Where the Wild Things Are

Mark your calendar for October 16th if you were and are enchanted by the children's book Where the Wild Things Are. That is the release date of a live-action feature-length motion picture that has been made from the classic 1963 picture book. The trailer promises a rich treat adapted from Maurice Sendak's 10 lines of text and beautiful illustrations. Sendak, now 81, co-produced the film, directed by Spike Jonze. Of the dozens of children's books Sendak wrote and/or illustrated, Where the Wild Things Are remains the most popular and is now regarded as a masterpiece, although it was controversial when published for catering to the "nightmarish" aspects of childhood fantasy. Another of his books, In the Night Kitchen, is still challenged for its illustrative depiction of the young protagonist Mickey in the nude (gasp), rather than its admitted reference - by way of cooks with Hitleresque mustaches trying to cook the boy in their ovens - to the Holocaust. Wild Things won a Caldecott Medal, an award named in honor of English illustrator Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886), who died and was buried during a holiday here in Florida. Regarding the film, as Max and this blogger say, "Let the wild rumpus begin!"

White Bengal tiger

My idea for today's blog was postponed as soon as I saw this incredible image in the weird news this morning - a rare white Bengal tiger vying for his food at the Singapore Zoo. White tigers have a recessive gene that causes the pale colorization, but are not albinos. They can breed with - and often grow larger than - orange tigers, reaching an adult male weight of more than 500lbs. A white tiger named Mohan (1950-1970) was captured as a cub in India by the Maharaja of Rewa and successfully bred in 1953, producing white tigers that went to 6 zoos, including England's Bristol Zoo and Washington, D.C.'s National Zoo. When Mohan's daughter was drawn up to the White House in a traveling cage in 1960 for presentation to Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969), the president's reaction to the tiger roaring and leaping in his direction was, "Well!" followed by silence. Another strain of white tigers began with the birth of Tony in 1972 in the Cole Brothers Circus. The Cincinnati Zoo acquired a pair of Tony's offspring and bred 70 white tigers, 3 of which were purchased by German-American entertainers Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, better known as the animal and magic act Siegfried & Roy.
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Siegfried & Roy then bred white tigers in collaboration with the Nashville Zoo. They incorporated the tigers into their act and Roy, as you will recall, was mauled by one of them onstage. Montecore had been raised by Roy and had performed with him for 6 years when, on Oct. 3, 2003, the tiger mauled him, causing severe blood loss. Accidentally injured onstage, distracted by a female audience member, or confused when stagehands attempted to intervene after Roy tripped over his paw, Montecore grabbed Roy by the neck and attempted to drag him offstage (as a mother would her cub, says Siegfried). The critical injury resulted in months of rehabilitation and left Roy with partial paralysis. Siegfried & Roy have returned to public life, although their Las Vegas show was cancelled after the attack, and appeared most recently at the award ceremony for inductees to the Nevada Entertainer/Artist Hall of Fame. Roy is pictured with Montecore above and reportedly said, "Don't shoot the cat" as he was being transported to the hospital on that fateful day. There are only 130+ white tigers in the world, all of them in captivity...but obviously not domesticated. They can be trained, but not tamed.

Death of Payne Stewart

My Dad was watching the golf tournament yesterday and reminded me of the strange aircraft accident that killed American pro golfer Payne Stewart (1957-1999) and 5 others on October 25, 1999. Remember the news reports of authorities tracking a jet that was on autopilot and wasn't responding as it flew from Florida all the way to North Dakota? The Learjet 35 (photo below) was co-owned by Stewart, who was enroute from his home in Orlando to the Pro Tour in Dallas with his 2 agents and a golf course designer. Flight traffic controllers lost contact with the 2 pilots 20 minutes after take-off from Sanford-Orlando airport. The Oklahoma Air National Guard sent up 2 F-16s and reported that the windows had frosted over and the occupants were nonresponsive. The plane flew out of control for 1,500 miles, crashing after 4 hours outside of Mina, South Dakota. Analysis at the crash site showed that the jet plummeted nose-first at 600mph from an altitude that had varied from 22,000 to 51,000 feet, leaving a 10' crater in the ground. It had finally run out of fuel. No one on the ground was hurt and there were no survivors, the occupants having died of hypoxia when the plane lost pressurization and the emergency oxygen system apparently failed. News reports called the flight "eerie" and "ghostly," as it flew toward an unpopulated area unintercepted. Also eerie is the quote from Payne, "I've been fortunate enough to have travelled all over the world, and I've seen things you only read about and see on the news," in light of the fact that his travelling was the news all day that day as we watched the story play out.

