Infinite Art Tournament: the Life and Times of Michael5000

Flag Friday XXXX

2012-01-27T00:50:00.000-08:00

Flag Friday is a periodic discussion of the world's national flags; the project is explained and indexed here.

These discussions are about graphic design, and perhaps about nationalism and national symbolism in general. They should not be taken as critical of the countries, ideals, cultures, or people that the flags represent.

Western Sahara

Parsons: Without comment, he gives it a "B", 70/100.

Michael5000: The star-and-crescent is a nice touch that overcomes the monotony of the red/green/black/white school somewhat.

Grade: B+

Yemen

Parsons: Without comment, he gives it a "B", 70/100.

Michael5000: Well, it's hard to say much about a tricolor this late in the alphabet. It's a perfectly respectable flag, in a set of colors that I do not happen to find very inspiring.

Grade: B

Yugoslavia

Parsons: "Serbians will have a chance to change this flag when Montenegro secedes from Yugoslavia. I suggest they take it." They did!

Zambia

Parsons: With "graven images" and "bad colours," but being "original," it gets a "D+", 45/100. Interesting layout doesn't redeem the bad colours on this one," says Parsons.

Michael5000: It's certainly original, but the interesting colors don't redeem the bad layout on this one.

Grade: D+

Zimbabwe

Parsons: " Features a hawk sitting on a toilet," says Parsons. It has a "bad shape," is "too busy," and makes [him] nauseous. "D", 40/100.

Michael5000: The line about a hawk sitting on a toilet is kind of unfortunate, because it's fairly apt. It's actually a representation of the Zimbabwe Bird, an artistic motif found in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. But once you've got Parson's one-liner in your head, it's kind of hard to get it back out.

Otherwise, we're looking at an intense but harmonious range of colors laid out in an aggressive, symetrical design.

I kind of like it!

Grade: B+

The Hometown5000 Trove of December 2011

2012-01-26T00:50:00.000-08:00

Shortly after I began to re-succumb to the charms of the 33 1/3 vinyl album, I happened into the city library of Hometown5000, the only building -- to date -- to have my name carved on its edifice. And there, for 50 cents a pop, were vinyl LPs! Fortunately, I only had two dollars with me, so I was limited to four. Except, I might have taken five. By accident.

The first pick was this solid 1963 recording of the Fourth Beethoven Piano Concerto, featuring an uncannily young Van Cliburn.

It is of course an excellent recording, and comes with slavish liner notes with sentences like "Mysticism alone can be a closed circle." Great stuff.

Then we've got this groooOOooOOooovy 1967 recording of The Baroque Art of Telemann.

It looks more like a Jimi Hendrix album cover than a Georg Philipp Telemann cover, no? The design is by Jules Halfant, who didn't do covers for Hendrix -- he was on a different label -- but who did design a lot of rock covers and was clearly comfortable in the psychodelic mode. [Clue that the artist was seconded from the rock music division: the six-peg cello.]

It's interesting to listen to Telemann played in 1967, because that was a time when music of the Baroque period -- which is to say, the stuff before Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven -- was being rediscovered and rehabilitated after more than a century during which it had been very rarely performed. These days, musicians who play Baroque music tend to specialize in the period and try to reproduce a dry, crisp, precise sound that we think is the way the composers intended it to be played. In 1967, though, this was still a pretty new idea, so on this record you get Telemann being played as if he were Mozart -- nothing dramatic, but it seems a bit lush if you listen to a lot of classical music.

But we can top that: a recording of Vivaldi concerti from 1953! With a woodcut design that reminds me of my grandmother! Or just of grandmothers in general!

If the 1967 Telemann seems a little lush, this Vivaldi record is played like a full-blown Romantic symphony. It might as well be Leopold Stokowski conducting something like, well, like anything I guess (Stokowski was famous for taking any piece of music in the repertoire and turning the emotional fervor up to a torrid level.) Treating Vivaldi like Tchaikovsky is a perfectly legitimate interpretation of the notes on the page, actually, but it sounds really odd to a modern classicalhead.

This one, also, is played with a fine Romantic intensity. But then, it's a piece of fine, intense Romanticism. And wowie-zowie, it is one freaking awesome performance. Worth every penny of its 50 cents, plus a reasonable chunk of the turntable.

Like the label says, "Incomparable HIGH FIDELITY."

But you can't go out and just buy up no-risk classical gems. Where's the sport in that? No, the true music lover must take risks! Otherwise, how can you grow? So I picked up this one too.

Hey, it could have been awesome! Mustard blazers, baby! Regrettably, it's not especially great. Turns out that the Salem Singers are still around and active, though, 43 years after this album was recorded! Presumably there's been some turnover of personnel, but still. They've put out a dozen or so records over the years, and would be happy to sell you some of the newer ones from their website. Or, you can come by Castle5000, and I'll put this older one on the hi-fi and we can have drinks.

The Wednesday Quiz was accused of corrupting an entire generation

2012-01-25T00:15:00.000-08:00

It's:

I was accused by Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, a well-known New York clergyman and author who supported the Vietnam War, of corrupting an entire generation. In a sermon widely reported in the press, Reverend Peale blamed me for all the lack of patriotism, lack of responsibility, and lack of discipline of the young people who opposed the war. All these failings, he said, were due to my having told their parents to give them "instant gratification" as babies.

Who is he?

2. He built one of the first and, while it lasted, most powerful multinational corporations in history through efficient and disciplined business practice, skillful risk management, aggressive aquisition of rivals, and dirty tricks. He is generally regarded as the richest person of all time, but always tithed ten percent to his church and made massive contributions to educational and public health causes, especially those that would benefit African-Americans. Who was he?

3. What's the pink part on this map?

4. We talk about it all the time, seldom pausing to reflect that it refers to "any of a group of complex organic macromolecules that contain carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and usually sulfur and are composed of one or more chains of amino acids."

5. He's the guy credited with designing the green part of this map, although you shouldn't knock Calvert Vaux's share of the work.

6. It can mean a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless, or a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths, or a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake.

7. The anti-Semitic Wagner is said to have worn gloves that he would throw away after conducting the music of this composer -- a life-long practicing Lutheran -- and the Nazis banned performance of his work. After a century or so of being criticized as too musically conservative, he is now generally considered one of the major composers of the nineteenth century.

8. When she dies, her husband says

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

9. What's this here language?

10. It comes between three Books of John and the Book of Revelation.

--

Put your answers in the comments, unless you adhere to a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 2: Balla v. Balthus

2012-01-24T00:15:00.000-08:00

Giacomo Balla
1871-1958
Italian
Defeated Hans Baldung in Round 1.

-----

Balthus
1912-2001
Polish-French
Defeated Michelangelo's buddy Fra Bartolommeo in Round 1.

----

[It's Balla v. Fra Bartolommeo in the M5K personal tourney.]

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

Introducing… The "Infinite Art Tournament!"

2012-01-23T00:30:00.000-08:00

This blog, formerly the Life & Times of Michael5000, was renamed (or “rebranded” in the parlance of our times) in December, and is now called Infinite Art Tournament. Many readers have already noticed the change. Longtime reader Chuckdaddy sure did!

I am very opposed to the name change. You can't change the name to a sub-category?!? Unless you plan to make every post about the art tournament, this makes no sense…. Have you never seen an outline?

Although art plays a significant role in this blog, it is, again, one of many categories. Why would an Art Tournament blog be writing about elements and geography?

To which I cleverly retorted:

You can definitely change a name to a sub-category. There's even a word for it: "synecdoche," the part representing the whole. And, an Art Tournament Blog would be writing about elements and geography because it's infinite, of course. Encompassing all of life's rich banquet with the same sort of reverent/irreverent enthusiasm that would put the canon of great artists into a tournament bracket.

Experimental Masthead #1

Chuckdaddy was unconvinced. But I’m really fond of the new name. In my own mind, at least – and at the end of the day, I’m the only one who knows the account password – it represents the kind of reverent/irreverent stance towards art, and by extension towards all of knowledge and experience, that I try to embody in what I choose to write about. Not buying it? No worries. I’ve got several more reasons for the name change.

Several more reasons for the name change.

1. Although I realize that blogging is very 2004 ("my money's on blogs not even being around in 8 or 9 years," writes reader dhkendall, as if blogs were around now), I persist in hoping that a few more readers might be lured in to occasionally peruse my groovy, groovy content. “Infinite Art Tournament” seems like it might catch the attention of the target demographic, whatever that is.

2. Which is to say, it seems like the name “Infinite Art Tournament” might have the potential to attract people who might be interested in Art, and curious about what an “Art Tournament” might be.

3. Although I have previously affirmed – and hereby reaffirm! – prior use and claim on the name “Michael5000,” changing the name of the blog nevertheless eliminates a minor but perennial source of confusion for fans of Houston-area rapper Michael “5000” Watts. No, really! I don’t think anybody is likely to conflate the two of us, but neither do I wish to, as they say, get all up in Mr. Watts’ grill.

Experimental Masthead #2

4. It’s a way of marking the end of the Quizzes, which have been the marquee feature of the blog for most of its lifespan, and of the Flag Friday business, which has been with us for two years. You know those are ending soon, right? You’re braced, right?

5. Let’s say I needed to cut back on the amount of material I post. Let’s say I decided to stop writing for the blog altogether. What would be a better name for the rump blog (so to speak) that consisted entirely of The Infinite Art Tournament? The Life & Times of Michael5000? Or Infinite Art Tournament?

6. Even at this late date in human evolution, ampersands are still a pain in the butt within html code.

7. Because longtime reader katenben, designer of the 2010-2011 L&TM5K masthead, made a new masthead for IAT before I, having been struggling with the above prototypes, EVEN HAD TIME TO ASK HER IF SHE WOULD. Or offered her any money to do so! Awesome! So, today’s unveiling of the new masthead marks the full transition to the new name.

Michael5000 Shows Jenners a Thing or Twenty-two

2012-01-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

When I resolved to do daily sets of push-ups to match the date this month, there were some skeptics! Or at least one. It was regular IAT(fL&TM5K) reader Jenners. She said the following, which I am only distorting a little bit by taking it out of context:

I can't imagine you doing 22 push-ups by Jan. 22. Can you do a vlog...?

IS SHE RIGHT?!? Is it even possible that I could do 22 push-ups on January 22? Or would a vlog instead reveal my shame and humiliation? Let's find out* in this little video I took yesterday, January 22!

* For those of you who do not wish to watch video of a middle-aged dude doing push-ups, the answer is yeah, I can. I am not nearly the wuss that Jenners apparently thinks I am.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Giovanni Bellini v. Bellmer

2012-01-21T00:05:00.000-08:00

Giovanni Bellini
c.1434 - 1516
Venetian

-----

Hans Bellmer
1902 - 1975
Polish; worked in France

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

Introducing… "The Infinite Art Tournament!"

2012-01-20T01:00:00.000-08:00

In a recent comment, regular IAT(fL&TM5K) reader dhkendell remarked:

I must have missed the post where he [meaning me, Michael5000] said that 1000 artists will be considered. In fact, I think I missed where he explains this whole thing altogether!

Well, truth be told, dhkendell didn’t “miss” it so much as I “didn’t post” it. For if there is one thing I’ve learned after five years of blogging – although only after five years of blogging – is that it’s not good to make a big fuss about a massive, years-long new enterprise until you are quite certain that (1) you yourself are actually interested in it and that (2) at least three or four other people can be persuaded to play along. Those criteria having been met to my satisfaction, I hereby announce that

I’m going to run a big goofy art appreciation exercise in the guise of a tournament! It’s going to be called “The Infinite Art Tournament!” In fact, it has already started!

Here’s how it will work!

1. I have a list of artists deemed by some, or by somebody, to be more or less “great.” I would rather not divulge where I got this list, but I freely admit that it is (a) conservative, (b) subjective (of course), and (c) slightly dated.

2. Every weekend, I post two paintings apiece by two artists off this list, proceeding in dogged alphabetical order.

3. You vote. Along with your fellow IAT(fL&TM5K) readers, you look at the paintings (and, if it floats your boat, do further research or activate your prior knowledge) and vote on which artist you prefer.

4. Winning artists move on into the second round, etc. In eight or nine years, in theory, those of us still alive will witness the crowning of the greatest artist of all time!

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why?
A: Because it amuses me. Because I hope that it might amuse others. Because art, and knowledge and appreciation of art, leads to a modestly enhanced experience of life. Because it’s refreshing to approach Art History, with its reasonable but sometimes tedious preoccupation with schools, regions, and centuries, from the randomizing flight path of alphabetical order.

Q: How do you pick the paintings?
A: Well, there is a system that makes the first image, shall we say, “automatic.” I don’t choose it myself. I do select the second image myself, and try to represent the artist’s overall shtick (as the Art Historians say) as best I can from a brief reconnaissance. If there’s a third image, it’s semi-automatic; I choose it myself from a very limited list. We’ll worry about fourth images when we get there.

Q: What if there’s a tie?
A: I have a plan, but haven’t had to put it in action yet. This project is what you might call “emergent,” which is a very professional way of saying “we’re making it up as we go.”

Q: Doesn’t being the artist that comes first on the page give that artist an unfair advantage/disadvantage?
A: Perhaps.

Q: Do YOU vote, Michael5000?
A: Oh, hells yeah! I usually wait a week, though, in order to be an less obtrusive MC. You may have noticed that I’m also keeping separate track as if I was the only one voting, but that’s very incidental to the real tournament.

Q: What if a whole bunch of new people started showing up just to vote in the tournament?
A: That would be cool.

Q: What if nobody voted?
A: Than I’d probably stop.

