ffffffound!

my great grandmother painted this bleak scene at some point in the 1920s. i always thought that it was depicting lassie about to enjoy a tasty winter meal while my kid-sister believed that it was showing a dog rescuing a stray lamb.

a few days back my kid sister emailed me this link, which shows that great granny was actually plagiarising the work of acclaimed victorian painter, walter hunt. the title of the original is found. my kid sister pointed to this as proof of her theory, while i maintain that it further proves my own.

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.

this pretty much sums up my evenings

woodcut by clyde j. newman (1902).

for wunderkammer: tableau synoptique d’oreilles d’a. bertillon

mysterious lurker, ramona has submitted this beatiful taxonomy of the ears of french criminals to the wunderkammer. says ramona:

The attached is for the wunderkammer – now I am suffering from anxiety that it is not sufficiently wunderful [editor’s note: ramona, stop being a dork].   I love it as its own thing, but i also particularly love the odd story of its creator, M. Alphonse Bertillon, who never let the obtuseness of lesser mortals (everyone else) stand in the way of his rampant o.c.d.   He was even written up by Ida Tarbell, a gobsmacking interview at which to have been a fly on the wall.   I would like to think that there are picturesque names for each characteristic shape, but I fear M. Bertillon had no room for poetry in his cataloguer’s soul.

one of the five hearts (a metaphor) of the ragbag is my obsession with the names of things. let you and i be the poets that bertillon was not. to wit:

my left ear is an emesis basin (fig. 3) and my right ear is somewhere between a bass clef (fig. 44) and a wilting orchid (fig . 16).

2.5 million bushels of flour

this is my great-grandfather’s business card. he was a flour salesman°.

missing from the card are his address, email address, cell phone number, fax number, tumblr screen name, and aol keyword (which makes it eerily similar to susan’s card).

the adventures of henry james and edith wharton

While driving near Windsor they got lost, and, spotting an old man, approached him for directions. “My good man,” James began. “To put this to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of depature; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.” The old man looked dazed, at which point Wharton leaned over and asked where King’s Road was. “Ye’re in it,” snapped the man.

an unrelated fyi: edith wharton’s nickname was pussy wharton.

a cross-section of ganan manor and the ganan archivists. also, wally.

originally from here.

and in what vehicle does raynor ganan have his nightly joy ride? the bronx book wagon, duh°.

what’s this? an audio post—on the ragbag? indeed. listen along as thomas stearns eliot affects a phony british accent (like madonna and greenday) while reading his poem, macavity the mystery cat.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,
For he’s a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square -
But when a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there!

we shall not cease from exploration

the [possibly apocryphal] ad placed by ernest shackleton for his 1914 imperial trans-antarctic expedition. the documentary is not to be missed, especially in these tough economic times.

thornton gone wilder

i don’t want to get all gary vanderchunk on you, but this article in the hudson review is worth a look-see in the hopes that it might convince you that thornton wilder (and his works) are worthy of a longer look-see:

He was born in 1897, the same year as William Faulkner, a year after F. Scott Fitzgerald, and two years before Hemingway; he published his first novel in 1926, the same year as Soldiers’ Pay and The Sun Also Rises, a year after The Great Gatsby and Arrowsmith, and a year before Elmer Gantry, and was immediately hailed as one of the best writers of his generation. He went on to write several more novels, almost all of them critically acclaimed bestsellers, and to win three Pulitzer Prizes, one for fiction and two for drama (he is still the only writer to have won Pulitzers in both categories). One of his novels was among the twentieth century’s great publishing sensations; one of his plays is the most performed American theatrical work of all time; yet another of his stage efforts was the basis for one of the most successful Broadway musicals in history. Some consider him the equal or superior of Hemingway and Fitzgerald as a novelist, and some place him alongside—or above—Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams in the pantheon of American drama.

Why, then, can it seem as if Thornton Wilder has fallen between the cracks?

an impersonal passion: thornton wilder by bruce bawer. in the hudson review (autumn 2008)

your weekend todo list: solve the dorabella cipher »

The Dorabella Cipher is a letter written and enciphered by Edward Elgar [the guy who scored your graduation ceremony] to Miss Dora Penny [a young girl who was also the inspiration for one of his enigma variations]. She was never able to decipher it and its meaning remains unknown to this day.

A count of the 87 characters reveals a symbol frequency very close to that that would be expected if the cipher were a simple substitution cipher, based on a plain text in English, but attempts to decipher it along these lines have so far proved fruitless, leading to speculation the cipher may be more complex.

of course, it could also be an unelaborate hoax. but this should not stop you from making it your weekend project and finally showing the world the potentially pervy message that lies hidden under all those squigglies.