Gossamer

Be warned, arachnophobes: this post is about spiders - or more specifically, spider silk. Gossamer has made the weird news again, this time for a special project undertaken by a British art historian and an American fashion designer living in Madagascar: harnessing spiders to produce silk assembly-line style. Four years ago, they began hiring locals to capture 3,000 spiders a day and to gently attach the threads from the spinnerets of two dozen at a time to spools that would collect up to 400 yards from a single spider. The 24 threads were hand-twisted into one and joined into 96-thread strands that were then woven in a loom with traditional Malagasy motifs.The drawbacks included the cannibalistic nature of the spiders, their status as an occasional snack in that country, and the weather (too cold and the spiders wouldn't spin; too humid and the silk was too viscous to be used). Spiders that didn't die in production were released back into the wild. The result, on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is a 11' x 4' textile (pictured) that has been woven entirely with the saffron-colored silk of 1 million female orb weaver spiders!

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Gossamer is a protein fiber with which spiders create webs to catch prey, nests for themselves, or coccoons to protect their young. They can also use it to suspend themselves, drift on the wind, or sustain themselves when food is scarce. Gossamer is as strong as Kevlar, can resist the stress of high-grade steel, can stretch to 140% of its length without breaking, and can hold its strength to -40 degrees Celsius - all of this despite being incredibly lightweight (a spider silk that encircled the globe would weigh less than a pound). A single spider has 2 to 8 spinnerets (pictured in close-up) from which they can spin several different kinds of silk to suit various purposes. Webs or threads have been used on a small scale to treat wounds, catch fish, make crosshairs for optics, and help in mammalian nerve regeneration. Because of its unique properties, there has been an interest in producing or duplicating spider silk commercially.

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It is to this end that scientists are provoking strange news stories:

• 8/21/00 A Canadian company has genetically engineered goats with spider genes so that their offspring of nanny goats will produce milk containing spider web protein. The "silk milk" will be used to make a fiber they are calling "Biosteel," from which they will manufacture - among other things - artificial tendons and ligaments, and sutures for use in eye and neurosurgery.
• 4/28/08 German researchers are getting closer to producing artificial spider silk after making a spinneret that mixes the right ratio of proteins at the right time to create a biodegradable synthetic filament for use in bulletproof vests, as fishing line, and for medical sutures.
• 4/24/09 Physicists in Germany have made spider silk 3 times as strong by layering it with zinc, titanium, and aluminum. The metal atoms coat the silk, but ions also penetrate the fibers and react with the proteins.
• 6/19/09 American researchers have determined that spider silk reacts very much like biological muscle, for instance producing strong contractions in response to humidity, which opens up possibilities for biomedical and robotics applications.
  9/20/09 Scientists suggest several reasons why some spiders decorate their webs, debunking earlier claims that the stabilimenta reinforce the webs and unwilling to allow that they are done for aesthetic reasons alone.

And I will end on a personal note. For my nephew Ross's 10th birthday on the 17th of this month, I sent him a remote-controlled tarantula. He was delighted and said, "I will scare everyone, including myself, with this!" I made him promise not to scare my sister, though, and I hope she made it through this post without cringing. Only male tarantulas have spinnerets, by the way, so that they can produce a web as part of the mating process.

Animal mummies

Researchers may have uncovered a 5th reason that ancient Egyptians mummified and entombed animals. Until now, animal mummies have fallen into 4 categories:

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Beloved pets, like the monkey pictured above, were carefully prepared after a natural death by their grieving owners and later entombed with them. It is also possible that some pets were sacrificed when their owners died so they could be buried with them. Cats (mentioned in a previous post) and dogs were assumed to be mummified pets when entombed with their owners, but when buried separately were likely symbols of the gods Bastet and Anubis.

