$mas Suggestions

If you were thinking of buying Another Kiwi a present but have no idea of his tastes, my sources tell me that what he's really after is a digitised version of ledgers from the Wheatstone Concertina factory, starting in 1834, now available on a CD-ROM from the Horniman Museum.

Presumably a demand exists for this kind of obsessive detail (records of who worked on and signed off on each concertina from the factory; costs of materials, sales records; payments to the employees). Does that worry you? It worries me.

Charles Wheatstone* designed the concertina as an alternative to the accordion** and then kept refining it; the Horniman collection holds several hundred concertinas, documenting all his variant designs.

* Also inventor of Wheatstone's Bridge, intended to link the Isle of Wight to mainland England.
** the Parisian Guild of Annoying Cafe Entertainers had patented the accordion, and charged exorbitant royalties for its use.

Bonus Horniman blogging:
Wheatstone was not the only musically-creative physicist of the time. "Maxwell's Demon" was a new organ pipe, invented by Maxwell for the premiere of Liszt's Faust Symphony. Thomas Young was well on the way to inventing the glockenspiel, only he was side-tracked by his ideas about deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. Meanwhile in Germany, Helmholtz was collaborating with Wagner on a new kind of "stealth tuba" intended to slip past English defenses.

Is it true that Wheatstone's dying wish was for his skin to be tanned and used for the bellows of his last and greatest concertina design, the culmination of his life's work, now held in a locked room at the Horniman and shown only to genuine scholars? I could not possibly comment. Nor could I speculate on the kind of warped patriotism that would cause someone to be tattooed on every covered inch of skin with repetitive images of Queen Victoria without clothes.

Bonus Bonus Horniman blogging:
This stuffed walrus has been voted "Pinniped Most Resembling Geoffrey Gerry Brownlie" for the last eight years running. I have no idea why it is so inflated but according to my provisional theories it was used in an ambitious scheme to smuggle rhubarb into the UK from China and evade the punitive duties midway through the Opium Wars. Either that, or it was on display in the walrus pool at London Zoo to remind the adolescents of the species of the need for regular exercise, until it was moved to the Horniman collection because too many of them were growing up to be chubby-chasers.

Bonus³ Horniman blogging:
Giant Tuba, designed by Lord Kelvin to recapture the British lead in brass-instrument technology. This was after Erskine Childers wrote his espionage novel "The Riddle of the Sounds" to call the public's attention to the threat of German sonic supremacy.

H. Bustos Domecq, 1967 (translated 1976):

"[Jean-Françoise Darracq] opened in Geneva a restaurant exactly like all others, serving dishes in no way different from those of the past: the mayonnaise was yellow, the greens green, the cassata a rainbow, the roast beef red. He was at the point of being dubbed a reactionary when then and there he laid the golden egg. One evening, in perfect calm, with a smile about to flicker across his lips and with that sureness of hand that genius alone commands, Darracq carried out the simple act destined to place him forever at the topmost point of the pinnacle in the entire annals of cookery. He snapped out the lights. There, in that instant, the first tenebrarium was launched."

A bOING bOING contributor, 2009:

"I'm at Opaque, a fancy restaurant in San Francisco in which patrons dine in perfect darkness. [...] In addition to offering a tasty five-course prix fixe menu, Opaque forces us to live without our vision for a few hours — most of us rely on the sense of sight heavily during our daily lives, and we don't really know what it's like to not be able to see a thing."

Evidently the best way of keeping abreast of cultural trends is to read parodic essays from 40-odd years ago.

The connection between Peter Eisenman* and Domecq's chapter on uninhabitable architecture ("The Flowering of an Art") is left as an exercise for the reader.

