Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Shell

Phoenix
Mississippi
Lung

Long Range

Prov. 12:10
"A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."

rabbit eggs
Congratulations to member flowerfurly, the winner of our Creative Challenge: Eggs. How do you make your Easter Eggs?
Chess: "Mark Twain" "Mississippi" "Shell" "Phoenix" "Lung" "Long Range"

Bowl

Bow
Winding

Buenos Aires
The Bowery
 


Prov. 12:15
"The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise."


Hiking Mt. Cook

Chess: "Winding" "Buenos Aires" "Bow" "Bowl" "The Bowery"

Bowery


The Bowery (pronounced /ˈbaʊ.ə.ri/ or /ˈbaʊ.ri/) is the name of a street and a small neighborhood in the southern portion of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The neighborhood's boundaries are East 4th Street and the East Village to the north, Canal Street and Chinatown to the South, Allen Street and the Lower East Side to the east and Bowery (the street) and Little Italy to the west.[1]
Bowery is an anglicisation of the Dutch bowerij. In the 17th century the road ran from Fort Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan to the homestead of Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherland. As a street, the Bowery was known as Bowery Lane prior to 1807.[2] Today it runs from Chatham Square in the south to Cooper Square in the north. Its further extension, angling across the grid plan of Manhattan to Union Square, has long been renamed 4th Avenue. Major streets that intersect the Bowery include Canal Street, Delancey Street, Houston Street, and Bleecker Street. A New York City Subway station named Bowery on the BMT Nassau Street Line (J, M, and Z services) is located at the Bowery's intersection with Delancey Street.
The Bowery (pronounced /ˈbaʊ.ə.ri/ or /ˈbaʊ.ri/) is the name of a street and a small neighborhood in the southern portion of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The neighborhood's boundaries are East 4th Street and the East Village to the north, Canal Street and Chinatown to the South, Allen Street and the Lower East Side to the east and Bowery (the street) and Little Italy to the west.[1]
Bowery is an anglicisation of the Dutch bowerij. In the 17th century the road ran from Fort Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan to the homestead of Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherland. As a street, the Bowery was known as Bowery Lane prior to 1807.[2] Today it runs from Chatham Square in the south to Cooper Square in the north. Its further extension, angling across the grid plan of Manhattan to Union Square, has long been renamed 4th Avenue. Major streets that intersect the Bowery include Canal Street, Delancey Street, Houston Street, and Bleecker Street. A New York City Subway station named Bowery on the BMT Nassau Street Line (J, M, and Z services) is located at the Bowery's intersection with Delancey Street.

Colonial and federal period

The Bowery is the oldest thoroughfare on Manhattan Island, preceding European intervention as a Lenape footpath, which spanned roughly the entire length of the island, from north to south.[3] When the Dutch settled Manhattan island, they named the path Bouwerij road—bouwerij being an old Dutch word for farm—[4] because it connected farmlands and estates on the outskirts to the heart of the city in today's Wall Street/Battery Park area.
In 1654, the Bowery’s first residents settled in the area of Chatham Square; ten freed slaves and their wives set up cabins and a cattle farm.
Petrus Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam before the English took control, retired to his Bowery farm in 1667. After his death in 1672, he was buried in his private chapel. His mansion burned down in 1778 and his great-grandson sold the remaining chapel and graveyard, now the site of the Episcopal church of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.[5]
By 1766, when John Montresor made his detailed plan of New York,[6] "Bowry Lane",[7] which took a more north-tending track at the rope walk, was lined for the first few streets with buildings that formed a solid frontage, with market gardens behind them; when Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Librettist for Mozart's Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Cosi Fan Tutte, emigrated to New York City in 1806, he briefly ran one of the shops along the Bowery, a fruit and vegetable store. In 1766, straight lanes led away at right angles to gentlemen's seats, mostly well back from the dusty "Road to Albany and Boston", as it was labeled on Montresor's map; Nicholas Bayard's was planted as an avenue of trees. James Delancey's grand house, flanked by matching outbuildings, stood behind a forecourt facing Bowery Lane; behind it was his parterre garden, ending in an exedra.


Cigarette trading card featuring the Bowery Theatre; a few 3½ storey structures of the 1830s (like the building at right) remain on the Bowery today
The Bull's Head Tavern was noted for George Washington having stopped there for refreshment before riding down to the waterfront to witness the departure of British troops in 1783. Leading to the Post Road, The Bowery rivalled Broadway as a thoroughfare; as late as 1869, when it had gained the "reputation of cheap trade, without being disreputable" it was still "the second principal street of the city"