Q: When’s the deadline for voting?
A: Any given pair if artists will be up for at least one month. After a month – generally well, well after a month – I will come by and tally up votes in order to get the post for the next round ready. When I do that? That’s the deadline.

Q: This is silly! / pointless! / shallow! / methodologically flawed!
A: No shit, Sherlock.

Q: Do you really intend to see this thing through?
A: As long as it’s fun to me and to a modest quorum, and I’m able to do it, I imagine I’ll keep pushing it along. I'm like that.

Q: I sure hope H.R. Giger makes his way into this tournament. Actually, that makes me wonder whether ANY of my favorite artists, (who tend to be commercial/fantasy artists yet are more appealing that the majority of what we've seen on here so far) will make it into the tournament. Artists like Luis Royo, Brom, Dorian Cleavenger, Michael Whelan, Sorayama, Brian Froud, Boris Vallejo, Frank Frazetta, or even pin-up artists like Olivia and those that are harder to classify, like Mark Ryden. Is it truly the infinite art contest? Royo is one of my absolute favorites - I'd put him up against a scribbler any day of the week.

A: I can tell you that not a single one of the artists you mention are among the 1000 in the big, big bracket. (Indeed, it is not an infinite art tournament, only an (anticipated) eight-year art tournament. I exaggerate for effect and for the life-metaphor.) Regrets, in a way, although your complaint is probably more with the dynamics of culture than with what I'm up to in this particular long-term stunt. I hope you'll stay in the voting pool; I'm always interested in what you have to say.

…oh, wait,

that last one wasn’t a “Frequently Asked” Question so much as a question that reader Voron X posed in December, and the answer I gave him. He makes a really good point. I have pondered, and continue to ponder, the idea of the Infinite Art Tournament hosting an Alternative Infinite Art Tournament. The only problem is… how would I assemble, or where would I find, the list? I'm open to suggestions!

Michael5000 Teaches Himself Hindi!*

2012-01-19T00:45:00.000-08:00

Michael5000 is chatting casually with his co-worker, a young Hindi-speaking woman.

Michael5000: I've been reading a detective novel from India. I'm learning some Hindi words, but I don't think they are very nice Hindi words.

Co-Worker: What do you mean, 'not very nice'?

Michael5000: The characters are all gangsters, so I think they are mostly swearing at each other.

Co-Worker (amused, encouraging): Oh, really? Let's hear an example!

Michael5000: "Chutwa." "Matachod." "Ryundi."

Co-Worker: [gasp!]

---

* See also "Teach Yourself Urdu!" (April 2011)

The Wednesday Quiz's topics include the laws of sacrifice

2012-01-18T01:00:00.000-08:00

It's:

5. This is information about a language test. What language is it in?

6. Shah Jahan built its most impressive monuments, but it reached its peak of power under Aurangzeb. In 1700, it encompassed about a quarter of the world's population, but by 1804 it existed only as a formality, and in 1857 its last vestiges were eliminated. What was this political entity?

7. Its topics include the laws of sacrifice, the rules of the priesthood, how to avoid and purge uncleanliness, and other assorted rules on behavior.

8. It's the pink one over to the east.

9. The main character of The Grapes of Wrath, he's also the title character of songs by Woodie Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen.

10. Who wrote The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans, and Never Let Me Go?

--

Don't bother with the Wednesday Quiz; there aren't really any problems left to solve in it.

Element of the Month: Iridium!

2012-01-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

January's Element of the Month:

Iridium!
Ir
77

Atomic Mass: 192.217 amu
Melting Point: 2466 °C
Boiling Point: 4428 °C

Iridium is among the Elements with the coolest names. It is, however, very, very rare! Wikipedia will even tell you, in fact, that there are only three Elements (Rhenium, Ruthenium, and Rhodium) that are less common in the Earth's crust. Naturally you won't fall for that old line, though: you are a savvy IAT(fL&TM5K) reader and know all about naturally-occurring Neptunium. But the point is, there's not a whole lot of Iridium strewn about. There's only about 1/40th as much of it as there is Gold, if that gives you a point of reference. There is only about a tenth as much of it as there is of Platinum. Platinum is the Element that Iridium tends to hang out with most. In fact, Iridium was first discovered, along with Osmium, in the weird sludge that always seemed to be left over if you did a really good job of smelting your Platinum.

It's pretty impressive stuff, Iridium. It is very, very dense, and has one of the highest melting points of all the elements (2466°C, as compared with a relatively wussy 1668°C for big-shot Titanium). Machine parts made out of Iridium can remain functional at extremely high temperatures, and it is the most corrosion resistant of all the metals. You would think that engineers would be all over it, right? But there's a hitch! In addition to being so damn rare, it is also hella difficult to work with. Think about it: You want to make Iridium machine parts that would be resistant to the greatest extremes of heat. Great! So, you make your mould, then you melt down the Iridium, and -- d'oh! So that's why one of its uses is in cruciables used to melt other metals with high, but not quite as high, melting points. It is also used, as you might expect, in alloys for specialized things that you really, really want to hold up well to corrosion and wear, like jet engine parts and casings around plutonium fuel capsules and stuff like that.

The Centerfold!

An Iridium wedding band is unconventional, but practical if your spouse is
frequently subjected to corrosion or extremely high temperatures.

Now, it's thought that there might be a lot more Iridium down in the Earth's interior than there up here on the crust. I was not able to check this out in person, but it seems reasonable enough. Iridium is a very heavy element -- #77! -- and some settling was bound to occur in shipping. And if that doesn't get your futuristic mining fantasies going, consider this: there is 500 times as much Iridium in your average meteorite than there is here on Crustal Earth.

There's actually a tie-in from this last little fact to the well-known hypothesis that a meteor impact caused the great age of extinctions after the dinosaurs. Wherever you go in the world, there's apparently this thin layer, right between your Cretacious and your Tertiary sedimentary rocks, that has way, way, way more Iridium than it ought to. This evidence is consistent with a scenario in which the Cretacious era was going along all fine and dandy, tra-la-la, and suddenly pow! there was a big, brief, sudden infusion of Iridium over the entire planet at the same time that the global environment changed so extensively that it would effect geology: the sedimentary rocks formed afterwards would be dramatically different. Wow! A nervous glance up at the sky would be appropriate at this point.

Like with a lot of the rare Elements, the price point for Iridium tends to flit all over the place. Without many sellers (the human community, in the average year, extracts from the planet a quantity of Iridium equal only to the mass of a blue whale's tongue) and without many buyers (see "hard to work with," above), the market is ripe for gaming by people in suits, and also for hoarding by users of Iridium who wish to protect themselves from gaming of the market by people in suits.

Happy MLK Day!

2012-01-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2012

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Beckmann v. Bellini

2012-01-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

Max Beckmann
1884 - 1950
German; worked in Netherlands and U.S.

-----

Gentile Bellini
c.1429 - 1507
Venetian

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

Flag Friday XXXIX

2012-01-13T01:45:00.000-08:00

Parsons: "I like the frowning sun," says Parsons -- a poetic line, it strikes me -- but he still tags Uruguay for "graven images" and assigns a "B-", 65/100.

Michael5000: It's been two years since I covered Argentina in this series, perhaps a bit uncharitably in retrospect. Uruguay, just across the bay, has the same white, blue, and "Sun of May," but configured differently. The multitude of stripes risks the kind of clown-pants effect I complained of in the last installment, but ten stripes is better than thirteen and blue a little more subdued than red. Too, Uruguay's blue is much bolder than Argentina's; I usually feel that sky blue is a problematic choice for a piece of fabric that is going to be set off against the, um, sky.

The Sun of May, originally a symbol representing an Incan God, was adopted as a symbol of independence from Spain in the early 1800s. On a conceptual level, it niggles at me just a little bit that, well, what is an Incan symbol doing way the hell out in Uruguay? It seems kind of like, I don't know, Nigeria putting the Sphinx on its flag. Or a new flag for Maryland featuring the Space Needle. But, that's nobody's business but the Uruguayans.

Grade: B-

Uzbekistan

Parsons: It has "too many stars" and is "too busy," getting a "C", 56/100.

Michael5000: Uh-oh, I just dissed sky-blue on flags, and here we are in Uzbekistan, which has an awesome flag with a sky-blue field. Does it have too many stars? Yeah, sure. But it has red stripelets, a nice piece of innovation that add some heat to the otherwise cool color palette. That flash of red also provides elements of visibility and uniqueness, which is good on a flag.

Is it too busy? Let's ask the crowd!

Nah, they seem to like it. Like almost all of the post-Soviet states, Uzbekistan did a good job with flag design.

Grade: B+

Vanuatu

Parsons: It has "good colours" but is "too busy" and "has too many stars." Parsons gives it a "C+", 60/100.

Michael5000: This is it, the occasion for us to learn the answer to the question we've all been asking ourselves since Vanuatu became independent in 1980! To wit, "What the hell is that posthorn-looking dealie?" Turns out it's a boar's tusk. Boar's tusks are apparently considered a good luck charm locally. Well, O.K., that's a pretty reasonable and sew-able flag symbol. But inside the boar's tusk? That's apparently two leaves of the namele fern, with 39 fronds to represent the 39 members of Vanuatu's legislative assembly. Whoa, what?!? That's not only way too much detail on a flag emblem, but symbolizing the number of your legislators on a flag is a terrible precident! I mean, what if the United States heard about it? You'd end up with a 535-star flag, that's what.

Otherwise, it's pretty nice. I like the use of black, particularly the black stripelets.

Grade: B

Vatican -- Listed out of sequence, here.

Venezuela

Parsons: With "good colours," it gets a "B", 70/100.

Michael5000: It's been a long time since we talked about the Colombia-Ecuador-Venezuela business, so the serious student of flagginess will wish to refresh his or her memory. Meanwhile, the flag of Venezuela in particular seems to be interestingly flexible. Like a lot of Latin American flags we have looked at, for instance, there is a simple design (seen above) for the general-use civil flag, but the state flag is a dressed-up version with a coat of arms.

Both of these are a relatively new eight-star version introduced by President Hugo Chávez in 2006. Like everything Mr. Chávez says, does, or is in any way connected with, the eight-star flag is of course a point of much controversy. There was, for a while anyway, a bit of a resistance movement keeping the older seven-star version in use. This has calmed down as far as I can tell, and the eight-star Venezuelan flag seems to be a fait accompli, but I'd bet my eyeteeth that there are plenty of irritated holdouts.

Grade (civil flag, eight stars): B

Vietnam

Parsons: It's "simple," but "not quite as nice as Somalia." "A", 85/100.

Michael5000: It's very visible, although not perhaps especially easy on the eyes. It's interesting that such a -- take your pick -- simple/boring design choice as a star in the middle of a background is so distinctive. Its closest peers are China and Somalia, and you're not going to confuse it with either one of those.

Grade: B

Biscuits of Mongolia: #7

2012-01-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

The biscuits of Mongolia project is an endeavor of L&TM5K Ambassador to the Post-Soviet Fringe Meaghan. It is republished here by permission.

Country of origin: Russia.

Packaging languages: Russian.

Biscuit type: cream wafer (vafli).

Mouthfeel: kraft paper and mucilage.

Price: 480 tugrug.

The Wednesday Quiz is a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction

2012-01-11T00:30:00.001-08:00

It's:

2. The capital of Jalisco, it's Mexico's second-largest city.

3. The Wiki calls him "a noted polymath... a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat," and notes that "he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics...." Who was this smart dude?

4. All right, this very small African country is one of the few places on the continent where Spanish is a major language, and its 87% Catholic population is a bit of a anomoly as well. Big oil revenues make it a wealthy country on paper, but the wealth is, to put it mildly, highly concentrated. Its human rights record is considered among the world's worst! The mainland is wedged between Gabon and Cameroon, but the biggest city, Malabo, is on Bioko Island, quite a ways to the north. NAME THAT COUNTRY!

5. Numerous movies, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report have been made from this odd science fiction writer's novels and short stories.

6. His other most famous works are Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, and El Salon Mexico.

7. This is a fragment of what ancient language?

8. It was -- according to the Wiki, again -- shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction, the 2001 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the 2001 Whitbread Book Award for Novel. It won the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the 2002 WH Smith Literary Award, the 2002 Boeke Prize and the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel. Time named it the best fiction novel of the year and included it in its All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels, and The Observer cites it as one of the 100 best novels written, calling it "a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction." I liked it too. And its four-part plot is set in motion when a little girl gets confused after witnessing a sexual encounter in the night and accuses a more or less innocent guy of rape.

9. It's that Yiddish word that means "pleasingly plump, buxom, full-figured."

10. So where's this?

--

10. For A = 1 to 10
20. Give Answer A in the Comments.
30. Next A
40. End

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 2: Audubon v. Bacon

2012-01-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

John James Audubon
1785-1851
American
Defeated Frank Auerbach in Round 1.

-----

Francis Bacon
1909-1992
British
Defeated Dutch master Hendrick Avercamp in Round 1.

----

[It's Auerbach v. Avercamp in the M5K personal tourney.]

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

The Bins Trove of December 2011

2012-01-09T01:00:00.000-08:00

I've made several trips to the legendary "Bins" lately -- you Citizens of Roses know what I'm talking about -- and on one of them I finally succumbed to the logic that:

I have a record player.
Vinyl records are basically free.
It is amusing to listen to vinyl records, and
The vinyl format is an excellent defense against the evils of prolonged sitting.

So of course you'll want to know what I picked up.

A perfectly cromulent recording of core piano repertoire by a Big Name Pianist of a few decades back. Reason for grid on cover not immediately apparent.

