via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Tyrannosaurus rex is known for being huge and threatening. What's with those tiny arms though? Don't call them useless.
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via Interesting Literature
Are these English literature’s greatest poems about eyes and sight?
The poet sees many things which the rest of us miss, and we might even offer one definition of ‘poet’ as ‘someone who takes the unremarkable and everyday and shows its deeper meaning to us’. It’s only an approximation of what the poet does, although it’s applicable to many of the greatest writers of poetry down the ages. And some of the greatest poets in English literature have written about the importance and power of eyes, and what it means to have – or not have – the gift of sight.
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WOW. Just for once I know all of these – not to quote perhaps but enough to know I enjoy listening to them.
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Steven Nadler on a new Life that shows the philosopher ‘deeply embedded in his dangerous times’
via Arts & Letters Daily: Times Literary Supplement
In the early 1630s, the French artist Simon Vouet, recently named premier peintre to the court of Louis XIII, produced a series of pastel portraits, probably commissioned by the King himself. One of these drawings, now in the Louvre, depicts a man in a broad white collar who appears to be in his mid-thirties. He has a fringe and shoulder-length hair, heavy eyelids, a moustache and a short beard beneath his lower lip. Writing in the TLS three years ago, Alexander Marr claimed that the subject of this portrait is the philosopher René Descartes (March 13, 2015); if Marr is correct, then this would be a fine addition to the small number of authentic portraits of Descartes painted during his lifetime.
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via the OUP blog by Adam Munn and Mark Harrison
Orangutan by ghatamos, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr
Orangutans quite literally are “persons of the forest,” at least according to their Malay name (orang means “person” and hutan is “forest”). But this is more than just a name. As well as their distinctively “human” qualities, these large charismatic fruit-eaters are also gardeners, forest engineers responsible for spreading and maintaining a wide array of tree species. In Borneo in particular, their role as ecosystem engineers is not simply aesthetic, they may be critical for mitigating global carbon emissions. But how exactly might orangutans do this? The answer is in their poo.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The Fatimid caliphate 909-1171 was a medieval Shiite Arab state centered in Cairo from 972. In the era of its power, the Fatimid caliphate included the territories of Egypt, the Maghreb, Palestine, and Syria. The caliphate split from the Abbasid caliphate as a result of an uprising of the Berber tribes in the province of Ifrikia, modern Tunisia, headed by the Ismaili preacher, Abu Abdallah. Abu Abdallah transferred all power to Ubeidallah, who claimed to be a descendant of Fatima. The caliphate was defended by Saladin, a Seljuk commander of Kurdish origin, who was called upon to organize a defense against the Crusaders in 1169.
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via Library Link of the Day: Jessica Leigh Hester in Atlas Obscura
Fire-branded symbols were a sign of ownership. ALJNDRCZ/CC BY SA 4.0
When books hit the road, they don’t always make their way home again. Who among us doesn’t have some rogue volumes on our shelves, pilfered from libraries or “borrowed” and then absorbed? In the 15th and 16th centuries, when book printing was in its infancy, this problem of books gone missing was especially pronounced when the volumes in question were expressly designed to roam.
In particular, texts tagged along as missionaries fanned out to proselytize across the New World. When it came to converting indigenous people to Christianity, religious texts were a powerful weapon in missionaries’ arsenals, and psalms, confessions, and other liturgical texts—written in Spanish, Latin, and scores of indigenous languages—were printed in Europe and shipped across the ocean to New Spain. This land, encompassing present-day Mexico and other portions of Central and South America, was an epicenter of conversion efforts, and it soon became a hub for the printed word, too.
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via Interesting Literature
The best poems by Byron
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) wrote a great deal of poetry before his death, in his mid-thirties, while fighting in Greece. But what are Byron’s best poems? Here we’ve selected some of his best-known and best-loved poems, spanning narrative verse, love poetry, simple lyrics, and longer comic works.
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via Boing Boing by Seamus Bellamy
Some folks believe that when it’s your time to go, you’re gonna go, no matter what you do. Were he still able to speak, at least one former citizen of the Roman city of Pompei might have something to say on the subject. In a press release pushed out by Parco Arceologico Di Pompei, it was announced that archeologists recently uncovered the remains of some poor bastard that managed to survive the initial eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, only to be crushed like a bug by a flying piece of stonework that was most likely tossed into the air by explosive volcanic gases which followed the eruption.
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via About History by Alcibiades
Macrinus was Roman Emperor from 217 to 218. He was born in Caesarea of Mauritania, today’s modern Algeria, in 164 AD. For this reason, contemporaries called him the Moor, although he was a purebred Roman citizen and came from the ranks of the equestrians. After receiving a law degree, Macrinus served in Rome. Already during his first court session, he drew the attention of the powerful Prefect of the Praetorium. This happened during the reign of Septimius Severus.
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via the New Statesman by Billy Bragg
In the beery, beardy world of folk music, Collins – a young, working class woman – had few people on her side.
“I felt the old singers standing behind me”: Shirley Collins on the South Downs, East Sussex
In the late 1950s, Ewan MacColl, one of the driving forces behind the postwar folk revival in Britain, decreed that, henceforth, folk singers should only sing material from their own national culture. Given his stance, you’d think that MacColl would be supportive of Shirley Collins. A young, working-class woman, she was born and bred in Sussex and many of the songs in her repertoire were learned from the county’s traditional singers. Alas no. MacColl, hiding behind the pseudonym “Speedwell”, penned unflattering rhymes about Shirley, printed in the pages of his own magazine, Folk Music, likening her to a lumbering Jersey cow.
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