This here is scarecrow country
Since a few years ago, when I started properly trying to get to know the part of rural Britain where I live, instead of just repeatedly driving from my house to B&Q, Starbucks, Borders and Sainsbury’s and missing all the interesting bits, I’ve taken photographs of around 300 scarecrows – or “mawkins”, as they’re known here in Norfolk. In order to do this, I’ve got off trains before my scheduled stop and made myself late for meetings, almost been run over at least three times, and put my life at risk trespassing on a variety of East Anglian allotments. I’ve snapped scarecrows who look like floating ghosts, scarecrows who look like futuristic horse people from outer space, scarecrows with their own pet scarecrow foxes, chav scarecrows, disco scarecrows, scarecrows with drawn-on gnashing teeth that could haunt your dreams more than any George A Romero film.
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
I’d buy that app.
Fuck it I’ve heard enough, I’m going to make some killer android app that listens to every word you hear and uses Google’s voice recognition shit and some semantic networks and logistic regression crap and fucking starts chirping at you whenever it detects someone is hitting on you, make it look like an incoming call from captain obvious or something. It make take a while to accumulate enough training data to detect every subtle hint but it should pick this one up pretty easily. #
One of the 5,661 comments on From Male Redditors: What are some hints females gave you, but you didn’t get them until after you had your chance?
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Easter ’66
“PBS will never be defunded.”
“Proof:”
All Rite Now
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” (Hunter S. Thompson)
The Talk
This is mostly for Cindy, but it’s for everyone too. Julia Sweeney’s 8 year old daughter started asking questions about sex, and Sweeney soon found herself answering endless questions. Long but good, via the Hairpin.
Okie Noodling
There is nothing like the thrill of catching a 60-pound catfish with your bare hands, and that’s just what Oklahoma fishermen have been doing for hundreds of years. Diving into creeks, rivers and lakes in search of bank-dwelling catfish, the tradition of “noodling” originated as a Native American hunting practice, but has survived as a rural sport with a unique and colorful subculture. ‘Okie Noodling’ is a one-hour documentary which catches the excitement and sense of community that has hooked three Oklahoma families on hand fishing.
I saw this on PBS the other night, and noticed it on Amazon streaming. Keep en eye out for the guy who’s fifty-five, and tell me how old you think he is. Now, if I can find the documentary I watched with the ferret named Oreo Speedwagon.
from the comments
Not sure I agree with your police work there, Joel. The Little People Animal Sounds Zoo and the Little People Zoo are not one and the same. This Little People world is a complex one and not something you want to simply dabble in.
Sheila, if I tell you where the giraffe goes, I’ll have to change my name again.
good morning
This is the first in a series of posts I plan on people who look like animals.
on becoming human
Premodern humans—often described as “archaic Homo sapiens”—were thought to have lived in small, vulnerable groups of closely related individuals. They were believed to have been equipped only with simple tools and were likely heavily dependent on hunting large game. Individuals in such groups would have been much less insulated from environmental stresses than are modern humans. In Thomas Hobbes’s words, their lives were “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” If you need a mental image here, close your eyes and conjure a picture of a stereotypical caveman. But archaeological evidence now shows that some of the behaviors associated with modern humans, most importantly our capacity for wide behavioral variability, actually did occur among people who lived very long ago, particularly in Africa. And a conviction is growing among some archaeologists that there was no sweeping transformation to “behavioral modernity” in our species’ recent past.
(via @longreads)
Throwing keys to a person
Is this ever done without status entering into it?
Pete Shelley: “Homosapien” (1981)
The Order of Myths
A film by Margaret Brown. Trailer:
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Downtrickler
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.
Poe’s Corollary:
It is impossible for an act of Fundamentalism to be made that someone won’t mistake for a parody.
Poe’s Paradox:
In any fundamentalist group where Poe’s Law applies, a paradox exists where any new person (or idea) sufficiently fundamentalist to be accepted by the group is likely to be so ridiculous that they risk being rejected as a parodist (or parody).