The Brahms Violin Concerto, with notes by Deems Taylor, a minor league composer and major league musicologist of a few generations back. You remember him (Taylor, not Brahms) for his stilted, dimwitted blathering in Walt Disney's bizarrely overrated Fantasia.

Like the Brahms, this recording of Mendelssohn's 3rd is a "Book of the Month Club Music-Appreciation Record." Mrs.5000 and I consider this concept a bit of a hoot. Note that the performance is by the "Music Appreciation Symphony Orchestra" under the baton (Classical Music Tip: always say "under the baton of" and, for extra points, swallow the "n" in "baton") of Thomas Scherman, whoever he was. A pick-up band, in other words, which provides the kind of workmanlike performance you would expect from pros putting in a day's work.

Nowadays, of course, we do not refer to the Mendelssohn 3 as the "Scotch." We refer to it as the "Scottish." Especially around large, muscular, politically minded Scotsmen.

This is actually the record that made me decide to make a space in my life for vinyl again. Brubeck Time? Just sitting there naked and sleeveless at The Bins?!? I couldn't let that happen. It's a pretty sweet record.

And, because there's no reason not to gamble on long odds at Bins prices, I Remember Sweden by Nils Flacke, his accordion, and orchestra. Which turns out to alternate between pleasant-enough accordion polka tracks (almost all of which are in the basic metrical and harmonic structure of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game") and vocal tracks which are, alas, schmaltzy without being either a remarkable display of talent or amusing in an ironic fashion. But just to own it is worth the quarter I paid, although whoever eventually has to deal with my estate may beg to disagree.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Beauneveu v. Beccafumi

2012-01-07T00:05:00.000-08:00

Andre Beauneveu
active 1361, died c.1402
French

-----

Domenico Beccafumi
c.1486 - 1551
Italian

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

Element of the Year 2011!!!

2012-01-06T01:00:00.000-08:00

All throughout 2011, a parade of earnest, hopeful elements did their best to dazzle you with their essential natures, all of them dreaming of joining 2010's Oxygen to become our Second Element of the Year. And now, with the voting over, with Terbium and Thallium bravely trying to smile while they are cry their hearts out inside, the moment has come!

And we begin with the Second Runner-Up!

Potassium

Even if you shy away from the volatile reactivity of the K-Element, Potassium, you can't walk away from it altogether. After all, a quarter of a percent of you is it, and if it you somehow lost it your neurons would stop firing, your cells would stop metabolizing, and your number would basically be up! No wonder the Readers picked Potassium as one of the darlings of the 2011 Elemental lineup!

The First Runner-Up!

Boron

Our Readers found nothing Boring about Boron, one of the most elusive of the single-digit Elements. Number Five on the Periodic Table, it was Number Two in our hearts for 2011!!!

And now, it's:

The Element of the Year 2011!!!

Nitrogen

It's as dear to us as the air we breathe! Sure, we're all hooked on 2010 Element of the Year Oxygen -- but frisky, reckless Oxygen wouldn't do us much good if it wasn't in such graceful partnership with mellow, relaxed Nitrogen! It's three percent of your body, seventy-eight percent of your atmosphere, and one hundred percent

Element of the Year 2011!!!

Element #7 is also the seventh most common element in the universe, as far as we can tell. It makes the plants grow! You have been continuously pumping it in and out of your body for the whole time you've been reading this little article. Gentle Readers: please welcome Nitrogen -- our Element of the Year!

The Christmas Trove

2012-01-05T02:15:00.000-08:00

Did you get any awesome loot for Christmas this year? I sure did. For one thing, I got lots of socks and other things of a practical bent. Which was terrific.

But then, I was also given a smashing trove of exquisitely impractial material related to the subject matter of this blog! To the extent that this blog has subject matter! For instance, I received no fewer than four (4) sets of boring postcards, with two siblings, the parents, and Mrs.5000 all doing their part. IT'S LIKE THEY KNEW WHAT I WANTED. Then, on a somewhat grander scale, sisterjen gave me:

Art... postcard... book! It's a threefer! I think it will serve as a coffee table book for a while, before going on to a second life as postcards.

Mrs.5000 really poured it on. For instance, do you think I might enjoy the lavishly illustrated World Encyclopedia of Flags?

Sure, it has historical material. Sure, it discusses every country's flag in depth. But it also covers sub-national flags...

...and has killer vintage flag images. Yummy.

Then we have the DK Ultimate Visual Dictionary, which I highly recommend for anyone who is interested in everything.

Did she stop there? No, she did not. She continued on with an Elements calendar!

It's really quite lovely, even if, with only 12 months to work with, it has to leave a few elements out. It's funny, though, because it has the Elements of the Month all wrong. For instance, it has Bismuth for January.

But the Element of the Month for January isn't Bismuth. It's Iridium.

Lastly, for my collection of vintage books about classical music, it the 1891 Famous Composers and their Works, Volume II!

It was edited by John K. Paine! The guy who could be considered the first great American composer, if Received Opinion had some different starting assumptions!

Now, apparently Mrs.5000 purchased this book (for the excellent price of $3) at the Friends of the Library Book Sale a few months back. And apparently, when she tried to give it to me, I told her that she was crazy not to keep such an awesome find back as a Christmas gift. And now that she mentions it, I do vaguely remember something of the sort happening in the happy excitement of the book sale. But... I sure was surprised. And delighted!

Did you get anything awesome for Christmas?

The Wednesday Quiz is only making plans for Nigel

2012-01-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

It's:

The Wednesday Quiz, in its third incarnation, is basically the same old weekly game of knowledge, intuition, inductive reasoning, and willingness to risk public embarrassment in a friendly and moderately supportive environment!!

Traditionally, it is a closed-book quiz.

It is very possible that answers will come out over the weekend.

1. He became prominent in the years around 1900 as a civil rights leader in South Africa. Later, he led a very well known independence movement in his home country. Who is this very famous man?

2. This odd sentence -- A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. -- is, in halves, the opening and closing line of what notoriously difficult book?

3. He developed the first practical rolls of photographic film as well as the first good motion picture filmstock, made a vast amount of money, and was extravagently philanthropic; but -- contrary to what ~I~ always thought until just now -- none of his daughters or granddaughters ever married a Beatle.

4. Hoo boy. OK, who is the Italian composer whose best known works are the operas La fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment), L'elisir d'amore (The Elixir of Love), and Lucia di Lammermoor?

5. In what 1967 American movie does forgetting your number, losing your spoon, playing grab-ass or fighting in the building, not being in your bunk at eight, smoking in the prone position in bed, turning in the wrong sheet, sitting on bunks in dirty pants, not bringing back your empty pop bottle, loud talking, or failing to keep order all result in spending a night in the box?

6. Iraq's second-biggest city and major port, it's also the hometown of Sinbad the Sailor, or at least it would be if Sinbad the Sailor weren't fictional.

7. What company do these vehicles belong to?

8. This is a map of the provinces of what country?

9. What's the yellow bit on this map?

10. Wikipedia very accurately states that this "band from Swindon, England [is] perhaps... better known for [its] long-standing critical (rather than commercial) success." Their better-known songs include "Senses Working Overtime," "Dear God," "Making Plans for Nigel," and the impressively dextrous "Love on a Farmboy's Wages." What was their name?

--

Anyone who fails to put their answers in the comments, spends the night in the box.

Month to Month Resolutions: January 2012

2012-01-03T03:30:00.000-08:00

As I hinted yesterday, the grossly self-indulgent L&TM5K "Quarterly Reports" are henceforth to be replaced by grossly self-indulgent IAT "Month to Month Resolutions." As I am a UnitedStatesian, and have the naive concomitant belief in the possibility of intentional self-improvement, the idea is to use this here blogging platform to provide myself with incentives and disincentives for certain types of behavior. Every month I set some goals, and report back to you on how I did on the previous month's goals. As if you could give a damn.

Like any truly geeky project, this one involves a graph on a clipboard. I'm very excited about it.

You will notice, I think, that the goals for January are very, very achievable. (You shoulda heard Mrs.5000 sputter when I told her about the "veggies" goal! It was awesome.) The idea is just to ease me into the mindset and see if I can get in the habit of keeping up with the chart. Which, as I mentioned, is on a clipboard. I think that will help.

Categories and Goals for January 2012

Push-ups: A fine exercise for the trunk as well as the upper arms!

Goal: To do a number of push-ups equal to the date (eg. 22 push-ups on January 22). May be done in sets. I am writing this on January 1 and have already done my push-up, and I'm telling you, I feel great!

Weighing-in: I shed quite a bit of extra weight in 2010, but plateaued for 2011. I'd ultimately like to take off another chunk this year if I can.

Goal: Simply to weigh myself and record my weight every morning, just like they say you aren't supposed to. I think it will work for me.

Cola: Mmm, delicious cola.

Goal: To consume no more than an average of two units of cola per day per week. The definition of "units" being, well, a secret.

Veggies: Mmm, delicious veggies.

Goal: To consume no fewer than four units per week. The definition of "units" being "something that, to me, feels like a serving of vegetables."

Gym: I apparently have a gym membership!

Goal: No fewer than two visits over the course of the month.

Paper Mail Sent: Personal cards, postcards, or letters to friends, acquaintances, or strangers.

Goal: An average of at least one item per day over the course of the month. This one was considered challenging by some consultants, but it's actually well within the range of what I send normally.

That Other Blog: Michael Reads the Bible

Goal: No fewer than two posts over the course of the month.

Garden: Those plants growing outside the house.

Goal: none at this time.

Music: An ordered sequence of pitches that we are culturally and perhaps biologically predisposed to enjoy.

Goal: none at this time.

I trust, Gentle Reader, that I have your blessing and support in these endeavors. And of course, in your capacity as a Reader of this blog, you have the right to suggest additional goals or to deride the existing ones if you would like me to self-improve so as to be more to your liking. That's what the comments section is for!

Happy Rose Bowl Sunday!

2012-01-02T14:20:00.000-08:00

The IAT (fL&TM5K) naturally expects you to support the University of Oregon Ducks, unless you have a damn good reason to the contrary, such as a position on the University of Wisconsin faculty.

But there's more than one contest in town.

During halftime and the interminable commercial breaks, you can check to make sure you've cast your vote in all of the current IAT (fL&TM5K) action!

The hopefuls (in blue) for Element of the Year 2011!

Element of the Year 2011!

The Infinite Art Tournament, First Round!

Baumeister v. Bazille

Bassano v. Batoni

Baselitz v. Basquiat

Balthus v. Fra Bartolommeo

Baldung v. Balla

Avercamp v. Bacon

Audubon v. Auerbach

The Infinite Art Tournament, Second Round!

Archipenko v. Arcimboldo

Fra Angelico v. Anguissola

Altdorfer v. Andre

Agasse v. Algardi

Quarterly Report to the Shareholders, Fall 2011, part I

2012-01-02T00:30:00.000-08:00

Blogging

Happy New Year. As you see, we are still here, and here we shall remain. MRtB is a going concern too, albeit a concern that goes very slowly.

The most fanatically alert readers may have noticed changes in the wind. For instance, the title of the blog has changed, although the masthead has not yet caught up. It's taking the name of my favorite of the newer features, which [[pretention alert!!]] is in my mind something of a metaphor for the attitude towards life that I try to imply here in the "content." It also sheds a lame-ass name that I picked when I didn't fully understand what a blog was, let alone what this one would be.

There will be six more Wednesday Quizzes. I've ridden that horse as far as it will go. And, thank god, only a couple more Flag Fridays. Content will shuffle around accordingly to fill the gaps. I hope to keep it interesting for people of a certain temperament who like looking at interesting things and thinking about interesting books and enjoying their place at the banquet of life. And I'll start doing movies again.

And this will be the last Quarterly Report.

Reading

I don't really need to give you quarterly stats on reading. If a book is interesting enough to talk about, I'll talk about it.

Filmed Entertainment

Same deal.

Geohashing

I'll continue to list my Geohashing exploits over in the sidebar, in the unlikely event that you are interested. Of course, I very much encourage you to take up geohashing yourself. It's marvelous. If you would like help getting started, please ask! I'd be happy to help! With missionary zeal!

The Chess Project

I'm still puttering away at my project of playing chess with someone from every country. Again, there's a section in the sidebar about it.

Quilting

I'm nearing completion on two pieces and well along on the piecing of a third. I don't really intend on waking up the quilt blog again, but I'll show off anything I finish here. Probably on a Thursday.

House and Garden

No unusual activity.

Music

No unusual activity.

Counties

No new counties. If and when I DO get new ones, I will probably be unable to resist telling you all about it.

Running

This time last year, I had a comically elaborate set of running goals, all attached to my strangely comprehensive bookkeeping system. I got all of them, including the ones I never told you about. On December 31, I went on a medium length run that (1) made December the "best-ever" December in terms of miles run (since I started keeping track in 2009). Every month of 2011 was the "best-ever" month. And (2) took me over 800 miles for the year. (My goals had been 500 or 600 miles.) Meanwhile, there are only a few little scraps of streets left to explore on the big running map.

My running goal for 2012 is to run 800 miles.

Bicycling

At some point this year, I realized that as a city boy cycling is a fantastic form of dry-season medium-length transport, but not a very fun way to get exercise on a regular basis. No goals. I'll continue to track it, however, and post any notable accomplishment over in the "Prowess" section of the (very comprehensive) sidebar.

Gardening

If anything remarkable happens in the garden, such as another highly stinky inflorescence, I'll be sure to let you know.

Caffeine and Cola

This will be among the categories of the "Month to Month Resolutions," the goal-setting feature that will replace these Quarterly Reports.

Weight

Also to be a category of the Month to Month Resolutions.