Slide from respectability

When Lafayette Street was opened parallel to The Bowery in the 1820s, the Bowery Theatre was founded by rich families on the site of the Red Bull Tavern, which had been purchased by John Jacob Astor; it opened in 1826. Across the way the Bowery Amphitheatre was erected in 1833, specializing in the more populist entertainments of equestrian shows and circuses. From stylish beginnings, the tone of the Bowery Theatre's offerings matched the slide in the social scale of the Bowery itself. By the time of the Civil War, the mansions and shops had given way to low-brow concert halls, brothels, German beer gardens, pawn shops, and flophouses, like the one at #15 in which the composer Stephen Foster lived in 1864[9] Theodore Dreiser closed his tragedy Sister Carrie, set in the 1890s, with the suicide of one of the main characters in a Bowery flophouse. The Bowery, which marked the eastern border of the slum of "Five Points", had also become the turf of one of America's earliest street gangs, the nativist Bowery Boys. In the spirit of social reform, the first YMCA opened on the Bowery in 1873;[10] another notable religious and social welfare institution established during this period was The Bowery Mission and Young Men's Home, which was founded in 1880 at 36 Bowery by Rev. Albert Gleason Ruliffson. The mission has relocated along the Bowery throughout its lifetime. From 1909 to the present, the mission has remained at 227-229 Bowery.
By the 1890s, The Bowery was a magnet for sporting men as a center for prostitution that rivaled the Tenderloin, and for bars catering to gay men and some lesbians at various social levels, from The Slide at 157 Bleecker Street, New York's "worst dive",[11] to Columbia Hall at 5th Street, called Paresis Hall. One investigator in 1899 found six saloons and dance halls, the resorts of "degenerates" and "fairies", on The Bowery alone.[12] Gay subculture was more highly visible there and more integrated into working-class male culture than it was to become in the following generations, according to the historian of gay New York, George Chauncey.
From 1919 to the early 1960s the Third Avenue El ran above the Bowery, further darkening its streets, populated largely by men. "It is filled with employment agencies", cheap clothing and knickknack stores, cheap moving-picture shows, cheap lodging-houses, cheap eating-houses, cheap saloons", writers in The Century Magazine found it in 1919. "Here, too, by the thousands come sailors on shore leave,—notice the 'studios' of the tattoo artists,—and here most in evidence are the 'down and outs'".[13] Prohibition eliminated The Bowery's numerous saloons: One Mile House, the "stately old tavern... replaced by a cheap saloon"[14] at the southeast corner of Rivington Street, named for the battered milestone across the way,[15] where the politicians of the East Side had made informal arrangements for the city's governance,[16] was renovated for retail space in 1921, "obliterating all vestiges of its former appearance", The New York Times reported with satisfaction, but the assertion that "The Bowery has turned over a new leaf" was premature:
Home of many music halls in the 19th century, the Bowery later became notable for its economic depression. Though pressure for a new name pre-World War I came to naught,[18] in the 1920s and 1930s, it was regarded as an impoverished area. The "Dead End Kids" (aka the "The Bowery Boys") of film were from the Bowery. In the 1940s through the 1970s, the Bowery was New York City's "Skid Row," notable for "Bowery Bums" (disafiliated alcoholics and homeless persons).

Monday, March 29, 2010

London

Lake
Lago
Fare

 
Prov. 12:11
"He that tilleth his land shall be satisfied with bread: but he that followeth vain persons is void of understanding."


 
Parliament, London


Chess: "Lake" "Fare" "Lago"


fare
intr.v., fared, far·ing, fares.
  1. To get along: How are you faring with your project?
  2. To go or happen: How does it fare with you?
  3. To travel; go.
  4. To dine; eat.
n.
  1. A transportation charge, as for a bus.
  2. A passenger transported for a fee.
  3. Food and drink; diet: simple home-cooked fare.
[Middle English faren, from Old English faran.]
farer far'er n.

Tutor's tip: That "phare" (a lighthouse) with the gourmet restaurant may have delicious "fare" (the price of passage, food, or drink) but not at a "fair" (just or impartial) price.


verb
  1. To progress or perform adequately, especially in difficult circumstances: do, fend, get along, get by, manage, muddle through, shift. Informal make out. Idioms: make do, make shift. See thrive/fail/exist.
  2. To move along a particular course: go, journey, pass, proceed, push on, remove, travel, wend. Idioms: make one's way. See move/halt.
  3. To take (food) into the body as nourishment: consume, devour, eat, ingest, partake. Slang chow. Idioms: break bread, havetakea bite. See ingestion.
noun
Something fit to be eaten: aliment, bread, comestible, diet, edible, esculent, food, foodstuff, meat, nourishment, nurture, nutriment, nutrition, pabulum, pap, provender, provision (used in plural), sustenance, victual. Slangchow, eats, grub. Seeingestion.


Fare

Dansk (Danish)
n. - billetpris, kørepenge, kost, passager
v. intr. - drage, fare, klare sig, leve
Nederlands (Dutch)
voedsel, tarief, passagier, kost (ook voor gebruik/amusement), zich redden, reizen, dineren, onthaald worden
Français (French)
n. - (Rail) prix du voyage, prix de la course (en taxi), client (d'un taxi), voyageur, chère/nourriture (sout)
v. intr. - se passer, se porter, aller bien
Deutsch (German)
n. - Fahrpreis, Fahrgeld, Fahrgast, Kost
v. - ergehen, reisen
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - επιβατικός ναύλος, εισιτήριο, κόμιστρο (επιβάτη), τροφή, σίτιση
v. - προχωρώ, πηγαίνω, περνώ, τα πάω, πορεύομαι
Italiano (Italian)
vitto, tariffa
Português (Portuguese)
n. - tarifa (f) (de ônibus, trem etc.), passageiro (m) de um táxi
v. - acontecer, comer, viajar
Русский (Russian)
плата за проезд, ездок, пассажир, пища, стол
Español (Spanish)
n. - precio del billete, del viaje o del recorrido, tarifa, pasaje, alimento, alimentos, comida, vianda
v. intr. - progresar, viajar, comer y beber
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - passageraravgift, passagerare, kosthåll
v. - klara sig, fara (illa), leva (i avseende på mat och dryck), färdas (litt. el. åld.)