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Sacred animals, like the birds in the middle image, were worshipped in animal cults as incarnations of deities and carefully mummified after death. The falcons in the photo represented Horus and the ibis represented Thoth. The most cumbersome sacred animal to mummify was the Apis bull, an incarnation of Ptah, creator of the universe.

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Votive offerings, like the fish in the top image, were purchased by pilgrims to the various animal cult centers and placed in catacombs as gifts to the particular gods. The fish were most often Nile perch, of a species that no longer exists. Ibis, sacred to Thoth (see above), filled two catacombs as votive offerings - one in Tuna el-Gebel and the other in Abydos.
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Food for the dead, often consisting of butchered meat but sometimes entire fowl, were placed in tombs so that the deceased would be well-fed in the afterlife. The animals were preserved, wrapped in linen, and placed in "coffinets" made of sycamore wood.

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In 2001, the unique discovery of a lion in the tomb of Maia, King Tutankhamun's wet-nurse, did not seem to fit into any of these categories. The male lion was found, along with some cat mummies, in an area of the tomb sacred to the female cat deity Bastet, and may have been considered an incarnation of the son of the related lion goddess Sekhmet. The remains were thought to have been mummified, but no linen wrappings were discovered. It was evident from the skeleton and teeth that the lion had reached a great age and had been kept in captivity, but it had been placed in the tomb long after Maia's death. "Maybe this lion's importance is as a family pet rather than as a representative of a god. The context doesn't seem to fit," says anthropologist Robert Pickering.
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Earlier this month, it was reported in National Geographic that the site director of Hierakonpolis, Egypt's oldest city, has found evidence that a number of large animals buried at the edge of a cemetery belonged to the city ruler's menagerie. A 3,500-year-old baboon and fellow creatures are the earliest evidence of a practice that later spread through the country. So category 5 appears to be zoo animals!

Oarfish

The weird news of this week featured a link to a photo gallery of the longest bony fish in the sea - the oarfish. The site didn't provide many details about these rare creatures, so I am compelled to do so here. Called the "king of the herrings," the oarfish is found in all temperate and tropical oceans, but rarely seen. They occasionally wash up on shore - most recently in February of 2009 - but that means they are dead or dying, as this video describes. As you can see, they need to be held by several people to pose for the pictures after being pulled in on fishing lines, because their ribbony bodies can grow to at least 36' long. They are to some extent fished commercially, but their flesh is gelatinous. Their bluish-black streaks and spots fade after death and they were not filmed alive until 2001. They undulate when swimming - leading some scientists to believe that the Loch Ness Monster may be an oarfish - and they have been seen to propel themselves upwards vertically. The oarfish, which has no visible teeth, feeds on zooplankton, shrimp, squid, and jellyfish, and are themselves preyed upon by sharks. Safe to say there are no oarfish in the spring-fed lake across the street from my house, but my friend Cris, who is also visiting, is thrilled to be catching and releasing large-mouth bass and - this morning - a big pickerel...

