Cremated ash tatoos: "I've got you under my skin"

The prevalence of ash tattoos is increasing as a way for those mourning a loved one to cherish that person’s life and legacy. Some are even doing it with an animal who has died...

Your Angel’s Ink uses a three-step thermal sterilization process to mechanically infuse the ashes. Those who purchase ink on his website receive a collection kit in the mail that they can use to extract just a teaspoon of ash, which they then send back to the company...

When people ask how many children he has, Ventimiglia says he still has two: one physical and one spiritual. While watching TV, he sits with his arms crossed and his hands touching his ash tattoos, he said, so he can give his youngest son a hug.

The image is a screencap from the video embedded at the NPR station's website.  The song lyrics are here.

Scummy

Legal, of course.  But still scum, IMNVHO. 

Complex theology simplified

One of the most vexing questions for a theist to ponder is the coexistence of evil deeds and an omnipotent beneficent god.  This is the answer offered by Pearls Before Swine.

Best-selling children's paperbacks in 1990

Found this smudged photocopied list in my files.  Saved at the time because of the odd (though perhaps not surprising) distribution of title names.   Source unknown - maybe Harper's magazine.

I wonder what a comparable listing would look like today.  Perhaps some reader/librarian can come up with ideas or a link.

Good name for a dog

"Karen sandwich"

Context.

How to help the people of Ukraine

There is currently a massive worldwide effort to help the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Putin's aggression.  Countries are contributing weaponry, companies are shutting off commerce, and the world's financial institutions are aggressively imperiling the Russian economy.  

For the individual wishing to do more than stand on the street with a blue and yellow sign, the easiest way to provide tangible assistance is through a financial contribution, but that means navigating a minefield of spurious organizations trying to find ones that are legitimate.  

Charity Navigator now has a page devoted to the Humanitarian Response to the Ukrainian-Russian Crisis.  One of my cousins searched Charity Navigator and decided to donate to World Central Kitchen, which is providing food to the fleeing refugees [noninteractive screencap above].  World Central Kitchen's Charity Navigator score is a perfect 100.

I forwarded that suggestion to an old high school friend living in Washington D.C., who works with NGOs; he responded that he had just donated to World Central Ktichen.  That convinced me, and I made my contribution to them this morning.

Comfy chair

Image cropped for size from the original at the Awful Taste but Great Execution subreddit.

The best book about the Shakespeare authorship controversy

In the Shakespeare section of TWYKIWDBI, I've alluded several times to my belief that the true author of "Shakespeare's" works is not the man from Stratford, but rather Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.  I came to that conclusion decades ago after attending a lecture on the authorship question.

Shakespeare's authorship was first questioned in the middle of the 19th century, when adulation of Shakespeare as the greatest writer of all time had become widespread. Shakespeare's biography, particularly his humble origins and obscure life, seemed incompatible with his poetic eminence and his reputation for genius, arousing suspicion that Shakespeare might not have written the works attributed to him. The controversy has since spawned a vast body of literature, and more than 80 authorship candidates have been proposed, the most popular being Sir Francis Bacon; Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford; Christopher Marlowe; and William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby.

Since then I've done quite a bit of reading on the subject.  At the top of this post I've embedded a scan of the cover of what I consider to be the best and most objective treatment of the subject.  I was disappointed that the author was not an "Oxfordian."  On the contrary, he approaches the controversy methodically and thoroughly, as one can see from this table of contents:

I'll offer some excerpts from the book in the months ahead when I have more time.  For now I'll just present this info on the book for those with an interest in the subject.  It should be available in your local library.

Coin purse

From the Awful Taste but Great Execution subreddit.

Transcript from the Apollo 10 mission

From the Twitter thread of the elves at Quite Interesting.

Three new words in one paragraph

"In some ways, Stewart was the last person one might expect to find immersed in acts of gonzo fieldwork. He was a tweedy, lifelong academic, known to many today as the author of Names on the Land, a charming, if sometimes inaccurate, encyclopedia of American toponyms. Yet the research for his work—which spanned evolutionary science, science fiction, thrillers, Civil War history, educational history, literary theory, onomastics (the study of names), and hodology (the study of roads)—tended to involve a degree of reckless abandon."

Found in a book review in Harper's Magazine.

Toponym.  A place name (back-formation from toponymy).  And from that microtoponomy (nomenclature of small places like fields or sections of forests).  Derived from the Greek components.