Friday, March 19, 2010

Robbie Burns

Mouline RougeMolinos Rojos
Robbie Burns

 
Prov. 27:20

"Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied."



Silke Hornung

Sculpture in Bratislava old town
Making Friends

Chess: "Mouline Rouge" "Molinos Rojos" "Robbie Burns"




Moulin Rouge
One of Paris' most famous cabarets, the Moulin Rouge ("The Red Windmill") took its name from one of the many windmills in the Montmartre area of Paris. It is the home of the French cancan. The Moulin Rouge is located at the base of Montmartre, in Pigalle, Paris' red-light district.
Immortalized by French artist, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the birthplace of the dance, the cancan, the Moulin Rouge (The Red Windmill) took its name from one of the windmills of Montmartre. On October 5, 1889, the Moulin Rouge opened as the "rendez-vous du high life" at the foot of Montmartre. Both a dance hall and cabaret, it housed a large dance floor, mirrored walls, and a fashionable gallery lit by round glass globes of gas lamps mounted throughout the interior. In the garden were an outdoor stage and an enormous wooden elephant, with interior stairs leading to a glass-enclosed howdah, tame monkeys, and donkeys that ladies would ride after removing their stockings. There were masked balls twice a week. The music was a brassy accompaniment to various new forms of the risqué "cancan" which shocked some visitors. Professional dancers appeared on the floor, described in the 1898 "Guide des Plaisirs à Paris" (Guide to the Pleasures of Paris) as "a host of young girls who are there to demonstrate the heavenly Parisian Chahut dance as its traditional reputation demands...with a physical elasticity as they do the splits, which promises just as much flexibility in their morals." Now and then, a representative from the police morals squad had to be on the watch to be sure the chahuteuses (cancan dancers) were wearing underwear. The performers were also noted for their spectacular costumes -- and quick changes.

Notable performers at the Moulin Rouge have included La Goulue, Josephine Baker, Frank Sinatra, Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril, Mistinguett, Le Pétomane, Édith Piaf and others. The Moulin Rouge was also the subject of paintings by post-impressionist painter Toulouse Lautrec.

Can-Can at the Moulin Rouge

The main feature of an evening at the Moulin Rouge is the nightly cabaret performance. The Moulin Rouge is famous internationally as the 'spiritual home' of the traditional French Can-Can, which is still performed there today. Whilst the dance of the can-can had existed for many years as a respectable, working-class party dance, it was in the early days of the Moulin Rouge when courtesans first adapted the dance to entertain the male clientele. It was usually performed individually, with the courtesan moving in an increasingly energetic and provocative way in an attempt to seduce a potential client. It was very common for them to lift their skirts and reveal their legs, underwear and occasionally the genitals. As time progressed, the can-cans seen at the Moulin Rouge became more and more vulgar and overtly erotic, causing much public outrage.
Later, however, with the rising popularity of music hall entertainment in Europe, courtesans were no longer 'required' at the Moulin Rouge and it became a legitimate 'nightclub'. The modern can-can was born as dancers were introduced to entertain the guests, many of them failed ballet dancers with exceptional skill. The can-can that we recognise today comes directly from this period and as the vulgarity of the dance lessened, it became reknown for its athelic and acrobatic tricks. Also the Moulin Rouge has lost much of its former reputation as a 'high-class brothel' and it would soon become fashionable for the very best in French society to visit and see the spectacular cabarets, which have included a traditional French can-can ever since. The dance is recognisable for the long skirts with heavily frilled undergarments that the dancers wear, high kicks, hops in a circle whilst holding the other leg in the air, splits, cartwheels and other acrobatic tricks, normally accompanied by squeals and shrieks. As the dance became respected, it became less and less crude, however but the choreography is always intended to be a little riqsue at times and somethat provocative and 'a little naughty'.
Today, the Can-Can performed at the Moulin Rouge has iconic status in dance throughout the World. In France, the Moulin Rouge and the dance that made it famous are regarded with great respect as part of the countries cultural heritage.

Striptease

The People's Almanac credited the origin of striptease as we know it to an act in 1890s Paris in which a woman slowly removed her clothes in a vain search for a flea crawling on her body. At this time Parisian shows such as the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergere pioneered semi-nude dancing and tableaux vivants. One landmark was the appearance at the Moulin Rouge in 1907 of an actress called Germaine Aymos who entered dressed only in three very small shells.

The music video for Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil' Kim and Mýa's Lady Marmalade was shot at the Moulin Rouge.



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March 17, 2010

Fortune-telling, bad breath and stress in Roman society

Is my wife having a baby? Am I going to see a death? Am I going to be sold? - a few of the questions listed in one of the most intriguing works of Classical literature


