Disappearing quotes?

There's something I remember reading. It was a quote by Lou Reed on why Lester Bangs had turned on him so hard. Lou said something along the lines that when someone worships you as a god, it can be disappointing when they find out how human you are. It was rare enough for him to speak cordially to the press, much less saying something gracious about a journalist.

As for "something along the lines of" I have no choice but to paraphrase. The actual quote, or the context it came in, is nowhere to be found. Now I'm not sure whether I first read it online or offline, but it seems like something that should be on the internet somewhere or other. But apparently it isn't.

Untold wonders

Lamassu is a deity belonging to Assyrian mythology. As such the figure goes all the way back to the Bronze Age. Lamassu has the body of  a beast, most often depicted as a bull. But with a human head. The deity appears to be involved with the afterlife.

Now the name "Lamassu" also refers to a "Bitcoin ATM", which is apparently something that exists. Such an honor.

Weeks

I was going to write about the self-styled fascism experts who have started crawling out of the woodwork again, but there's no way I can even maintain the necessary interest in them to produce a couple of paragraphs. Here's something that is interesting.

Sunday              Sonntag            Domingo         duminică

Monday             Montag             Lunes              luni

Tuesday             Dienstag           Martes             marţi

Wednesday        Mittwoch          Miércoles        miercuri

Thursday           Donnerstag       Jueves              joi

Friday                Freitag              Viernes            vineri

Saturday            Samstag            Sábado            sâmbătă      

So that's the days of the week in four columns. The first two are from Germanic languages (English and German). The third and fourth are from Romantic languages (Spanish and Romanian.) Patterns largely hold across those subfamilies.

In English most names for weekdays are taken from Norse gods: Tuesday from Tyr/Tiw (war); Wednesday from Odin/Wotan (supreme god); Thursday from Thor (thunder); and Friday from Freya (love). German does the same mostly, although they dethrone Odin and just call Wednesday "midweek." 

Romance languages―and this would hold for French, Italian, etc.―substitute equivalent Roman gods, at least in theory. This is pretty straightforward for Tuesday and Friday. But Jupiter/Jove is honored on Thursday instead of Wednesday even though he's the supreme Roman god. Presumably the thunder connection has something to do with it. And Wednesday goes to the messenger/commerce/trickery god Mercury. On the surface very different from Odin.

Just a curious matter, that's all.

The secret

A little over a week ago I ordered a book through the interlibrary loan system. It hasn't arrived. Apparently it hasn't even moved from the library that has it. 

Yesterday I called my local branch and asked about it. All they could tell me was that it hadn't been sent out. Which I of course knew already. Today I was actually at the library and I talked to a nice and knowledgeable lady at the circulation desk. She didn't know why it hadn't been sent but said she'd call the owning library. No one else had done this.

This exact thing has happened before. What it proves is that the results you get if you know the right person to talk to are very different from those you get if you don't.

Let's bring some color to '25!

 

Henri Matisse drew from eclectic sources. Old enough to remember the first wave of Impressionism in the late nineteenth century, he also knew Greek pottery and statuary, as well as Islamic decoration. And of course he and the Spaniard Pablo Picasso had an ongoing artistic conversation, in spite of their very different temperaments. But in the final effect he was an original. He looked like no one else and there was no one like him.

"The Daisies" is Matisse all over. It's a mature painting, from 1939, and in a few years he'd mostly switch to cut paper. You could break it down into four rough quarters. In the upper left is the nude, a painting within a painting. To contemporary eyes she looks like she's scrolling on her phone, which is both funny and sad. The classical pitcher is also mostly in the upper left. Upper right gives us the flowers of the title, flower that's never too much. The pensive model in the lower left has taken on an entirely red hue, blending in with her chair. And in the lower right is the table that holds up the pitcher and flowers, as well as half a dozen lemons. The table has a very substantive base.

All of them make up a harmonious and inviting whole.

Oh Otmoor

This from Peter Hitchens is a lovely and thought-provoking essay about the mystery at the heart of natural occurrences. It also gave me a bit of new information. Otmoor in Oxford was so squared off by hedges and ditches that it helped inspire Lewis Carroll (or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson if you prefer) to write about the Red Queen's chessboard. That chess game took place in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, of course.

Thus far I haven't found any pictures of the area at the time, which would be mid-nineteenth century. There are contemporary pictures, of course. It doesn't look anything like a chessboard now. It does look very beautiful and distinctive. Yes, Virginia, the English countryside does have a romance of its own.

Nature's whiteboard

We're having a snowfall tonight. Best word for it. More than a flurry, less than a storm, certainly not a blizzard. But a noticeable amount of snow.

Which has an interesting effect. When it snows at night, it's night, so it's still dark. But the sky looks light, due to the snow clouds. Trees in the distance then look darker than they otherwise would. And in this contrast their little movements in the wind become more pronounced. They seem like shadow puppets, of a kind.

Back for more

The 1957 chiller Back from the Dead didn't get too many good reviews when it came out. Fast forward 67 years and look at the B-movie bloggers and unpaid review sites and...people still don't seem to like it much. This is frustrating, because the movie actually does achieve something. But it's perhaps understandable that its virtues would be missed. 

The basic plot is as follows: A married pregnant woman is spending time by the seaside with her husband and older sister. While her husband plays a record of avant-garde electronic music for her she suffers both an epileptic seizure and a miscarriage. When she comes to she is no longer herself, but the reembodied spirit of her husband's first wife. He'd never told the second wife about his first marriage, and there are likely Freudian concepts about repression at play in the script. The first wife was involved in a crypto-Satanic cult that practiced human sacrifice. She gets in touch with the cult leader, as well as her parents. Mom is totally on board with the whole evil thing. The husband, sister, and an architect friend have to try and frustrate her plans and, if possible, bring back the innocent second wife.