Tomatoes

I should pay a little more attention to my diet.

---

Any questions from the floor may be posed at this time. Or any other time.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Baumeister vs. Bazille

2011-12-31T00:05:00.000-08:00

Willi Baumeister
1889 - 1955
German

-----

Frederic Bazille
1841 - 1870
French

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

The Reading List: "Motoring with Mohammed"

2011-12-30T00:30:00.000-08:00

Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea
Eric Hansen, 1992.

Despite more than a passing interest in geography, in places, and in the varieties of human experience, I’ve never been a big fan of travel writing. Part of the problem may just be that I am not crazy about travel itself. Travel broadens, as we all know, but it also narrows: a traveler generally travels to places that appeal to his or her interests and beliefs, and then concludes from this experience that the world is more or less in line with what was expected.

Then too, the reports of a traveler suffer hugely from a sort of uncertainty principle: travel writing can not really capture what a place is really like, because the place itself is distorted by the presence of the traveler. Does this sound flip? I’m not being flip. The next time you read a piece of travel writing, pay attention to how much of the text is spent describing the plans, motives, adventures, and discomforts of the person traveling, how much is spent describing an outsider’s reaction to novelty, and how very, very much is spent describing amusing or amused conversations between the traveler and the local people. What is left over, generally, is more than just setting but much, much less than a real understanding of a place.

Eric Hansen’s Motoring With Mohammed is an interesting book about Eric Hansen, set in Yemen. Hansen is a smart, resourceful man who spent an amazing youth wandering about the antipodes. Just as he was beginning to think about settling down, he had a truly remarkable adventure involving a shipwreck in the Red Sea, rescue by Eritrean goat smugglers, and a brief period stranded in what was then North Yemen. Later, in the hopes of recovering personal journals lost in the shipwreck, he would return to that country, have a variety of very colorful adventures, and interview a lot of expatriates about their own very colorful adventures.

They really are awfully colorful adventures, and Hansen’s workmanlike prose renders them effectively enough. I chuckled occasionally. I thought about how remarkable Hansen’s life seems to have been, and found myself occasionally weighing his life choices against my own. But I also found myself wondering from time to time why I was reading these stories. Eric Hansen has been in some amazing situations, for sure, but Eric Hansen is not my favorite uncle. These are the amazing stories of someone else’s favorite uncle.

Let’s be fair. To be sure, I found the glimpses of Yemen and Yemeni life very interesting. I found myself digging out various maps of Yemen. In fact, my threshold of interest has been raised to the point where, if I were to encounter a book about Yemen, or better yet a book FROM Yemen, I might toss it onto the pile.

There are two technical flaws to Motoring With Mohamed that are grievous enough to be worth mentioning. The first is that, in a book about a man wandering around North Yemen having adventures, there is a map of North Yemen… following the final page. I salute the decision to include the map, but it would have been nice to know it was there while I was still reading the book.

Secondly, the title is unfortunate. If it is intended to be read literally, it refers to a single trip made in the company of a man named Mohammed that occupies considerably less than one-tenth of the book. If, on the other hand, it is supposed to suggest that this book captures some sort of essence of what it is like to travel within the Islamic world, than it is patently delusional. If it is Hansen’s own title, I’d love to know what he was thinking, but I kind of suspect that it’s just a set of words that a meeting at the publishing house thought would be jaunty enough to sell a book of real-life adventure stories set in the southern mountains of the Arabian Peninsula.

Element of the Year 2011: The Voting

2011-12-29T00:05:00.000-08:00

Wow, wasn't it an exciting year in Chemistry? Yes it was! And now it is time once again to select the Element of the Year!

It's never easy. We investigated twelve more extremely excellent elements this year, and I know we'll all have a hard time deciding which is our favorite.

January: Mo -- Molybdenum
February: Tl -- Thallium
March: B -- Boron
April: Cr -- Chromium
May: N -- Nitrogen
June: Es -- Einsteinium
July: Nb -- Niobium
August: Lr -- Lawrencium
September: Np -- Neptunium
October: Yb -- Ytterbium
November: Tb -- Terbium
December: K -- Potassium

Or to see 'em all at once, click here.

How will we decide? Same as last year! YOU, that's right YOU, gentle reader, may pick your first, second, and third favorites, and make your votes in the comments (or send 'em in by boring postcard, or by whatever means you prefer communicating with the IAT (formerly L&TM5K)).

VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE ELEMENT TODAY!!!

The Wednesday Quiz is about the concept of man as a heroic being

2011-12-28T00:05:00.000-08:00

It's:

3. Here's a radar image; an actual photograph wouldn't show you much because of the dense clouds of sulfuric acid in its upper atmosphere. What is this hard-to-get-to place?

4. It's first Article is: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

5. Who is this fictional young man?

6. Who claimed that the Angel Moroni lent him scriptures written on golden plates?

7. Born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum in Russia, she moved the United States when she was about 20. She spent a lot of energy promoting her ideas about "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." What was her pen name?

8. It's what you get when you divide the dividend by the divisor.

9. If you've got an all-powerful and benevolent god, why would human suffering exist? This little conundrum is known as the "_________ ___ _____."

10. She was the star of "Thimble Theatre" for ten years before Popeye even existed.

--

Send your answers to Michael5000 inscribed on golden plates.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 2: Archipenko v. Arcimboldo

2011-12-27T00:05:00.000-08:00

Alexander Archipenko
1887-1964
Ukranian; worked in France and the United States.
Defeated Karel Appel in Round 1.

-----

Giuseppe Arcimboldo
1527-1593
Italian (Milanese)
Defeated Jean Arp in Round 1.

----

[It's also Archipenko v. Arcimboldo in the M5K personal tourney.]

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

2011-12-26T00:30:00.000-08:00

Caliban the Cat wishes you:

Happy Boxing Day!

Happy Christmas!

2011-12-25T00:05:00.000-08:00

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Bassano v. Batoni

2011-12-24T03:05:00.000-08:00

Jacopo Bassano
1510 - 1592
Italian

-----

Pompeo Batoni
1708 - 1787
Italian

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

Advent

2011-12-24T00:05:00.000-08:00

Advent

2011-12-23T00:05:00.000-08:00

Michael5000's Nine Best Lists of Christmas Carols

2011-12-22T03:00:00.000-08:00

Four Christmas Carols That Sound Different in the United States and England

"Angels from the Realms of Glory"
"Away in a Manger"
“O Little Town of Bethlehem”
"While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night"

Three Christmas Carols That Have Swoopy Arpeggios

"Angels We Have Heard on High"
"Carol of the Bells"
"Ding Dong Merrily on High"

Eight Christmas Songs That Arguably Suffer from a Surfeit of Repetition

"Deck the Halls"
"Do You Hear What I Hear?"
"The First Noël"
"Here We Come A-Wassailing"
"The Little Drummer Boy"
“(Simply Having) a Wonderful Christmastime”
"The Twelve Days of Christmas"
"We Wish You a Merry Christmas"

Six Popular Christmas Songs That Lose a Little Something By the Time You Have Your Permanent Teeth

"Frosty the Snowman"
"It's Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas"
"Jingle Bells"
"Let It Snow"
"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"
"Santa Claus Is Coming to Town"

Six Remarkably Well-Written Popular Christmas Songs

“Baby It’s Cold Outside”
"Blue Christmas"
"The Christmas Song"
"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"
"I'll Be Home for Christmas"
“The Happiest Christmas”

Five Popular Christmas Songs That Work Best if Belted Out by a Performer Who Is All Lit Up Like a Christmas Tree*

“(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays”
“The Secret of Christmas”
"Silver Bells"
"White Christmas"
"Winter Wonderland"

*This is also true of several songs on other lists.

Thirteen Awesome Carols That Get Medieval* On Your Christmas

“Adeste Fidelius” (“O Come All Ye Faithful”)
"The Coventry Carol"
"God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen"
"The Holly and the Ivy"
"I Saw Three Ships"
"In Dulci Jubilo" (“Good Christian Men Rejoice”)
"Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming"
"O Come O Come Emanuel”
“O Sanctissima”
“The Sussex Carol" ("On Christmas Night All Christians Sing")
“Ther is No Rose of Swych Vertu”
“Un Flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle”
"The Wexford Carol" ("Good People All, This Christmastide")

*or come from so deep in the folk tradition that nobody really knows their origins

Seven Pretty Sweet Christmas Carols From the Nineteenth Century

"Good King Wenceslas"
"It Came Upon the Midnight Clear"
"O Holy Night"
"Once in Royal David's City"
"Past Three O'Clock"
"Silent Night"
"We Three Kings of Orient Are"

Five Christmas Carols That Were Composed by, Like, Composers

“Ave Maria” (Schubert)
"Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" (Mendelssohn)
"In the Bleak Midwinter" (Holst)
“O Jesu So Meek” (Bach)
“Panis Angelicus” (Franck)

Advent

2011-12-22T00:05:00.000-08:00

The Wednesday Quiz is drifting towards an incapacitating insanity

2011-12-21T00:05:00.001-08:00

It's:

4. This is, for better or worse, among the best-known works of the Swiss painter _____________.

5. A highly intellectual plantation farmer, he founded the University of Virginia; hhis private library became the core collection of the Library of Congress. He also had an active diplomatic and political career. What's his name?

6. What's the term for this?

7. It's sometimes said that there are 330 million of them, but then it's often said that they are all avatars of Brahman. What are they?

8. What was the name of the ambitious economic development program in the late 1950s and early 1960s that, in addition to stifling its country's economy, ended up killing about 25 million people? (Oddly, its architect is still taken seriously in some quarters.)

9. This is the Wednesday Quiz of Nonidi, 29 Frimaire CCXX in the ____________________.

10. What the technical term for a chemical reaction that releases heat?

--

Put 330 million answers in the comments.

Advent

2011-12-21T00:05:00.000-08:00

Advent

2011-12-20T00:05:00.000-08:00

Michael5000 vs. Shakespeare: Cymbeline (Arden, 1955)

2011-12-19T03:30:00.000-08:00

The Play: Cymbeline
Edition: Arden, edited by J.M. Nosworthy, 1955.

Genre & Setting: Cymbeline is one of the “Romances,” which I have generally taken to mean “one of the ones that are hard to classify as either Tragedy, Comedy, or History.” J.M. Nosworthy saw me coming, though, and in the introduction cites literature to the effect that

the term ‘romance,’ as applied to Shakespeare’s final plays, is not merely a vague substitute for something more specific, but is exact in the restricted and historical sense of the word. These plays belong in matter and tone to a [particular] literature of love and love-making….

He lists the characteristics of “a full-fledged Elizabethan romance”:

“Love is treated as a sublime and momentous experience which imposes courtesy and hazardous quests.”
“Faithful love is subjected to abnormal strain….”
Complex scenarios grow out of scheming and intrigue.
There is much coincidence and mistaken identity.
Characters make elaborate quests for unlikely reasons.
There are journeys through the forest.
“Ultimately the whole contorted pattern yields to poetic justice which effects the conventional happy ending.”

As it turns out, this is almost a perfect recipe for the action of Cymbeline. OMG it’s the perfect romance! Except, since this was a definition chosen from among many competitors by an editor who wanted to establish Cymbeline as a romance, and since Cymbeline is one of the high profile (and therefore literally definitive) examples of the genre, we should probably recognize that there is some circularity happening here. But whatever. No blood, no foul.

The play is set in quasi-historical Britain, Cymbeline being a quasi-legendary (I think) early British chieftain who pays tribute to, but is not part of, the Roman Empire. Bits happen in Cymbeline’s capital, and other bits happen in, of all places, Milford Haven, Wales. In practical terms, though, everything really happens in a generalized fairytale kingdom of long ago.

The Gist, which will obviously involve spoilers: So there’s this king, Cymbeline, but like Henry IV and Julius Caesar, he is a minor character in his own Shakespeare play. So let’s not worry too much about him.

The action of Cymbeline is something of a Rube Goldberg machine in which a number of very common plot elements are all superimposed on top of each other, creating a perfect storm of many, many unlikely misunderstandings and wacky complications until all is put right in a deluge of last-act revelations. Here’s how it’s put together.

We begin with

(1) The Princess who Wants to Marry Below Her Station. Imogen, who is of course lovely and pure, wants to marry Leonatus Posthumous. Posthumous, as he is called, got his ridiculous name because he was the son of a guy named Leonatus who died shortly after his birth, leaving him an orphan. He was brought up in Cymbeline’s court, which gave me the queasy sensation early on that Imogen the lovely and pure was wanting to get it going on with her adoptive brother, but it becomes fairly clear, I think, that we aren’t supposed to regard the relationship in that light. Nevertheless, Dad is pissed.

(2) The Wicked Stepmother. “Queen” – she is not given a name – pretends to be all sugar and spice, but is secretly contemptuous of Cymbeline. She wants to secure the throne for her doltish son Clotten by marrying him off to Imogen. Obviously she is not thrilled by the Posthumous business.

(3) The Dumb-Ass Bet About the Girlfriend’s Fidelity. The stupidest device in all of literature, but you know how it is with playwrights and librettists: cosi fan tutti. Posthumous, banished from Britain for his insolent nuptial aspirations, makes a bet with Iachimo, a dastardly Italian, that he (Iachimo) won’t be able to talk Imogen into putting out for him. Iachimo – rather cleverly, really – asks Imogen to store a crate for him in her room, then sneaks out of the crate while she’s asleep to take a thorough inventory of her décor and physique. Back in Italy, he uses this fairly dubious evidence, along with some uncharitable fibs, to convince Posthumous that Imogen was not as constant as might have been expected. Posthumous – perhaps not the sharpest tool in the shed – takes it hook, line, and sinker, and writes home commanding his faithful servant to have Imogen killed.