Is my wife having a baby? Am I going to see a death? Will I become a councillor? Am I going to be sold? Am I about to be caught as an adulterer? These are just a few of the ninety-two questions listed in one of the most intriguing works of Classical literature to have survived: the Oracles of Astrampsychus, a book which offers cleverly randomized answers to many of ancient life’s most troubling problems and uncertainties. The method is relatively straightforward, but with just enough obfuscation to make for convincing fortune-telling (“easy to use but difficult to fathom” as one modern commentator nicely put it). Each question is numbered. When you have found the one that most closely matches your own dilemma, you think of a number between one and ten and add it to the number of your question. You then go to a “table of correspondences” which converts that total into yet another number, which directs you in turn to one of a series of 103 lists of possible answers, arranged in groups of ten, or “decades” (to make things more confusing there are actually more lists of answers than the system, with its ninety-two questions, requires or could ever use). Finally, go back to the number between one and ten that you first thought of, and that indicates which answer in the decade applies to you.
Confused? Try a concrete example. Suppose that I want to know if I am about to be caught as an adulterer, which is question 100. I think of another number – let’s say five, giving a total of 105. The table of correspondences converts this to the number 28. I then go to the twenty-eighth decade, and pick out the fifth answer, which brings good news: “You won’t be caught as an adulterer” (and in some versions adds the extra reassurance: “Don’t worry”). If I had chosen the number six, the same procedure would have offered me only a temporary reprieve: “You won’t be caught as an adulterer for the time being”. Number seven would have brought bad news of a different kind: “You’re not an adulterer, but your wife loves another man”.
The introduction to this little book of oracles – it amounts to some thirty pages in modern editions – claims that its author was a fourth-century-BC Egyptian magician, Astrampsychus, who used a system first invented by the famous philosopher-cum-mathematician Pythagoras. Not only that: by way of an advertisement, it also claims that the book had been the vade mecum of Alexander the Great, who relied on it to decide matters of world governance, “and you also will have unwavering renown among all people if you use it too”. In fact, however wayward Alexander’s decision-making processes may have been, they could not have depended on this system of oracles, which was almost certainly nothing to do with any fourth-century magician or with Pythagoras, but was a product of the Roman Empire of the second or third centuries ad. Our best guess is that the book was not so much an early self-help manual but part of the equipment of professional, or semi-professional, fortune-tellers – who would probably have invested the mechanical process of consultation with some impressive ad-lib mystery and mumbo-jumbo.
However this oracle book was actually used, it gives us a rare glimpse – as Jerry Toner stresses in Popular Culture in Ancient Rome – into the day-to-day anxieties of the ordinary inhabitants of the Roman Empire. For (never mind the publicity yarn about Alexander the Great) this is not elite literature, or certainly not literature aimed exclusively at the elite; in fact, the question about “being sold” implies that slaves were among the intended clientele. Here we have a long list of the kinds of problems that made ordinary Roman men (and they do seem to be exclusively male questions) anxious enough to resort to fortune-tellers.