Piper nigrum

What is this, you ask? Why, a peppercorn, of course! My Dad is visiting right now and he and I both love fresh ground black pepper, especially on our salad greens. It dawned on me yesterday that I had no idea where it comes from or what it looks like in its fresh state. Black pepper (Piper nigrum) is a flowering vine (pictured) and its dried fruit are peppercorns. The plant matures in 4 or 5 years and bears fruit for 7 years. Black peppercorns are harvested before they are ripe, washed, and dried. Green peppercorns are picked before they are ripe, but treated to retain their color. White peppercorns are also unripened, but are soaked to remove the outer skin. Red peppercorns are ripe and preserved in brine before being similarly processed and treated to retain their color. Pepper is one of the most common spices in European cuisine and accounts for 1/5 of the world's spice trade. Its flavor is best retained when kept in an airtight container out of sunlight - and ideally when freshly ground.
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Pepper is native to India, where it has been used since prehistoric times and where the International Pepper Exchange (the only organization that deals with the global exchange of black pepper) is located. But today, India produces 19% of the world's pepper, with 34% being produced and exported by Vietnam - which uses almost none of the product domestically. The rest is produced in Brazil (13%), Indonesia (9%), Malaysia (8%), Sri Lanka (6%), China (6%), and Thailand (4%). Although it is not known how pepper reached the Nile in ancient times, black peppercorns were found stuffed in the nostrils of the mummy of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II (c. 1303 B.C.-1213 B.C.). Attila the Hun (406-453 A.D.) demanded a ransom of a ton of black pepper when he besieged Rome. Pepper has been used as a currency and also as a medicine - said to cure constipation, diarrhea, earache, gangrene, heart disease, hernia, hoarseness, indigestion, insect bites, insomnia, joint pain, liver ailments, lung disease, oral abscesses, sunburn, and toothaches. Conversely, it contains small amounts of a compound found to be carcinogenic and is known to cause sneezing. Gesundheit.

Optical illusions

In short order, I have found some of the best optical illusions on the web - and the best site to view more...

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You will be amazed to learn that the blue and the green in the image at the top are the same color! I found the image here and there is further explanation here.

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The illusion in the center appears to spiral, but it is in fact made up of 4 circles that do not touch each other! The image is here and is from the blog of psychologist Richard Wiseman.

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Your eyes alone are animating the illusion at the bottom, which I found here with a tip on how to make the movement stop.

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The powerful illusion here is called the Pinna-Brelstaff illusion and is animated because moving toward and away from the static image causes the rings to rotate. I first saw it at a Ripley's museum. The example and explanation are among 84 Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena on the website of German professor of opthalmology Michael Bach. It is this site that I have found to be the most accessible, comprehensive, and informative regarding optical illusions - though I have only scratched the surface.

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Coincidentally - and not the catalyst for this post - comes the weird news that a sculpture that functions as an optical illusion is being installed in the middle of a roundabout it Middlewich, Chesire, England. The segmented arch by local artist Stephen Charnock will appear complete from certain angles. Reminds me of some of the etchings by M.C. Escher and sounds interesting, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to entice drivers to take their eyes off the road - this from someone who tapped the car in front of me when my eyes were drawn to an ugly temporary sculpture placed in a median I passed every day...

Sedan chair

In the middle of the night, I found myself wondering what the conveyances like those depicted are called. A little searching this morning revealed that this form of human-powered transport is known as a litter. Litters are chairs or platforms, sometimes enclosed, suspended on shafts and carried by 2 or more men. But because they are features of many different cultures, they have many different names:

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sedan chair The idea of the litter was imported from Mexico, Peru, and India by explorers and colonists to France, Spain, and England. They met instant success in the messy streets of Rome and the narrow streets of London. They transported the King of England; the paying public of England, Scotland, and Italy; the well-appointed residents of London; and the visitors to Bath in the 17th and 18th centuries, finally giving way to the hackney carriage in the early 19th c.

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Sedia gestatoria is a richly adorned portable throne used for at least 1,000 years to transport Roman Catholic popes to their coronation, to special ceremonies in the basilicas, or to appearances before the public. It consists of a silk-covered chair supported by 2 poles that is carried on the shoulders of 12 men in red uniforms. Pope John Paul II refused to use it and Benedict XVI has not restored its use, so the Sedia gestatoria has been replaced in modern times by the "popemobile."

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palanquin or palkhi These covered sedan chairs were used in southeast Asia from 250 B.C. and only began to fall out of favor when rickshaws were introduced in the 1930s. In Japan, they were used by the nobility and warrior classes and were an important means of transportation when horses were marshalled for other labor. Palanquins can still be hired in remote areas of Asia to carry patrons up steep slopes.

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jiao In China, wooden or bamboo litters were used by commoners (minjiao) and members of the Mandarin class (guanjiao). A jianyu, or lacquered and gilded shoulder carriage, was used by brides and equipped with red silk curtains to shield them from view. In Hong Kong, private litters were used by the wealthy and licensed litters used to be the only form of public transportation. They can still be found in Chinese mountain resorts where they are used to take guests to otherwise inaccessible locations.

