Wonderful Scott Siskind meditation on San Francisco as the city at the end of time.
More on South Korea's angry feminists. Interesting that cutting their hair very short has become a symbol of women who reject dating, marriage, and childbearing.
Moche mural of two-faced men unearthed in Peru. Moche iconography is wonderful, but we have very little surviving myth or folklore to use in interpreting it, and it is very hard to reconstruct myths from images. So nobody has any idea what these represent.
A first edition of Copernicus' De revolutionibus is going to be auctioned later this spring, one of only 277 known. Could be yours for around $2.5 million.
Delightful narrative by Michael Benanav, chronicling his journey through the Himalayan foothills on the track of an old Indian folktake (NY Times)
Preserved botanical compositions from Flower Press Studio.
The House of the Vetti at Pompeii has reopened after a 20-year restoration, and now women will be admitted to the rooms with pornographic paintings. Progress!
Winners of the British Wildlife Photography Contest.
Corsican wild cats, long known to natives as the "cat-fox", are confirmed as a separate species. Amazing that they could have survived independently of domestic cats, which have bred with and swamped most wildcat species in Europe. Maybe they have some quirk of mating behavior that excludes other cats?
In the Netherlands, the government has gone full bore on fighting climate change and nitrogen emissions, which has included plans to restrict livestock and close thousands of farms; this is what led to last year's protests. Now a newly formed farmers' party has just become the largest in the upper house of Parliament, with the sole purpose of fighting those changes. People support environmentalism when it dovetails with other things they care about, but not when it seems to go against rural tradition.
X-ray analysis shows that most of the obsidian used by ancient Native North Americans came from a single source, Obsidian Cliff at Yellowstone. This includes the amazing bifaces found at Hopewell sites in Ohio. (NY Times, JSTOR) Interesting that, so far as I know, no modern Indian nation has any folklore about Obsidian Cliff; obsidian objects are widely considered to be spiritually potent and are part of many medicine bundles, but nobody's lore references the source.
One of my odd little interests is people who fake their age and go back to high school. The NY Times reports on a 29-year-old Koren American woman whose lawyer said "Recently divorced and far away from her family in South Korea, she was trying to recreate the sense of safety she had felt as a student."
The radical career of Quaker agitator Benjamin Lay, a pioneering abolitionist whose constant protests helped persuade the Pennsylvania Quakers to begin censuring slave owners in 1758.
While others are remembering the 20th anniversary of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and all that followed, Nicholas Kristoff chooses to remember something else Bush did: PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which somebody once calculated has saved 25 million lives. I remember trying to tell my liberals friends in those days that Bush had a great program for AIDS in Africa and being met with disbelief, but nobody is all good or all bad. (NY Times video; wikipedia)
Fan fiction is huge, however you measure it. So far as I am concerned, that's great; telling your own version of the story is a wonderful thing. But why are fan faction writers constantly demanding respect from outsiders? Stop caring what other people think, and just do your thing.
At the New Yorker, the story of "Afro-Cuban writer" Hache Carrillo, who, after his death, turned out to be Detroit-born Herman Glenn Carroll. Carroll seems to have been a serial inventor of lives and personas, who lied about everything, but his novel Losing My Espanglish sounds to me like an amusing take on identity and its permutations rather than a serious attempt to fool people. Maybe one day we'll stop caring who people are and just read their books.
Ukraine Links
Artilleryman Thomas Theiner has two Twitter threads about shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons that will tell you everything you wanted to know about them, with cool pictures and short videos. (First on warheads, second on attack paths and armor.)
And here Theiner lays out NATO doctrine for attacking fortified lines like the ones Russia has constructed in southern Ukraine. He makes it sound like this would be no problem for NATO or anyone else with a few thousand attack planes, but I doubt that Ukraine can do anything like what he describes.
NATO countries are finally transferring their old MIG-29 jets to Ukraine.