Some of these are the perennial issues of sex, illness and success (“Will I split up from my girlfriend?” “Will the one who is sick survive?” “Will I be prosperous?”). But other questions reflect much more specifically Graeco-Roman concerns about life’s fortunes and misfortunes. Alongside worries about the wife’s pregnancy, we find questions about whether or not to rear the expected offspring: a vivid reminder that infanticide was one orthodox method of family planning in the ancient world, as well as being a convenient way of disposing of those who emerged from the womb weak, sickly or deformed. Debt and inheritance also bulk large among the topics of concern, accounting for at least twelve of the ninety-two questions (“Will I pay back what I owe?” “Will I inherit from a friend?”). So do the dangers of travel (“Will I sail safely?”) and the potential menace of the legal system (“Am I safe from prosecution?” “Will I be safe if informed against?”). Even illness may be thought to be the result of crime or malevolence, as the question “Have I been poisoned?” shows.
Toner is excellent at squeezing the social and cultural implications out of this material. As well as reflecting on the perilous, debtridden, short and painful human lives that the oracle book reveals, he notes some surprising absences. There is nothing here (poisoning apart) to suggest a fear of violent crime, despite the fact that we often imagine that the Roman Empire was full of highwaymen, pirates and muggers. Nor is there anything on the institution of patronage. Modern historians have written volumes on the dependence of the poor on their elite patrons – for everything from jobs, to loans or food. Toner speculates that the intended users of these oracles were so far down the Roman social hierarchy that they were below the reach of the patronage system (which only extended so far as “the respectable poor”). Maybe. Or maybe the whole system of patronage was far less important in the life of the non-elite, than the Roman elite writers, on whom we mostly rely, liked to imagine. Or, at least, maybe it was far less important in whatever corner of the Roman Empire this strange little book originated.
Pushing the evidence a little further, Toner suggests that we might see in these oracles a rudimentary system of risk-assessment. He reckons, for example, that the answers on the fate of a newborn baby (where one in ten suggests that the baby will “not be reared” – that is, exposed or killed – and two out of ten suggest that it will die anyway) more or less match up to the social and biological reality of infant survival. Referring to other similar sets of oracles, recorded in ancient inscriptions found in cities in modern Turkey, he points out that 18 per cent of oracular responses warn that a business venture will fail – roughly the same rate of failure implied by the rate of interest that was regularly charged on so-called “maritime loans” (for shipping and trading expeditions). On Toner’s view, in other words, the oracular responses reflected real-life risks and probabilities.
I am not so sure. On that principle, there was an eight-out-of-ten chance that a consulter of these oracles would become a local councillor. That would mean either that those who used these oracles were higher up the social hierarchy than Toner would like to imagine, or that those who asked that particular question (“Will I become a councillor?”) were a self-selected group, or that fortune-telling trades in over-optimism. Conversely, it seems sometimes to trade in gloom. Five out of ten oracular answers to the question “Have I been poisoned?” suggest the answer “Yes”.
Popular Culture in Ancient Rome is, overall, a spirited, engaging and politically committed introduction to the culture of the “non-elite” in the Roman Empire. Toner notes in his introduction that his mother, to whom the book is dedicated, was a “college servant” in Cambridge; and the leading idea of the book – that there is a popular culture in the ancient world to be discovered beyond the elite literature that is the mainstay of modern “Classics” – is driven by a political as well as a historical agenda.
Toner’s achievement is to open up the world of the Roman tavern, rather than the senate house; the world of the garret rather than the villa. Drawing on material out of the mainstream of Classical literature, from the Oracles of Astrampsychus to the one surviving Roman joke book (the Philogelos or Laughter-Lover) or the book of dream interpretation by Artemidorus, he vividly conjures up a vision of Rome very different from the shiny marble of the usual image: it is a world of filth and stench (for Toner, Rome was basically a dung heap), of popular pleasures, carnival and the lower bodily stratum, of resistance, as well as submission, to the power of the elite. The only misjudged chapter is one on mental health, with its superficial modernizing ideas about the stress levels that affected the Roman poor. Despite Toner’s denial that he is trying “to give retrospective diagnoses of the dead”, we are left with the strong impression that he thinks St Anthony of Egypt was a schizophrenic, and that rank-and-file Roman soldiers were likely to be victims of combat stress and PTSD.
The big question, though, is whether the Rome that Toner conjures up for us is as “popular” as he suggests. Is this dirty, smelly, dangerous world the world of the peasants and the poor, or is it also the world of the elite? Maybe, whatever his political agenda, Toner has succeeded best not in taking us into the real life of the disadvantaged, but in showing us another side of the culture of the elite. For it is far from clear that the texts that we now choose to designate as “sub-elite” or “non-elite” (because that is where they fit on our hierarchy) were really “popular” in the ancient world. There are more hints than Toner admits in the Oracles of Astrampsychus that the intended customers included those who were relatively upmarket. “Will I become a councillor?” (which could equally well be translated “Will I become a senator?”) is not the only question to hint at privileged consumers. An early Christian edition of the text includes the question “Will I become a bishop”, with five out of ten answers indicating “yes” (albeit one, with a realistic view of the problems of power in the early Church, prophesying “You’ll become a bishop soon and you’ll be sorry”). Much the same is true of the Roman joke book. There have been all kinds of modern fantasies that the Philogelos was a record of the kind of banter you would have heard at the ancient parish-pump or barber’s shop. But the compilation of jokes as we have it is much more likely to be a desk-job encyclopedia by some rich, late Roman academic.
Besides, it is almost impossible to identify (even if, like Toner, you are looking hard for them) clearly divergent strands of elite and popular taste. Rome was not a culture, such as ours, where status is paraded and distinguished by aesthetic choices. Quite the contrary. So far as we can tell, cultural and aesthetic choices at Rome were broadly the same right across the spectrum of wealth and privilege: the only difference lay in what you could afford to pay for. This is strikingly clear at Pompeii, where the decoration of all the houses – both large and small, elite and non-elite – follows the same broad pattern, with roughly the same preferences in themes and designs. The richer houses are distinguished only by having more extensive painted decoration and by painting of greater skill: the more you paid, the better you got. Whether there was such a thing as “popular culture” (as distinct from dirt, poverty and hunger) is a trickier issue than Toner sometimes acknowledges.
In Resurrecting Pompeii, Estelle Lazer takes a different approach to the lives and lifestyles of “ordinary Romans” with her meticulous analysis of the human bones of the victims, rich and poor, of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 ad. It is an eye-opening book in many ways, not least for its description of the conditions in which she worked on these bones in modern Pompeii – about as far from the glamour of Indiana Jones-style archaeology as it is possible to imagine. Apart from some celebrity skeletons and plaster casts of dead bodies on display to the public, most of the human remains that survived the Allied bombing raids on the site during the Second World War were piled up in two main stores, each in an ancient bath building not normally accessible to ordinary visitors. Lazer spent most of her research time, months on end over seven years, in these depots – ill-lit (she worked for part of the time with a hand-held bicycle light) and infested by wildlife. The identifying labels once attached to the bones had long ago been eaten by rodents; many of the skulls had provided convenient nesting boxes for the local birds (covering the bones and what Lazer calls the key “skeletal landmarks” with bird lime); in one store a “cottage industry” had been established, which used the human thigh bones to make hinges to restore the ancient furniture on the site. “This has contributed”, as Lazer writes, with deadpan understatement, “a novel source of sample bias to the femur collection.” From this very difficult material Lazer has drawn some very careful conclusions about the victims of the eruption and the population of Pompeii (and to a lesser extent Herculaneum) more generally. She has no time at all for the more sensational conclusions that have been based on the study of some ancient bones, and is particularly critical of the analysis of more than 300 skeletons that were found in the early 1980s in a series of so-called “boat sheds” along the seafront at Herculaneum. The study of this material was financed by National Geographic, and the magazine got the vivid, personal details about the dead that it had paid for: one, with a skeleton that suggested highly developed muscles, must have been a slave; another, who happened to be carrying a sword and dagger, was called a “soldier”; another was identified as a helmsman simply because it was found near a boat. Lazer not only points out how flimsy these identifications are (the boat turned out to be in a completely different archaeological layer from the “helmsman”, and the so-called “soldier” also carried a bag of carpentry tools); she also underlines how tricky and contested the conclusions drawn from ancient skeletal material almost always are, no matter who is paying and with what sensationalist aims.
Determining the sex of pre-adult skeletons is always a guessing game. There has been no reliable DNA sequence obtained from any of the human remains at Pompeii or Herculaneum. Most striking of all, two different studies of the bodies in the boat sheds have produced estimates of the average height of the victims that differ by several centimetres. There is clearly something more involved here than getting out a ruler and just measuring the skeletons.
But despite (or maybe because of) her caution in drawing ambitious conclusions from the bones, Lazer has a great deal to say about the population of Pompeii – beyond the well-known fact, now repeatedly demonstrated from the analysis of hundreds of teeth and jaws, that the levels of oral hygiene in the Roman world were truly dreadful. (When the Roman poet Martial attacked some of his contemporaries for their bad breath, it was probably not poetic fantasy.) One important observation relates to the demographic profile of the victims. It is often said that those left behind in the city, as Vesuvius rumbled and eventually exploded, must have been the weaker section of the population: the very young, the very old, the disabled, or those in some other way incapacitated. In carefully going through the stored bones, Lazer has found no indication of any such bias: the surviving human remains seem to represent a typical distribution of age and sex that you would expect in a Roman town.
Even more important for our understanding of Roman society in general is the relative homogeneity of human remains. Pompeii was a port town, and to all outside appearances decidedly multicultural – from the famous temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis to the Indian ivory statuette found in one of the houses. Yet the tell-tale visible characteristics of the skeletons (for example, double-rooted canine teeth, or particularly distinctive formations of the tibia) suggest to Lazer a relatively homogeneous population, “either as a result of shared genes or a common environment during the years of growth and development”. More than that, the tell-tale characteristics of the skeletons at Herculaneum appear to be consistently and significantly different. This would imply that – whatever their multicultural trappings – these small towns around the Bay of Naples were more like inbred Fen villages than the homes of a mobile population, as we often assume.
Resurrecting Pompeii is a remarkable (if not always elegantly written, or meticulously edited) book, partly because Lazer is so careful never to go beyond what her most exacting standards of proof will allow. She also consistently writes with respect for the material she is dealing with, never seeming to forget that her material is all that is left of the human victims of a terrible natural disaster, albeit 2,000 years ago.
The eruption of Vesuvius was, of course, an ancient tragedy of rare proportions. But in the calculations of the victims, in their decision whether or not to run for it or to stay put, it must remind us of the dilemmas of those who consulted the Oracles of Astrampsychus. As Toner suggests, the fact that seven out of ten answers to the question “Am I going to see a death” say “yes” tells us something of the realities of ancient life, for everyone.