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jempana In traditional Javanese society, wicker palanquins could be hired by paying customers, but the guilded jempana was reserved for nobility, with the number of bearers indicating status. They were used to carry royalty, flanked by their bodyguards, in military procession. And in Hindu culture today in Bali, they are used to transport the dead to their pyres and cremated with them.

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gama In Korea, these were used to convey royalty, aristocrats, and government officials - whose rank was indicated by one of six styles. In traditional weddings, bride and groom are still carried to the ceremony in separate gamas.

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lectica In ancient Rome, members of the royal family and dignitaries who were not mounted on horseback were carried on litters called lectica.

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Litters were favored by pharaohs of ancient Egypt and by wealthy American colonists: Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was said to have used one regularly.

Georgia O'Keeffe and bones

I watched the premiere of a 2-hour movie about American artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) that airs again on Lifetime tomorrow night. Like the reviewers, I had some issues with it, but it is worth watching. The film prompted me to have another look at her skull paintings and to see what she said about bones:

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"When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home. I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it."

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"Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - the blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished."

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"The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable and knows no kindness with all its beauty."

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In the process, I found the portraits above in which O'Keeffe is depicted with vertebrae and skulls. None of these was taken by her husband, American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). The 1st was taken by Philippe Hausman in 1967, the 2nd by John Candelario in 1942, and the 3rd by Arnold Newman in 1968.

Three clocks

There is a great interactive link in Thursday's New York Times which allows you inside the room behind the 100-year-old clock on the facade of the city's Grand Central Station. The clock has a circumference of 13' and is surrounded by sculptures of Minerva, Hercules, and Mercury. The motor is plugged into a standard outlet and the clock hasn't missed a step since it was built in 1913. The "VI" is on a tiny hinged door, offering a view of Park Avenue. The face of the clock contains the world's largest example of Tiffany glass.
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The bell of the clock in the northeastern end of the Palace of Westminster in London is better known as Big Ben. This national symbol -famous for its reliability - just celebrated its 150th anniversary in May of this year. The largest 4-faced chiming clock in the world, each clock face is 23' in diameter and made of an iron frame containing 312 pieces of opal glass, some of which open to allow access to the hands. The clockwork mechanism weighs 5 tons and can be seen on video or on a virtual tour. The 3.9M pendulum hangs in a windproof box below the clock and beats every 2 seconds. Despite being hit by a German bombing raid in 1941, which damaged 2 of the clock faces, Big Ben chimed accurately throughout the Blitz (although the faces of the clocks were darkened at night).
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The clock in Salisbury Cathedral in southern England is the oldest working modern clock in the world, dating from about 1386 A.D. It operates on a system of weights attached to ropes that are threaded through pulleys 20' above the clock, and is wound daily. You can watch it at work - ticking every 4 seconds - here. It has no face, because the clocks of the time rang out the hours on a bell to summon worshippers to the 6 or 7 church services each day. The bell tower was destroyed in 1792, so the clock was placed in storage, where it was rediscovered in 1929 and restored to working order in 1956. Only a few parts were replaced, but to save on wear and tear the clock now chimes only at special demonstrations.

Spanish moss

Spanish moss gives much of the South its "gothic" appearance and we have a lot of it hanging from our trees in the yard - including the one that we built the new deck around, so we wouldn't have to cut it down. I thought the moss was a parasitic plant, but it is an epiphyte, so it lives on trees, but gathers its own nutrients and water. It does not kill its host, though it may shade the leaves from the sun, limiting photosynthesis; weigh down the branches, causing them to break; and create more wind resistance, making the tree more susceptible to hurricane damage. Here are some strange but true facts about Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides):

