Scottunder

Victorian infographics

Love this page of Victorian infographics from the BibliOdyssey site. Below is a comparative chart showing the lengths of rivers and heights of mountains around the world.

 

Another morning online

Here's how the morning has gone. My friend Angella sent me links to a band named Balmorhea, who she learned about from her cousin's husband's ActiveListener podcast. 

Balmorhea have a recent album All Is Wild, All Is Silent. They're a six-piece instrumental band from Austin: guitars, violin, cello, double bass, sometimes banjo,  drums, and keys. It's slow, thoughtful, and elegiac -- not unlike Godspeed You Black Emperor in places, but with shorter songs and fewer huge-big-loud crescendos. 

Here's their song "Remembrance":




Here's Balmorhea doing "Night Squall" in a French courtyard:

So, of course I go to Balmorhea's website and see they're coming to SF in March at the Bottom of the Hill, at which I've mostly seen noisy rock bands. Balmorhea is on tour opening for a Danish band called Efterklang, so I had to find out about them.

Here's a rather Sufjanesque song by Efterklang with a charming animation video, "Mirador."



And here's Efterklang's "Cutting Ice into Snow," which you see when first visiting their website.



The "Cutting Ice into Snow" video features imagery from In a Dream, a documentary about a Philadelphia tile-and-glass mosaic artist named Isaiah Zagar. He has made an installation you can visit called The Magic Garden.



Here's another excerpt from the movie with him talking:



That's probably enough for one post.

Tutulemma

I earlier wrote about analemmas, the name for the shape the sun describes against the sky over the course of a year, so I thought this was worth sharing: a Tutulemma, an invented portmanteau of analemma and the Turkish word for solar eclipse.

 

Found on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site.

Friar to monkey to coffee to doo-wop

In the early 16h Century, a Franciscan friar, Matteo di Bassi, felt his order wasn't copying St Francis quite closely enough, and he tried to live more as he did. He grew a beard, went barefoot, lived liked a hermit, and preached to the poor. More important for my purposes, he designed a new habit -- same brown fabric as the Franciscans but now with a pointed hood.

This hood is cappuccio in Italian, capuche in old French, which comes from the Latin cappa, hood, and ultimately from Latin caput, head, which led to cape (like a cloak), cap (on your head), and to a lot of other words.

Anyway, others followed Matteo, dressing the same, and they got the French nickname capuchin, and cappuccino in Italian -- presumably, "little hood-wearer." After some internal Franciscan strife, the Pope allowed him to form a new order, a Franciscan offshoot named the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, after their distinctive hoods.

When explorers came to the Americas, the saw a new species of small monkey that immediately reminded them of the monks -- with the pale face and a cap of dark hair atop the head, they called them Capuchin monkeys. 

Another connection is of course the coffee drink, which seems directly connected but has two or three stories about how it came about. Most often, the color of the cappuccino reminding someone of the Capuchin robes -- but why not call it a Francisccino? Another says that the froth was pointed, and another that the foam sat on the top, like a monk's hood.

 Also related to Latin cappa is chaperone. A chaperon was originally a hood for a hawk. From that sense, a verb chaperonner, to cover with a hood, or protect, and from there to an antique sense of an older woman who accompanied a young woman in public as her protector. 

Further on, cappa as cloak brought us chapel, which was originally a very specific place: a place to hold the cape of St Martin of Tours, venerated by France's first kings. Latin for chapel was capella, and the a capella groups of today are merely singing in the manner of the choir in church -- without instruments.

Highlights: A Found Poem

I took home from the library a used Sunday magazine
The previous reader had marked some quality words
Carefully, with a yellow felt pen

dire straits    collude    riveting    besotted
touchstone    ubiquitous    isomorphism    reproach
copacetic    vistas    relished    voracious
obdurately    fervent    illuminating    catapult
titrating    arduous    rebuffed    edict
froth    volatile    smoldering    palpable
fugue    debacle    respite    belligerence
emanate    protracted    hectored    concurred
culminate    assimilate    ameliorate    chided 

Maybe the marks were made by a child doing homework
Or an elderly man adding to his vocabulary
Before completing the crossword

But
The article is long and emotional
And concerns couples in counseling

I imagine a woman with a yellow pen
Not yet fluent in her new country
Not yet separated from her husband and his old ways
Who wants to understand the words
And what comes next

Babies

Everyone loves... babies.

Well, actually, I'm more fond of adults, but this does look like an excellent documentary. Maybe a lesson here for helicopter parents wo try to insulate their children from the dirt of the world.