Jerry Toner
POPULAR CULTURE IN ANCIENT ROME
248pp. Polity. £55 (paperback, £17.99).
978 0 7456 4309 0
Estelle Lazer
RESURRECTING POMPEII
408pp. Routledge. £65.
978 0 415 26146 3


Mary Beard’s most recent books are The Roman Triumph, 2007, and Pompeii: The life of a Roman town, 2008. It’s a Don’s Life, a collection of her TLS blogs, was published last year. She is Professor of Classics at Cambridge and Classics editor of the TLS.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

MacArthur PArk

Boston
Monteverde

Potrero

Lawn
Act 8:38
"And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him."

Prov.27:27

"And thou shalt have goats' milk enough for thy food, for the food of thy household, and for the maintenance for thy maidens."
Symmetry
Nature's Symmetry
Chess: "Monteverde" "Boston" "Potrero" "Lawn" "Hemisphere"

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Meaning of Crossing the Red Sea

Solomon
El Boyero
The Three Sisters


Prov.1:1
"The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel;"

The Three Sisters, Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry
Three Sisters, Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry, Ireland

Chess: "Crossing the Red Sea" "Solomon" "IsRaEl" "El Boyero" "Three Sisters"
The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel;1parabolae Salomonis filii David regis Israhel
1Proverbes de Salomon, fils de David, roi d'Israël,
1 Sprüche Salomos, des Sohnes Davids, des Königs von Israel,
1 Los proverbios de Salomón[a]* hijo de David, rey de Israel,
Proverbi di Salomone, figlio di Davide, re d'Israele,
1Provérbios de Salomão, filho de Davi, rei de Israel:
1Притчи Соломона, сына Давидова, царя Израильского,
* 1Kings4:29 And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding much, and largeness of heart, even as the sand that is on the sea shore.

29И дал Бог Соломону мудрость(wisdom) и весьма (greatly) великий (grandeur) разум, и обширный ум, как песок на берегу моря.
29
Dieu donna à Salomon de la sagesse, une très grande intelligence, et des connaissances multipliées comme le sable qui est au bord de la mer.
29 Dios dio a Salomón sabiduría y prudencia[a] muy grandes, y tan dilatado corazón como la arena que está a la orilla del mar.
Reyes 4:29
En la tradición israelita, Salomón llegó a ser el prototipo del sabio (véase 1 R 3.12 nota m.) De ahí que con el paso del tiempo se le hayan atribuido todos los escritos sapienciales (así como toda la Ley se le atribuyó a Moisés y los salmos a David). Cf. Pr 1.1; 25.1; Cnt 1.1; Ec 1.1-2.

Helios soleil The Cosmic and Heliospheric Learning Center, brought to you by the cosmic ray group at NASA GSFC, is designed to increase your interest in cosmic and heliospheric science. (The heliosphere is the HUGE area in space affected by the Sun.) It's an exciting subject to learn about and is a robust area of study.