Igor Girkin says Putin should stop talking about the war because everything he says sounds lame and weak. "Tell the president to stay quiet and talk less about his ill-fated nose."
Ukraine claims that a drone attack on a rail yard at Dzhankoy in Russion-occupied Crimea destroyed kalibr missiles on their way to the fleet at Sevastapol. If so, that points to major Russian failures of both air defense and operational security.
Twitter thread on the fate of the Alga battalion of volunteers from Tatarstan, which was shot up as Russia withdrew from Kherson and then thrown into the meat grinder at Vuhledar; source says in that battle "the battalion was put down almost completely."
Interesting that cutting their hair very short has become a symbol of women who reject dating, marriage, and childbearing.
ReplyDeleteWhat's so interesting about it? It's basically the equivalent of American men growing their hair very long in the 60s and 70s - defiance of the way society expects them to wear their hair as an expression of defiance of the status quo with which they disagree. Or less recently, it's like 1920s women bobbing their hair, wearing trousers, and riding bicycles.
Korea has long had incredibly strong expectations based in gender, particularly so for women, and those expectations haven't faced the kind of modern erosion that American gender norms have in the past century. Long hair is still viewed in Korea as a necessary component of "femininity", and thus rejecting long hair is a symbolic rejection of the entire gender norm imposed upon women.
If being a woman in Korea is going to result in the gross mistreatment they face, many are going to choose to become "less womanly". This is not only a symbolic act of protest and defiance, but also a practical act of directly repelling the men who want to control them - in the same way many western lesbians traditionally made themselves appear "masculine" in order to repel men who found such looks unattractive.
Corsican wild cats, long known to natives as the "cat-fox", are confirmed as a separate species. Amazing that they could have survived independently of domestic cats, which have bred with and swamped most wildcat species in Europe. Maybe they have some quirk of mating behavior that excludes other cats?
ReplyDeleteWell, they have a lot of factors that seem to be obviously contributing.
First, habitat - they live:
1) ...in very steep and rugged mountain terrain...
2) ...that is very heavily forested...
3) ...on an island...
4) ...which is 50-100 miles away from mainland Europe (and 7 miles away from Sardinia)...
5) ...with a very low human population density (~28 inhabitants / km²)...
6) ...in very remote and isolated areas far from human settlement.
On top of that, they are:
A) ...strictly nocturnal...
B) ...exceptionally reclusive, and...
C) ...seemingly extremely few in number.
I'm not sure that you even NEED a quirk of mating behavior to explain their situation with all that working against the idea of interbreeding. There could easily be extremely little geographical overlap with domestic cat ranges, making encounters rare.
And even where there is overlap, the "cat-fox" may simply be far too skittish and elusive, going out of their way to avoid encounters entirely. (I suppose this could count as an indirect form of "quirk of mating behavior"?)
And there even may be other factors, such as dangers in their habitat which they can cope with but which domestic cats are unsuited to handle (Corsica has foxes, boars, weasels, a variety of large birds of prey, etc - and who knows what kinds of parasites, diseases, etc). It's pretty hard to interbreed if one party has an exceptionally low life expectancy in an area.
X-ray analysis shows that most of the obsidian used by ancient Native Americans came from a single source, Obsidian Cliff at Yellowstone. This includes the amazing bifaces found at Hopewell sites in Ohio. (NY Times, JSTOR) Interesting that, so far as I know, no modern Indian nation has any folklore about Obsidian Cliff; obsidian objects are widely considered to be spiritually potent and are part of many medicine bundles, but nobody's lore references the source.
ReplyDeletePresumably the obsidian moved about as a trade good - would it actually make sense for peoples living in places like Ohio to have established lore about the origin of something they obtained exclusively from trade, likely through a chain of many intermediaries?
I assume there are other similar cases - maybe wampum / cowrie shells moving from the east coast inland? - which exhibit much the same situation? People clearly would have valued them, but not known much about where they came from other than 'far away' or 'somewhere in the .