Today I came across a vintage film, a brief one about the Indian nomadic shepherds who traded with Tibetans. The film is of a valley a little further to the east of Manali, in the state of Uttarakand.

  I knew locals in Manali who had made their fortune that way, as an Indo-Tibet trader. Mr. Chandrabhaga, for example, who told me he used to take his mules up over the Rohtang Pass, onto the Tibetan Plateau, into Tibet. His mules were packed with sewing needles, matches, sugar, candles. Simple things it sounded like. He traded that with Tibetans for gold, turquoise and other things. He amassed his fortune and became a powerful landowner in Manali. So I was curious to see other traders like Mr. Chandrabhaga.

The nomadic shepherds of the northwestern Himalayas trade and have traded for a very long time, with the nomadic shepherds of western Tibet. This is a lovely little film about the nomads in India and that beautiful, remote part of India.

 On the internet Archive, Tibetan Traders, 1957

Journal of a tour through part of the snowy range of the Himala Mountains, and to the sources of the rivers Jumna and Ganges
By James Baillie Fraser
Printed for Rodwell and Martin, London - 1820


A short contemporary video about the same place with some history
In the Valley of the Jadhs- June 2013 (Part 1/2)




 James Baillie Fraser

Views in the Himala Mountains, Rodwell & Martin, 1820, 
hand-coloured aquatint title and 20 fine hand-coloured aquatint plates by Robert Havell & Son after J.B. Fraser, versos with brushstroke marks from old adhesion, all plates reguarded at gutter margins, occasional small wormholes to margins, several plates with archival marginal repairs: plate VIII (Valley of Jumna) with longer closed tear repaired to right margin, plate XII (Assemblage of Hillmen) with small repaired tear to lower left corner, not affecting image, plate XV (Temple of Mangnee) with repaired long vertical crease to left side of the image, plate XVII (Junction of the Touse) with two small repaired patches to left hand blank margin, not affecting image, and plate XX (Jumnotree the Source of the River Jumna) with minor repairs to blank margins, plates interleaved with good quality thick wove paper, modern red half morocco gilt, upper cover with red morocco gilt label, sheet size 675 x 485 mm, elephant folio 

Provenance: Penelope Chetwode, Lady Betjeman (1910-1986), manuscript note at front presenting the book to her friend John Nankivell (b. 1941, architectural artist), in memory of their first Himalayan Temple trek, April-September 1971. Abbey Travel 498. "Among the finest aquatints of mountain scenery ever produced" (Godrej & Rohatgi). Rarely found complete. James Baillie Fraser (1783-1856) was a Scottish traveller and artist, who, following the end of the war with Nepal in 1815 travelled with his brother William to the Himalayas, spending two months exploring the region. They became the first Europeans to reach the sources of the Jumna and Ganges rivers. Tutored by the artist George Chinnery, Fraser was encouraged by William Havell to publish his sketches upon his return to Calcutta. Fraser's account of his travels was separately published as 'Journal of a Tour through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains, and to the Sources of the Rivers Jumna and Ganges', with a map in the same year. "It is interesting, also, that Rodwell and Martin take the pains to say that the work is uniform with the Daniell (1795-1807) and the Salt (1809), neither of which folios was published by them." (Abbey). 





This coloured aquatint was made by Robert Havell and Son from plate 5 of JB Fraser's 'Views in the Himala Mountains'. Fraser and his brother William reached Rampur, the capital of Bushair State in the Himalayan foothills, on 12 June 1815. It was an important trading place for cashmere wool and was situated on the banks of the river Sutlej, which was crossed by the precarious rope bridge seen in the bottom left corner.

 Bheem ke Udar - 1820

This coloured aquatint was made by Robert Havell and Son from plate 7 of JB Fraser's 'Views in the Himala Mountains'. While crossing the mountain pass between the valleys of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, on their way to the source of the latter, Fraser and his party spent a night at this spot. It is named after Bhima, one of the five Pandava brothers in the epic Mahabharata. Fraser wrote: "Our encamping ground was ... a cave under a large stone, called Bheem-Ke-Udar; in a dry night it is sufficiently comfortable, but rain would readily beat in. In this cavern, and under a few other large stones around it, there was some shelter, though scanty for our company."
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Monday, May 28, 2018

May 28, Spring 2018

Ooh, cool to learn about national and regional foods, their names and histories! Nice way to combine a map and foods.

