"All the fun's in how you say a thing"

Fifty-plus years ago a then-young English- and American Literature major walked out of a college bookstore with this hardcover copy of Complete Poems of Robert Frost.  The $7.00 expense was substantial in those years, but he considered the book an appropriate addition to his personal library.

Since then the book has traveled with him from Boston to Dallas to Lexington to Indianapolis to St. Louis and finally to Madison.  The next destination will be as a donation to our local Friends of the Fitchburg Library book sale.  Before saying goodbye to an old friend, I thought it appropriate to give it one final cover-to-cover read.  Herewith some gleanings from that book.

Uncommon words:

"With a big jag to empty in a bay"  (a load, as of hay)

"Not old Grandsir's/Nor Granny's surely..." (grandsire is archaic for grandfather)

"But there's a dite too many of them for comfort"  (???)

"Choked with oil of cedar/And scurf of plants"   ("scaly matter or incrustation on a surface")

"...they smelled/A thing the least bit doubtfully perscented" (?neologism)

"The lines of a good helve were native to the grain" (handle of an ax, hatchet, hammer (ME,OE))

(re turtle eggs) "All packed in sand to wait the trump together."  (sound of a trumpet)

"...nothing Fate could do/With codlin moth or rusty parasite" (codling moth larvae feed on apple)

"The storm gets down his neck in an icy souse" (soaking)

"By grace of state-manipulated pelf" (disparaging term for money, from ME/OF=booty)

"On our cisatlantic shore" (attaching the prefix meaning "on this side")

"But spes alit agricolam 'tis said." ("hope sustains the farmer")

"As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins" (container of size one-quarter of a barrel)

"We would pour oil on the ingle" (fire burning in hearth; fireplace (Gael.)

"And dayify the darkest realm" (presumably a neologism and the prerogative of a poet)

"The wavy upflung pennons of the corn" (flag borne on lance of knight [from Latin pinna=feather])

"For all humanity a complete rest/From all this wagery." (?working for wages?)

"The other way of reading back and forth/Known as boustrophedon, was found too awkward."

"Behind her at the dashboard of his pung." (sleigh with boxlike body on runners [short for “tom-pung” = toboggan]

"The bulb lights sicken down." (presumably get weaker?)


Memorable lines or clever turns of phrase

(re a farmhand)
"Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,
And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in." (did Frost invent this phrase?)

(re a mountainside brook):
"Warm in December, cold in June, you say?
I don't suppose the water's changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it's warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm
But all the fun's in how you say a thing."

"We love the things we love for what they are."

"Baptiste knew how to make a short job long
For love of it and yet not waste time either..."

"From my advantage on a hill
I judged that such a crystal chill
Was only adding frost to snow
As gilt to gold that wouldn't show."

"When I was young my teachers were the old...
I went to school to age to learn the past...
Now I am old my teachers are the young...
I go to school to youth to learn the future."

"But I may be one who does not care
Ever to have tree bloom or bear.
Leaves for smooth and bark for rough,
Leaves and bark may be tree enough." (the same sentiment as in this Denise Levertov poem)

(re life):
"It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past.  The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing -
Too present to imagine."


Miscellaneous

"And the cagèd yellow bird/Hung over her in tune..."   In my edition, the word cagèd is printed with that accent (not true in many reprints of the poem).  I presume Frost did this to alter the meter of the line.  I didn't see him employ this device elsewhere in the book and wonder if it is a common technique used by poets.

"The new moon!/What shoulder did I see her over?"  (It is said to be unlucky to see the new moon over your left shoulder, but lucky to see it over your right shoulder.)

(re orchard on a northerly slope) (?true)
"No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
'How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard.  Good-by and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below."

(re barn doors):
"The advantage-disadvantage of these doors
Was that tramp taking sanctuary there
Must leave them unlocked to betray his presence.
They could be locked but from the outside only...
And it had almost given him troubled dreams
To think that though he could not lock himself in,
The cheapest tramp that came along that way
Could mischievously lock him in to stay."

"As a brief epidemic of microbes/ That in a good glass may be seen to crawl..." (I've heard the term "good glass" applied to telescopes.  Presumably the reference is similar here, to lens glass that is free of imperfections) ??

(re Santa Claus):
"We all know his address, Mount Hekla, Iceland./So anyone can write to him who has to" (???)


Links to my favorite poems

Mending Wall

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Birches (and audio)

The Road Not Taken


And now, goodbye old friend.

Reposted from nine years ago to take a break from doomscrolling.

The "Agartha" meme ("Himmler's favorite myth")

As reported in The Atlantic: 

Heinrich Himmler and other Third Reich occultists in the 1930s latched onto the strange idea that the Aryan race was not the product of evolution but descended from semidivine beings who left the heavens and established a secret civilization on Earth, possibly beneath Central Asia. Himmler, the head of the SS, was so enthralled by the possibility of what he considered celestial proof of the superiority of the white race that he provided funding for an SS expedition to Tibet in 1938 in the hope of locating his utopia, according to Black Sun, a 2001 history of Nazi occultism by the British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.