Onomastics.  The branch of lexicology devoted to the study of names and naming, especially the origins of names.  From the French onomastique.

Hodology.  The study of pathways or interconnected ideas, including the study of connections between brain cells.  From the Greek hodós, “path, road, way; journey.”  Related word: odometer (you learn something every day).

Addendum:  see the Comments re endonyms vs. exonyms.

"Have some sunflower seeds"

A civilian woman confronted a heavily armed Russian soldier and offered him sunflower seeds... so that flowers will grow where he dies on Ukrainian soil.

The rest of her rant is recorded in this brief video (caution: profanity).

Image credit

Relevant:  Just learned that sunflowers are the national flower of Ukraine.

"The narcissism of small differences" explained

Late in Democracy in America, in a chapter lavishly titled “Why the National Vanity of the Americans is More Restless and Quarrelsome than That of the English,” Tocqueville observes that national pride in public affairs takes on the social character of the upper classes:

In aristocratic countries, great men possess extensive privileges to sustain their pride without any need to rely upon those smaller advantages which accrue to them. Those privileges, having reached them through inheritance, are regarded to some extent as a part of themselves or, at least, as a natural and inherent right. They have, therefore, a quiet sense of their own superiority; they have no thought of boasting about privileges obvious to everyone and denied by no one.

On the other hand, in more democratic states, “when class distinctions are not very great, the smallest advantages gain in importance,” he continues. “Pride becomes demanding and jealous; it latches on to wretched details and guards them stubbornly.” A quarter century before the birth of Freud, Tocqueville identified the narcissism of small differences.

More at the linked Harper's essay.  See also the Wikipedia entry, and this awesome National Post essay by Christopher Hitchens:

In numerous cases of apparently ethno-nationalist conflict, the deepest hatreds are manifested between people who — to most outward appearances — exhibit very few significant distinctions... The partition of India and Pakistan, for example, which gives us one of the longest-standing and most toxic confrontations extant, involved most of all the partition of the Punjab. Visit Punjab and see if you can detect the remotest difference in people on either side of the border. Language, literature, ethnic heritage, physical appearance — virtually indistinguishable. Here it is mainly religion that symbolizes the narcissism and makes the most of the least discrepancy.

I used to work in Northern Ireland, where religion is by no means a minor business either, and at first couldn’t tell by looking whether someone was Catholic or Protestant. After a while, I thought I could guess with a fair degree of accuracy, but most of the inhabitants of Belfast seemed able to do it by some kind of instinct. There is a small underlay of ethnic difference there, with the original Gaels being a little darker and smaller than the blonder Scots who were imported as settlers, but to the outsider it is impalpable. It’s just that it’s the dominant question locally.

Likewise in Cyprus, it is extremely hard to tell a Greek from a Turk... In his book The Warrior’s Honor, Michael Ignatieff spent some time trying to elucidate what it was that made soldiers in the Balkan Wars — physically indistinguishable from one another — so eager to inflict cruelty and contempt upon Serb or Croat or Bosnian, as the case might be... Of course, here again there are latent nationalist and confessional differences to act as a force multiplier once the nasty business gets started, but the main thing to strike the outsider would be the question of “How can they tell?”  In Rwanda and Burundi, even if it is true, as some colonial anthropologists used to claim, that Hutu and Tutsi vary in height and also in the delimitation of their hairlines, it still doesn’t seem enough of a difference upon which to base a genocide...

One of the great advantages possessed by Homo sapiens is the amazing lack of variation between its different “branches.” Since we left Africa, we have diverged as a species hardly at all. If we were dogs, we would all be the same breed. We do not suffer from the enormous differences that separate other primates, let alone other mammals. As if to spite this huge natural gift, and to disfigure what could be our overwhelming solidarity, we manage to find excuses for chauvinism and racism on the most minor of occasions and then to make the most of them. This is why condemnation of bigotry and superstition is not just a moral question but a matter of survival.

The photo embedded at the top is of a street scene in Moscow (credit AP, via India.com).

The reason old books smell better than new ones

Details in the embedded infographic, but for the TL;DR crowd, it's basically because the cellulose in old books breaks down into ring structures that have pleasant fragrances, while new books smell like adhesives, inks, and other synthetic molecules.  You learn something every day.