Most of the cast was not particularly familiar to me. The possessed wife is played by Peggie Castle, who was something of a sex symbol and looks like one. Marsha Hunt, who plays the older sister, would appear on The Outer Limits a few years later as a woman unfortunate enough to have a queen bee in human form put the moves on her husband. Here she initially seems like a stereotypical fifties fifth wheel, passive and helpless. But she shows surprising amounts of toughness and savvy as the film goes on.

That's the thing. It defies expectations. Back from the Dead has the makings of a bad movie, and a dull bad movie where nothing happens at that. But things do happen, and they happen in slightly offbeat ways that reward attention if you pay it. Also in rather striking California Modern settings. But it might be too subtle for B movie fans. There's very little cheese here, and more of it might have drawn more attention. 

ENDNOTE: If there is anything cheesy it's Otto Reichow's performance as cult leader Maitre Renault. Despite the name he doesn't sound like he's trying to be French. He does sound like he's doing a bad Schwarzenegger in all of his scenes. This would be uncanny since Ahnold was still a child, but stranger things...might have happened.

I live in the future and here's how it doesn't work

Consider Hanna-Barbera.

In The Jetsons all the houses are built atop impossibly tall poles, like off-brand Space Needles. Their residents can engage in FTL jaunts in personalized flying saucers anytime they want. The Jetsons have a robot maid.

Yet George Jetson also has a reassuringly mundane job doing some kind of management with Spacely Sprockets, a company that makes―you guessed it―sprockets. Just as Fred Flintstone was a construction worker who happened to use dinosaurs and mastodons as equipment. What Hanna-Barbera was doing, in essence, was to take a very mid-20th-century kind of prosperity and project it as far into both the future and the past as it could plausibly go. 

Of course from the point of view of the actual (to them) future this seems very quaint. Many markers of the 20th century economy―things like department stores and trains full of business computers―have disappeared with nothing much to replace them. The future has been depopulated of its onetime dreams.

Bach on...

 

Bach on vibraphone. Specifically, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." This gentleman whose hands are the only thing we see of him can play it. I suspect Milt Jackson could have as well, given the classical inclinations of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Of course maybe if Bach had lived a couple of centuries later he would have been a jazzman himself. "That cat with a wig can really lay down a groove."

Doggy night

Out the window I just saw a guy walking two dogs at the same time. They were pretty frisky. Seemed excited to be walking on the snowy sidewalk. Sometimes when a person is walking more than one dog you can gather that they're a professional dog walker. Doubt that's the case here since it's pretty deep into the night. An owner not walking the dogs themselves would likely be asleep.

But some people do walk their own dogs pretty late. Not too long ago I was taking out the trash late at night and this lady was walking her little dog down the sidewalk. Bad tempered thing, it yapped and snapped at me even though I was all the way on the side steps of my building. Now I'm doubly sure this lady wasn't a pro dog walker, since after she passed I could still smell weed in the air.

⭐🐍

It can be fun joining your Western Zodiac sign together with your Eastern Zodiac sign to see what kind of hybrid you get. Mine is "bull dog" which is easy to remember.

Anyway, soon starts the Chinese Year of the Snake. There's an anecdote about that.

A race was held to cross a great river, and the order of the animals in the cycle was based upon their order in finishing the race. In this story, the snake compensated for not being the best swimmer by hitching a hidden ride on the Horse's hoof. When the horse was about to cross the finish line, the snake jumped out, scaring the horse, and thus edging it out for sixth place.

I guess you could call this cheating. I probably would. But it's also kind of ballsy. If you're a snake there's a certain risk inherent in freaking out a horse.

Put off

Late last week I saw a flier pasted up at a bus shelter. For a political group. It talked about countering Trump, but that's not the big thing. At the end it said something like, "Please mask. Masks will be provided."

They'll be provided. That's nice.

Is the left suicidal? Because that's where this new model citizen―the kind of person who can't think of anything worse than spreading germs―comes from. And outside of that everyone else has moved on. It's as much of a drag on outreach and organizing as the whole idpol thing, of which it's probably an outgrowth.

D'oh!

Who was Homer? The question will almost certainly never be answered, and might in fact be unanswerable. It's hard to imagine any documents or remains turning up that will even provide a list of candidates. From our perspective Iron Age Greece was a long time ago. Long, long, loooooong time. If things weren't properly recorded there's not much we can do about it now.

Which in a way makes it even more incredible that the Iliad and Odyssey have survived all this time and inspired so many. Whoever he, she, or they (as in multiple people) were, the author could scarcely have dreamed that their work would survive multiple collapses and rebuildings of civilization.

It's been a long long gag

Due to a number of consolidations, nearly all newspaper syndicated comics can be found on one of two websites: Comics Kingdom and GoComics. GoComics is the online presence of the Andrews McMeel Universal syndicate. It posts the daily newspaper comics on the same page as all the syndicate's political cartoonists, as well as what are essentially webcomics never intended to be printed anywhere. 

Someone a while ago apparently decided to troll them on this. Thus comedy writer John Scully created The Comic Strip That Has a Finale Every Day. Yes, you can check the archives. No you won't see anything different.

Despite the "every day" in the title Scully apparently stopped adding technically new strips last January. Either he got tired of the joke or GoComics finally put their foot down on what they were willing to pay for.

Hello out there

Would not have guessed this. According to reports I keep hearing about, at least half of everybody―and maybe a good deal more than that―don't have an inner monologue. In the abstract I guess I can see how other ways of thinking make sense, could have advantages. But the thing about having an inner voice is that I didn't set out to develop it. As long as I can remember it's just been there. 

What's it sound like? Pretty much, you're looking at it. Or an edited version, at least.