Almost a century later, this idea of a lost Aryan civilization, called Agartha, has caught on again, this time with teenagers posting memes online. If you’re older than 25, you likely missed it. But over the past year, memes about Agartha—a mystical, underground city in the center of the Earth full of flaxen-haired, blue-eyed people—kept going viral and have become a staple of the youth internet...

Agartha memes usually feature supercuts—a video of short clips—comprising UFOs in the Antarctic, pyramid-laden civilizations, digitally altered images of Charlie Kirk with blond hair and chiseled features, stereotypical Nordic-looking people, and sugar-free Monster Energy drinks in white cans... But all of the Agartha memes share in common the concept of the subterranean Aryan paradise that Himmler yearned for...

Agartha was first developed as a mythical fantasy by French writers in the late 1800s but had no far-right associations at the time. After Himmler co-opted Agartha, neo-Nazis carried it and other Third Reich racist myths into the postwar era by creating a new philosophy and value system called “esoteric Hitlerism,” a fusion of racialist ideology and wacky mysticism. In the early 2020s, white supremacists turned those myths into internet propaganda...

Sellner positioned the memes as something that could be taken in jest. “Irony is the glue that holds this whole meme-universe together. Anyone who takes things deadly seriously or gets triggered has lost,” he wrote. This is the tone that a lot of people online have taken regarding the Agartha memes. No matter the underlying content, you’re not supposed to take the joke seriously, and if you do, the joke’s on you.

It’s a well-worn tactic, but also a common excuse used to launder noxious content. It’s not ironic or satirical for ethno-nationalists to joke about a mythical ethno-state when that fantasy is reflective of their extreme beliefs.

Editorial note:  the word is AgaRtha, with an "R", not Agatha (and there is a Wikipedia entry with lots of info).

Anti-vaxxers are now in charge

Offering a startlingly candid view into the philosophy guiding vaccine recommendations under the Trump administration, the leader of the federal panel that recommends vaccines for Americans said shots against polio and measles — and perhaps all diseases — should be optional, offered only in consultation with a clinician.

Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who is chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said that he did have “concerns” that some children might die of measles or become paralyzed with polio as a result of a choice not to vaccinate. But, he said, “I also am saddened when people die of alcoholic diseases,”.. 

In the case of an infectious disease, a personal choice to decline a vaccine may also affect others, including infants who are too young to be vaccinated or people who are immunocompromised. But a person’s right to reject a vaccine supersedes those risks, Dr. Milhoan said.

“If there is no choice, then informed consent is an illusion,” he said. “Without consent it is medical battery.”

I'm a polio survivor with residual impairment.  The attitude of this man in a position of authority is deplorable.

The difference between freezing rain and sleet

This infographic was posted by the City of Roanoke (Texas) Police Department on their Facebook thread, with this clarification:

So many people are probably wondering: what is the difference between freezing rain and sleet? I mean, they can’t be that different, right?  Well, we picked something completely at random—and in no way related to police work—to showcase the difference between the two.

Found and posted by John Farrier at Neatorama.

How Minnesotans organize their ICE protests

Excerpts from an excellent article in The Atlantic:

(B)ehind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as “engineered chaos” produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.

At times, Minneapolis reminded me of what I saw during the Arab Spring in 2011, a series of street clashes between protesters and police that quickly swelled into a much larger struggle against autocracy. As in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Minneapolis has seen a layered civic uprising where a vanguard of protesters has gained strength as many others who don’t share progressive convictions joined in feeling, if not always in person. I heard the same tones of outrage from parents, ministers, schoolteachers, and elderly residents of an affluent suburb...

“Overall, this community has exercised enormous restraint,” Allison Sharkey, the executive director of the Lake Street Council, which represents many minority-owned businesses that have been hit hard by the ICE raids, told me. “But we have been pushed, probably intentionally, towards civil unrest.”..

I went upstairs to see breakout sessions where people were being trained for direct confrontations with ICE. Inside a classroom, several dozen people ranging in age from 14 to about 70 faced off against three trainers playing ICE agents, in a loud fracas that lasted several minutes. Afterward, the trainers offered the volunteers a critique. One gray-haired lady said she had found the exercise difficult, “not being a ‘Fuck you’ person.” Others got tips on how to brace themselves more effectively so that the agents could not easily knock them down...

The nonprofit groups that run these training sessions are not organizing or directing the anti-ICE protests taking place in the Twin Cities. No one is. This is a leaderless movement—like the Arab Spring protests—that has emerged in a spontaneous and hyperlocal way...