(4) The Long Lost Brothers/The Nice Young Rustics Who Don’t Realize They Are Heirs to the Throne. Tipped off by the faithful servant, Imogen takes off to Milford Haven, where she expects to find Posthumous and be able to clear things up. Near there, she meets some very nice guys who live in a cave. They are of course her brothers, the princes who we happened to hear about early on, the ones who mysteriously disappeared in their infancy. Cool.

(5) Amazingly Successful Cross-Dressing. I should mention that, having fled the Queen, Imogen spends most of the second half of the play disguised as a boy.

(6) Poison! Unfortunately, the Queen has passed some poison on to Imogen. She drinks it and dies.

(7) OMG She’s Dead! Fortunately, a wise doctor back home had realized that the Queen is bad business, and when she asked him for poison he just gave her some Ambien. So Imogen isn’t really dead.

(8) OMG He’s Dead! Clotten, however, is quite dead, having picked a fight with the wrong Rustic Who Is Actually, Unbeknownst To Himself, A Long-Lost Prince. Clotten rode out to Milton Haven intending to rape Imogen and drag her home for a good old-fashioned marriage of convenience, but this did not work out. So, Imogen wakes up next to Clotten’s body. She doesn’t recognize him, though, because (a) he has been decapitated and (b) he had dressed up in Posthumous’ clothes in order to taunt Imogen during the whole rape business. Therefore the Princess, who apparently has not made it much past first base with her fiance’, assumes that this body must be her beloved Posthumous. She is naturally distraught.

Do you feel like there are enough balls in the air at this point? Shakespeare apparently did, because now events are pushed along by a Roman invasion. King Cymbeline is briefly captured but is saved by his long-lost sons, although neither of them recognize each other yet. Posthumous has come back and engages in some swordplay with the dastardly Iachimo. Posthumous is remorseful for having made the dumb bet and for having had Imogen killed. Iachimo is remorseful for having made the dumb bet and for having been so, you know, dastardly.

And at this point, having erected radical misunderstandings and/or mistaken identities between pretty much any two major characters, Shakespeare manages to gather everybody in one place: Milford Haven! So the last act is preposterous, or great fun, or both, with its long parade of Amazing Revelations. Information trickles in from minor characters, and major characters decide to finally reveal their secrets, and lo, we in the audience are treated to the spectacle of the characters finally figuring out all of the things that we have known about all along. It’s called “dramatic irony,” and in Cymbeline it is turned up to 11.

The Edition: Y’all probably know that most Shakespeare plays have more than one source text, that they don’t generally line up especially well, and that there’s ample grounds for speculation about whether specific scenes in a given play might have been written by one of Shakespeare’s pals, or maybe just slapped together by somebody who had acted in or seen the play, working from memory. So a Shakespeare “Edition,” in addition to offering lots of contextual information and (Shakespeare scholarship being Shakespeare scholarship) great edifices of educated guesswork, has heaps of notes on the texts.

This is the first time I’ve ever read an edition thinking about its quality as an edition. What I noticed is that Nosworthy generally tells you what various literary giants of the past thought about a portion of the text, and then tells you what HE thinks. He tacitly makes fun of critics who shallowly argue that a scene or passage should be omitted as “not Shakespearean,” for instance, but then he doesn’t really give a lot of insight into his own thought processes either. The bulk of the notes recap somewhat esoteric disputes about the meaning of difficult or garbled passages that you can otherwise blow past without too much trouble. The notes are generally pretty interesting in their own light, though, and there is occasionally one that you are really grateful to for clearing up an otherwise opaque passage. The most entertaining are the ones that summarize centuries of argument over the meaning of a passage that, as far as ~I~ can tell, are completely unproblematic. I have read that this kind of thing is just an occasional hazard of serious literary study.

Adaptation: It seems to me that you could go two directions with Cymbeline. You could play it straight, as the adventures of Imogen the Princess, and end up with such melodrama that it would be tough to keep the audience from laughing. The wiser choice, I think, would be to revel in the overblown plot mechanics and stage it as a very early absurdist comedy.

Prognosis: In the introductory material, Nosworthy – who, since he is editing an edition of Cymbeline, has a powerful vested interest in saying that it is awesome – suggests that the strength of the play is that it is a pioneering work in the new genre of Romance, and that its inconsistencies and rough patches just show how experimental it was. The flaws of the play are spun so as to flatter Shakespeare: “look how close to the cutting edge he was!”

Personally, I can’t help wondering if Cymbeline was something more along the lines of a “spoof.” Why not? Self-referential parody was certainly around in the English tradition before Shakespeare – check out Chaucer’s own tale in the Cantebury tales – so why couldn’t a talented and popular dude like Shakespeare throw together a light-hearted lampoon of the goofy plot devices that undergirded most of his work? It would have been fun for him, and his fans probably would have loved it. “The OMG He’s Dead gambit! Ha! Ha! Just like that one about the Italian kids!”

Advent

2011-12-19T00:05:00.000-08:00

The Infinite Art Update

2011-12-18T07:00:00.001-08:00

Don't let the Advent Calendar distract you from voting in this weekend's first-round IAT action: Living German Guy Georg Baselitz versus Late 20th-Century American Jean-Michel Basquiat!!!

Other active first-round action!!

Balthus v. Fra Bartolommeo

Baldung v. Balla

Avercamp v. Bacon

Audubon v. Auerbach

Archimboldo v. Arp -- Polls closing soon!

Appel v. Archipenko -- Polls closing soon!

And available for voting in the Second Round!!

Fra Angelico v. Anguissola

Altdorfer v. Andre

Agasse v. Algardi

Remember: Your vote counts as we continue the long long journey to decide the greatest artist of all time!

Advent

2011-12-18T01:00:00.000-08:00

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Baselitz v. Basquiat

2011-12-17T03:30:00.000-08:00

Georg Baselitz
1938 -
German

-----

Jean-Michel Basquiat
1960 - 1986
American

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

Advent

2011-12-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

Not the Reading List: King, Queen, Knave

2011-12-16T03:30:00.000-08:00

King, Queen, Knave
Vladimir Nabokov (as V. Sirin), 1928.
Translated and Revised 1968.

King, Queen, Knave is not on the Reading List. I bought it because it is by Nabokov, and because it has an awesomely lurid cover. It’s interesting to think that, almost within my lifetime, Nabokov was not just an important literary figure, not just a bestselling author, but a bestselling author who had enough commercial power that they would try to sell his books in tawdry paperback form. There must have been a fair number of disappointed buyers, I’ll tell you what.

It’s a book with an interesting background. During his twenties, waiting for the Russian Revolution to run its course so he could head home, Nabokov tutored in various languages, taught tennis and boxing, worked on his butterfly collection, composed chess puzzles, and published a couple of novels in the Russian émigré press; this was his second book. It didn't make much of a splash, until the runaway success of Lolita made the Nabokov brand name capable of pushing serious book sales. At this point, he had his son make a literal translation of King, Queen, Knave into English, and from that raw material made substantial revisions to his forty-year old text and tale. What I read, then, is kind of an interesting mashup of younger Nabokov and older Nabokov, with some level of input from Nabokov Junior. Cool.

The story, and of course I am about to issue spoilers, is a very simple contrivance about a country boy who comes to Berlin to seek a job in his uncle’s commercial empire, but whoops, falls under the spell of his sexy sexy aunt. This premise is very simple – there are really only three characters in the book – and the complications that ensue are fairly simple complications, if you follow me. Ultimately, though, Nabokov has a few surprises and ironies up his sleeve to reward the part of your brain that follows the plot.

The Usual Triangle? In a Nabokov Novel? Hardly.

But this is not a book that’s “about” the plot. It’s really a book about narrative technique (although if that makes it sound deadly tedious you could just say that it’s the kind of story where it’s not so much what he said, it’s the way that he said it). Specifically, Nabokov’s gambit here is to radically destabilize the point-of-view. None of the three characters is a POV character – or rather, they all are. This is not especially unusual in and of itself – lots of books switch POV from chapter to chapter – but in King, Queen, Knave, the POV slithers around from paragraph to paragraph. Nor is there always much in the way of signposting, and occasionally we realize with a start that the perspective has shifted without us noticing, and we have moved from, say, the uncle’s to the nephew’s conception of the situation.

Nabokov has fun using this unstable perspective to enrich the simple complexities of his story. Since each of the characters has secrets from the others, and since none of the three are particularly self-aware personalities, his subtle sliding around from mind to mind lets him exploit their disparities of information for dramatic and comic (albeit dry-as-dust comic) effect. We readers, meanwhile, have the satisfaction that always comes when we have access to lots of information and get to watch the poor benighted characters stumble about in their relative blindness. As I will say about a very different piece of fiction next week: it’s called “dramatic irony,” and in King, Queen, Knave it is turned up to 11.

Now, what (older) Nabokov himself found most interesting about KQK when he exhumed it for revision is that (younger) Nabokov used the technique of interior monologue at a time when he had not read, and didn’t yet know much about, Ulysses. Nabokov – (older) Nabokov – had a bit of an axe to grind on the subject of interior monologue, feeling that Joyce had been given more credit for pioneering the technique than he deserved. Specifically, he felt that interior monologue was plainly on display in Tolstoy, particularly in Anna Karenina. Therefore, finding his younger self crafting interior monologues at a time when he was presumably under the influence of the Russian masters, but not so much the English-language modernists, is a nice homegrown piece of evidence to support his theory.

Me, I’m more hung up on this shifting-perspectives thing, and I think it’s interesting too that KQK was written only a few years after the heyday of Cubism. Because, see, it’s not just that point of view shifts among the characters. A given paragraph might also find us in a mode of neutral observation, or in the care of a conventionally omniscient narrator, or addressed by an unconventionally omniscient narrator who is able to make reference to the characters’ futures, or the provenance or destiny of ordinary items encountered by the characters. Some second-person narration is occasionally thrown in for good measure.

Cubist painters tried to show us things in a new way by breaking down the visual field – rendering objects or people from multiple angles (or through a sequence of time) simultaneously. Essentially, their idea was to fracture the concept of point of view. Nabokov’s fractured point of view is metaphorical rather than literal, but there’s something of the same effect: we have the sensation of looking at the characters from multiple angles all at the same time, and although our usual conventions of representation are being tampered with, there are new ways of looking at things to be discovered as well.

You may be wondering if I enjoyed the book. Yeah, it was pretty good. I gave it 4/5 stars on Goodreads. It’s not a book that many would read compulsively – I could put it down! – but it entertained me, especially in the final third. But more to the point, it also made me think in new ways about words and stories, and I liked that. Since so much of conscious life is built out of words and stories, it seems to me that thinking about how they work is always a good sort of experience to be chasing after.

Advent

2011-12-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

Advent

2011-12-15T01:00:00.000-08:00

The Wednesday Quiz is basically an elaborate alegory about Freemasonry

2011-12-14T03:15:00.000-08:00

It's:

What is it?

6. Why, it's a population density map of _____________!

7. Why, it's an infrared image of ____________!

8. A tropical fruit native to the Sudan, it is fairly common in the foods of India, Africa, and Latin America. In the United States, you are only likely to encounter it in drinks sold in Mexican restaurants or markets... or in Worchestershire sauce. What is it?

9. Element number 11 is a silvery-white metal! It's essential to your biological function, but if you live in North America you probably have way too much of it in your diet, since it's so deliciously savory when combined with Element number 17! What's it called?

10. If you've read a book that is a thinly-veiled treatment of actual people and events, and you want to impress the people in the English department, you refer to it as a ___________________.

--

Put your thinly-veiled treatment of actual people and events in the comments.

Advent

2011-12-14T00:05:00.000-08:00

The Biscuits of Mongolia: #6

2011-12-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

The biscuits of Mongolia project is an endeavor of L&TM5K Ambassador to the Post-Soviet Fringe Meaghan. It is republished here by permission.

Country of origin: Moldova.

Packaging languages: Moldovan (Romanian), Russian.

Biscuit type: butter biscuit.

Mouthfeel: sawdust, shavings, rust.

Price: 500 tugrug.

Advent

2011-12-13T00:05:00.000-08:00

Michael5000's Holiday Craft Project

2011-12-12T05:30:00.000-08:00

So you put up your Christmas lights, and of course quite a few of them will be "burnt out," their filaments having shaken loose when you took them down, or in storage, or when you put them back up.

You replace them, and you end up with a couple pockets full of burned out bulbs. Do you just add them to the relentless sea of Christmas lights overspilling our landfills? Not anymore, for I have had a very clever idea (although I very much doubt I am one of the first million to have had it).

Take your dysfunctional bulbs and secure them in place. I'm all fancy doing two at once in the illustration, because I have a good vise, but really you could just grip them firmly. Also, I'm doing C9 bulbs here, but it works fine with C7s too.

Drive a hole through the threads of the bulb. I'm using a drill with an old bit here, but you could probably drive your holes with an awl, or a ball-point pen for that matter. Bulbs aren't exactly a durable good, and you'll find that the material the threads are made out of is not much more than a stiff foil.

Next, make loops out of eight inches or so of yarn, string, durable thread, wire, or whatever you've got handy. I'm using fancy linen thread here, but that's a little extravagant. Thread your line through the holes you made, then tie a firm double knot to complete the loop.

Voila, Christmas ornaments!

Hang 'em on a tree of some sort.

CHRISTMAS CHEER, BABY!!!

Estimated time requirement: ~10 minutes setup + 2 minutes/bulb.
Difficulty: Super-easy.
Kid-Friendliness: Well, we're puncturing glass objects here. Not for toddlers, know what I'm sayin'?

