laufmaschine

the sissy in the bellhop uniform in this picture is riding his (appropriately named) dandy horse. it was a pedal-less predecessor of the modern day bicycle and (if you ask me) was the segway of the georgian era (in every way).

at anyrate: the crank arm broke off my road bike last night (in the middle of an intersection that had lots of babes in tank tops) and i had to scoot my way home via the dandy horse method. what an evening! mom made tuna casserole!

rats!

this is a real book? why am i only learning of it now?! consider the following anecdote as a cautionary tale for the next time that you find yourself crawling under your floorboards with a your pet ferret hunting a bitch rat by candlelight:

I remember a private house where I was engaged catching rats under a floor with ferrets. I went as far as possible on my belly under the floor with two candles in my hands, and I saw the ferret kill a large bitch rat, about six yards from me against a wall, where neither the dog nor myself could get at it.

I finished the job and made out my bill for my services, but in about two or three weeks after they again sent for me, declaring they could not stay in the sitting-room on account of the smell that arose from beneath the flooring boards. They had in consequence to send for a joiner; and as I knew the exact spot where the rat was killed I ordered him to take up the floor boards just where the dead rat lay, and the stench that arose from the decomposed rodent was bad in the extreme. I disinfected the place, and I was never sent for again.

from full revelations of a professional rat-catcher by ike matthews (1898).

gratuitous portrait of my great great grandmother as a young girl

you may notice that her twin is clutching a bible and perhaps it will delight you to learn that that bible is currently one of the most prized holdings of the ganan library. as a wee raynorling, i spilled spaghetti sauce (which my grandparents call “red gravy”) on some boring passage from judges and everyone went apeshit. if only the cherubim in this picture knew what was in store for their bible.

chaz babbage’s windows error report

ever since i posted the marvelous letter from charles babbage, father of your laptop, to alfred tennyson, i could not shake babbage’s neuroses from my thoughts. the one that struck me the most was that he actually tallied and categorised the causes of 464 broken windows of a nearby factory in a ten month period. what mad mind would do this? whatever the state of his mind, his data was ripe for the pickin’ and plottin’—thus this chart (you can distend it with a well-placed mouseclick).

for the inquisitive: this is the first treemap that i have had occasion to make and i didn’t quite know how to start—my slapdash solution involved these two programs.

cracher par terre

ridiculous french schoolyard sign reads: “no spitting on the floor or speaking breton.” because, you know, as indicators of your barbarous habits go, speaking the noble language of your elite 10th century forefathers is more or less on par with blowing snot rockets onto your school’s marble floor and using pencil nubs to dredge the waxy seepage of your inner ear.

more about the systematic attempt to eradicate the breton language here (including a quote from sociologist fañch elegoët which i deemed too depressing to excerpt on the ragbag on a monday morning).

the other day, a friend and i decided it would be a hoot to watch leatherheads. boy were we wrong! at-any-rate, at some point during the snapless dialogue, i remarked that renée zellweger was probably the most periody thespian in modern cinema. once the actual sentiment of what i was saying registered with my companion, he immediately countered by throwing a cate blanchett in my face. and thus the seeds of this chart were sewn.

mean periods: ms zellweger—1923. ms knightley—1812. ms blanchett—1942.

notes: certain quasi-period pieces were omitted: star wars (ms knightley was in star wars?) and lord of the rings. also, both of ms blanchett’s elizabeth films (ca. 1570) and ms knightley’s arthur (ca. 460) have been left out. when an actress was in an epic movie that spanned multiple decades (ms blanchett in benjamin button), i selected the decade that best matched the actresses’ actual age during filming. as always, it is within your power to click this image and DOUBLE its girth.

an impressive bust -or- a little head

i received this phrenological sculpture for my birthday recently from my kid sister. you will note that the very spot on the side of my cranium where i have been having a headache for weeks is the very spot that controls my desire for liquids and is right below the ingenuity zone. yikes!

the back of the bust reads:

For thirty years I have studied Crania and living heads from all parts of the world and have found in every instance that there is a perfect correspondence between the conformation of the healthy skull of an individual and his known characteristics.

