It’s only a flesh wound
Heyyyy…I didn’t know they’d identified Ned Kelly’s remains last month. Dug him up with a bunch of other old bones and ran some DNA tests. He finally gets to be buried in the family plot, a hundred and thirty something years after it was his last wish.
Kelly was either a cop-killing savage or Robin Hood, depending on where you lean in the Irish/Aussie/English ethnic preferences continuum. They’ve made a couple of movies about it, so you may know all about him and his gang, and some of that may even be true.
Me, I only love him for this bad-ass body armor he kluged together out of old farm equipment for his last shootout.
The authorities not being complete morons, they shot him through the legs.
November 9, 2011 — 11:09 pm
Comments: 27
My pet goat
Happy Eid al-Adha, everyone (this year, it runs from Sunday the 6th until Wednesday the 9th). The Festival of Sacrifice celebrates Abraham’s willingness to cut his son’s throat in obedience to God — one of the more disturbing chapters in the book, I’ve always thought.
Today, a taxi driver told my mother in law this story: when he was a lad in Kashmir, his grandmother bought a young goat every Summer and raised it as a pet. She stroked it and spoiled it with treats until it loved her and followed her everywhere.
Then they killed it for Eid al-Adha.
Because, see, Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, you should sacrifice something you love, and that loves you back.
I’ve been trying to tell myself that of course the gods must ask you to do difficult things; but I’m not sure it follows that the gods must tell you to do rotten, shitty things. You can draw a pretty straight line between people who think God expects them to kill their pets, and people who rejoice when their sons fly airplanes into office buildings in the name of God.
November 4, 2011 — 11:09 pm
Comments: 46
On My To Do List
Antoine Joseph Wiertz (1806 – 1865). Don’t know why he popped into my head tonight. He was a Belgian painter in the Romantic tradition (though “Romantic” is a brain-hurty way to describe most of his work). After art school, he won the Prix de Rome, a fellowship that allowed him to live and study in Rome for a few years.
He entered a few bits in at the Paris Salon of 1839. That didn’t go so well.
Up to that point, he’d specialized in big, bombastic historical paintings. After the French snub, he went back to Brussels and got weird. The Belgian government was anxious to promote local painters, so they built him a studio in 1850. He holed up in it, writing and painting all on his ownsome, until he died in it fifteen years later.
He had a prodigious output. He did the usual historical and Biblical subjects, but also lots of paintings that were macabre or erotic. Or both. When he died, he left his studio and its entire contents to the Belgian government on condition that they make it a museum in perpetuity.
I bet they’re real sorry about that now. His paintings have gone way, WAY out of style; their museum is a bit of a laughing stock. It’s been on my “things to do across the Channel” list forever.
Some typical examples: Human Insatiability. Suicide. Two Young Girls (one of ’em dead). Two Witches. The Burned Child. Oh, and he was also involved in a distasteful experiment with a freshly severed head. So I learned that today.
Not a very good painter, but the situation is self-correcting. He experimented with the composition of his paints. This is always a bad idea; his stuff is gently falling to bits.
September 20, 2011 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 22
Speaking of earthquakes…
Meet my favorite doomsday scenario, the New Madrid fault. It runs along the border between Missouri and Tennessee. The chart compares the relative impact of the Northridge earthquake of 1994 to a quake along the New Madrid fault in 1895.
But 1895 wasn’t a biggie for New Madrid. Oh, dear me, no. We’re coming up to the 200th anniversary of the biggest seismological event in recorded history.
Between December of 1811 and March of 1812, thousands of quakes shook along the NM fault, including four spectacularly large ones. Church bells rang in Boston. The Mississippi River ran backwards for hours. An Indian village was swallowed whole. Reelfoot Lake, essentially a huge pothole, just appeared. Tens of thousands of acres of forest were flattened.
I’ve never heard an estimated death toll for these quakes. Many people just disappeared (along with their houses, in some cases — some cracks in the earth were five miles long). But that part of the country was very, very sparsely populated in 1811.
If it happened today? You could kiss Memphis goodbye, for a start.
August 24, 2011 — 8:27 pm
Comments: 27
Happy Solstice!
Okay, the Solstice is tomorrow, but I post late so you’d miss it. Ten o’clock here, and still light enough to walk around the garden.
Tomorrow is the only day of the year they close Stonehenge, so the silly hippies can dance around it and pretend they know what our ancestors did there. Which is more than usually silly because a) we have no idea what the Stonehenge people were up to and b) Stonehenge is fake.
Okay, maybe not fake fake, but it was significantly reassembled in our time. The circle saw reconstruction projects in 1901, 1919, 1920, 1958, 1959 and 1964, with stones being winched into place and set in cement. And if you can’t trust a site called www.ufos-aliens.co.uk (with ads for London hotels and an online casino embedded in the text), who can you trust?
Well, really. Constable painted the above in 1835, and massive umpty-ton stones don’t just right themselves, do they?
So, now that I think about it, it’s perfect: tomorrow, people will perform a ritual they hope is something like the original around a ring of stones archeologists hope is something like the original.
June 20, 2011 — 9:27 pm
Comments: 24
Can I interest you in a codpiece?
Earlier this week, I spotted something interesting in an auction house window and asked if I could phone in a bid. I was directed to this website.
It’s an auction aggregator, and it’s much cooler than it sounds. Well, I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it.
