New Yorker Cartoon

New Yorker Cartoon

Having read that brilliant book myself, I am still expecting the wrath of all the gods mentioned there....

TLS: Ancient Meals and Recipes

* Meals and Recipes from Ancient Greece by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti is divided into two parts: in the first, she offers a background to ancient eating and drinking habits, based on classical sources; in the second, the study is put to practical use, in the form of recipes. Ms Ricotti tells us that, "to begin with, in the Iliad, men sat down to eat . . . chunks of beef roasted over an open fire"; at the time of the Trojan War, she believes, no other cooking methods were known. "Black wine was served in expensive cups."
We know what expensive cups are, but what is "black wine"? Ms Ricotti states that it was "far stronger than today's wine" and that Western civilization required the development of a diluted version. Only the Scythians continued with the hard stuff, hence the direction to one's merchant: "make it like the Scythians". Being partial to a drop of both the Scythian and the non-Scythian, we wondered how it was produced, how it might have tasted, what exactly "far stronger" means. Ms Ricotti does not say.
Still, the table is laid and dinner must be served. We turned to a recipe for "Zeno's Lentil Soup", consisting of 1 lb lentils, 2 litres broth, a chopped leek, carrot and onion tossed in oil; add honey and "12 coriander seeds". It's probably delicious - in fact, we know it is because we make it all the time (using parsley instead of coriander). Zeno never enters our minds. The same goes for the Greek recipes for fried shrimp (cook in olive oil for 6-7 minutes), lobster, bream and kid goat. The last, attributed to Apicius, we are happy to pass on: "Put it in the oven, roast it and serve it". The wisdom of the ancients.
With pork, Ms Ricotti finally produces a classic: Vulva Eiectita, "the vulva of a sow that had miscarried". But she turns out to be too delicate for the delicacy, dashing our hopes of finding any sow's vulva in the local agora.
"Even if we wanted to try it, which I doubt, it would be impossible given mechanized meat-processing sytems", she writes, ignoring both the hardiness of the modern palate and the potential of organic farming. The first reader to send in a recipe for sow's vulva will receive a copy of Meals and Recipes from Ancient Greece (Getty, Pounds 15.99).

TLS: on ants

excerpt from Eat my wings by Matthew Cobb
review of SIX LEGS BETTER. A cultural history of myrmecology. By Charlotte Sleigh. 320pp. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. $55

For the writers of the Old Testament, ants held a particularly important place as an exemplar for human behaviour: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise", reads Proverbs 6: 6. Repeatedly, comparisons have been made between human society and the scurrying activity of insect societies. For the pioneer Dutch entomologist Jan Swammerdam (1637-80), viewing ants through his mystical Christian glasses, life in the ant nest was positively idyllic: "love and unanimity, more powerful than punishment or death itself, preside there and all live together in the same manner as the primitive Christians anciently did, who were connected by fraternal love, and had all things in common". Modern myrmecologists would see things very differently, but their views are probably equally tinged by their surrounding culture. Contemporary scientists argue that behind the superficial cooperation and order of the ant nest lurk powerful conflicting interests between the queen and the workers, an ageist division of labour, and complex behaviours that emerge out of very simple rules. No love, no unanimity, but selfish genes and conflict.
How we got from there to here, from Christianity to conflict, via the twentieth century, is the subject of Charlotte Sleigh's fascinating account of the changing shape of our vision of ants. Part history of science, part history of culture, Six Legs Better uses the history of myrmecology as a focus for a sweeping survey of the interaction between science and culture through some of the decisive decades in the development of both expressions of human activity.

Слова

Романтики - это люди, у которых любовь случается чаще, чем секс.

Мужчины делятся на козлов и баранов.
Бараны - это мужчины, которые плохо разбираются в женской психологии.
А козлы - которые разбираются слишком хорошо.

Матроса называют человеком только когда он за бортом.

Нас утро встречает рассолом!

