While eating breakfast, I saw a newspaper ad for Indo-European Sunflower Oil.
All I could think was, shouldn’t that be Sindhuh-Europe Sawel-bhel Elaia?
I think I was warped by playing the mad professor in Ionesco’s The Lesson in high school, with his rants on philology.
Back when this blog was young, I wrote a post called “Aphrodite will not be Denied” about the botheration caused to some Muslim clerics by the sultry Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe.
If there is anything that drives the mullahs and imams mad, it is female sexuality.
The bloom is off the rose of the recent Egyptian revolution, you may be sure, for now the Muslim Brotherhood, the best-organized political grouping, wants to establish Saudi-style morality police.
Veena Malik
In a video at this link, the Pakistani actress Veena Malik rips into a grim-faced mullah who claims that she has “filled his heart with sadness.”
“No one in Pakistan can look at her pictures in the presence of their daughters,” he rants. (These mullahs can accelerate from reasonable to rant in 2.4 seconds.)
“I don’t think that her [hypothetical?] son will like to look at his mother’s pictures in the future.” (It’s always all about the boys.)
Whereupon she rips him a new one, suggesting, for example, that he concern himself with Islamic clergy who rape the little boys that they are supposed to be teaching. (Sound familiar?)
In American political discourse, however, feminist values too lead to some odd turnings when they conflict with the mainstream media narrative about “the religion of peace.”
For example, when Time magazine ran a picture of a young Afghan woman mutilated by the Taliban for an alleged sexual offense, the New York Times dismissed the photo as “war porn.”
And although Veena Malik might be shocked to hear it, I see the power of Aphrodite in her “smackdown” of the ranting mullah. As as goddess, she can manifest how and when she pleases.
Spammers and plagiarists target e-books (Kindle, etc.)
Mike Essex, a Search Specialist at UK digital marketing agency Impact Media, believes that ebooks are the next frontier for content farmers and is already noticing an increasing number of spam e-books hitting ebookstores like the Kindle Store. He originally wrote about his discovery on the Impact Media blog.
Amazon does not care.
Many ebook vendors don’t check copyright on works that are submitted, and Essex noticed that people are stealing content from the web, quickly creating ebooks about the same topics from multiple angles in order to target different keyword variants, and publishing them—some Kindle authors have “written” thousands of books in a single year. The Amazon.com domain name gives these books an added boost in search results; royalty payouts are high even when a book is priced at $0.99, and reviews aren’t a surefire solution to combating the problem.
More information at Making Light.
Bad writers, yes. One man’s trash is another man’s pit of voles. But one of the advantages of e-book/Kindle store/et al that we keep hearing from the e-book enthusiasts is that it bypasses the gatekeepers.
“Stolen content and scammers” is another area, and there isn’t any pressure on Amazon to stop ‘em, since they get their cut regardless. Adding acquiring editors would add time and expense, and keep the struggling geniuses whose works no one understand from ever getting published at all.
Ain’t it wonderful? This is what happens when you “bypass the gatekeepers” (all those grumpy editors).
H.P. Lovecraft claimed to be a total materialist, so how did his stories become so involved with the realms of the esoteric and magical?
Eric Davis, in an essay titled “Calling Cthulhu,” writes,
This phenomenon is made all the more intriguing by the fact that Lovecraft himself was a “mechanistic materialist” philosophically opposed to spirituality and magic of any kind. Accounting for this discrepancy is only one of many curious problems raised by the apparent power of Lovecraftian magic. Why and how do these pulp visions “work”? What constitutes the “authentic” occult? How does magic relate to the tension between fact and fable? As I hope to show, Lovecraftian magic is not a pop hallucination but an imaginative and coherent “reading” set in motion by the dynamics of Lovecraft’s own texts, a set of thematic, stylistic, and intertextual strategies that constitute what I call Lovecraft’s Magick Realism.
Speaking of new Lovecraftian visions, I finally saw The Call of Cthulhu, a retro-silent movie released in 2005. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has more, much more, unspeakably more.
The Lovecraft cult has even reached the shooting sports: “Bullets over Arkham.”
• The writing process, graphed, from Boing Boing.
• The “great conversation” lives on: University students discovering ideas that their so-called teachers kept from them because they were not “relevant” or something.
• Why did Borders crash? Here is one view. Too much space given to music. for one thing, says the writer.
• Support for a “gap year” before university grows in the U.S. I could have used one.
. . . that Gerald Gardner did not invent Wicca in the early 1950s.
Or not.
But it is one of a series of “50 Unexplainable Black & White Photos.”
Number 2 looks like some kind of fertility ritual to me.
FedEx “Office Print Online” sounds like a great idea for work-at-home types like me. But if it won’t work in Los Angeles, I hold out no hope for southern Colorado.
The follow-up customer (dis)service is equally bad.
No doubt FedEx is promoting this as a wonderful time-saver for the self-employed.
Another strike against the so-called Transportation Safety Administration’s general bureaucratic ineptitude. Add religious discrimination to their list of ugly attitudes.
Judge: Let’s take the witchcraft out of it. If someone complains to you, he’s Jewish, and refers to a stereotype about his Judaism, go to mediation and work it out? Is that management’s response to that?
Lloyd: No. That would not be management’s response to that.
Judge: OK. But witchcraft takes it into a different thing? I guess. I guess witchcraft and Judaism are different in the sense that — what?
Lloyd: To be perfectly honest, sir, at the time, I wasn’t even — I didn’t know anything about witchcraft or Wiccanism. … I wasn’t even aware that Wiccanism was a recognized religion at the time. I had to research it afterwards.
In cave-riddled Tennessee, archaeologists are discovering more and more ancient art, mostly from the High Mississippian culture (roughly coeval with the European Middle Ages) but some much, much older.
Just to whet your interest, here are a few paragraphs from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “America’s Ancient Cave Art.”
The imagery was classic Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), meaning it belonged to the vast but still dimly understood religious outbreak that swept the Eastern part of North America around 1200 A.D. We know something about the art from that period, having seen all the objects taken from graves by looters and archaeologists over the years: effigy bowls and pipes and spooky-eyed, kneeling stone idols; carved gorgets worn by the elite. But these underground paintings were something new, an unknown mode of Mississippian cultural activity.
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High Mississippian culture fell apart just before the Spanish reached Florida, not just after as you’d expect, given the diseases and the massacres—it’s a riddle of American archaeology.
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A good archaeologist, Russ Townsend—he’s now the “tribal historic preservation officer” for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Townsend has worked with Jan on plenty of projects, but he has never gone into the caves. I asked him about it. “The Cherokee interpretation is that caves are not to be entered into lightly,” he said, “that these must have been bad people to go that deep. That’s where they took bad people to leave them. So they can lie on rock and not on the ground. It makes a lot of Cherokee uneasy. The lower world is where everything is mixed up and chaotic and bad. You wouldn’t want to go to that place, where the connection between our world and the otherworld is that tenuous.”
•••
It was easy to see what had so impressed Simek about this place. You could look through any number of coffee-table books on prehistoric Native American art from the Southeast and see absolutely nothing that looked like these pictures. We saw birds, yes, but this seemed to be a sort of box bird—its square body was feathered. Now there were more of them.
If you liked this, you will like Office Hours, “a humor website about academia through the eyes of an adjunct.” Bonus: actual human actors.
Here is Season Two, Episode One, but maybe you will want to start at the beginning.