Advent

2011-12-12T00:05:00.000-08:00

The Infinite Art Update

2011-12-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

Don't let the Advent Calendar distract you from voting in this weekend's first-round IAT action: 20th Century European Balthus versus Renaissance Florentine Fra Bartolommeo!!!

Other active first-round action!!

Baldung v. Balla

Avercamp v. Bacon

Audubon v. Auerbach

Archimboldo v. Arp

Appel v. Archipenko

And available for voting in the Second Round!!

Fra Angelico v. Anguissola

Altdorfer v. Andre

Agasse v. Algardi

Remember: Your vote counts as we continue the long long journey to decide the greatest artist of all time!

Advent

2011-12-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Balthus v. Fra Bartolommeo

2011-12-10T02:00:00.000-08:00

Balthus
1912 - 2001
Polish-French

-----

Fra Bartolommeo
c.1474 - c.1517
Italian (Florentine)

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

Advent

2011-12-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

Flag Friday XXXVIII

2011-12-09T03:00:00.000-08:00

Parsons: Parsons reviewed a short-lived flag that Tuvalu used in 1996 and 1997. It got rid of the Union Jack, but that turned out to be an unpopular move; apparently the British flag is seen locally as symbolic of Tuvalu's own monarchy, which is very popular. Here it is.

The 1996-97 flag shared the star layout with the current flag, though, so Parson's remarks on this subject bear repeating: "I didn't realize the horrible truth about their flag. Those stars aren't in a random arrangement at all... they're in the shape of the islands that make up the country. It's a map!" This and other factors landed it with one of Parsons' very lowest grades.

Michael5000: I don't have any problem with an abstract representation of a map, especially in the South Pacific, the Original Home of Abstract Cartographic Representation. As patterns of irregularly placed stars go, I like that all the stars are the same size, shape, and orientation; this cuts down on the noise that is generated by Southern Cross flags like New Zealand's and Australia's. The baby-blue field with the ubiquitous Union Jack does create a little built-in-boredom, though, and obviously whenever you've got eight stars floating around there's going to be a certain busyness business. Let's give it:

Grade: C+

Uganda

Parsons: With "graven images" and being "too busy," it "makes [him] nauseous" and gets a "D", 40/100.

Michael5000: The central device (a "Grey Crowned Crane"!) is too fussy and the six stripes of aggressive coloration create an awful lot of noise. Points for distinctiveness: it's one of the most recognizable flags out there. Points off for embarrassing the Grey Crowned Crane.

Grade: D+

Ukraine

Parsons: With "bad colours," it gets a "B-", 65/100.

Michael5000: It's impressive that a flag this simple could be so distinctive. A very strong bicolor.

Grade: A

United Arab Emirates

Parsons: Without comment, it gets a "B", 74/100.

Michael5000: I think I admitted a few Fridays back that I find the red/green/black/white variations of the Eastern Mediterranean a bit dull. My loss, I'm sure. But with the UAE, the color scheme combines with the lanky 2:1 ratio to make it look, to me, like somebody took a perfectly serviceable tricolor and then gave it a superfluous red margin on the poleward side. It's just not the flag for me.

Grade: B-

United Kingdom

Parsons: It's "too busy" and gets a "B", 70/100.

Michael5000: Goofy as it often looks when embedded in somebody else's flag, and much as it has been commercialized by fans of groovy British institutions such as The Who, there is a jaunty individuality to the Union Jack that is hard not to like. Plus, it's a little history lesson in the expansion of England's power over its Celtic hinterlands.

Note that the Welsh get completely screwed in this scheme, but they make up for the snub by having a flag of their own that is about as awesome as any other pictorial flag out there.

I would love to see the flag-waving at a Wales-Bhutan soccer match. Or Quiddich. Whatever.

Grade (for the Union Jack): A

United States

Parsons: "If one is good, fifty must be just right," quips Parsons. With "too many stars" and being "too busy," it gets a "C+", 60/100.

Michael5000: I myself happen to be a citizen of the United States of America, and this makes it difficult to look at this particular flag objectively. For one thing, it's the flag of my country, land that I love, yadda yadda yadda. Run it up the flagpole to see if I salute, and you'll find I do.

But for another thing, it is a symbol that is routinely used within my country to browbeat people who do not agree with one or another point of view. I've noticed that it is often invoked in support of stupid points of view, which makes sense, as better-reasoned ideas tend to fly on their own wings and do not need to get propped up by bogus assertions of nationalist identity. Furthermore, if you spend enough time in the United States, you will eventually see a gigantic version of this flag being used in an effort to sell cars.

Conversely, you will find many of my paisanos who, when travelling abroad, will proudly eschew this flag and its associated national symbolism in favor of someone else's. They do this either to avoid the horror of being recognized for who they are, or out of an unwillingness to be associated with the party in power combined with the condescending belief that foreigners can't comprehend that there will be differences of opinion within a large political entity. I have little patience for this practice. Then too, there are the nutters who think that burning the flag of their own country is a great way to "make a statement," and while I feel that the idea of making this a criminal offense is frankly mawkish, neither can I think of a more effective way someone could choose to discredit his or her own beliefs.

So, doing my best to steer around the complicated baggage, I find that I have a list of things I do not like about the American flag. A substantial list, actually. The first item on the list is conceptual: it is not a stable flag. Although this hasn't been an issue in the last handful of decades, historically the number of stars has been in constant flux. It's not a huge issue visually, but it kind of fights against the idea of an enduring symbol. (I have read somewhere that the Heraldry Office, or whatever we have, has 51-star and 52-star and who knows how many other layouts all ready to go, just in case. This amuses me.)

Then, there's the sheer number of stars. Fifty! It's really a bit absurd, and creates all sorts of algebraic star-placement issues that are revealed if you browse the history of U.S. flag star layout. It's about as busy as you can get without slapping a national seal on there. And while we're discussing busyness, I fear I must point out that there is a good reason that the word "triskaidecacolor" doesn't exist. It's because thirteen stripes is way too many. Friends, forgive me: the stripes of the U.S. flag bear more than a passing resemblance to circus pants.

And what kind of ratio is 10:19, anyway?

Grade: C

Advent

2011-12-09T00:05:00.000-08:00

Advent

2011-12-08T19:30:00.000-08:00

Element of the Month: Potassium!

2011-12-08T02:55:00.000-08:00

December's Element of the Month:

Potassium!
K
19

Atomic Mass: 39.0983 amu
Melting Point: 63.38 °C
Boiling Point: 579 °C

There are lots of cool things about Potassium, such as that you've heard of it and that its chemical symbol is "K." You can't help but love Potassium, because you are 1/400th it! (The same is true of anyone you've ever been in love with.) It's tied (with Sulfer) as the seventh most common element in your body, although if you went on a truly serious Doritos binge it might drop behind Sodium for a while if my math is correct. Compare that with these fancy Swedish Elements we've been studying lately! You don't have any Ytterbium in your body! At least, you shouldn't.

No doubt Potassium has incredibly esoteric uses in the alloying and metallurgic biz, but it's important in more fundamental ways too. For instance, it's essential for neural transmission, basic metabolism, and cell function. Don't leave home without it. But not to worry: it's one of those dietary minerals that is kind of hard not to get enough of, so long as you are eating normal foods, but there's apparently some evidence that a little more Potassium in the diet may keep strokes at bay.

The Centerfold!

(Photo by Wiki guy "Dennis S.K.," used under one of those open licence dealies.)

Most industrial Potassium production goes into fertilizer, because while you and I are only 1/400th Potassium, plants are up to 1/50th of the stuff. The fertilizer is a Potassium compound, though, such as Potassium Chloride or Sulfate or Nitrate. Elemental Potassium itself is -- wait for it -- a soft, silvery metal. People don't like to keep a lot of it on hand, because it reacts quickly with oxygen to form a Potassium "superoxide" which is, like, tremendously explosive. And Potassium reacts violently with water, which creates lots of hydrogen that starts burning and creating more heat that sustains the reaction and, well, the point is, you don't just leave raw potassium sitting around on the mantlepiece.

Oh, did I mention that Sir Humphry Davy first isolated elemental Potassium in 1807? He did. And a couple of months later, he isolated Sodium. In 1808, he isolated Calcium. Then he did Magnesium, Boron, and Barium, and proved that Chlorine was its own Element and not an Oxygen compound like everybody thought. He was also a respected poet, and he invented a lamp that saved countless thousands by dramatically reducing the incidence of mining explosions. What have you been up to lately?

Advent

2011-12-08T00:05:00.000-08:00

The Wednesday Quiz has, um, "conquered" quite a few women

2011-12-07T02:00:00.000-08:00

It's:

3. He earned a buck a year at his highest-profile job, co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, and, sad to say, died young a few months back.

4. One of the most recognizable and well-known styles of painting took its name from a hostile review of this 1872 painting. What was the name of the movement it represented?

5. This epic Western movie cost about $44 million, and earned back something like $4 million. This debacle pretty much killed off United Artists Studios, and shifted control of American moviemaking to from directors to studio executives. Bummer.

6. What's the name of the penninsula where Turkish soldiers engaged in an extended bloody battle, oddly enough, with soldiers from Australia and New Zealand?

7. Here are a few of the patents of a very smart guy who won the Nobel Prize for Physics when he was 37:

#2206634, Process for the Production of Radioactive Substances, filed October, 1935, issued July, 1940
#2798847, Method of Operating a Neutronic Reactor, filed December 1944, issued July, 1957
#2813070, Method of Sustaining a Neutronic Chain Reacting System, filed November, 1945, issued November, 1957
#2836554, Air Cooled Neutronic Reactor
#2837477, Chain Reacting System

(He was also apparently the first person to point out that our lack of contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life is in itself an adequate proof for the non-existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, which was a big disappointment for me since I thought that idea was my own baby.)

What's his name?

8. Popularly used to refer to gourmet hedonist attitudes, it technically denotes a classical philosophy expounded by this guy:

The idea is that by pursuing virtues one may enjoy the most happiest life possible. What "-ism" word am I talking about here?

9. Mozart's eponymous villain has, um, "conquered" quite a few women, including 1003 in Spain alone. And mind you, he's well-travelled. What's his name?

10. This novel by Anthony Burgess, made into a movie by Stanley Kubrick, wonders whether good behavior is meaningful if it is compelled rather than chosen. What's it called?

--

Put your answers, made into a movie by Stanley Kubrick, in the comments.

Advent

2011-12-07T00:05:00.000-08:00

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 2: Fra Angelico v. Anguissola

2011-12-06T02:00:00.000-08:00

Fra Angelico
c.1387-1455
Italian
Defeated Florentine master Andrea del Sarto in Round 1 by a decisive but respectful margin.

-----

Sofonisba Anguissola
c.1532 - 1625
Italian
Defeated Italian predecessor Antonello da Messina in Round 1 by two votes -- a one-vote swing would have resulted in a draw. YOUR VOTE COUNTS!

----

[In the M5K personal tourney, this round pits Fra Angelico v. Antonello da Messina.]

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting.

Advent

2011-12-06T00:05:00.000-08:00

Gingerbread Victory!

2011-12-05T04:00:00.000-08:00

We won at a gingerbread house party! And by won, I mean "had a fun time with various highly charming people." But also, like, won.

Specifically, I tied for first with my lighthouse.

Frankly, I'm a bit mystified by this. It looked just slightly cooler before the peak of the roof fell off on the way home -- it had a a red candy tip -- but not that much cooler. The judges may have been swayed by the unique hollow-core no-frosting construction; it is really just a pile of gingerbread rings held together by gravity. Also, I think people like fire.

Much more impressive, I think, is Mrs.5000's church.

After all, the hard part about gingerbread construction (as our hostess amply demonstrated) is having your construction stay up. And look at those vertical lines! How did she do it? Like they did back in the day: buttresses! I helped by encouraging her to stick with the simple plans of Romanesque design rather than getting embroiled in the Gothic. She got third!

Advent

2011-12-05T03:00:00.000-08:00

Advent

2011-12-04T18:00:00.000-08:00

The Infinite Art Update

2011-12-04T04:30:00.000-08:00

Don't let the Advent Calendar distract you from voting in this weekend's first-round IAT action: 16th Century German Hans Baldung takes on Italian Futurist Giacomo Baldung!!!

Other active first-round action!!

Avercamp v. Bacon

Audubon v. Auerbach

Archimboldo v. Arp

Appel v. Archipenko

Anguissola v. Antonello da Messina -- Polls Closing Soon!

Andrea del Sarto v. Fra Angelico -- Polls Closing Soon!

And available for voting in the Second Round!!

Altdorfer v. Andre

Agasse v. Algardi

Remember: Your vote counts as we continue the long long journey to decide the greatest artist of all time!

Advent

2011-12-04T00:05:00.001-08:00

Advent

2011-12-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Baldung v. Balla

2011-12-03T03:00:00.000-08:00

Hans Baldung
c. 1484 - 1545
German

-----

Giacomo Balla
1871 - 1958
Italian

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

Advent

2011-12-03T00:05:00.000-08:00

If You Can Make It Another Week or So, You'll Be Through the Worst of It

2011-12-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

(Void in Southern Hemisphere and Equatorial regions)

Advent

2011-12-02T00:05:00.000-08:00

It's the Globe Arts!

2011-12-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

There's a show opening tomorrow (Friday, Dec. 2) that has a Mrs.5000 piece in it!

Although we call it "The Globe Show" here at the Castle, its real name is "Welcome to My World." It is at the ever-wonderful 23Sandy Gallery, which by intriguing coincidence happens to be located at -- well, near -- the intersection of NE 23rd and Sandy here on the beautiful East Side. 5 to 8 p.m. Attendance is mandatory.

