Divertimento

Run your mouse over the dots.  Keep going....

The Pissed Consumer website focuses on consumer complaints and reviews.  You can enter a complaint, or search a company to see what negative experiences others have had.

"Last week, however, saw the publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), which reveals [Ernest Hemingway] was for a while on the KGB's list of its agents in America. Co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, the book is based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 90s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow."  More on Hemingway as a spy here.

This gif concisely depicts 'murica's values.

"Archaeologists claim to have proved that Julius Caesar set foot on what is now Dutch soil, destroying two Germanic tribes in a battle that left about 150,000 people dead.  The tribes were massacred in the fighting with the Roman general in 55BC, on a battle site now in Kessel, in the southern province of Brabant.  Skeletons, spearheads, swords and a helmet have been unearthed at the site over the past three decades. But now carbon dating as well as other historical and geochemical analysis have proved the items dated to the 1st century BC, the VU University in Amsterdam said."

A detailed, line-by-line explication of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

A 40th-anniversary reinterpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody "performed by a duet from the English National Ballet, a string quartet from the Royal Academy of Music and Trinity Boys Choir, cut with archive footage of Queen’s performance on Christmas Eve in 1975."

"A Modesto pastor is recovering after being shot during a gun safety class, CBS Sacramento reports.
Tom Smith, a family pastor who also helps with church security, was shot by his own gun safety instructor... The shooting incident comes at a time when church members in California are training to carry concealed weapons in response to recent mass shootings..."

A gif of peanuts being harvested.

A website that lets you look up how liberal or conservative an American town is.

A man displays the world's longest fingernails.  He's been growing them for 60 years.  "I can’t move much, so every half an hour or so I wake up and move my hand to the other side of the bed,” he admitted."

"Former Oglala Sioux Tribe police officer Rebecca Sotherland was found not guilty of using unreasonable force by a federal jury last week. The indictment against her stemmed from an August 2014 incident where she used a Taser an estimated 28 times on an unresponsive man in Manderson, South Dakota."  Video at the link.

gif of crowd control at a Tokyo event.

"ProPublica has identified 35 instances since 2012 in which workers at nursing homes and assisted-living centers have surreptitiously shared photos or videos of residents, some of whom were partially or completely naked... Abusive treatment is not new at nursing homes. Workers have been accused of sexually assaulting residents, sedating them with antipsychotic drugs and failing to change urine-soaked bed sheets. But the posting of explicit photos is a new type of mistreatment."

Here's what happens when you put powdered sugar on a birthday cake and then blow out the candles.

D magazine (from Dallas) offers a comprehensive backstory behind the "affluenza" teen, his parents, and the events that unfolded.

"The location of the oldest established European multi-year settlement in the United States is indeed in the heart of Pensacola.  Discoveries by local historian Tom Garner in October and research afterward by University of West Florida archaeologists confirmed where Don Tristan de Luna established his Spanish colony in August 1559 – six years before the St. Augustine settlement and nearly 48 years before the English settled in Jamestown, Va."

The etymology of the word "biffy," referring to a toilet, is from "privy."  It seems to be an outdated term now - one that I heard primarily from older generation residents of Minnesota.  Not sure if it was commonly used elsewhere.

"One thing most people don't suspect is Rogue Access Points, for wifi you set up an access point using your own insecure protocols and you put it at a mall and call it "Free wifi" or "Starbucks" and people when connect you can steal session cookies, personal information etc.  Most people just connect to any wifi point with the strongest signal or unprotected."

BBC One will be presenting a new movie version of Agatha Christie's classic And Then There Were None.  Yay !!!

An informative discussion thread about the history of labor unions in the United States.

"An Arizona lawmaker who believes the Earth is 6,000 years old is the new chairwoman of the state Senate committee that oversees education-related legislation."  In the video at the link she says at a committee meeting that "the Earth has been here for 6,000 years - long before there were environmental regulations - and somehow it hasn't been done away with..."

An incredible volleyball save.

How people make millions of dollars by buying the rights to structured settlements from uneducated injured people.

Video of a giant squid.

"Although it’s been nearly 50 years since the first color broadcast, more than 9,000 Britons are still using black-and-white TVs for watching Television and only 550 sets are registered in Scotland."

A new essay by Bill Moyers about plutocrats.

"... merely shopping at a gardening store could make you the target of a criminal drug investigation." With a raid by a SWAT team. More at the Washington Post.

Headline of the day: Fight breaks out at Newark anti-violence rally.