Inside the schools, many administrators have been making their own preparations over the past year. Amanda Bauer, a teacher at a Minneapolis elementary school that has a large portion of immigrant students, told me that administrators informed parents last fall about their emergency plans for ICE raids by phone or in person, because they were already concerned about leaving email chains that could be mined by a hostile government...

Dan and Jane resisted the idea that they had become political. A better word, Jane said, was humanist. Their anger was unmistakable as they told me that the Trump administration was violating basic Christian principles. “It became clear very quickly that ICE is the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo boys. They’ve given them uniforms and let them run wild,” Dan said. He attended a legal-observer training—which happened to have been on the day Good was killed—and now the couple delivers groceries regularly to immigrant families in Minneapolis...

A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed.  Knutson told me he had never been a protester. It seemed pointless, or just a way for people to expiate their sense of guilt. But when he saw those ICE agents laughing, something broke inside him.  “I grab my keys, I grab a coat, and drive over,” Knutson told me. “I barely park my car and I’m running out screaming and crying, ‘You stole a fucking flower from a dead woman. Like, are any of you human anymore?’”...

Many people are hiding indoors—so many that, in a city with a substantial minority population, I hardly saw any Black or Latino faces on the street.

All this sheltering has created an economic crisis that has grown worse by the day. Many immigrant-owned businesses have seen their sales drop by as much as 80 percent, said Allison Sharkey, of the Lake Street Council. Large numbers have shut their doors entirely, fearing for themselves or their employees. Sharkey called it “an assault on our entire Main Street.”..

Apologies to The Atlantic for my excerpting so much material (and both photos).  My goal as a blogger is never to steal traffic from sources; on the contrary I want to drive readers to the sources.  This article was written by Robert Worth.  These are his credentials: "Robert F. Worth is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. A former bureau chief for The New York Times, he has spent more than two decades writing about the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. He is the author of A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS, which won the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize."

"The Dutch Angle" explained and illustrated

Last night I started watching The Third Man because I wanted to hear the opening musical theme and the closing one where Anna walks out of Holly's life.  But I got trapped and wound up watching the entire movie again - for perhaps the fourth or fifth time.  

The nice thing about rewatching a classic movie is that it is no longer necessary to pay attention to the storyline, and therefore it's easier to study and enjoy the other aspects of the film, such as the cinematography.  My attention last night was on the rather dramatic angles of some of the shots (reiniscent of Citizen Kane).  A brief search of the internet yielded the proper technical term: the Dutch Angle.

"In filmmaking and photography, the Dutch angle, also known as Dutch tilt, canted angle, vortex plane, oblique angle, or a Durkin, is a type of camera shot that involves setting the camera at an angle so that the shot is composed with vertical lines at an angle to the side of the frame, or so that the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of the frame. This produces a viewpoint akin to tilting one's head to the side. In cinematography, the Dutch angle is one of many cinematic techniques often used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed. The Dutch angle is strongly associated with German expressionist cinema, which employed it extensively..."

The video embedded at the top offers a concise 5-minute discussion of the technique, and the video embedded below presents just for fun clips from dozens of movies showing the ever-increasing angle of the shots - the final one being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

"The Third Man" theme played on a zither by Anton Karas

""The Third Man Theme"... is an instrumental written and performed by Anton Karas for the soundtrack to the 1949 film The Third Man. Upon release the theme proved popular, spending eleven weeks at number one on Billboard's United States Best Sellers in Stores chart. Multiple versions have been performed and recorded, selling tens of millions of copies, and its success influenced the release strategy of later film singles.

The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir, directed by Carol Reed. One night after a long day of filming The Third Man on location in Vienna, Reed and cast members Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli and Orson Welles had dinner and retired to a wine cellar. In the bistro, which retained the atmosphere of the pre-war days, they heard the zither music of Anton Karas, a 40-year-old musician who was playing there just for the tips. Reed immediately realized that this was the music he wanted for his film..."

Here's the trailer for the movie -

 

Pondering these icicles

Lots of these photos on the internet today, for obvious reasons (this one from The Atlantic).  Am I correct in assuming that the lengths of the icicles on the lower power line would form a normal distribution (a bell-shaped curve without any skew?)  Eyeballing it seems to suggest this, but is it fair to assume the shape of the distribution?  I obviously don't have time to make the measurements...

The video taken by The Lady in the Pink Coat

Video from the Lady in the Pink Coat
byu/tommyknockerman8 inLeakednews

You have probably seen her on the "back" side (sidewalk side) of the action in the videos filmed from the street.  Immediately after the shooting there was open concern online as to whether the Lady in the Pink Coat was safe and whether her cellphone footage was safe and would be released.  Here it is.

More comments (lots more) from me later.  And hopefully a better copy of the video.  Just embedding this here for now.

Baby, it's cold outside

Reposted from 2013 to add updated incredible numbers (see embed above) for this morning's weather.