About 260 BC

Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric Universe.
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Aristarchus.html


Aristarchus was certainly both a mathematician and astronomer and he is most celebrated as the first to propose a sun-centred universe. Aristarchus
figured out how to measure the distances to and sizes of the Sun and the Moon. Because he deduced that the Sun was so much bigger than the moon, he concluded that the Earth must therefore revolve around the Sun.
He figured out how to measure the relative distances from the Earth (E) of the Sun (S) and the Moon (M). When the Moon is exactly half full, the angle E-M-S must be exactly 90 degrees. Therefore, a measurement of the angle M-E-S when the Moon is half full will give the ratio of the Earth-Moon distance to the Earth-Sun distanceAristarchus measured the angle M-E-S to be 87 degrees, giving the ratio to be 1/19. Actually, the angle is 89 degrees, 51 minutes, giving an actual value of 1/400, that is, the Sun is 400 times further away from the Earth than the Moon is. Aristarchus' measurement was probably off because first, it is hard to determine the exact centers of the Sun and the Moon and second, it is hard to know exactly when the Moon is half full. On the other hand, his estimate showed that the Sun is much further away from us than the Moon is. Aristarchus also figured out how to measure the size of the Moon. During a lunar eclipse, he measured the duration of time between the moment when the edge of the Moon first entered the umbra and the moment when the Moon was first totally obscured. He also measured the duration of totality. Because he found the two times to be the same, he concluded that the width of the Earth's shadow at the distance where the Moon crosses it must be twice the diameter of the Moon Therefore, the Moon must be about half as big as the Earth. Note that he already knew the approximate size of the Earth. Actually, the Moon is about 1/4 as big as the Earth. Aristarchus also reasoned that since the Sun and the Moon have the same angular size, but the Sun is 19 times further (or so he thought), then the Sun must be 19 times bigger than the Moon. While his measurements were not very precise, they nonetheless demonstrate
a simple understanding of the sizes and distances
of the Earth, Moon and Sun.

He is also famed for his pioneering attempt to determine the sizes and distances of the sun and moon…. Aristarchus was a student of Strato of Lampsacus, who was head of Aristotle's Lyceum. However, it is not thought that Aristarchus studied with Strato in Athens but rather that he studied with him in Alexandria. Strato became head of the Lyceum at Alexandria in 287 BC and it is thought that Aristarchus studied with him there starting his studies shortly after that date. … Of course there is the immediate question of what Aristarchus invented, and Vitruvius explains that he invented a sundial in the shape of a hemispherical bowl with a pointer to cast shadows placed in the middle of the bowl…. (transitory : Super Bowl XL Steelers vrs. Seattle Seahawks)
Chess: "K" "Aristarchus:ángulo" "up" :setting up the chessmen : "The acquaintances she had already formed were unworthy of her" [("Canis Major") Jane Austen] "upholster"

.
2: To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding;
2ad sciendam sapientiam et disciplinam
2 Pour connaître la sagesse et l'instruction, Pour comprendre les paroles de l'intelligence;
2 um zu erkennen Weisheit und Zucht, um zu verstehen verständige Worte
,2 para aprender sabiduría y doctrina,[b] para conocer razones prudentes,
2per conoscere sapienza e ammaestramento per intendere i detti(sayings:dichos) di senno;2Para se conhecer a sabedoria e a instrução; para se entenderem as palavras de inteligência;
2чтобы познать мудрость и наставление, понять изречения разума; Prov.1

Chess: Chess: "L" "Cocos Island" "AB" Jas.1:5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.
Arabic
The vocative case is indicated in Arabic by the particle ya (Arabic: يا‎) placed before a noun. In English translations, this is often translated literally as O instead of being omitted.

"sage" : "Camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the friendly sage-brush" Mark Twain. Roughing It. Ch.3 p.15 see the wole paragraph: "It is an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature, is the "sage-brush." Its foliage is a grayish green, and gives that tint to desert and mountain. It smells like our domestic sage, and "sage-tea" made from it taste like the sage-tea which all boys are so well acquainted with. The sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and grows right in the midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing else in the vegetable world would try to grow, except "bunch-grass." The sage-bushes grow from three to six or seven feet apart, all over the mountains and deserts of the Far West, clear to the borders of California. There is not a tree of any kind in the deserts, for hundreds of miles--there is no vegetation at all in a regular desert, except the sage-brush and its cousin the "greasewood," which is so much like the sage-brush that the difference amounts to little. Camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the friendly sage-brush. Its trunk is as large as a boy's wrist (and from that up to a man's arm), and its crooked branches are half as large as its trunk--all good, sound, hard wood, very like oak."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essay 1.

HISTORY
There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.
I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be–fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.
This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, 'Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.
It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things. Human life as containing this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws, and wide and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of self–reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures — in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius — anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; — because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.
We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal allusions. A true aspirant, therefore, never needs look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but more sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea, further, in every fact and circumstance, — in the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows from mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.
These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.
Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling. Walt Whitman. Prov.1

Chess: "L" "AB" Jas.1:5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.
Arabic
The vocative case is indicated in Arabic by the particle ya (Arabic: يا‎) placed before a noun. In English translations, this is often translated literally as O instead of being omitted.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case"

Hiram Corson: Introduction to the Poetry of Browning:
The Rev. James Byrne, of Trinity College, Dublin, in his lecture on
`The Influence of National Character on English Literature',
remarks of Spenser:  "After that dark period which separated him
from Chaucer, after all the desolation of the Wars of the Roses,
and all the deep trials of the Reformation, he rose on England as if,
to use an image of his own,

     "`At last the golden orientall gate
     Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
     And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate,
     Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
     And hurled his glistering beams through gloomy ayre.'
That baptism of blood and fire through which England passedat the Reformation, raised both Protestant and Catholic to a newness
of life.  That mighty working of heart and mind with which the nation
then heaved throughout, went through every man and woman,
and tried what manner of spirits they were of.  What a preparation
was this for that period of our literature in which man,
the great actor of the drama of life, was about to appear on the stage!
It was to be expected that the drama should then start into life,
and that human character should speak from the stage
with a depth of life never known before; but who could have
imagined Shakespeare?"

