Nepenthe

The Art of Tom Gauld :)  

New York City is the greatest public works project in the USA . It is a city of tubes, grids, circuits and networks. We are organised by numbered floors and numbered streets and numbered apartments, fed and watered through great pipes and tunnels and bridges, shuttled to and fro in shifts along lines. On  Monday  night the magnificent machines were revealed to us, as they failed one by one. American newscasters hyperventilate about everything, and foam at the mouth when the subject is weather systems over the Northeastern United States, so there seemed no special reason to pay them any urgent attention in the days leading up to Sandy. The storm only became real when the governor announced the closure of the subway system on Sunday  morning. The process takes eight hours. Employees moved train cars, removed tracks that might be damaged by salt water, primed pumps, cleaned drains, evacuated stations and cleared rail yards prone to flooding. That night, the Metr...

His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horse-back, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws. Later, Henry will say, 'Your girls flew well today'. The hawk Anne Cromwell bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler, who rides by the king in easy conversation. They are tired; the sun is declining, and they ride back to  Wolf Hall  with the reins slack on the necks of their mounts. Tomorrow his wife and two sisters will go out. These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Weightless, they glide on the u...

thank you, The Guardian  DataBlog :) Münster: Ortelius: Blaeu: Moll: Hase: Clouet: Cary: Tallis: Levasseur: Andriveau-Goujon: (idem)

The Art of Grant Snider , who tells us: In my exhaustive research for today's comic, I read that John Steinbeck often signed his books with a drawing of the Pigasus, a mythical flying pig. He also included the Latin motto  "Ad astra per alas porci": "To the stars on the wings of a pig."

Here

A first look review from The Guardian : In his gently astonishing new film,  Life of Pi , adapted from Yann Martel's 2001 bestseller, director  Ang Lee  melds so many disparate elements – Aesopian fable and cutting-edge  3D  technology, east and west, young and old – that he may have just succeeded in rebranding himself as the Obama of world cinema. The fiercely urgent candidate of 2008, of course, not the stealth version currently working the stump. The sheer number of world religions given a shout-out in the film – Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist – is enough to send Donald Trump's comb-over scampering up the nearest tree trunk, looking for cover. The film takes a while to get going, like someone roused from their morning meditation, with lots of flowers and candles and people wearing kindly, fixed smiles suggesting enlightenment, or as if they had been hit around the head with a brass pot. In French India, the young son of a zoo owner collec...

International Music Day or World Music Day is a concept too good to believe and the best part is that it actually exists. Yes, International Music day or the IMD was initiated on the 1st of October in 1975 by Lord Yehudi Menuhin. It was first organized by the International Music Council on 1st of October, 1975, in accordance with the resolution taken at the 15th General Assembly in Lausanne in 1973. The International Music Council (IMC) or the guardian of the IMD was founded by UNESCO in 1949. The IMC is the world's largest network of organizations, institutions and individuals functioning in the field of music. The International Music Council encourages and fosters musical diversity, access to culture for everyone and unites organizations in some 150 countries worldwide in building peace and understanding among people cutting across class, culture and heritage. The IMC in its bid to establish a global harmony through the music, celebrates the International Music Day and ...

This week's poem is Punk Prayer by the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot , three of whose members have just been  sentenced to two years in a prison colony for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" . Is there any truth in the accusation? It's worth taking a closer look at the lyrics of  Punk Prayer . This, of course, is the song that sparked the trouble when the three women performed it in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour five months ago. The performance was mildly shocking, at least for any believer unused to trendy vicars putting on rock concerts. Loud, rude, up-yours protest is what punk is all about. But the lyrics are not all raw obscenity: they have something significant to say, which the careless translations slopping around the internet tend to obscure. Western commentators have cherry-picked simple-mindedly to find quotations. In offering my version of Punk Prayer as Poem of the Week, I'm expressing solidarity with the ...

Fernweh [1] is what the Germans call that longing for faraway places, the poetic certainty that things are better elsewhere. But there is a superlative degree of geographic desire, a Fernweh even more sublime: the ache for fictional faraway places. Of such nonexistent locations, the mythical continent of Magellanica surely is the crowning glory. By rights of pedigree and size, it should be the most prominent of of phantom lands. Yet  Magellanica is as absent from the imagination as it is from contemporary maps - those prosaic projections of mere topographic fact.  Magellanica has had many names and shapes, and regularly occupied large swathes of the southern hemisphere on world maps from the 15th to the 18th century. The most fantastic climates, cities and costumes were attributed to her. But most cartographers shied away from focusing on this hypothetical, as yet to be discovered continent. Conventionally, it is shown as an upside-down curtain, arbitrarily ...

“He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.” - Wuthering Heights , Emily Bronte

- Jane Eyre (The Word Made Flesh)

(1920 - 2012) “ We can’t go on without him.” “What’ll we do? Carry him?” Simmons spat. “He’s no good to us or himself. He’ll just stand here and drown.” “What?” “You ought to know that by now. Don’t you know the story? He’ll just stand there with his head up and let the rain come into his nostrils and mouth. He’ll breathe the water.” “No.” “That’s how they found General Mendt that time. Sitting on a rock with his head back, breathing the rain. His lungs were full of water. ” — The Long Rain

Via: Medical Insurance

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Bandwiches: AC/DC:  Beer-battered kangaroo sausage, sliced hard-boiled egg, low-calorie port cheese, Dutch crunch. Black Sabbath:  Ham, stilton,  LSD  mustard, milled wheat bread. Thin Lizzy:  Chopped sausage, mincemeat, Jameson-shiitake reduction, soda bread. The Beatles:  Beef, ham, chicken, lamb, fondue sauce, dinner roll. Wings:  Sliced vegan haggis, wilted arugula, aged soy cheddar, rice bread. Led Zeppelin:  Arum sandwich with hummus, lettuce, 22 thin-sliced deli meats; side of Colman’s mustard. Bob Dylan:  Scrapple, melted pepper jack, hemp-seed garlic bread. The Pogues:  Gin-fed lamb, whiskey-marinated turkey, beer-braised pork shoulder, mustard, soda bread. Van Halen:  Grilled 17-cheese sandwich on white bread; side of nacho cheese soup. Ted Nugent:  Cubed Grizzly bear, white buffalo brisket, unicorn haunch, Jim Beam barbecue sauce, white bread. The Jimi Hendrix Experience:  Bacon-double ...

AN OPEN LETTER TO EVERYONE WHO, WHEN MY FIANCÉ LEFT ME, TOLD ME IT WAS “HIS LOSS.” BY  MEGAN VAN LOH - - - - Dear Everyone, The person I love most in the entire world has left me. Gone. Vanished. And the real kicker here folks—he left by choice. You all know this and yet you still say it’s “his loss.” As if that is supposed to make me feel better, console me; make me the “bigger person.” It does none of the above because the truth of the matter is: I  have  experienced a loss. Losses and wins involve points, am I correct? Let’s think about the situation and see where the points should be awarded. Are we all in agreement that the loss goes to the person with the least amount of points? Good. Let’s begin: Since it was his choice to leave me, and I had no say in the matter—actually I wasn’t even warned it was coming (or going, as was the case), or given the opportunity to work on things or speak with a third party—I’d say that’s 1 point him, 0 points me....