In 2013 I added this video of Lady Gaga and Joseph Gordon-Levitt reversing the traditional male-female stereotypes for the song when they performed it for a holiday special with the Muppets:

Compare that modern version with the original from the musical romantic comedy "Neptune's Daughter" from 1949, where the heavy-handed seduction of Esther Williams by Ricardo Montalban is almost painful to watch:

And I'll close with a shout-out to young Lucas, who lives across the street.  At 9:30 last night after he finished his activities at school, he braved sub-zero temps to clear our driveway to facilitate our travel to a medical appointment this morning:

"The Ark Before Noah"

Cultures around the world are awash with "great flood" myths.  Wikipedia has a list of flood myths that includes too many for me to count today.  It takes no leap of imagination to assume that ancient peoples traversing mountains and seeing fossilized obvious seashells on mountains used basic logic to accept that in ancient times a huge flood must have covered the world.

I have previous reviewed a very scholarly book discussing in details the great floods after the ice age and the submersion of Doggerland in the North Sea and Sundaland in southeast Asia.  Also related is my old post on The Black Sea Deluge as a source of ancient flood myths.

This post is about another book, published in 2014 (Doubleday) and recommended to me by a reader many years ago.  The author has the awesome title of "Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures" at the British Museum.  He is the person in charge of the gazillion cuneiform tablets stored at the museum, and he can read those nicks in the clay the way that I can read cursive.  This book focuses on an "ark tablet" in the museum holdings that presents in detail a myth of a world flood and the survival of mankind thanks to a man who builds an ark.   Here is the tablet (more pix at the link):

And here are some of my excerpts and thoughts after browsing the book...

Modern scholars generally agree that the ark described in Babylonian times was constructed of reeds (which are huge and plentiful in Mesopotamian wetlands).  Jewish scholars recognize that the word translated into the Hebrew Bible as "gopher wood" if pronounced slightly differently would also mean "reeds."

While I was pondering this problem, I was simultaneously reading about ancient Babylonian versions of the flood story. Of course, there are different approaches regarding how to reconcile these with the Torah's account, which are not our concern here. But I suddenly realized that they describe the ark as being made of reeds - which, in Hebrew, is kannim, the very word that our verse uses, albeit vocalized differently. And this was apparently the standard technique used for creating boats in ancient Mesopotamia - they were made of reeds, sometimes hybridized with a wooden frame for greater strength. (Note that this technique would have been unknown to later generations in other parts of the world, where boats were made exclusively from wood.)

It is also clear from three different cuneiform flood tablets that the ark was round like a circle (p 129).  And see this 2012 post.

There are two Hebrew sources for the description of the flood ("J" and "P").  The "J" says forty days of rain and everything dies.  The "P" source says flood rose for 150 days to cover  mountains, then takes 150 days to go down.  (217)

The kingdom of Judea was conquered in battle by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in 597 BC, and the people of Jerusalem were taken into exile in Babylon -"all the officers and fighting men, and all the skilled workers and artisans - a total of ten thousand.  Only the poorest people of the land were left."  Those Judeans were then incorporated into Babylonian society, where they would have learned of the flood story. (227).  They would have seen the immense Tower (ziggurat) of Babel - seventy meters in height, way more than anything in Jerusalem.  It is incorporated into the 11th chapter of Genesis.

It is during this time of exile that two important shifts occur (pp 240s).  The Judeans incorporate the ark story into their own heritage, because all the intelligent young men of the society are being educated in Babel.  Conversely the Babylonian society, famously polytheistic, begins to view the gods in a more monotheistic arrangement (in accordance with the strictly monotheistic Jews).  The second commandment of the Judean Hebrew bible states "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" indicates a recognition of the existence of other gods.  But the Babylonians conversely start blending their various "gods" into Marduk - previously the "king of the gods" but now viewed as a single god with multiple manifestations:

The Judeans life in exile in Babylon is arguably the reason for their creation of their bible, nicely delineated on page 247:

"In the years before Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC the Judeans certainly did more than sit about and weep.  They adjusted and settled.  In time they became Mesopotamian citizens.  By the time Cyrus arrived by no means all of Nebuchadnezzar's displaced persons wanted to go "home" to Jerusalem.  However, the Judeans' ancient and somewhat ramshackle religious identity had meanwhile been crystallising into permanence due to their encyclopaedia of history, custom, instruction and wisdom.  They became literally the people of the book.  From this angle it can be argued that the Babylonian Exile, far from being the disaster it is usually judged, was ultimately the process that forged what became modern Judaism."

And that eventually led to the formation of Christianity six centuries later.  A fascinating idea.

There is more in the book than the ark story, including some discussion of the Babylonian Map of the World (the earliest known map of the world):

Inside the inner circle are the great rivers and the major cities.  They are surrounded by a great sea, beyond which are huge mountains.  The resemblance to the famous T and O map of the world is compellling.