• Originally referred to as "tree hair" or Spanish beard, and now also known as Florida moss, long moss, or graybeard, it is not actually a moss.
• It was harvested by the ton for years as a stuffing material for mattresses, car seats, and furniture and kept them cooler and more comfortable because of its natural insulating properties. It was also used as a binder in plaster walls and in clay chimneys.
• Today, Spanish moss is used by florists around the base of plants, by landscapers as a privacy screen, by builders as wall insulation, and by shippers as a packing material.
• In the trees, the moss is home to birds, bats, rat snakes, and amphibians; on the ground it can harbor chiggers. There is a particular species of spider which has only been found in Spanish moss.
• The moss will only grow on trees. Most often found on southern live oak or bald cypress, its masses can grow up to 20' in length.
• In addition to the southeastern U.S. (from Texas to Florida), it grows in Central and South America, and can also be found in Hawaii, where it was introduced in the 1800s and used in leis.
• The plant has been used to treat Type II diabetes, heart disease, edema, and hemorrhoids.
• It can go dormant and withstand extremes of cold and drought for long periods.
• Spanish moss is not propagated by seeds, but by fragments or festoons.

Finally, here is a poem about Spanish moss's origin:

There's an old, old legend that's whispered by Southern folks,

About the lacy Spanish moss that garlands the great oaks -

A lovely princess and her love, upon their wedding day,

Were struck down by a savage foe amidst a bitter fray;

United in death they were buried, so the legends go,

'Neath an oak's strong, friendly arms, protected from their foe;

There, as was the custom, they cut the bride's long hair with love,

And hung its shining blackness on the spreading oak above;

Untouched, undisturbed, it hung there, for all the world to see.

With the years the locks turned gray, and spread from tree to tree.

Everything you wanted to know (or didn't think to ask) about Spanish moss!

Ray Bradbury

American author Ray Bradbury is still writing his "speculative fiction" despite a stroke in 1999. His 1957 novel Dandelion Wine is one of my favorite books, and there is a chapter in it that I find quite evocative. An old man named Colonel Freeleigh calls regularly from his wheelchair to a friend in Mexico City and asks him to hold the telephone out the window so he can hear the sounds of the street. The colonel explains, "You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city, it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And so it is good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living..." You can read most of this chapter on Google Books (search "Mexico City" and start reading on p. 130) and you can hear the sounds of the Mexico City street on sound-effect.com (click arrow to listen to 127-second preview). I first read this story as a teenager and was reminded of it while talking to Jody Arlington when she lived in Madrid in the late 1990s, so I reread it and faxed her a copy. I thought of it again last night when imagining what it would sound like to be on one of the ships in my rather tame post of yesterday...

Submerged steamers

The remains of a Civil War steamship like the one pictured (top) have just been found in Florida's Jonesboro River (bottom). This is the 2nd so far:

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Scottish Chief - This wreck was found 3 weeks ago with sonar in 15' of murky water by a Florida Aquarium research team on Tuesday. It was lodged near an I-275 overpass in Tampa. After its engine had been salvaged, the 124' wooden vessel had been burned and sunk by Union troops in 1863 after repeatedly smuggling cotton and cow hides to Cuba in exchange for medicine, food, ammunition, and other supplies - including liquor and cigars. "This is a fairly major find," said chief researcher John William Morris. "It's buried up to the gunwales and the preservation factor is pretty high." He believes the hull may be fully intact.

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Kate Dale - This blockade runner, known for its speed, was found near Lowry Park in the same river last year. It had been docked to have its hull scraped of barnacles when it was attacked, burned to the water-line, and sunk in 1863.

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The remains of the Scottish Chief will not be raised, but its location will be shared with the public so divers can take a look. Another vessel, The AB Nays, was docked near the Kate Dale, but was burned by the Confederates to prevent its capture and is believed to lie 150 yards north of the Scottish Chief, where it can sometimes be seen at low tide.

Damien Hirst

British conceptual artist Damien Hirst's installations of animals preserved in formaldehyde stirred controversy when they were created in the 1990s, but made his reputation. Here he is posing in front of some of them: "The Incredible Journey" (top), "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (center), and "In His Infinite Wisdom" (bottom). Hirst has since done a series of medicine cabinets, one of which sold for 9.65 million pounds, making him the most expensive living European artist (and what some consider one of the most over-valued). From the news reports, Hirst can be a bit touchy. He ended his relationship with long-time collector Charles Saatchi in 2003 and sold a complete show at auction in 2008 rather than through his long-standing galleries - a move that garnered him a record-breaking $198 million.