From the Annals of Creationism
The Atlantic Wire has a nice write-up on Answers In Genesis and their plans to include both dragons and unicorns in their new “Ark Encounter” theme park:
The group says “yes,” to both, which implies that their creationist theme park will include dinosaurs and unicorns on the Ark. Here’s Answers In Genesis explaining why dinosaurs were on the Ark, although the group prefers to call them “dragons”:
Being land animals, dinosaurs (or dragons of the land) were created on Day Six (Genesis 1:24–31), went aboard Noah’s
Ark (Genesis 6:20), and then came off the Ark into the post-Flood world (Genesis 8:16–19). It makes sense that many cultures would have seen these creatures from time to time before they died out.
And here’s their position on Biblical unicorns:
The biblical unicorn was a real animal, not an imaginary creature. … The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.). … To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demean God’s Word, which is true in every detail.
Frankly, I was a little confused as to their choice of words (i.e., why using the word “dinosaurs” is any less ridiculous than “dragons”), but I’m sure they’ve thought through that semantic argument pretty thoroughly.
Sisu, the Finns’ favorite word
Because it’s long, I have set this video to start at the discussion of sisu; it’s worth watching all the way from the beginning, however.
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The Horn
My friend Lou has rounded the Horn, though she is confined (briefly) to quarters on account of un catarro.
You can read about her voyage to the End of the World here.
spam name
Talitha Refugia.
Father Christmas fucked my pussy (Christmas pussy song)
(thanks, Aaron)
Werner Herzog: What I saw in the cave
Werner Herzog discusses his 3D documentary, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” As recorded by Roger Ebert at the 2010 Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO.
A Thanksgiving Rick & Teel Story
My friends Rick and Teel Sale were in Rabat, Morocco, several decades ago, and while there they visited the gardens of Fort Chellah. The place is vast, and one may wander about in it, among Roman ruins, for a long time without seeing other people. But they came to the edge of a pond and found several naked young women sitting at its edge. There were many broken eggshells floating on the water. Teel stepped forward and asked a woman about the pond and the eggshells. The young beauty told her that she and her friends would be married soon, and the eggs were offerings to the eels–to ensure fertility.
from the comments
Along these lines, I just filled out a lengthy review form for a textbook published by a big publisher of university-level textbooks. The experience left me with the distinct impression that the publisher has not realized the doom that awaits their aims. But–perhaps they asked for opinions because they do see what lies ahead. It’s the students who have changed. They now always occupy several time phases at once and won’t sit still in the way that some books ask them to. In my view the future of publishing lies in youtube and books made as book art artifacts. I’m still a lover of paper, though, and I imagine I will go out that way.
Naomi Harris: America Swings
A friend’s paraphrasing of this episode of WFMU’s radio show Too Much Information from last night:
I was listening to the radio and Benjamen Walker (the host guy) was talking about some photo on the playlist page, and so I glanced over to look at the page I didn’t look at when I opened it two hours earlier. Just then he said to the photographer he was interviewing, “The people in your photos of American swingers don’t look like average Americans; they are, like, 300 pounds overweight, white, kinda crazy and distracted, and, well, really, they look more the Tea Party than any other group of Americans, even if they are crawling around their living rooms having group sex while they watch football on TV and drink beer.” As I was glancing at the photo, the photographer generally confirmed that, yes, the people in her photos were, as a rule, in the Tea Party.
I did not need that. Nooooooo…
The photographer being interviewed is Naomi Harris. If you are over 18, or under 18 with the ability to sense a trick question, you can page through her book, America Swings, at the Taschen site.
Please note that just because you can does not mean that you should. I’m just saying.
new shit has come to light
Hello,
We have received a formal DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice regarding allegedly infringing content hosted on your site. The specific content in question is as follows: (from DMCA notification) “This site has been displaying without permission copies of an image taken from the website of AMTC, Inc. This is a breach of
copyright. Go to: http://www.clusterflock.org/2010/07/actors-models-talent-for-christ.html”