I'm going to stop here.  If you are interested, the book should be in most public library systems.  It's TMI regarding cuneiform lettering and texts, but fascinating in its overall scope.  I highly recommend Chapter 11 (excerpted at length above) and Chapter 14 ("Conclusions: Stories and Shapes") for the TL;DR readers.

The Black Sea deluge

Another addition to my list of recommended books, this one explaining in detail the hypothesis that an immense and abrupt irruption of water into the Black Sea from the Aegean/Mediterranean seas was responsible for major cultural disruptions and may have been the basis for the "great flood" hypothesis seen in so many cultures.

In prehistoric times what is now the Black Sea was an immense freshwater lake, fed by glacial meltwaters.  When the outflow drainage at the Bosphorus closed and when the climate changed (disappearance of glaciers, aridity of the overall watershed), the lake evaporated to a smaller size.

The schematic at right shows the approximate relative sizes and shapes of the ancient freshwater lake and the current Black Sea.  That freshwater lake was a magnet for early human civilization because of the presence of water, game, and arable land.

When the Bosphorus "opened up," the inflow of seawater was on a scale not seen anywhere in the modern world.  The Mediterranean was open to the Atlantic, and the sea level was about 500 feet higher than the lake.  When water found a crack in the Bosphorus the flow would have started as a trickle, then as the passage eroded the flow would increase exponentially.  

"Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls, enough to cover Manhattan Island each day to a depth of over half a mile."  

The lake then began to rise 6" per day, and depending on the gradient, the shore would expand by as much as a mile a day - every day, without pause.  The people living on the shores of the lake would be forced to flee.

"It is hard to imagine the terror of those farmers, forced from their fields by an event they could not understand, a force of such incredible violence that it was as if the collected fury of all the gods was being hurled at them.  They fled with family, the old and the young, carrying what they could, along with fragments of the other languages, new  ideas, and new technologies gathered from around the lake."

The diaspora is detailed in several chapters of the book.

"All these people appeared in Europe shortly after the flood.  All have been described [by archaeologists] as outsiders: people who migrated from some distance... all seem to have been more culturally advanced than those [original European residents] whom they displaced.  Perhaps not so coincidentally, at that time in the middle of the sixth millennium B.C., Europe began a rapid ascent into what has been called a "Golden Age"...

The diaspora also happened in the other direction, creating enormous population changes in Anatolia and the Middle East.

"In the [Mesopotamian] epic of Gilgamesh the seven sages are credited with building the walls of Uruk and bringing the arts of civilization to the Sumerians - irrigation, farming, and the use of copper, gold, and silver.  The question of where the Sumerians came from is still unanswered."

"The oldest known written versions of the flood were committed to clay tablets over two millennia after [this flood] event in Sumerian, the language of the first known writing, a language with no known roots and no known descendants..."

The final point to make is that the story of the flood would have been passed by oral history down through dozens of generations.  Archaeologists have noted that the peoples who fled to Europe tended to settle some distance away from freshwater lakes and streams.  But those who fled to the fertile crescent would have been reminded of the great flood because their new territory was also subjected to annual flooding from the Tigris and Euphrates, which may explain why the legend was maintained there until the invention of cuneiform writing.

If you don't have time for the book, you can browse the high points at the Wikipedia page for the Black Sea deluge hypothesis.

Other interesting bits from the book:

"[King Darius I the Great] governed skillfully and managed a vast empire long before that of Alexander the Great, a regime that encompassed all the prior realms of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Ionians, Persians, and Medes, extending to the east as far as the Indus Valley, to the west into Europe, and to the south into Africa, flourishing in economy and culture."

"Apparently what had so deeply moved Smith was the realization that the [cuneiform] fragments he had assembled contained an independent version of the biblical deluge.  The heathen words told almost exactly the same story as the Hebrew narrative, right down to the selection of a survivor of the deluge through the intervention of a god, the forewarning that gave time to build a wooden ark, the refuge in it of every kind of animal, bird, and reptile, the grounding of the boat on the side of a mountain, the details of dispatching a swallow, raven, and dove to find land, the offering of a sacrifice, and the pledge that the gods would never again return the world to its primeval watery chaos."  "... after the feast one of the goddesses flung her jeweled necklace into the sky to be the sign of a covenant never again to drown the world."  "There was no doubt that the deluge described so vividly in the Gilgamesh legend had been inscribed on stone tablets long before the writing of the first books of the Old Testament."

The fact that the Mediterranean basin had once been a desert is confirmed by the discovery that the Nile River has an immensely deep central gorge (now filled with sediment) as a result of erosion when the Nile used to empty into a much lower basin.  The separation of the Mediterranean from the Atlantic occurred during the Messinian time interval between 7.2 and 5.4 million years ago.  "The transition from sea to land and back to sea had taken less than half a million years."  "Although no humans lived five million years ago, had any been present, they would have witnessed the Mediterranean desert disappearing permanently beneath a mile of salt water in a matter of a single human lifetime."