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My quibble is not about whether or not Hirst's works should be considered art. In my opinion, if the artists say it is art, you have to take them at their word - as proven by Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) in 1961 (and many others subsequently). My issue is with the permanence of the artwork, if that is what is intended and being paid for by the patron. In Manzoni's case, the cans began to disintegrate; with Hirst's, his iconic shark rotted in its vitrine and had to be replaced first with a model, and then with a properly injected shark.
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But back to the exorbitant prices he puts on his works, Hirst has valued a set of pencils that were stolen from a recent installation at half a million pounds! This in an ongoing feud with a graffiti artist named Cartrain. Hirst objected to the inclusion of images of his own piece - a diamond-encrusted skull entitled "For the Love of God" - in the teenager's collaged portraits of him, and demanded that the works be seized and the profits (200 pounds) be forfeited. In revenge, Cartrain swiped the rare pencils from Hirst's installation "Pharmacy" at the Tate and held them for ransom, threatening to sharpen them unless his collages were returned. The boy was arrested and may be convicted of one of the highest valued art thefts in modern Britain. One journalist suggests, "Perhaps the artist is considering legal action as a new (and lucrative) form of conceptual art."

Marshmallow

Despite having eaten s'mores, peeps, and Rice Krispie treats for years, I only just learned that marshmallow is a plant! The herb Althaea officinalis is native to Europe and has a mucilaginous root (meaning it's slimy like okra). It was blended with egg whites and sugar several centuries ago to make a chic dessert, but roots and leaves have been used by herbalists for millenia to soothe the following conditions: abscesses, bedsores, boils, burns, chest pain, convulsions, cramps, hemorrhoids, inflammation, insect stings, irritated skin, sore throat, splinters, stomach ulcers, toothache, varicose veins, and wounds. It was described by Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder in 1st c. Greece, Charlemagne in 8th c. France, and John Gerard in 16th c. England. Gerard prescribed it for pain: "The mucilage or slimie juice of the roots, is mixed very effectively with all oils, ointments, and plasiters that slacken and mitigate paine. It cureth rifts of the fundament, it comforteth, defendeth, and preserveth dangerous greene wounds from any manner of accidents that may happen there, it helpeth digestion in them, and brings old ulcers to maturation." Even if you make your own, today's marshmallows do not contain any ingredients from the plant, but they do satisfy the sweet tooth. If you don't have access to a campfire, go to Cosi - they'll bring the makings for s'mores and let you roast the marshmallows right at your table!

Eskimo snow

That old chestnut about Eskimos having 100 words for snow? Not true. Linguists have been trying to dispel this myth for decades and date it back to the introduction to The Handbook of North American Indians, published in 1911 by German American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942). Boas pointed out that, like English has separate roots for words about water (liquid, lake, rain, dew...), Eskimo has separate roots for snow-related words:

• aput - snow on the ground
• gana - falling snow
• piqsirpoq - drifting snow
• qimuqsuq - snowdrift

The passage was misinterpreted and inflated by amateur American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), whose article was quoted, reprinted, and further embellished. Whorf's 7 snow terms became 9, then 50, then 100, then 200...even after anthropologist Laura Martin tried to set the record straight in 1982. Geoffrey K. Pullam makes another attempt to suppress the oft-repeated "factoid." Steven J. Derose points out several "counting" issues, including the fact that Eskimo is not a single language, but a term that encompasses 2 major cultural groups: Inuit and Aleut. Anthony C. Woodbury tallies up the snow-related lexemes in the Inuit language, Yu'pik. David Mendosa reprints a satirical list of the "100 words" that includes entries like "tliyel - snow that has been marked by wolves, hiryla - now in beards, and klin - remembered snow. And again Geoffrey K. Pullam gets the last word by stating that because Inuit has multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation, the words that Eskimos can apply to snow is actually infinite.