Инструкция - это бумага, которую обычно читают в двух случаях:
1. Когда нечего читать.
2. Когда уже все сломано.

Молдавские мальчики уже к 12 годам могут самостоятельно выполнять
евроремонт. Именно к этому времени у них окончательно формируется
мастерок.

Хороший асфальт на дороге не валяется!!!

LRB: Letter to Editor

Saving the World
From Ken Worpole

Although Andrew O’Hagan doesn’t mention them, dead human bodies are also technically waste, and for the past 150 years have been subject to much the same regulatory frameworks and strategies for disposal (LRB, 24 May). Burial and cremation are simply different terms for landfill and incineration, similarly enacted beyond the city limits where disposal creates less anxiety and less environmental harm.
In the early 20th century town planners were among the most fervent advocates of cremation, fearing that towns and cities would eventually be surrounded by a ‘white belt’ of cemetery land, separating town from country. Some 61 per cent of public open space in the London Borough of Newham is still made up of cemetery land (as is much of Queens seen from the A Train that goes from Manhattan out to Kennedy Airport). Cremation saved the day but at some psychic cost, as well as contributing to the ‘toxic canopy’ that O’Hagan describes.
As with the removal of all other waste, public opinion and professional expertise are turning against incineration, though cremation still accounts for some 70 per cent of disposals in the UK. The Department for Constitutional Affairs recently established a working party to draw up guidelines and forms of accreditation for the growing number of ‘green’, ‘natural’ or ‘woodland’ burial sites (the terms are confusingly interchangeable), where bodies are disposed of with minimal environmental damage. The owners and managers of a number of these sites claim that they will be returned to publicly accessible woodland within three or four generations, leaving no trace of former use. This is the zero waste option.
However, ecological burial marks a major shift in public attitudes. Most cultures have traditionally regarded burial places as hallowed ground in perpetuity, places of permanent memorialisation and public ritual. The question which then arises, as O’Hagan reminds us in regard to waste in general, is how to commemorate an absence? A number of urbanists and landscape architects are currently puzzling how best to create places of public inscription and memory in contemporary towns and cities: a presence of the dead at ‘the table of the living’ when those who are to be remembered are not only located elsewhere but have effectively been recycled.
Ken Worpole
London N4

and the summer is here

A T-Shirt that can be easily converted into a poker table on a beach!

Image du Jour

Le Poids des Mots
Photo by Quentin Bertoux

To be a baker's boy...

from review by Bee Wilson of
Good Bread is Back by Steven Laurence Kaplan

To be a baker's boy in eighteenth- century Paris must have been pretty close to hell. You were effectively a slave, both to your master and to the intricate demands of sourdough fermentation. The working "day" began close to midnight.
Wearing rough, uncomfortable underwear made from old flour sacks, you were forced to knead as much as 200 lb of dough at a time, using nothing but your hands and -in desperation -your feet. This kneading took place not once but many times over the night, usually in a clammy cellar too dark for you to see what you were doing, and so hot that the dough sometimes melted before it had risen. The baker's boy in charge of kneading was known as le geindre, the groaner, on account of the blood-curdling noises he made as he worked. When you were finally granted rest, sometime in the morning, you were obliged to sleep in the blinding heat of the bakery. After three hours, you were forced to wake up again, to minister to the sourdough starter, which, like a newborn child, required round-the-clock feeding. In 1788, the journalist Louis-Sebastien Mercier described how unhealthy bakers' apprentices looked. Unlike butchers' boys, who were robust and ruddy, bakers' boys were flour-coated wretches, huddling in doorways, haggard and white.
All this misery was required to serve the panimania of the French. Bread signified more to the French than it did to other nations. It was not just subsistence; it was a sacred matter, as well as an affair of state. The Communion wafer was holy, but so was the ordinary white sourdough loaf of everyday life. To turn a loaf upside down was considered bad luck, akin to sacrilege. Before eating, it was customary to trace the sign of the cross over the bread using a knife. In 1789, the Encyclopedie methodique noted that "most people" in France "believe(d) they would die of hunger if there (were) no bread" -even if other food was available.
The "tyranny of bread", as Steven Laurence Kaplan has it, tied the French together. Kaplan, who probably knows more about French bread than anyone alive, does not make enough, perhaps, of how the French approach to carbohydrates differed from that of their neighbours. By 1789, the Italians were swapping the crustiness of bread for the slipperiness of pasta. Across the channel, the British were abandoning bread in favour of sugar. During the eighteenth century, British sugar consumption increased eightfold, to 16 lb per person per year. With all these sweet calories, bread was no longer so vital, especially since much British bread now came adulterated with alum, an astringent chemical which could make white porous loaves out of poor quality flour. In France, though, bread remained relatively pure -and essential. Life without bread was unthinkable. To have "lost the taste for bread" was synonymous with losing the will to live. By the end of the nineteenth century, the average Frenchman was still consuming close to a kilo of bread per day. And "bread" for the French had extremely stringent and precise connotations, well crusted with an alveolated crumb, kneaded from white flour and made by a slow and arduous process of fermentation and baking. All consumption has its costs. While the cost of Britain's sweet tooth was the slave-driven sugar colonies, the cost of France's passion for bread was the terrible life of the baker....

