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.