"... the Sumerians and Akkadians, and even the Greeks, did not believe in a reward after death.  Death might be postponed through a petition to a god, but  no one could escape it.  The body returned to clay, and a duplicate "phantom" entered a new abode through an aperture in the grave, leading to an immense, dark, silent, and sad netherworld where one had a torpid and gloomy existence forever."

Reposted from 2022 to accompany other posts. 

"Eden in the East" - Southeast Asia as the epicenter of prehistory

I suppose everyone is startled when they first encounter these passges in the Epic of Gilgamesh:

"What I had loaded thereon, the whole harvest of life I caused to embark upon the vessel; all my family and all my relations, The beasts of the field, the cattle of the field, the craftsmen, I made them all embark.  I entered the vessel and closed the door...

For six days and nights Wind and flood marched on, the hurricane subdued the land.  When the seventh day dawned, the hurricane was abated, the flood which had waged war like an army; the sea was stilled, the ill wind was calmed, the flood ceased. I beheld the sea, its voice was silent, And all mankind was turned into mud! As high as the roofs reached the swamp;...

I beheld the world, the horizon of sea; Twelve measures away an island emerged; Unto Mount Nitsir came the vessel, Mount Nitsir held the vessel and let it not budge... When the seventh day came, I sent forth a dove...

These words [more at the link] were inscribed onto clay tables in Ninevah centuries before the Bible was assembled.

What I didn't realize until reading Eden in the East is that there are some 500 flood myths from around the world - not just from the Middle East, but also in northern Europe, North America, China and the far East.  This book undertakes the immense task of collating the flood myths in search of a unifying hypothesis.   

I'll offer just a bare-bones thumbnail sketch.  Everyone agrees that the world has experienced marked changes in sea level since the appearance of Homo Sapiens, the most dramatic of them occurring when changes in the global climate resulted in melting of the glaciers:

The time scale in Figure 1 above goes back to 18,000 years before the present - about the time that early humans were traversing Beringia (on land or via near-shore vessels) from Asia to the Americas.  Note that early in human prehistory (10-15,000 years ago), sea levels around the world were 50-100 meters lower than their present levels.

Figure 3 above "zooms in" on the third world-wide flood about 8,000 years ago, and shows geologic evidence of that rise in regions as far apart as the Arabian Gulf, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.

Those glacial melts flooded continental shelves around the world - as for example Doggerland:

That land between GB and Europe was above water and inhabited by modern humans, and if you dredge the bottom of the North Sea, you can haul up artifacts from that era.

I bookmarked Doggerland years ago as blogworthy material, but for now I'm going to shift back to Eden in the East.  Oppenheimer notes that there was an immense low-lying coastal landmass between what is now Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam and what is now Borneo/Mayasia - the undersea area now referred to as "Sundaland."

Oppenheimer uses this area as the focus of his book, and postulates that cultural diffusion from this Sundaland may have spread to Austronesia, the Indian subcontinent, Mesopotamia, and then worldwide.

That's the big picture.  Here's a smattering of excerpted tidbits - starting with the science of the megafloods:

"Around 12,500 years ago, not long after the first flood, pottery appeared for the first time in southern Japan.  Some 1500 years later there is evidence of pots being made in China and Indo-China.  These examples of pottery making antedate any from Mesopotamia, India or the Mediterranean region by 2500-3500 years.  Stones for grinding wild cereal grains appeared in the Solomon Islands... as early as 26,000 years ago, whereas they were not apparently used in Upper Egypt and Nubia until about 14,000 years ago..." [p. 18-19]

"The third dry cold period was interrupted suddenly around 8000 years ago by an event which, although only discovered in the last decade, has been described as 'possibly the single largest flood of the [past two million years]'.  The melting Laurentide ice cap had dammed up vast volumes of fresh water in glacial lakes occupying a third of the land area of eastern Canada...  Geologists have calculated that the combined surface area of these glacial lakes... exceeded 700,000 square kilometres... Calculations of the total unfrozen water volume discharged instantly vary between 75,000 and 150,000 cubic kilometres - enough to raise the global sea-level by 20-40 centimetres instantaneously...  The centre of the ice cap that was also flushed out through the Hudson Strait, however, would have rapidly added another 5-10 metres to the sea-level..." [33-35]

"This last rapid rise in global sea-levels was presumably also responsible for breaching the Hellespont and flooding the partially desiccated Black Sea... Bill Ryan and Walt Pitman... who discovered this flood, suggest that this may  have given rise to the legend of Noah's flood.  This is possible for the Middle East, but it does not explain all the other 500 flood stories from around the rest of the world." [38]

"Southeast Asia has the highest concentration of flood myths in the world.  It is an area with few large river deltas and no recent reputation for flooding, but it lost more than 50 per cent of its landmass after the Ice Age." [62]

"... the strong likelihood of superwaves arising from the crustal strains when the Laurentide ice sheet of Canada collapsed and melted around 8000 years ago... The release of energy from the Earth's crust would have produced waves rolling across the Pacific and inundating all shores and flat hinterlands in direct line..." [107]

The excerpts above are from Part I of the book, which details the geologic events that would have produced widespread flooding. Part II shifts the focus to how the displacement of large coastal populations by the floods could have led to the diffusion of knowledge/customs/technologies from southeast Asia to other parts of the world, using new information from linguistics, anthropology, and genetics.