The embedded images today come from the Cabin Porn tumblr.  Top to bottom:

1 - House in Hemsedal, Norway.  Contributed by Turid Lismoen.
2 - Cabin on Tara Mountain, Serbia. Contributed by Dragan Drobac.
3 - Stone cabin in the village of Savogno in Val Bregaglia, Italy. Contributed by Maria Piccinini.
4 - A-frame in Landmannalaugar, Iceland. Contributed by Gaspard Sommer.

5 - Subterranean cabin in Palenzuela, Spain. Contributed by Edu Lartzanguren.

6 - Stone huts in Geiranger, Norway. Contributed by Elwin Zuiderveld.

America's first "boob selfie"

Note that the above is the entire painting - not a selection from a larger one.  Here are some excerpts from an explanatory story in The Economist:

The picture comes not from Britain, where miniature-painting became especially popular in the 18th century, nor even from France, the home of sensuality. It was painted in puritanical Boston in 1828. If that is not surprise enough, more surprising still is the painting’s atmosphere of vulnerable humanity: the left breast rounder and slightly more settled than the right, the nipples ever so lightly puckered, the skin salted with goosebumps... “Beauty Revealed: Self Portrait” was painted from life by a right-handed woman in a studio that was none too warm...

The exquisite finish of “Beauty Revealed” came from using watercolour on an ivory wafer so thin it is transparent when held up to the light.

Miniatures required a special delicacy of hand and brush; being associated with emotion, they were deemed from the beginning to be particularly suited to women. Sarah Goodrich, the artist who painted “Beauty Revealed”, was born in 1788. She grew up in the Massachusetts countryside and learned to draw, according to her family, by scratching pictures on birch bark using a pin. Eventually she moved to Boston, then the most cultured city in America, and took instruction from Gilbert Stuart, a celebrated portraitist, who, during the American revolution, had exhibited at the Royal Academy in London...

In 1853, three days after Christmas, Sarah Goodrich had a stroke and died. Daniel Webster had succumbed just over a year earlier. Ill already with cirrhosis of the liver, he suffered a brain haemorrhage after falling from his horse. Among his personal effects, his family found two gifts from Goodrich: one of her paintboxes and “Beauty Revealed: Self-Portrait”, the disembodied ivory miniature. Only someone who had seen that bosom uncovered would recognise, on the inner curve of the right breast, the tiny beauty spot—and know to whom it belonged.

Hollyhock House and the Piranha Women

YouTube link.

"The Aline Barnsdall Hollyhock House is a building in the East Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as a residence for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, built in 1919–1921. The building is now the centerpiece of the city's Barnsdall Art Park.

As with many of Wright's residences, it has an "introverted" exterior with small windows, and is not easy to decode from the outside. The house is arranged around a central courtyard with one side open to form a kind of theatrical stage (never used as such), and a complex system of split levels, steps and roof terraces around that courtyard. The design features exterior walls that are tilted back at 85 degrees (which helps provide a "Mayan" appearance sometimes referred to as the Mayan Revival style), leaded art glass in the windows, a grand fireplace with a large abstract bas-relief, and a moat. Water is meant to flow from a pool in the courtyard through an underground tunnel to this inside moat, and out again to a fountain.

The hollyhock is used as a central theme to the house, with many symmetrical decorations adapting the plant's general appearance. Planters are decorated with the motif and filled with the plants themselves, and Wright's stained glass windows feature a highly stylized hollyhock pattern. An interesting feature is the glass corners, an early Wright idea later used at Fallingwater...

Like many houses designed by Wright, it proved to be better as an aesthetic work than as a livable dwelling. Water tended to flow over the central lawn and into the living room, and the flat roof terraces were conceived without an understanding of Los Angeles' rains. The cantilevered concrete also has not stood up well to the area's earthquakes. 

The house and grounds were used as the temple of the Piranha Women in 1989's Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death."

Via Kottke.

Word for the day: pandering

The word "pander", meaning to "pimp" is derived from Pandarus, a licentious figure who facilitates the affair between the protagonists in Troilus and Criseyde, a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer.  Pandarus appears with a similar role in Shakespeare's interpretation of the story, Troilus and Cressida.

The plot function of the aging lech Pandarus in Chaucer's and Shakespeare's famous works has given rise to the English terms a pander (in later usage a panderer), from Chaucer, meaning a person who furthers other people's illicit sexual amours; and to pander, from Shakespeare, as a verb denoting the same activity. A panderer is, specifically, a bawd — a male who arranges access to female sexual favors, the manager of prostitutes. Thus, in law, the charge of pandering is an accusation that an individual has sold the sexual services of another. The verb "to pander" is also used in a more general sense to suggest active or implicit encouragement of someone's weaknesses.

The image at the top is Vermeer's portrayal of The Procuress.

The woman in black, the leering coupler, "in a nun's costume", could be the eponymous procuress, while the man to her right, "wearing a black beret and a doublet with slashed sleeves", has been identified as a self portrait of the artist.