TLS on Vollmann's latest book

excerpts from Around the sun by J. L. Heilbron

review of UNCENTERING THE EARTH. Copernicus and "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres". William T. Vollmann. 302pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Pounds 18.99. -
978 0 297 84568 3. US: Norton. $15.95. - 978 0 393 32918 6.

In The Postmodern Condition (1989), Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote: "The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training of minds . . . is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so". His prediction that knowledge acquisition and mind training would part company appears to be confirmed at Harvard, the world's leading university, where, according to its current President, Derek Bok, many of its seniors graduate without being able to write well or reason clearly. William T. Vollmann's Uncentering the Earth would fit perfectly into a curriculum for underachieving undergraduates. It conveys no worthwhile reliable information, assumes readers with no capacity for reasoning, and insinuates that a trained mind is a wasted one. The series in which Vollmann's book appears seems directed to such a readership. It rests on the postmodern premiss that books about science are all the better if written by non scientists.
...Why does his failure matter? Vollmann is an accomplished writer with a large and devoted following; Uncentering the Earth will be read. Harvard graduates and others unable to reason will come away mistakenly thinking that they have learned something worthwhile. Those who realize that they have gained nothing may lose more. They may conclude that science, even elementary astronomy, is too deep a mystery for ordinary minds.

Moscow, the most expensive city...

in the world for the employees of the multinational corporations for the second year in a row.