 The Taste Atlas.

Ambulant reduplication explains why "tock-tick" doesn't sound right























I love the artisans of bali paintings on eBay

Guys jumping rope precisely

 A fabulous gif of Manhattan's population heartbeat as it transitions through the week.
The City is Alive: The Population of Manhattan, Hour-by-Hourvia citrusvanilla



































This year I learned about Archy and Mehitabel



July 27, 2006


Seeing Things From the Under Side
Meet a cockroach with strong opinions about the screwed-up world
by Maria Browning
Photo
The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, By Don Marquis and Michael Sims, ed. (Penguin Classics, 346 pp., $15)
It’s a fearful time in America. War is raging overseas. Anti-immigrant sentiment is growing at home, fueled by ethnic hatred. In the name of protecting the country from internal enemies, the government is eroding civil liberties. 

 A lingering fin de siecleanxiety has people seeking certainty in religion of all stripes, from Bible-thumping fundamentalism to a new spiritualism that promises channeled wisdom from extraterrestrials and chats with the dead.
It all sounds eerily familiar, but the year is not 2006. It’s 1916, when Don Marquis, a popular columnist for New York’s Evening Sun newspaper, spotted a manic cockroach scuttling around his typewriter and began to do a little channeling of his own. The unfortunate Archy, a “vers libre bard,” reincarnated in a bug’s body, offered up his first poem in Marquis’ column on March 29 of that year. Shortly thereafter, Mehitabel the cat, another transmigrating soul previously known as Cleopatra (yes, that Cleopatra) began making star appearances in the odd-looking verse. (Archy was unable to work the typewriter properly, resulting in the total absence of capital letters and punctuation.

 Archy and Mehitabel were wildly popular during their 20 years in Marquis’ “Sun Dial” column, and in the decades since they have continued to float through American literary and pop culture like the wandering souls they were. The poems have remained in print since the 1920s, and the characters have been featured in a Broadway musical, an animated film and an opera. Now Penguin Classics has marked their 90th anniversary with The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, which features the verses in chronological order, as they first appeared in The Evening Sun. (Marquis did a bit of rewriting and time shifting in the later published collections.) Editor Michael Sims (author of the critically acclaimed Adam’s Navel, and former Scene writer) provides that publishing rarity, an interesting and readable introduction, along with extensive notes that explain the poems’ historical context.

 A versifying cockroach and a kitty with delusions of grandeur may sound unbearably precious, but a brief rifle through this collection will dispel any fear of saccharine overload. In fact, you might well find yourself in need of a sweet moment after an hour spent with Archy. By all accounts, Don Marquis was funny and bighearted, but he was also a sad and angry man who had seen a lot of the mean world by the time he started giving voice to vermin. He grew up in small-town Illinois, son of a struggling country doctor, and began his journalistic career in Atlanta, where he covered the brutal 1906 race riots. Archy was his mouthpiece for dark thoughts and acid observations, as the inaugural poem suggests: “i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach / it has given me a new outlook upon life / i see things from the under side now.”

 Things from the under side, according to Archy, are violent and chaotic, but also grimly funny.

…you simply cannot
keep a good bug down
as a cockroad friend
of mine once
remarked to a fat man
who had
inadvertently
swallowed him along
with a portion 
of hungarian goulasch
although the remark
i understand
originated with jonah…

 Death, which lurks around every corner for a cockroach, makes him philosophical—not necessarily an asset when dealing with other bugs, who have “no esthetic sense and no imagination.” In fact, Archy’s plight is tragic. He is a beaten-down Everyman and at the same time an existential philosopher with an intellect that can’t help shredding every comforting illusion. He’s fully awake to his own powerlessness, and he has a very modern sense of the inescapable absurdity of life. Suicide is one of his recurring themes.

