Australia: It’s like the United States, on meth.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Australia: It’s like the United States, on meth.
I confess — I sometimes find Stephen Colbert’s schtick wearing. But other times…whoa, this is beautiful. He got stood up by a musical guest, Daft Punk, so he complains about it bitterly and hilariously.
Ooops, stuffed it below the fold because the stupid videos are on autoplay. Why do people configure their videos that way? Are they just incompetent?
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival seems to be the place to go in early August. I can’t make it this year, but I’m trying to talk my wife into taking a vacation (I know, what’s that?) next year, and taking a little journey from Oxford up through the north of England and into Scotland and just relaxing with this sort of thing. Here’s the kind of event going on this year:
See? Relaxing.
It’s not the Koh-I-Noor or the Empress Eugenie Brooch or whatever my wife is wearing right now, it’s this:
It’s a small, broken fossil shell, collected from a fossil outcrop and transported 110 kilometers to a hole in the ground in Italy. Close inspection reveals that before it was broken, there was a pattern of abrasion in one spot that suggests a hole had been drilled in it and a loop of sinew threaded through it. Although most of it has been worn away by time, bits of material in microscopic pits on its surface reveal that once, this shell had been painted with red ochre.
It doesn’t sound like much. But then, what makes it precious is the burden of antiquity it carries: it’s about 47,000 years old, and it was made by Neandertals.
A few Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites preserve exotic objects with no obvious functional role and striking visual appearance such as quartz crystals, fossils, shells, and natural objects mimicking human or animal shapes. These are interpreted as the first evidence for the ability to distinguish ordinary from exotic items, to create conscious cultural taxonomies, and/or to detect iconicity in the natural world. Some argue these sporadic finds would have prompted the mental bridge between referent and referrer thus igniting the creation of symbolic material cultures. Although this possibility cannot be discarded, three reasons may favor the interpretation of the Aspa marginata from Fumane as a pendant, i.e. an object conceived to be suspended for visual display body through threading or stringing. The attention put to uniformly cover the outer shell surface with good quality red pigment suggests that this action may have been performed to make the object suitable for visual display. The wear detected on the inner lip, made of overlapping groups of striations oriented perpendicular to the shell main axis, is consistent with a sustained friction produced by a cord rich in abrasive particles, such as sinew. The absence of pigment on the shell fracture is most consistent with this item being used as a pendant.
It’s art. Very, very old art, made by a people who are completely extinct today, from a culture of which we have almost no knowledge, just these lost scraps with all context lost. That also adds great value to the object, that it is such a tiny fragment of knowledge, that it reminds us of how little we actually know about these long-gone people. Tens of thousands of years from now, if anyone is going through our decayed rubbish heaps, they aren’t going to find the Mona Lisa, a well-preserved space shuttle, or sheet music from a Beethoven symphony — they’re going to find a broken plastic toy from a McDonald’s Happy Meal, or a nicely symmetrical fragment of a concrete traffic bollard, and I suspect it will be regarded as a great and rare treasure then, too.
I also just find it wonderful to contemplate — that over 40,000 years ago, our relatives found enough stability and security in their communities that they had time to express themselves, and that they naturally exercised their minds and hands to create art, and that they worked to adorn themselves.
Peresani M, Vanhaeren M, Quaggiotto E, Queffelec A, d’Errico F (2013) An Ochered Fossil Marine Shell From the Mousterian of Fumane Cave, Italy. PLoS ONE 8(7): e68572. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0068572
A number of valuable paintings were stolen from a Rotterdam museum by a ring of Romanian criminals.
The stolen works have an estimated value of tens of millions of dollars if they were sold at auction. Thieves took Pablo Picasso’s 1971 "Harlequin Head"; Claude Monet’s 1901 "Waterloo Bridge, London" and "Charing Cross Bridge, London"; Henri Matisse’s 1919 "Reading Girl in White and Yellow"; Paul Gauguin’s 1898 "Girl in Front of Open Window"; Meyer de Haan’s "Self-Portrait" of around 1890; and Lucian Freud’s 2002 work "Woman with Eyes Closed."
They’ve been found.
A Romanian museum official said Wednesday that ash from the oven of a woman whose son is charged with stealing seven multimillion-dollar paintings — including a Matisse, a Picasso and a Monet — contains paint, canvas and nails.
…
Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, director of Romania’s National History Museum, told the Associated Press that museum forensic specialists had found “small fragments of painting primer, the remains of canvas, the remains of paint” and copper and steel nails, some of which pre-dated the 20th century.
“We discovered a series of substances which are specific to paintings and pictures,” he said, including lead, zinc and azurite.
You are permitted to cry a little bit.
Sunday night, I suggested names for sequels to Sharknado…and this was one of them!
Looks awesome. Although, I have to confess that my favorite at that link was “Sharknado 2: Aftersharks”. Heh. Aftersharks. Get it?
(Please, Syfy, don’t make any of these. It’s just a joke. Someday I’d like to see some intelligent science fiction on the television, and you aren’t helping.)
Millennials are those people born between 1980 and 2000 — an arbitrary block of time containing many diverse people (including most of my students!), but because we’ve got a label, we get to stereotype them. And isn’t that just a solid indictment of the whole principle of stereotyping right there, that we can do it over such a meaningless distinction?
What it’s really about, as Matt Bors explains, is providing us old people with reasons to complain about those young people, which is a way we geezers try to boost our self-esteem.
Over at The Friendly Atheist, Terry Firma points out that today is the 40th anniversary of one of the deadliest hate crimes in recent U.S. history: the deliberate arson of the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans.
Just before 8:00p, the doorbell rang insistently. To answer it, you had to unlock a steel door that opened onto a flight of stairs leading down to the ground floor. Bartender Buddy Rasmussen, expecting a taxi driver, asked his friend Luther Boggs to let the man in. Perhaps Boggs, after he pulled the door open, had just enough time to smell the Ronsonol lighter fluid that the attacker of the UpStairs Lounge had sprayed on the steps. In the next instant, he found himself in unimaginable pain as the fireball exploded, pushing upward and into the bar.
The ensuing 15 minutes were the most horrific that any of the 65 or so customers had ever endured — full of flames, smoke, panic, breaking glass, and screams.
It was a horrible murderous act, with 32 people dead, and Terry’s post is really hard to read. Not only for the description of the suffering (with a grotesque photo of the body of Metropolitan Community Church pastor Bill Larson, be warned) but also for the description of the reaction of locals after the event.
Tough reading, but do it anyway if you can. The victims at the UpStairs Lounge have been all but forgotten. They fucking well deserve better, and so do we.