WWII photographs of "The Kiss"

The 2nd photo is surely familiar to you, but the 1st may not be. Both were taken by German-American photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995), known for his candid shots. He is most famous for the 2nd image, titled "V-J Day in Times Square" and captured on August 14, 1945, as President Harry Truman (1884-1972) announced the end of the war with Japan. But Eisenstaedt bracketed World War II with the photograph at the top of a couple sharing a farewell kiss in Penn Station before the soldier shipped out. Each of the photos appeared in Life magazine and the spontaneity precluded asking the identities of the subjects. Though she has had rivals, the nurse in the V-J Day photo is accepted to be Edith Shain, who served as Grand Marshal in last year's Veteran's Day parade in New York City. When Life asked in its August 1980 issue that the sailor identify himself, claims were made by 11 men. Since then, 2 additional men - Carl Muscarello and Glenn McDuffie - have come forward, and a forensic analysis by the Houston Police Department concludes that McDuffie is the man in the famous photograph. The photo, incidentally, has been brought into the 3rd dimension in the form of two identical 25' statues, one in San Diego, California, and the other in Sarasota, Florida. Described as gaudy monstrosities, the full-color statues have themselves been the subject of recent dispute, while the controversy about the subjects in the iconic black and white photo seems to have finally been resolved.

Frankenstein and Dracula

Did you ever wonder how the novels Frankenstein and Dracula were originally received by the critics? The question crossed my mind the other day and here are the answers...

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Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) in response to a challenge by Lord Byron (1778-1824) that he and each of his guests - who included Mary and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) - write a supernatural tale during a dreary summer at his Swiss villa. Mary expanded her story into a novel, the 1st edition of which was published anonymously in 1818. The reviews were on the whole unfavorable, with the Quarterly Review calling it "a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity," though it conceded that the writer "has the power of both conception and language." There was much speculation about the identity of the author, who was assumed to be a man. While questioning part of the plot, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) acknowledged the writer's "original genius and happy power of expression." Once Mary's identity became known with publication of the 2nd edition, Frankenstein was largely dismissed by the critics, with the notable exception of her husband: "The interest gradually accumulates, and advances toward the conclusion with the accelerated rapidity of a rock rolled down a mountain. We are held breathless by suspense and sympathy..." But despite the many negative reviews, it was an almost immediate popular success. We now know it as a classic of popular culture and - since the mid-20th c. - critical acclaim.

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The opposite is true of Dracula, published in 1897 by Bram Stoker (1847-1912). Most contemporary critics raved, but it did not become a bestseller until later. They found it to be the best of Stoker's books and superior to Frankenstein. The Pall Mall Gazette declared it "horrid and creepy to the last degree" and the Glasgow Herald reported, "Henceforth we shall wreathe ourselves in garlic when opportunity offers, and firmly decline all invitations to visit out-of-the-way clients in castles in the South-East of Europe." And the Observer felt that although the subject of vampires was unworthy of Stoker's talent, "Not only is the subject gruesome, but the author's undoubted descriptive powers make the various ghastly experiences startingly realistic, and engender a fascination which forces one to read on to the end." The popularity of the book did not reach its iconic status until film adaptations began to appear in the early 20th c. Stoker did not invent the vampire, of course, but his interpretation of the legend has been the most influential. One earlier story, "The Vampyre," had been published in 1819 after it was written by John Polidori (1795-1821) during that gloomy summer with Lord Byron and the Shelleys...

Topiary elephants

I saw the photo just above (#7) on the Folly Fancier site, which I linked to last Sunday in the Wimpole's folly post. As the description explains, a topiary is not a folly, but I thought it would be interesting to look other shrubbery elephants - and found some with personality. The photos link to the sources, although only some identify the location. I found the one at the top to be my particular favorite because of its whimsy, but chose #2 because it needs trimming and looks like a mammoth and #3 because it is so skinny! No matter how realistically they are portrayed, elephants are not at all scary like the topiary animals in Stephen King's novel The Shining. It seems I was not the only one to be disappointed that they did not come to life in the 1980 film - instead replaced by a garden maze. The 1997 TV remake was not as good as the original film, but was worth watching to see the topiary animals go on the hunt!