 Mehitabel, by contrast, is a throwback to belle epoque gaiety. She often reminds Archy (when she’s not threatening to eat him) that her own descent from Queen of the Nile to mangy alley cat is far more drastic than his transition from poet to cockroach. But despair is alien to her; she’ll make her hard life a party, or die trying:

 i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there’s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

 Though Archy and Mehitabel are timeless archetypes in the tradition of Aesop’s fables or the Br’er Rabbit stories (Marquis, not incidentally, was once an editor at Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus’s Magazine), they are also very much of their time. And the striking parallels between Don Marquis’ era and our own give the poems a renewed resonance. Many of Archy’s reports, such as “Archy in Washington,” would not be the least bit out of place on The Daily Show:

 …from official
circles here i learn
that things could not well be worse
with regard to the war situation and that
this is no time for
pessimism as we have
the enemy licked to a
frazzle everything
is gloom and america
is about to save the
world…

 Like all great political humor, these little poems have you laughing even as they force you to confront a big question: should we ponder the ills of the world, fight off our own despair, and speak truth to power à la Archy, futile though it may be? Perhaps it’s better to emulate Mehitabel—embrace the promise of pleasure as a duty, keep consuming and ignore the refuse mound by any means necessary.
xxv mehitabel dances with boreas

 well boss i saw mehitabel
last evening
she was out in the alley
dancing on the cold cobbles
while the wild december wind
blew through her frozen whiskers
and as she danced
she wailed and sang to herself
uttering the fragments
that rattled in her cold brain
in part as follows

 whirl mehitabel whirl
spin mehitabel spin
thank god you re a lady still
if you have got a frozen skin

 blow wind out of the north
to hell with being a pet
my left front foot is brittle
but there s life in the old dame yet

 dance mehitabel dance
caper and shake a leg
what little blood is left
will fizz like wine in a keg

 wind come out of the north
and pierce to the guts within
but some day mehitabel s guts
will string a violin

 moon you re as cold as a frozen
skin of yellow banan
that sticks in the frost and ice
on top of a garbage can

 and you throw a shadow so chilly
that it can scarcely leap
dance shadow dance
you ve got no place to sleep

 whistle a time north wind
on my hollow marrow bones
i ll dance the time with three good feet
here on the alley stones

 freeze you bloody december
i never could stay a pet
but i am a lady in spite of hell
and there s life in the old dame yet

 whirl mehitabel whirl
flirt your tail and spin
dance to the tune your guts will cry
when they string a violin

 eight of my lives are gone
it s years since my fur was slicked
but blow north wind blow
i m damned if i am licked

 girls we was all of us ladies
we was o wotthebell
and once a lady always game
by crikey blood will tell

 i might be somebody s pet
asleep by the fire on a rug
but me i was always romantic
i had the adventurous bug

 caper mehitabel caper
leap shadow leap
you gotto dance till the sun comes up
for you got no place to sleep

 i might have been many a tom cat s wife
but i got no regret
i lived my life as i liked my life
and there s pep in the old dame yet

 blow wind out of the north
you cut like a piece of tin
slice my guts into fiddle strings
and we ll have a violin

 spin mehitabel spin
you had a romantic past
and you re gonna cash in dancing
when you are croaked at last

 i will not eat tomorrow
and i did not eat today
but wotthehell i ask you
the word is toujours gai

 whirl mehitabel whirl
i once was a maltese pet
till i went and got abducted
and cripes i m a lady yet

 whirl mehitabel whirl
and show your shadow how
tonight it s dance with the bloody moon
tomorrow the garbage scow

 whirl mehitabel whirl
spin shadow spin
the wind will pipe on your marrow bones
your slats are a mandolin

 by cripes i have danced the shimmy
in rooms as warm as a dream
and gone to sleep on a cushion
with a bellyfull of cream

 it s one day up and next day down
i led a romantic life
it was being abducted so many times
as spoiled me for a wife

 dance mehitabel dance
till your old bones fly apart
i ain t got any regrets
for i gave my life to my art

 whirl mehitabel whirl
caper my girl and grin
and pick at your guts with your frosty feet
they re the strings of a violin

 girls we was all of us ladies
until we went and fell
and oncet a thoroughbred always game
i ask you wotthehell

 it s last week up and this week down
and always the devil to pay
but cripes i was always the lady
and the word is toujours gai

 be a tabby tame if you want
somebody s pussy and pet
the life i led was the life i liked
and there s pep in the old dame yet

 whirl mehitabel whirl
leap shadow leap
you gotto dance till the sun comes up
for you got no place to sleep

 archy

 -don marquis, "archy & mehitabel" (1916-1927)

http://www.donmarquis.org/ode.htm

Poignant

Pictures Of People As Young Adults And 100 Year Olds (12 pics)



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