And what a new music burst upon the world in Spenser's verse!
His noble stanza, so admirably adapted to pictorial effect,
has since been used by some of the greatest poets of the literature,
Thomson, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and numerous others;
but none of them, except in rare instances, have drawn the music
out of it which Spenser drew.


Academus


A hero from Attica. A sacred area (northwest of Athens) dedicated to him was called the Academy. Plato founded his school there, and his students were called academics.

      

Etymology
"Of a silent district"
The Sun gives off light and heat because it is essentially a giant nuclear reactor that is fusing (burning) hydrogen into helium inside. When hydrogen combines to form helium, it gives off energy. Fusion is a very efficient way of converting mass to energy (light and heat); only a very, very, very tiny amount of the Sun is used up. 3: To receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and equity; 3 ad intellegenda verba prudentiae et suscipiendam eruditionem doctrinae iustitiam et iudicium et aequitatem
3 Pour recevoir des leçons de bon sens, De justice, d'équité et de droiture; 3 um anzunehmen Zucht [mit] Einsicht, [dazu] Gerechtigkeit, Recht und Aufrichtigkeit, 3 para adquirir instrucción y prudencia, justicia, juicio y equidad;[c] 3 per ricevere ammaestramento circa l'agire saggiamente, la giustizia, il giudizio e la diritturalâqach H
Heb 3947

The Sun consumes about 600 million tons of hydrogen per second. (That's 6 x 108 tons.) For comparison, the mass of the Earth is about 1.35 x 1021 tons. This would mean the Sun consumes the mass of the Earth in about 70,000 years.

Dr. Louis Barbier
The temperature of the Sun's core is about 15 million degrees Kelvin or about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.
Yes, it does take light thousands of years to get out of the Sun. The important thing to realize is that the Sun (especially at the center) is quite opaque, that is, light travels through it only slightly better than light travels through a rock. What happens is that light only travels a short distance before it is absorbed. It is then re-emitted, but in a random direction. It eventually random "walks" it's way out of the Sun, but that takes a long time.

Chess: "M" "Ram"
4: To give subtilty to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion.
4 ut detur parvulis astutia adulescenti scientia et intellectus

4 para dar sagacidad a los ingenuos, y a los jóvenes inteligencia y cordura.
4 um Einfältigen Klugheit zu geben, dem jungen Mann Erkenntnis und Besonnenheit.
4 per dare accorgimento ai semplici, conoscenza e riflessione al giovane.


Our Sun is about halfway through the "main sequence" part of its life. During this part, the Sun "burns" hydrogen into helium (fusion), which is what generates the heat and light. The Sun has been doing this for about 5 billion years, so in 13,000 years (15,000 A.D.) there will be no real difference from the energy left now. In about 5 billion more years, the useable hydrogen (not all the hydrogen) will have been converted to helium, and the Sun will start burning helium, and become a red giant. After that the Sun will recollapse down to a white dwarf and last for billions of years more.
Chess : "N" "pan"

5: A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels:
5
audiens sapiens sapientior erit et intellegens gubernacula possidebit


5 Il savio ascolterà e accrescerà il suo sapere; l'uomo con intendimento ne otterrà saggi consigli,
Why the corona is so hot, when the region below it is several orders of magnitude cooler, is one of the open questions in solar physics. Magnetic fields and turbulence in the plasma are certainly involved, but the exact mechanism is not understood. One suggestion is that large numbers of "microflares" are the cause. NASA is developing a mission that should study this problem (and others) called Solar Probe.

Dr. Eric Christian
Chess: "O" "Oir" "OakRidge" "Chicago"(Oak Park)
"O" :Round as Giotto's "O".Said of work that is perfect and complete, but done with little effort.
Oak: I sit beneath your leaves, old oak,
You mighty one of all trees;
Within whose hollow trunk a man
Could stable his big horse with ease. W.H. Davies: The Old Oak Tree.

The Oaks : The "Ladies'Race", one of the classic races of the turf; it is for three-year-old fillies, and is run at Epsom two days alter the Derby. Instituted in 1779 and so called from an estate of the Earl of Derby near Epsom named "The Oaks"
"Occam's Razor & La Oreja de Van Gogh" ?
6: To understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings. 6 animadvertet parabolam et interpretationem verba sapientium et enigmata eorum (de ellos)
6 per comprendere una sentenza e un enigma, le parole dei savi e i loro detti oscuri Prov.1
Chess: "P" "park" "Spots" "Jaguars"

How Much Power Does the Sun Produce? About how much power does the Sun produce? The Sun's output is 3.8 x 1033 ergs/second, or about 5 x 1023 horsepower. How much is that? It is enough energy to melt a bridge of ice 2 miles wide, 1 mile thick, and extending the entire way from the Earth to the Sun, in one second.
Dr. Louis Barbier