Le Monde 20 Juin 2007

MOSCOU est toujours en 2007, pour la seconde année consécutive, la ville la plus chère du monde pour le personnel des multinationales, selon le classement publié, lundi 18 juin, par le cabinet Mercer Human Resource Consulting. Londres et Séoul arrivent respectivement au deuxième et troisième rang.
« Il y a eu des évolutions importantes dans le classement depuis 2006. Elles sont principalement dues aux fluctuations des taux de change – en particulier la faiblesse du dollar américain et le renforcement de l’euro », explique Rebecca Powers, de Mercer. L’appréciation de la monnaie unique a ainsi contribué à faire grimper la plupart des capitales européennes dans le palmarès. Copenhague, première ville européenne de la liste, gagne deux places (6e), de même que Paris (13e), Amsterdam grimpe de 16 places (25e), Athènes de 30 places (29e) et Barcelone de 25 places (31e). En revanche, New York et Los Angeles perdent respectivement 5 et 13 places et sont reléguées à la 15e et la 42e place. Dubaï et Abou Dhabi sont descendus dans le classement en raison de l’arrimage de la monnaie locale au dollar.
Pékin et Shanghaï, qui occupent respectivement le 20e et 26e rang, restent loin des villes les plus chères. Plusieurs explications à cela. D’abord, au cours des douze derniers mois, le Yuan s’est dévalorisé d’environ 6 % par rapport à l’euro. Ensuite, le marché immobilier est demeuré stable avec une offre conséquente de logements de qualité. Enfin, l’inflation a été contenue.
Asuncion, la capitale du Paraguay, reste la moins chère des 143 villes étudiées pour la cinquième année consécutive. Ce classement utilisé par les sociétés internationales et les gouvernements compare le coût de 200 produits et services (logement, transport, nourriture, habillement et loisirs). Le loyer mensuel moyen pour un appartement non meublé, haut de gamme, avec deux chambres atteint 3 114 euros à Tokyo, contre 3 036,8 euros à Moscou, 2 952,36 à Londres, comparés à 2 000 euros à Paris. Le café, service compris, coûte l’équivalent de 4,64 euros àMoscou, 4,21 euros à Athènes, comparés à 2,3 euros dans une brasserie parisienne. Pour un compact disc, il faut débourser 22 euros à Amsterdam, 18,85 euros à Moscou,
16,99 euros dans la capitale française et seulement 13,23 euros à New York.

TLS: On Typing Monkeys

From Haunted technology
by Phil Baker
a review of THE IRON WHIM. A fragmented history of typewriting. By Darren Wershler-Henry. 344pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. $29.95;

Sooner or later, Wershler-Henry observes, "anyone writing about typewriting has to deal with the monkeys": the monkeys, that is, who will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. They appear to derive from a 1909 book on probability by the French mathematician Emile Borel, who invented the image of the "dactylographic monkey" to illustrate a mathematical proposition named Kolmogorov's Zero-One Law. According to zero-one law, Borel explained, a typewriting monkey would eventually reproduce every single book in the Bibliotheque nationale. Typing monkeys have had their niche in the mathematical imagination ever since. Sometimes they reproduce the Library of Congress, and in a 1940 short story by Russell Maloney, "Inflexible Logic", the British Library. Overhearing a man explain that six chimpanzees would eventually write all the books in the British Museum, a Mr Bainbridge sets out to experiment.
The experiment works almost too well, with the monkeys producing John Donne's prose, the memoirs of Queen Marie of Romania and a monograph on marsh grasses. It remains for his sobering mathematical friend, Mallard, to bring him back to earth: "These chimpanzees will begin to compose gibberish quite soon", he predicts. "It is bound to happen. Science tells us so."
More soberingly still, a physics professor at Yale, William R. Bennett, has calculated that if a trillion monkeys typed ten random characters a second, it would still take a trillion times longer than the universe has been in existence just to produce the sentence, "To be or not to be, that is the question". Moving from calculation to experiment, The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, in existence since 2003 with a hundred monkeys typing at a vastly accelerated speed, has produced just nineteen letters from The Two Gentlemen of Verona after 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey years: "Valentine. Cease to 1dor:eFLPoFRjWK78aXz . . . ".
An enterprising experiment that involved real monkeys produced even more confounding results, not least because "they get bored and they shit on the keyboard rather than type", but there was method in its madness. It was intended to underline the difference between machines and non-metaphorical animals, demonstrating the perils of analogy, the gap between the ideal and the real, and the irreducible otherness of other species. In the words of its designer, Geoff Cox, "monkeys aren't reducible to a random process".

Eco-profitable

Ecological can also mean "profitable". More and more products are being labeled as "eco-friendly", which makes them even more profitable.

Photo by CHRISTOPHE MAOUT

Made in China

In Chinese province Shanxi, a son of a local Party chairman kept 31 slaves at his brick factory. These men were not only malnourished, locked up, they were not allowed to wash themselves.

Climbing the Everest

Even the handicapped can now climb the Everest...

California Sea Floor

The sea floor of the Monterey Bay off the California coast is home to many exotic creatures. The images arrayed here come from “The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss" (University of Chicago Press, 2007), by Claire Nouvian, a French journalist and film director.