* Deconstructivist architecture: "Eisenman's focus on 'liberating' architectural form was notable from an academic and theoretical standpoint but resulted in structures that were both badly built and hostile to users. [...] 'By some scale of values [Eisenman] was actually enhancing the reputation of his building by letting it be known that it was hostile to humanity.' "

Gardening with Smut

With Spring well-advanced now and the equinoctial gales finally dying down, the unearthly ichor will be burgeoning within your half-plant half-human grafting experiments, and it is time to think about pruning them.

Using a sharp knife such as the one you use for vivisecting badgers, cut away any heads, torsos, hands or other body parts that have withered during winter. Cut diagonally and smear balsam from the dedaim plant onto the semi-animated stump to staunch the slow, viscid leakage of pale pink fluids, neither blood nor sap.* Decide whether you prefer to direct the growth of the abominable hybrid vertically into a column, or let it spread sideways into an old-fashioned broad espalier. This is also a good time to replace the fertiliser at the base of the root-stock, if last year's body has been drained of all nourishment.

A lot of people think that these morbid grafts will only thrive indoors, roofed over with great sheets of lead and copper, preferably lit by the sanguine light from a fiery globe levitated by infernal power and fed with the never-dying flames of that clime in which the fruits of Thasaidon swell to unearthly size. This is used to be true but with the modern root-stocks they can grow quite comfortably outside, in sunny dry conditions sheltered from the wind, as shown at the top.

Of course this is also the time of year when the pests are proliferating. Last year my Virgin-&-Child graft was flourishing with obscene vitality and I had high hopes for a prize from the Unnatural Necromantic Horticultural Show, but the a-phids sucked the fluids from it practically overnight.

* The stuff stains something awful and is a bugger to get out of your clothes, but an immediate bubble-bath sometimes works.

'Tis the season

Bah humbug. I'm feeling like this already, and it's only the 10th.





Thank god I'm heading to sunny Los Angeles for the New Year.

Of Mice and coffee and booze

A new study shows that drinking coffee will not sober one up in a miraculous fashion As Seen On Teevee.

The animals were given doses of alcohol and caffeine in various combination, and their performance on the maze was compared to others who were given a neutral saline solution.
Alcohol made the animals more relaxed, but less able to avoid the unpleasant shocks.
Animals given caffeine were little better at navigating around the maze, but were more alert and uptight.
In combination alcohol and caffeine appeared to produce relatively alert, relaxed animals that were still incompetent at sidestepping nasty shocks.

The mice did ask for a bit of peace and quiet for Chrissakes. They continued to ask what a person had to do to be left a- fucking- lone

Now, gentlemen if you will just bear with me for a moment

TPM has the lowdown on how Afghanistan is going to be won for the forces of righteousness. Or maybe it's some more puzzling art?

Things I learned from Art Museums #1

I was not previously aware that Hieronymus Bosch invented the Zimmer frame.



However, his ideas on the appearance of armadillos were clearly not informed by first-hand experience.





UPDATE: mikey in comments calls attention to Zimmer-Frame Dude's teapot.

A Seismic Act of Art Conservation

Tyler Green, writer of the finest Modern Art blog out there, Modern Art Notes, is reporting that Richard Serra's landmark Shift has been designated under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act.

Per Green's account:

"Once a property has been designated under Part IV of the Act, a property owner must apply to the local municipality for a permit to undertake alterations to any of the identified heritage elements of the property or to demolish any buildings or structures on the property."

So what does that mean? That Serra's work is safe, which is, as Martha Stewart would say, a very good thing.

Photos by Shawn Micallef

See it on Google Earth here.

End highbrow posting. Discussions of words that rhyme with penis will resume shortly. Ha. Shortly.

For BBBB

A 30-cm pizza topping of carnivorous delight covers 15 km of road in the Wairarapa.

New Zealand Transport Agency contractors on the job said it was a "pretty bloody awful" scene, with animal heads and carcasses among the mess.

In Belgium everyone would assume that it was the latest work from some conceptualist artist.

The Doctor is Out. Way out.

Oh Good Grief!