If you think about the sorts of things likely to come up for auction in the UK (and a few sites on the Continent), you’ll get what I mean. That codpiece, for example, is from a sale of historic items from the Stone Age to the Medieval period.
You can browse through individual collections, or do a keyword search across the lot. (To work out the guide prices, today’s exchange rate is $1.62 = £1).
Okay, here’s the coolest part: you can participate in the auctions in real time. You have to register with the site to listen in. (Don’t worry, you won’t accidentally buy an 18th C Chippendale dining set — if you want to bid, you have to jump through extra hoops).
Then go to the Live Auction page and click on any of the listings with a Watch live.
They show you the image for each lot as they go through and you can listen in to the bidding (hit the speaker icon to get the audio going). If you registered to bid in that auction, there’s a bid button, too.
You can also browse recently closed auctions to see how the actual price stacks up to the estimate. Interesting. Looks to me like coins and other small, valuable collectibles are being snatched up well over the guide price. Bad economy and worries about inflation, I reckon.
I’ve not been to many real auctions, but I saw occasional crazy bargains happen when I did. I suppose aggregating sales might put an end to that, at least for desirable or specialist items. But it’s an awfully fun way to waste an afternoon.
June 10, 2011 — 7:01 pm
Comments: 26
Funny — it’s not mentioned in the real estate listing
Great news — H.P. Lovecraft’s Shunned House (AKA 135 Benefit Street, Providence) is for sale! And for less than a million bucks!
Benefit Street is the oldest residential street in the US of A (Williamsburg is older, but is no longer residential); most of the houses along it are 18th Century. So I was surprised to read — if this article is correct — that the street was widened and a whole row of even earlier houses razed to build the current street.
Ol’ 135 really did have a creepy history from the get go. It was built over the graves of a couple Huguenots who had lived on the earlier site. A subsequent mistress of the house went mad and babbled in French — a language she didn’t know. Pesky dead Huguenots — didn’t these people see Poltergeist?
Benefit Street was a dangerous slum for most of the 20th Century. It was just pulling itself up in the late Seventies, when I moved to Providence to go to the Rhode Island School of Design. My apartment was a block from the Shunned House, up a little blind side street called Bowen Street. It was a row of three or four Depression-era houses, each with three identical flats, one above the other. If you got drunk at a party in one, it was the very devil trying to work out where you were.
The whole street is very done-up and posh now, so I’m sure #135 is very nice. Plus — learn French without studying!
Dead Pool is all set up and ready to autopost tomorrow at 6 sharp, Weasel Blog Time. Be there or…don’t be there, I guess.
May 5, 2011 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 15
We wuz robbed
Do you still doubt Obama’s genius? Could anyone else take the greatest PR coup in a century and turn it to shit in three days?
Not releasing the photos. And giving some sanctimonious bullshit waffle about why — before he goes to stand at Ground Zero for his 2012 election photo op.
He doesn’t own those photos. We do. We were wronged as a people and we have the right to see justice done. We watched office workers jump off the top floor of a skyscraper — jump rather than burn — and we have a right to see the dead face of the monster who ordered it.
This viewing of dead monsters has a long tradition. That’s Dillinger up there. My grandmother was one of the thousands who filed past the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde (she said they were dirty — old dirt, like people who hadn’t washed in a very long time).
Call it primitive, but it’s way down in our DNA. Things won’t be right until we see his face. Dead on a slab.
I thought that was the whole point of sending in the SEALs instead of bombing the complex flat.
May 4, 2011 — 9:05 pm
Comments: 46
President Firstlady
So the whole Middle East is bursting into flame, the Mid West is exploding in union thuggery, public broadcasting is disappearing up its own asshole, they’re holding hearings on radicalized Islam on Capitol Hill…ummm…two wars, economy in meltdown, and the President of the United States is holding a two day summit on…bullies?!
Are you fucking kidding me?
Is there no-one in his entourage who gets how big the office is, and how small this makes him look? This is the kind of pointless frippery First Ladies wile away their tenure on. He looked more presidential pardoning the freaking turkey last year.
All politics aside, this is not good. These are serious times; an unserious president puts the whole West in danger.
March 11, 2011 — 12:42 am
Comments: 29
The more you know…
Did you know, Providence, RI is the home of the diner? I did. And then I forgot. And then my mother-in-law called up all excited to tell me it, after she heard it on the radio late last night.
It says here, Walter Scott pulled a horse-drawn wagon up in front of the offices of the Providence Journal and sold plain grub to the newspapermen in 1872.
It’s hard to believe that was the first time anyone pulled food by horse and cart to a line of hungry men, but Providence is jealous of the title, so humor them. To this day, there are a bajillion excellent vintage diners in and around Providence. I’m pretty sure I’ve hit every one on this list.
The American Diner Museum isn’t actually a museum yet, but they’re working to restore a couple of old classics. Some neat info there, including a list of diners for sale. I totally think you should buy one.
The diner in the picture is still going strong in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I used to live in Pawtucket — Land o’ Limericks — and many’s a hearty Saturday breakfast I’ve eaten at the Modern. Mmmm-mmm!
No idea who the old geezer in the picture is. I stole it off somebody’s blog or Flickr stream or something. His name is Bob, apparently.
Everybody, wave to Bob!
March 3, 2011 — 12:51 am
Comments: 22