"I believe that Southeast Asia was the centre of innovations after the Ice Age and long-distance seeding of ideas from the region led to technological breakthroughs elsewhere.  The Austronesians may have contributed sailing technology, magic, religion, astronomy, hierarchy and concepts of kingship.  The Austro-Asiatic speaking people may have contributed the more down-to-earth skills of cereal farming, and even bronze.   A combination of all these traits was necessary for the first city-builders of Mesopotamia..." [221]

"If there were so many bad riverine floods in Mesopotamia, as the sedimentary record shows, one very bad one would not be remembered so long.  Instead the recurrent aspects would be recalled.  The myths from around the world do not usually refer to periodic river floods.  In any case most flood myths come from island Southeast Asia, which, unlike Mesopotamia, lost most of its alluvial flood-plains after the great melt when the Ice Age ended." [227]

"After 200 pages of concentrated flood myths he [Sir James Frazer] concluded that such ancient myths were widespread on every continent except Africa...  A large proportion of the Earth's surface was permanently lost to settlement and agriculture somewhere between 18,000 and 5000 years ago as a result of the sea-level rising...  Africa, with narrow continental shelves, would have been relatively spared... " [230-232]

"There is now general agreement that the stories of Noah's Flood and the floods of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians are related, although there is no agreement on the original source... There are now at least eleven related Ancient Near Eastern versions, including the two in Genesis and Berossus's account of Xisuthros.  The three Assyrian versions were committed to tablet in the seventh century BC.  This was perhaps a hundred years before the writing of the Priestly account in Genesis, but probably well after the Jehovistic account, for which a date is still under discussion.  The two surviving Babylonian accounts were written thousands of years earlier, somewhere between 1850 and 1500 BC..." [242-8]

"Frazer lists fifteen Greek flood stories in his Folklore in the Old Testament, twelve of which record a mountain landing." [258]

"A number of the Moon stories I have sketched contain the number seven.  I have suggested the lunar week as a possible origin for the use of this numeral... After one, two, and three, the number seven appears more frequently in Old World sacred texts than any other number.  This applies particularly for the Bible, the Koran, Babylonian texts and the Egyptian Book of the Dead...  Although five is a prime... the number of fingers on a hand and a half unit in the decimal system it is not more common in sacred texts than expected... [345-6]

"And did God first mould a model from blood and clay and blow into it to give it life?  Did he take the bone, Ivi, from man's side among the dark rainforest trees of Southeast Asia?.. Stories of the creation of humanity are universal.  They can be divided into two main varieties, people evolving from a totem, such as a tree or animal, and the creator fashioning man from clay.  These two archetypes have distinct distributions which overlap most dramatically in eastern Indonesia.  The merging of these two themes in that location eventually resulted in the beautiful and mysterious story of the Garden of Eden... In this chapter we trace the origin of the Genesis version of the clay-man myth from Southeast Asia... Polynesian informants insisted on the antiquity of stories stating that the first woman, who came from a bone in the man's side, was called Eevee/Ivi (the word for a bone in many eastern Polynesian languages).  Yet most of the Christian ethnographers assumed a missionary source for these stories rather than the disturbing possibility of a more ancient origin... It is likely that they were unaware of the widespread ancient distribution of the story elsewhere and thus could simply not believe their informants.  This selective bias is discussed at length by Sir James Frazer." [355-9]

"The Garden of Eden story holds a cherished place in Western literature... Yet the Genesis writers assembled this story less than three thousand years ago from a selection of fertility and immortality myths that were in common circulation at the time.  The separate elements of these myths are still to be found today in Southeast Asia and Melanesia."  [382]

"The tree of knowledge played centre stage throughout the snake's temptation of Eve.  The tree of life, however, remained in the wings unnoticed until it was nearly too late and Jehovah realised that Adam and Eve could eat from that too, and become immortal like Him.  He therefore shooed them out of the garden before they could gain immortality as well as knowledge... Frazer's view was that there were originally two trees, but that the tree of knowledge of good and evil had really been the tree of death contrasting with the tree of life.  This hypothesis may explain the verses:

'But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely  die.' (Genesis 2:16-17)

Clearly, humankind did not die on that day of the Fall, but instead became mortal." [384]

"In certain Aboriginal cultures, the Moon was regarded as a deity with the secret of immortality because it 'died' for three days every month, subsequently renewing itself during the first half of the next month." [386]