Pandering/pimping is in the news this week because a Stanford graduate publicly proclaimed her allegiance to the Iowa team in the Rose Bowl matchup, a few weeks before the Iowa Republican primary.

She later tried to retract the statement by claiming it was expressed "tongue-in-cheek."  Her several hundred supporters in Iowa will probably accept that.

Hallelujah Chorus performed by the Silent Monks

YouTube link.

From a 2012 Christmas concert at South Kitsap High School (Port Orchard, WA).

Hat tip to Mademoiselle Titam, who posted the original 2008 performance.  This newer version has better quality video and less giggling by the audience during the performance. 

Explain the pattern on this dead leaf

Give up?  Answer partway down the Reddit thread, or peek at this Home Depot page.

Image cropped for size from the original at imgur.

How to turn an electric wall heater into an airplane

YouTube link.

Some discussion at Reddit.

In any language...

Via The Land of Maps.

Addendum: Readers with a modicum of knowledge of the German language might enjoy browsing an "Atlas of Everyday German."  Go to the left sidebar, pick a random round of the survey, and see what you find.  Here, for example, is the regional variation in the phrase you would use if you walked into a shop some afternoon and met someone you know -

- and here is the less-clearly regionalized response to "thank you" -

A tip of the blogging hat to an anonymous reader, who sent me that link.

Many readers of TYWKIWDBI are already familiar with the fascinating dialect maps of English, for which I posted the link in 2013. 

Addendum #2:  A hat tip to reader Aleksejs, who sent along the link for this map of the Latvian words for "potato" (officially "kartupelis") -

How the "Just So" stories got their name

The Just So Stories began as bedtime stories told to ‘Effie’; when the first three were published in a children’s magazine, a year before her death, Kipling explained:

. . . in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. They had to be told just so; or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence. So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them,—the whale tale, the camel tale, and the rhinoceros tale. 

These are stories of origins: ‘How the Whale got his Throat’, ‘How the Camel got his Hump’, ‘How the Rhinoceros got his Skin’—stories that answer the kinds of question children ask, in ways that satisfy their taste for primitive and poetic justice. After Effie’s death, Kipling added nine others, so the number published in the first edition was twelve—a magic number, as everyone knows. 

More at the Oxford University Press Blog.

Gift exchange

As defined at Pearls Before Swine.

A gallery of "chemis-trees"

There are dozens and dozens of such creations posted at Chemistry World Blog.  A tip of the blogging hat to Madamejujujive for locating the thread and posting the link at Everlasting Blort.

Where to live if you enjoy blizzards

Found at The Land of Maps.

Youth&BeautyR/NOT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Kudos to Carrie Fisher for tweeting her insights into bias against aging.

Carrie Fisher — who is 14 years [Harrison] Ford’s junior — has in contrast had to address the apparently nonstop disappointment of those who wish she’d remained in a permanent gold bikini state...  [she] posted a photo of her dog Gary and the message, “My body is my brain bag, it hauls me around to those places & in front of faces where theres something to say or see…. Youth&BeautyR/NOT ACCOMPLISHMENTS, they’re theTEMPORARY happy/BiProducts/of Time&/or DNA/Don’t Hold yourBreath4either/ifUmust holdAir/takeGarys.”

Photo credit: Reuters/Danny Moloshok (cropped for size).

Today I learned that "vagina speakers" exist

I must lead a sheltered life.  I certainly was unaware of this development in childrearing:

Pregnant women who like the idea of playing music to their unborn babies can now do so through a brand new gadget: a vaginal speaker. 

Spanish company Babypod has created a small pink device that can be inserted into the vagina just like a tampon.

But this ‘tampon’ doesn’t absorb blood. Instead, it turns a woman's vagina into a sound system – and connects it to her smartphone- transporting music  up into the womb at a volume of 54 decibels (similar to a gentle conversation)...

The product was launched this month at ‘the first concert for foetuses ever held in the world’ - which took place in Spain. 2009 Eurovision singer Soraya serenaded ten pregnant women - all of who had Babypods in their vaginas - with Christmas carols.

Or did I party too much on New Year's Eve and have woken up on April 1 ??

Borges on poetry

I found the following quotation in a book I received for Christmas:

"Truly fine poetry must be read aloud.  A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently.  If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation.  Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.  It remembers that it was first song."

---from "The Divine Comedy", the first chapter of Seven Nights.

I'm not a big fan of poetry, but Borges' viewpoint does apply to most of my favorite poems - Prufrock, The Raven, Robert Frost, Dr. Seuss, nonsense poetry, et al (though not to E.E. Cummings).