Daniel Scheffer "The Human Comedy"

Saturday is usually devoted to art, and today was the day to visit Tabla Rasa in Brooklyn, where "The Human Comedy" The Art of Daniel Scheffer was presented in a small room with the artist at hand to discuss his works which are all laden with literary and Biblical allusions. The artist claimed complete ignorance of the art of stop animation, but some of his friends have animated his work. For some reason, the artist maintains that the title Human Comedy is William Saroyan's, and not Honoré de Balzac's. Well...

Photos by Valera Meylis

Boston Street

Photos by Valera Meylis

Family Portraits

A victim of kidnapping by the american agents in Milan and torture in Egypt, Abou Omar with his wife, or so we are told :)

Denmark

Somebody in Copenhagen was having too much fun :)

Poem du jour

Nick Laird
The Immigration Form

Are you now or have you ever been
skilled with silkworm gut or boric lint?
How intimate are you with breathing

through a Carbolic Chinese Twist? Using
the four-hand lift or bamboo splints?
Are you now or have you ever been

conversant, properly, with pain?
Bandages, assorted. Tincture Eucalyptus.
How intimate are you with breathing

through artificial respiration?
There is no time to get assistance.
Are you now or have you ever been

in want of courage or direction?
Cut the body down at once:
how intimate are you with breathing

life into cadere, the Latin swoon
beyond cadaver and the cadence?
Are you now or have you ever been?

How intimate are you with breathing?

Graduation Ceremony at the Cooper Union

Photos by Valera Meylis

Poem du jour

Talking to Myself
by Sue Butler

You are sitting in the shade of lindens, by the dried-up well;
I recognize it all, the un-manned halt, the single track,
steppe grass smouldering sullenly. I still have that plaid jacket,
that rucksack, that coin you have in your pocket: a single rouble
cast in the year I, or should I say we, were born,
given to us as a parting gift, for luck.

A cobbler in Kharkov thought me mad when I paid him
to make a hole in it. He threaded wire through
and soldered a loop just big enough to take the bootlace
he let me have for three cigarettes. He even helped me
tie it round my neck. Some days its power is strong
but it is not to be relied on.

Kissed frogs stay frogs. We catch hepatitis in Pskov. Dare I tell you
we never have a baby? You look up as if you have heard me,
smile at yourself for thinking the unthinkable -no,
at garrulous sparrows bathing in the dust. You will regret
your disregard for clothes, regret cutting your own hair.

At dinner parties you will make people glad
they secured a house and family. At christenings
they will take your silver, but seat you far enough away
not to breathe wanderlust on their child. Not to tell its siblings
of the ten hot hours waited here, then two days
on a hard-class seat; how you noticed wolves and hovering
hawks in a view famous for being oppressive, unchanging.

Northwest Airlines

fresh out of restructuring sent out a new bulletin, announcing a new international non-stop service from Detroit to Dusseldorf and Brussels and from Hartford to Amsterdam. Hartford??? HARTFORD? Are there that many people who can even point Amsterdam on a map in Hartford? I love Hartford to pieces, Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy lived there, but to fly directy from Hartford to Amsterdam?

Damien Hirst

British artist Damien Hirst revealed his latest work of art at the White Cube Gallery in London, June 1, 2007. "For the Love of God" is a life-size cast of a human skull in platinum and covered by 8,601 pave-set diamonds weighing 1,106.18 carats. The single large diamond in the middle of the forehead is reportedly worth $4.2 million alone. Hirst financed the project himself, and estimates it cost between 10 and 15 million. Of course, it will cost someone a pretty penny to own the work: It's priced at $99 million. But given the cultlike following for Hirst's previous works -- and corresponding financial takings -- some hedge fund manager, and closet Hirst fan, may shell out the cash for the diamond-crusted skull.
(Prudence Cuming Associates/Reuters)