"The location of paradise has always worried Bible scholars, particularly since the lush forest description given in Genesis fits so poorly with anything we know about the environment of ancient Mesopotamia.  Rainfall may have been better 6000-7000 years ago, but nothing fits the picture of paradise as well as tropical jungles such as in Southeast Asia.  Both ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians described their respective sites as far across the water towards the rising Sun, that is in the East." [405]

This is an impressive book, extensively annotated with relevant references from the literature.  I first encountered it shortly after its publication about 20 years ago, and after being duly impressed by the scholarly writing I set it aside for a re-read "sometime in the future" (that future having arrived this year).  I think it is sometimes erroneously grouped with the fantasy books about Atlantis or ancient aliens, but the existence of the "drowned continent" of Southeast Asia is factual, and the hypotheses presented here are eminently logical.

The book has probably "too much information" for the casual reader, so for the TL;DR crowd I can recommend the final ten-page "Epilogue" as a reasonably concise summary.  I've already created a mega-post here and I'm tired of typing, but I'll close by adding several excerpts from the Epilogue:

"In their partial rejection of diffusion as the reason for these links [between diverse cultures], folklorists of the twentieth century have had to propose the only two other possible causes of similarity: chance and the inner workings of the human mind.  While chance may operate for single obvious motifs, such as the worship of the Sun, I have shown that it is statistically extremely unlikely that complex story-types, sharing from three to ten distinct motifs, could have occurred more than once.  Yet this is what would have to happen for the distribution of myths in a diagonal band across Eurasia - with Polynesia at one end and Finland at the other - to have all occurred independently.  That these were the core myths that were preserved so carefully by the Mesopotamian, Middle Eastern and Egyptian civilisations can also be no coincidence.  All the main stories in the first ten chapters of Genesis are found in this cultural band and all occur in the Far East: the watery creation, the separation of skies and earth, the creation of man from red earth, and Eve from his side, the Fall, Cain and Abel, and, of course, the flood.  With the exception of the flood, the relative paucity of evidence for these complex story-types elsewhere in the Americas and Africa not only supports diffusion as a reason for the distribution, but also argues against both chance and the 'inner workings of man's brain' for their similarities."

"If we can accept the statistical evidence of trans-continental relationships in myths, then the dating of the first written versions of the Eurasian myths becomes crucial.  We are lucky here, since the Sumerians and Babylonians were so assiduous in recording the motifs on tablets and cylinder seals.  The date bracket that comes out of such an enquiry reveals that the myths, with their religious connotations, were among the first of all written records in the third millennium BC.  Since in the majority of cases the structure and content of the Mesopotamian myths show them to be derived from earlier Eastern versions, we may suppose that the direction of diffusion was East-to-West, and that the date of diffusion may be been earlier than the beginning of the third millennium.  This means that East-West cultural links may be older than 5000 years.  Such cultural links could only have occurred if there were people in Southeast Asia to hold the stories, and that they were capable of traveling to India and Mesopotamia to transmit them... The Sumerians and Egyptians themselves wrote about the skilled wise men from the East, a fact often dismissed as the embellishment of a fertile imagination."

Reposted from 2022 to accompany some newer posts. 

"Dog's breakfast" explained

Last weekend at a local auction the auctioneer started to enumerate the contents of a lot, then stopped and said it was a real "dog's breakfast."  It's a British phrase (he was Canadian), and the meaning was obvious, but I couldn't parse out the derivation.  I found this in a 25-year-old New York Times On Language column:

"A dog's breakfast is any kind of smorgasbord prepared, in haste or at random, from life's castoffs... The slang lexicographer Eric Partridge cited Glasgow circa 1934 as its place and time of origin, though he noted that Australians also used the phrase with the same meaning as "confusion, mess, turmoil."

About the same time, a dog's dinner appeared with a quite different sense. "Why have you got those roses in your hair?" asked a character in "Touch Wood," a 1934 novel by C. L. Anthony. "You look like the dog's dinner ." This expression was defined by the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement as "dressed or arranged in an ostentatiously smart or flashy manner," probably derived from the 1871 usage "to put on the dog ." 

The derivation summarized:  "Although the origin isn’t exactly known, it alludes to the fact that if what you don’t succeed at what you are cooking, then the results are only fit for a dog... It is suggested that this dates from a time before canned dog food when a pup’s breakfast would have consisted of dinner leftovers from the night before; hence, “a mess.”

And then there's "dog's bollocks," used to connote absolute excellence.

Cartoon credit here.

Reposted from 8 years ago because the subject came up this weekend and I had to look up details.

Chefs call it a "spootle"

We have wooden spoons, but this "spootle" combines spoonness with "spatula" features by incorporating a squared, tapered end.

The flat-bottom edge is ideal for scraping the brown bits off a pan without scratching the surface. And it has a carved bowl for scooping or tasting a spoonful of tomato sauce for seasoning as you cook.