This seems like the kind of show that Map of the Week would like...

Advent

2011-12-01T00:05:00.000-08:00

After this one, there will be ten more Wednesday Quizzes

2011-11-30T01:00:00.000-08:00

It's:

5. Who are these guys?

6. Before and during the U.S. Civil War, there was ongoing gang violence to determine whether it would be a "slave state" or a "free state."

7. He is said to have met Elijah and Moses on a mountain.

8. It's the autobiography of a Roman Emporer, except written in 1934 by Robert Graves.

9. It was that family that held the thrones of Spain, Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire for all those years.

10. What country is this?

--

Put your answers in the comments.

The Biscuits of Mongolia: #5

2011-11-29T01:00:00.000-08:00

The biscuits of Mongolia project is an endeavor of L&TM5K Ambassador to the Post-Soviet Fringe Meaghan. It is republished here by permission.

Country of origin: Turkey.

Packaging languages: Turkish, English (GB/USA/Canada!), Polish, Russian, Czech, Romanian, Spanish, Albanian, French, Italian, Arabic, Macedonian, Portuguese.

Biscuit type: sandwich.

Mouthfeel: velvet, lard, & quinine.

Price: 580 tugrug.

The 2011 Library Book Sale CD Trove I

2011-11-28T12:10:00.000-08:00

A new series of CD finds from the Friends of the Multnomah County Library Annual Booksale.

François Couperin: Messe à l'usage des Paroisses

Michel Chapuis, organ

I don't really know much about the French Baroque composer François Couperin, so I included this in my stack of thirteen Book Sale CDs with the idea of getting to know a new composer. When I was showing the stack to Mrs.5000, she said "But isn't that organ music?"

"Oh crap," I said.

Five seconds of playing time confirmed that this is, indeed, organ music. In fact it's apparently considered something of a landmark organ piece.

Yeah, we don't do organ music.

Decision: Discard. This CD is available for the asking.

Random Record Review 3: Matthew Sweet, "Blue Skies on Mars"

2011-11-28T00:40:00.000-08:00

The Record: Matthew Sweet, Blue Sky on Mars.
Format: CD
Year of Release: 1997
Genre: Rock

In 1997, I had completed graduate school and thought it was important to get in touch with The Music That Was Happening Now (ie. Then). Of course, if one is consciously making this kind of decision, the train has by definition already left the station, but I did not realize that yet.

I purchased Blue Skies on Mars after hearing two of its songs on a nationally syndicated public radio interview show, because as everyone knows, public radio invariably has its finger on the pulse of cutting-edge music trends. And I still like those two songs ("Behind the Smile" and "Over It"), which are excellent pieces of catchy power pop, although perhaps a bit too similar one to the other to co-exist on the same album with only one song between them. The rest of the record is, to my mind, formula songwriting fleshed out with merely competent arrangement and musicianship.

Decision: Discard. This CD is available for the asking, pending ratification of my decision by legal co-owner Mrs.5000.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Avercamp v. Bacon

2011-11-26T01:00:00.000-08:00

Hendrick Avercamp
1585 - 1634
Dutch

-----

Francis Bacon
1909 - 1992
British

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

The Rise and Fall of an American Reading List

2011-11-25T01:30:00.000-08:00

It's been more than four years since I browbeat the readership, as it was then, into providing me with a long long reading list. And, once I got over the hurdle of Dosteovsky, working my way through that list has been one of the great joys of the late aughts and early teens. And behold! I have read and reported back on a whopping 45 books! Many of them quite thick!

Yet, here in the late going, cracks have appeared in the ediface. I have run into a series of books that I have simply not been interested in reading, and even my mania for project completion has begun to flag.

Unread Books

The signal text was probably Fast Food Nation, a perfectly respectable piece of journalism about the fast food industry and American agribusiness. I understand why this is seen as an important book. Yet, to me, it embodys a perfect storm of barriers to produce reading. First, it is about food, and except in the way of every animal, I do not find food interesting. Secondly, it is about fast food, which is not really part of my life. Thirdly, it is about a vast social problem that I can do nothing about. And fourthly, worstly, it is polemical. I hate polemic, especially when I agree with it.

Then there's Amusing Ourselves to Death, a dated treatment of television. I could literally not care less about television, except as a medium for the broadcast of bowl games. Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy turned out to be a book length itteration of a good magazine article I read a long time ago. The Way We Eat and Why Our Food Choices Matter is, once again, about food; I feel like I've done yeoman's duty on the topic of food ethics with Matthew Scully's Dominion (read in October 2008), and feel no need to linger in the preached-at choir.

In short, I've decided that I could -- well, take your pick: "choose what I want to read for myself, like a norm," or "break faith with my readers." Very liberating! It allowed me, for instance, to throw Harry Potters V, VI, and VII into the out-box, manfully sacrificing my curiosity as to who the next three Defense Against the Dark Arts professors will be as well as the yearly updates in Quiddich broom technology. I'll try to roll with it.

Running From Rabbit

The big surprise, though, has been Rabbit is Rich, the third installment of John Updike's biography of the unloveable Harry Angstrom. I thought that Rabbit, Run was a tremendous book, and gave the second book, Rabbit Redux, a glowing review earlier this year. Yet Rabbit is Rich has completely failed to engage me. I don't know why. Maybe these are not books to read in the autumn, when the relentless negativity of their world view tends to claw at one more than it might in spring. It's genuinely puzzling to me. I checked out the critical response, more or less hoping that there might be a general consensus that Rabbit is Rich was the dog of the series. But that's not the case. And so I sat, nearly halfway through the book, feeling no motivation to continue: no curiosity as to what happens next, and no desire to remain immersed in the fictional world. I passed the first climax, a spectacular, emotional event that made me roll my eyes, and stopped.

Maybe I'm just over Rabbit.

Remaining Books

That leaves the following books on the Reading List, along with my intentions towards them, now that I've broken the seal on intentions:

Hansen, Motoring With Mohammed -- Judging from blurbs, this might be interesting. I'll give it a whirl.

McCall, Makes Me Want To Holler -- Judging from blurbs, this doesn't look very interesting. But I'll start it.

Donaldson, the first Thomas Covenant trilogy -- Oh sure. I'm curious about how it reads, 30 years on.

Davis, One River -- I don't know what this is.

Byatt, Possession -- I'm looking forward to this one.

Stegner, Angle of Repose -- I'm looking forward to this one, too.

Moore/Gibbons, Watchmen -- This is a comic book, I think? No reason not to read it.

Rawicz, The Long Walk -- A Mrs.5000 favorite, if I recall. What's good for the goose...

Levin, How the Universe Got its Spots -- Sounds like it has potentional.

Campbell & Campbell, The China Study -- It's about food. But I'll look at it, at least.

Tolstoy, War and Peace -- This one wasn't even on the original list; I smuggled it on because I want to read it.

LeGuin, Earthsea trilogy -- Definitely

Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country -- Sounds good.

Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas -- Sounds good.

It's Thanksgiving! (USA) (Ltd)

2011-11-24T01:00:00.000-08:00

The Wednesday Quiz is but mad north-north-west

2011-11-23T01:00:00.001-08:00

It's:

Traditionally, it is a closed-book quiz.

It is very possible that answers will come out over the weekend.

1. What's the capital of the second largest country in the world?

2. Who also wrote The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Transparent Things, and Look at the Harelequins!

3. Who is shown in this... wait! no! What extremely important world figure was born in 570 and lived until 632?

4. Hydrogen is Element #1, and Helium is Element #2. What is Element #3?

5. It is made with one part vodka, one part triple sec, and one part lemon juice.

6. As the President of the most populous country in the world, as well as General Secretary of its dominant political party and Chairman of its Military Commission, he is arguably far and away the most important person in the world.

But what's his name?

7. Mizoram, Kerala, Sikkim, and Uttar Pradesh are parts of _____________.

8. Who claimed to be but mad north-north-west, and, when the wind was southerly to know a hawk from a handsaw?

9. You've grooved to his operas Galileo Galilei, Akhnaten, and Einstein on the Beach, to his symphonies, and to his often performed violin concerto, but did you know he won a Golden Globe for his music for The Truman Show?

10. What is this a map of?

--

Put your answers in the comments, then reward yourself with a nice mixture of one part vodka, one part triple sec, and one part lemon juice.

Biscuits of Mongolia: #4

2011-11-22T01:00:00.000-08:00

The biscuits of Mongolia project is an endeavor of L&TM5K Ambassador to the Post-Soviet Fringe Meaghan. It is republished here by permission.

The biscuits of Mongolia project, #4.

Country of origin: Mongolia.

Packaging languages: Mongolian.

Biscuit type: butter biscuit.

Mouthfeel: cotton and copper.

Price: 200 tugrug.

Michael5000 vs. Shakespeare: Richard II (BBC, 1978)

2011-11-21T00:20:00.000-08:00

The Play: Richard II.
Directed by: David Giles, for the notorious BBC Series, 1978.

Genre & Setting: Richard II is one of the history plays, set in the fun-loving frolic of English dynastic politics leading up to the War of the Roses.

The Gist, which will obviously involve spoilers: We start with King Richard II trying to mediate between a couple of hothead nobles, Bolingbroke and Mawbray, who are robustly accusing each other of treason. “You’re a traitor!” “No, you’re a traitor!” “No, YOU’re a traitor!” “Am not!” “Am so!” The King fails to reconcile them, the first of a number of important failures, and agrees to let them duel it out.

Next, we see the dueling ground, and about three hours is spent reciting all of the proper formulae for a proper, legally-binding fight to the death. Except, just at the last moment Richard interrupts the proceedings with a Solomonic decree that instead of dueling, the parties must go into exile. By “Solomonic,” however, I don’t mean “wise” but “intolerable to all involved parties.” It’s not immediately obvious, but King Rick has already screwed himself royally (as we used to say in HomeTown5000).

John of Gaunt, who has been one of the leading nobles of England for the past several decades, warns Richard that he is not living up to the expectations of his job description and then keels over. Richard uses the pretext of treason to confiscate all of Gaunt’s estate, which he uses to fund a military expedition to Ireland.

While King Rick is swashbuckling in Ireland, his nobles – furious about the Gaunt business and about the generally shoddy state of royal administration – bring Bolingbroke (Gaunt’s son) home from exile and begin tinkering with the idea of regime change. When Richard returns, he finds that he has about three friends left in the world and will be forced to abdicate. There follows much dialog and speechifying on the nature of kingship: Richard feels that the divine prerogative of hereditary succession is sacred and inviolable, but then he would, wouldn’t he. Others, although a little uncomfortable about what God might be thinking about all of this, wonder if there might oughtn’t be a results-based aspect to a king’s tenure.

With Bolingbroke now on the throne as Henry IV, old King Richard is stashed away in prison. A plot emerges to reinstate him; we see this as an awful family drama in which one of the conspirators’ fathers pleads with Henry to execute his son as a traitor, while the conspirator’s mom pleads for her boy’s life. The upshot, of course, is that it’s dangerous to have Richard hanging around in mothballs, and the end of the play will not be a surprise to anyone familiar with the history of monarchical succession struggles.

The Adaptation: This is one of the best of the BBC series adaptations I’ve seen. This is to say, although it had pre-Star Trek effects, sets, and editing (despite being made ten years after Star Trek), it was however very effectively acted and performed. I never had any trouble figuring out what was going on, assuming that the above synopsis is not riddled with errors.

Clocks In At: About two and a half hours.

Pros: As a play, its strength is some mild but sincere contemplation of the nature of leadership. There’s a nice scene that didn’t make the synopsis up there where the palace gardeners talk about the nature of gardening in a conversation that is 100% allegorical: it’s all about the nature of governance.

It was interesting that this is a serious Shakespeare play with no comic relief bits – not a single punning yokel in sight. Or, if there were comic relief bits, they were played as serious in this adaptation (I have this theory that many of the traditionally “comic” bits of Shakespeare plays could be equally if not more effective if staged as sincere.) With no disrespect to the comic relief aspect of Shakespeare, it was nice to watch a play that kept to its dominant key all the way through.

Cons: Not a whole ton actually happens in Richard II. There’s a lot of meditating and arguing, but watching (for instance) a guy agonizing about whether to semi-voluntarily abdicate the kingship – it’s a choice between two flavors of humiliation, with important ramifications for the future of the country – is not the most gripping of entertainments. There is hardly any violence, and there’s no sex at all.

Prognosis: I wonder if this is a play where the value added of seeing it performed over reading off the page is unusually low.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Audubon v. Auerbach

2011-11-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

John James Audubon
1785 - 1851
American

-----

Frank Auerbach
Born 1931
German; works in the UK

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

Flag Friday XXXVII

2011-11-18T01:00:00.000-08:00

Parsons: "More effort needed here." He makes a "plagiarism" charge and gives it a "B-", 65/100.

Michael5000: Tonga's flag is a distinctive, one-of-a-kind design that nevertheless falls well within the constraints of traditional flag vocabulary, so I've got no idea what Parsons is on about here. Maybe he thinks there's too much gesturing towards Switzerland, but that's a bit of stretch.

So yeah, I have no problem with design integrity. I do, however, find the design kind of boring.

Grade: B

Trinidad and Tobago

Parsons: With "bad colours," it gets a "B-", 65/100.

Michael5000: Sharp!

Grade: A-

Tunisia

Parsons: "Nice design," says Parsons, "but this star and crescent features a particularly bad astronomical impossibility." There's also a "plagiarism" charge tacked on, but it nevertheless gets a "B", 70/100.