Ze lunatic fringe of America (also known as a rough 50% of the populace) has a new conspiracy theory to kick about.

Obama hates - wait for it - A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The mayor of an incest farm small town in the rural state of Tennessee has asserted that Obama's speech about Afghanistan was deliberately timed to interrupt the beloved Charles Schultz Christmas classic.

Here's the quote, which he posted on his Facespacetwitterweblog:

"Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it....w...hen the answer should simply be 'yes'...."

Why can't hizzoner use facebook the way god intended - to stalk college interns he works with?

Announcement

In previous lifetimes in the intertuba I was a regular at a political website which appears to have died. *Dances jig then feels sad then dances jig*
At this site various other posters impressed me or made me think that there were Orcs in the world. One who consistently made me laugh has joined the Authors of Riddled. Despite his affection for Manchester United and negative stereotyping of Hobbits I am welcoming Brett to the building. I lied to him about there being no lawn mowing involved so his first missives will probably be a bit grass stained.
I think that we can all learn that time spent reading the fine print is time spent wisely.

Bare faced cheek beats science anyday

Gerrit van der Lingen, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition: "I hope no agreement will be reached. After all, there is no scientific evidence human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous global warming. Actually, the planet has been cooling for the last 10 years while CO2 levels kept on increasing. I call it the greatest scam in human history."

Source
Actually the planet has been zarmeling fot ehr slegin altosah.
Remember the name New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, these bozos are quite active.
Desmog blog tells a bit more about van der Lingen here

No peer-reviewed research on climate change
According to a search of 22,000 academic journals, Van der Lingen has not published any research in a peer-reviewed journal on the subject of climate change. Google scholar shows two articles published in the 1970s. Van der Lingen describes himself as a geologist/paleoclimatologist and climate change consultant.

So the 'East Whangehu Biscuit Makers Monthly' doesn't show up in your search? Well whose fault is that

This does not mean anything about Australians

A Tasmanian man at the centre of a two-day missing persons search in New Zealand has been found drinking in a bar oblivious to the concern surrounding his whereabouts.

Pandering to the Zombie Agenda

A shamble of zombies came together at the end of October for the 2009 Wellington Zombie Walk.
Some were dressed for the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Ball later in the evening -- who can refuse an invitation that includes Regency Dancing and fresh brains? -- hence the Jane Austen costumes in the top frame.

The Obeah-woman is presumably from one of the Caribbean slave plantations of the time. These are never explicitly mentioned in Austen's novels, but are present implicitly, providing the income that sustained her characters' life-styles of cotillions, casual violence, hard drinking and amphetamine-fuelled car chases. So it made perfect sense that a forerunner of vaudou among the slaves might somehow have been brought back to England to spark off the zombie epidemic. I was loath to ask the obeah-woman to confirm this, on account of her dilated pupils.

One of the products grown on these slave plantations was indigo. The indigo trade was perhaps of even greater interest than the salted pineapple trade, because like many other pre-industrial-chemistry dyestuffs (madder, 'whelk purple', woad), the word originally described not so much a colour as a SHUT UP SMUT

Life and art and SPIDER ALERT!!!

A favourite book of mine is Dairy of a Nobody about Mr. Charles Pooter. It's pretty gentle humour but I like it and sympathize with Mr. Pooter.
Now, I find that Pooter is not a nobody anymore.He has a spider transfer apparatus named after him. See it in action here. Or not, for those of the arachnophobic persuasion.

The spiders are collected using a contraption called a 'pooter' which sucks the spider up safely into a container.

BUT

Ten years ago, a team of archaeologists from the University of Bradford carried out a major survey of the nearby Chapel Fell cave.
At the end of each day, they took their equipment to a nearby house to store overnight.
In doing so, they accidently carried with them spiders hiding among the equipment.

One would have thought that the maniacal laughing of the spiders would have alerted the scientists. Possibly they were thinking of twin studies that they would like to be doing.