—L. N. Fowler

“in every instance a perfect correspondence”!?!?!?! this burgeoning pseudo-scientific field sure sounds like the wave of the future. i hope that it doesn’t replace metoposcopy, though or my dear old daddy will be out of a job.

demanding satisfaction

if you live your life according to the code duello the way that i do, you will know that in duels, the challenged party has the right to choose the dueling weapons. these could be anything from knives to ninja stars to (apocryphally) tainted sausages.

of course there has never been a dual more preposterous or unusual than the one that took place between french hot air balloonists armed with blunderbusses (a type of proto-shotgun) over the city of paris in 1808:

…Early in the nineteenth century, a Monsieur de Grandpé and a Monsieur de Pique…had quarreled over Mademoiselle Tirevit, a famous dancer who was the mistress of the former but had been discovered in compromising circumstances with the latter. They decided to fight it out in balloons and on May 3, 1808.

Watched by a huge crowd which had been drawn by the sight of the balloons but little imagined the purpose they were meant to serve, each combatant climbed into his car, armed with a blunderbuss, since pistols would obviously have been ineffective in the circumstances. At nine o’clock the cords were cut and the balloons rose majestically into the air keeping within about eighty yards of each other. When they had risen some 2,000 feet, Monsieur de Pique fired his blunderbuss without result. His fire was returned almost immediately by Monsieur de Grandpré, whose shot punctured his adversary’s balloon, so that it hurtled to the ground dashing Monsieur de Pique and his second [a trusted representative] to pieces on a rooftop. The triumphant Grandpré then drifted happily away from the scene of his victory to land safely at a distance of seventeen miles from Paris.

from robert baldick’s the duel (1965).

a space opera… in the year 2000

what do you imagine going to the opera will be like in the year 2000? what about people in the 1800s, what did they imagine what going to the opera would be like in the year 2000? furthermore, what do you imagine that people in the 1800s imagined what you would imagine that they would imagine what going to the opera 9 years ago would be like? before we sink into an infinite abyss, let us observe this 1882 illustration from the hyper-cool paleo future blog (which has several more pictures of this series) where lithographer albert robida conceptualises his 2nd millennium operatic vision. consider:

your elegant monocle and tender moustache and the bevy of fly honeys in paisley petticoats that you assist in boarding your flying yellow dolphin while kaiser wilhem patrols the perimeter in a solo spaceship (sword at the ready), and 100 feet below you, some dandy ushers boobsy mcgee out of her wooly overcoat. it’s almost as if steampunk scene happened last year.

and to think only a few years before this lithograph was published, nietzsche (in die geburt der tragödie) went on a 54 paragraph tirade about how much opera blows chunks. look who’s eating a corvine delmonico now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(answer: friedrich wilhelm nietzsche!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

on eating a man[atee]

(emphasis mine)

Manatees… are, according to my friend, Chief Justice Temple, frequently caught and brought to the market of Belize, where they are snapped up with the greatest avidity.

The flesh of the manatus is white and delicate, and tastes like young pork eaten fresh or salted, while the fat forms excellent lard. The cured flesh keeps long without corruption, and it will continue good several weeks, even in the hot climate of which it is a native, when other meat would not resist putrefaction for as many days…The fat, which lies between the entrails and skin has a pleasant smell, and tastes like the oil of sweet almonds. It makes an admirable substitute for butter, and does not turn rancid in the sun. The fat of the tail is of a firmer consistence, and when boiled is more delicate than the other fat.

I do not, myself, fancy the flesh of this brute, for it is so inhumanly human—it reminds one so much of a mermaid, or of one of the fifty daughters of Nereus, that to eat it seems to me to be an approximation to cannibalism. It appears horrible to chew and swallow the flesh of an animal which holds its young to its breast, which is formed exactly like that of a woman, with paws resembling human hands.

from the curiosities of food by peter lund simmonds (1859).