Michael5000: Yeah, those are symbols, not a pictorial representation of an astronomical event. I think the central device could stand to be a little bigger relative to the flag as a whole, but all in all this is one of the more handsome banners in the region.

Grade: A-

Turkey

Parsons: It's "simple," and gets an "A", 85/100.

Michael5000: The similarity to Tunisia's flag is obvious. Tunisia's is better.

Grade: B+

Turkmenistan

Parsons: It is "eyewatering," has "too many stars," is "too busy," and "makes [him] nauseous." "Flag actually includes a Persian (sorry, Turkman) carpet," he adds. "Only flag to both make eyes water and induce vomiting." He assigns a "D+", 37/100.

Michael5000: By the letter of the fussiness law, the frimframery of the Turkmen and other Central Asian flags ought to bug me. They fail the Betsy Ross Test with too many flying colors. Except, that stripe represents the kind of fiber arts that the local Betsy Ross set actually practice. This kind of flag merges an indigenous tradition with the European flag concept and comes up with something that I actually find kind of cool. How does it look on a pole?

Pretty good!

Grade: B+

Element of the Month: Terbium!

2011-11-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

November's Element of the Month:

Terbium!
Tb
65

Atomic Mass: 158.925 amu
Melting Point: 1356 °C
Boiling Point: 3230 °C

With October Element of the Month Ytterbium fresh in your mind, you of course recall the little Swedish village of Ytterby and its prolific quarry o' elements. Well, we return to the same stomping this month with Terbium, yet another element that was discovered by a brainy Swede (Carl Gustaf Mosander) sifting through the rocks from the self same hole in the ground.

Now, just because you can't say "Ytterbium" without saying "Terbium" doesn't mean that the one is a component of the other. It doesn't work that way. They are Elements! The fundamental building blocks of matter! And so are as different as Iron and Oxygen! Except, you would never know it from looking at their characteristics. Terbium really seems an awful lot like Ytterbium. It is, for instance, a rare silvery element that never occurs in isolation, but only as a trace element in minerals that are themselves pretty unusual. At one part per million of the Earth's crust, it's not incredibly rare -- there's a hell of a lot more of it around than, say, gold, silver, or platinum -- but since it is always diffused through agglomerations of other Elements it has never attracted much attention.

The Centerfold!

Like Ytterbium, Terbium is used as a dopant (devoted readers will recall the analogy of the peppier.) The biggest use of Terbium in the human community is in its oxide form, which is used in fluorescent lighting technologies.

Here's something weird: looking at commodities charts, it seems that the price of Terbium has increased six-fold over the course of 2011. Aside from a few mild news articles to the effect that China has an essential monopoly on rare earths and can therefore charge whatever it likes, there doesn't seem to have been much comment on this astronomical rise. We may well be in the grips of a Terbium crisis, but nor am I entirely sure that the numbers aren't cooked for the benefit of stock scammers. Regardless, if you have been hording raw Terbium, this might be a good moment to cash in.

The Wednesday Quiz is become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

2011-11-16T00:30:00.000-08:00

It's:

Traditionally, it is a closed-book quiz.

It is very possible that answers will come out over the weekend.

1. If you saw this flag flying on a public building, you would probably be where?

2. The Punjab is its most densely populated region. Balochistan is its largest province in area, but it is very sparsely inhabited.

3. Having led a major scientific effort during World War II, he was subsequently denounced (inaccurately) as a communist during the McCarthy era and stripped of his security clearance. Who is the guy who, seeing the fruition of his most important work, famously recalled the Bhagavad Gita: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'

4. As King of Babylon, he oversaw great building programs. He failed to invade Egypt, but he had no problem at all destroying the little kingdom of Judah, destroying its capital and dispersing its leading citizens.

5. He is the founder and Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, the world's second-largest corporate media juggernaut. And it says here his wife is 38 years his junior!

6. In the Book of John, who is miraculously raised from the dead by Jesus of Nazereth?

7. In this map of the solar system, what is the green region called?

8. In a very famous story, his oxen, donkeys, and camels are all stolen, his 7000 sheep die in a mysterious fire, his children all die when their home collapses in a storm, and he is afflicted with serious dermatological problems. What's his name?

9. It has almost a dozen languages spoken by more than 10 million people, including Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Maithili, Malayam, Marthi, Oriya, and Telugu.

10. What country did this stamp come from?

--

Record your answers in the comments as your first step towards building the world's second-largest corporate media juggernaut.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 2: Altdorfer v. Andre

2011-11-15T00:15:00.000-08:00

Albrecht Altdorfer
c.1480-1538
German
Defeated Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema by a single vote in a thrilling come-from-behind victory in Round 1. YOUR VOTE COUNTS.

-----

Carl Andre
b. 1935
American
Defeated eighteenth-century European Jacobo Amigoni in Round 1 by two votes -- a one-vote swing would have resulted in a draw. YOUR VOTE COUNTS!

----

[In the M5K personal tourney, this round pits Altdorfer v. Amigoni.]

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

Random Record Review 2: Rilo Kiley, "More Adventurous"

2011-11-14T02:00:00.000-08:00

The Record: Rilo Kiley, More Adventurous.
Format: CD
Year of Release: 2005
Genre: Rock

It's funny how you, or maybe it's just me, can develop an aversion to the music of a few years back. I listened to this record, a Christmas gift from Mrs.5000, a lot during 2006, and saw much of it performed live a year or so later. Having not listened to it lately, though, I had to reluctantly brush off the conceptual dust and cobwebs in order to give it a listen for purposes of this project. And hey, isn't part of the point of this project to ferret out musical dead wood, to avoid getting trapped in the past? Maybe Rilo Kiley would be the first to fall.

But no. Revisiting the album with fresh ears, I recognized it for a sly and fiercely intelligent collection of power pop. Not every song is a masterpiece, of course, and personally I find a certain smugness in the opening track, "It's a Hit," a snall hurdle to get over. But then you land in "Does He Love You?" which is essentially an extremely compact modern epistolary novel, not a half bad one, that scans well when sung. Beyond that is the dark, infectious "Portions for Foxes," and you've already recouped the price of your ticket.

Most of the songs on "More Adventurous" are extremely dark. Take "The Absence of God," a very pretty pop tune sung by Jenny Lewis at her most girl-next-door angelic. These are songs that you can bop along happily until the time you pay attention, at which point you have one of those intellectual insights into the nature of existence that I, anyway, am so fond of.

There's a little bit of a cult of Jenny Lewis out there, and I have always thought she was a talented singer and performer. Taking a closer look at the album credits, I realized that she is the songwriter for this stuff, which really makes me stand up and salute. I don't know why I figured she wasn't. I think maybe I was thrown off by the dumb band name.

Decision: Strong Keep.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Archimboldo v. Arp

2011-11-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

Guiseppe Arcimboldo
1527 - 1593
Italian (Milanese)

-----

Jean Arp
1886 - 1966
German/French

----

Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for one month past posting.

The Reading List: Phantoms in the Brain

2011-11-11T01:00:00.000-08:00

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran with Sandra Blakeslee, 1998

Phantoms in the Brain is a collection of essays about the more exotic kinds of abnormal psychology, the kinds of bizarre behaviors that can sometimes result from strokes and traumatic brain injuries. If you are thinking “Oh, Oliver Sacks,” then you are correct: this book covers very similar ground to many of Dr. Sacks’ essays (collected in popular books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) and he is mentioned frequently in its pages.

Dr. Ramachandran (probably second author Blakeslee from Ramachadran’s instructions, of course, but we’ll follow the conventions here) begins the book by talking about his research in phantom limbs. Working with the kinds of patients who feel excruciating pain in a leg that was amputated years ago, or who baffle people by pointing and gesturing with an arm that was lost in a long-ago accident, Ramachandran pursues two parallel lines of thinking. First, of course, he tries to come up with ideas that will give his patients relief. Second, he wonders what is happening neurologically to give people with phantom limbs a contradictory internal body map.

What we learn is that an individual’s conception of his or her own body is in fact a complicated business. We get a sense of this as we move past phantom limbs to much stranger phenomena like, for instance, the inability of some stroke victims to realize that they are paralyzed, or the inability to recognize the left half of one’s body as one’s own (“That must be my brother’s arm,” says an otherwise perfectly intelligent and sane person, looking at her left arm. “I have no idea how it got here.”).

Ramachandran comes across as a pretty gung-ho sort of guy. To probe the details of patients’ misconceptions about their own bodies, he devises all sorts of ingenious tests and therapies. He keeps it real, low-budget, and actively experimental: his therapies involve lots of cardboard boxes, mirrors, pencils, insightful questions, and on more than one occasion graduate students hiding under the table.

What he is able to demonstrate is that our grasp of our own bodies, like everything else in our experience, relies on a brain that is a much messier organ than scientists used to realize, and a much, much messier organ than most people are entirely comfortable to find out about. In case you missed the memo: Nothing like a single unified entity, your brain is an evolutionarily cobbled-together contraption of a zillion or so overlapping, often mutually antagonistic, systems, the vast majority cranking along and doing their own esoteric business without us ever being aware of them. Our brain is like the most complicated of modern jet aircraft, except exponentially more complicated, and consciousness, the alert little ghost we usually think of as our “self,” is at best one of the pilots – although a coach-class passenger, a flight attendant, or the aircraft controller on the ground might all be more accurate analogies. The data is still coming in.

Specifically, Ramachandran shows pretty convincingly that phenomena like phantom limb syndrome are a product of two different body-awareness systems, both pre-conscious, falling out of alignment with each other. And by “pretty convincingly” I mean that he is actually able to use his theory to cure people – he’s able to make phantom limbs go away. He also gives step-by-step instructions for how you too can give yourself a phantom limb, or become momentarily convinced that your nose is several feet long, or – under the right circumstances – how you can briefly give yourself the very strong impression that a table is part of your body. It’s crazy stuff, and I say that very admiringly.

Ramachandran is a slightly less elegant writer than Sacks, and he sprinkles the book with jokes and gags that are probably gold from the lectern but are a little corny on the page. I like him, though, for his more aggressive pursuit of what the findings of abnormal psychology imply for normal psychology and the workings of the brain. It’s bracing stuff right up to the final chapter, in which he attempts to address head on the whole question of consciousness and what makes it tick. This, unfortunately, is a bridge too far. His empirical work has done a lot to explain certain specific aspects of how brains work and what that means for those of us who live inside them, but his leap from there to The Big Question is pretty tenuous. You can understand why he would want to give it a shot, but it’s a minor shame that it has to come at the end of the book, where it takes some of the glow from everything that came before.

It's the Book Arts!

2011-11-10T00:40:00.000-08:00

"The Recombinant Alice"
Mrs.5000, 2011

Limited edition in tripartite "exquisite corpse" format with photocopied illustrations and text from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

I have shown "you," the hypothetical blog reader, this one before, but not since 2008. Each "page" of this book is a text from Alice and Wonderland set opposite the original engraving of the character that it describes.

However, each page is cut into thirds, and the whole is cleverly engineered so that, by flipping the little page-thirds, you can create weird new characters with weird new texts to describe them.

It is like an elaborate game of "Exquisite Corpse," with the surreal setting of Alice and Wonderland serving as a natural jumping-off point into further absurdities.

We have noticed a remarkable tendency of many readers to carefully turn all three page sections together, in order to reconstruct each original character from its three parts. It is an entirely logical thing to do, but at the same time is a quietly hilarious defeating of the whole point.

This is I believe the only book that Mrs.5000 has made an "edition" of. There's more than one! In fact, I believe it is possible to purchase one from the very terrific 23Sandy gallery, located quite near the intersection of 23rd and Sandy here on the beautiful East Side. Oh hey, it's almost time for holiday shopping!

The Wednesday Quiz recognizes the Taijitu.

2011-11-09T01:20:00.000-08:00

It's:

Traditionally, it is a closed-book quiz.

It is very possible that answers will come out over the weekend.

1. It's why ambulances sound different once they've gone by, and it's the concept that allows our very brainiest physicists to infer the age and size of the universe. What is this property of light and sound waves?

2. What 1974 film noir follows the mishaps of a private detective who finds himself embroiled in violent struggles over water use in 1930s Los Angeles?

3. This fellow lost three U.S. Presidential elections, resigned as U.S. Secretary of State because he thought that Woodrow Wilson was too hard on Imperial Germany about the Lusitania, championed Prohibition, and ended his career trying to discredit evolution.

What's his name?

4. This painting of Carolina parrots is characteristic of what American artist?

5. Theodor Herzl was an influential leader in the 1890s, but he was never able to reach a strong accord with the Ottomans, and it was Chaim Weizmann who got the U.K. to enact the Balfour Declaration in 1917. We're talking about the __________ Movement.

6. Sure, you recognize the Taijitu.

But do you know what principle it represents?

7. Only ruins and the remnants of a city wall remain at Kublai Khan's summer capital. As far as Alph, the sacred river, Coleridge just made it up. Still, it was apparently a pretty hopping town back in the day. What was its name?

8. It happened for the first time in Chamonix, France, in 1924. It happened in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, in 1956, in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1964 and 1976, and in Salt Lake City in 2002. What is it?

9. Because we live on a magnetized planet, we are surrounded by zones of radioactive particles that can be tough on high-orbit satellites or passing astronauts. What are they called?

10. In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Remains of the Day," we are meant to understand the novel's narrative as clearly distorted by the political, emotional, and occupational prejudices of the first-person character. This makes Stevens the butler, along with Lolita's Humbert Humbert and The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, classic examples of the "________ __________."

--

Record your answers, clearly distorted by political, emotional, and occupational prejudices.