The Nutcracker

Pearl Floyd

Portugal segundo os Portugueses, esses ineptos :)

A Europa segundo Portugal, ou a Inépcia sempre imbatível :)

Ada Lovelace immortalized in a doodle

RIP Oscar Niemeyer

I am fine with PortuGalicia :)

A poetry book?

The Art of Tom Gauld :)

 

Bram Stoker - 165 years of a legend

Saudades da minha gata :}

The Machine Stops

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 onSunday 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 Metropolitan Transit Authority posted photos of Times Square subway station, empty. Penn Station, empty. Grand Central Station, empty, and a shot of the last train out of town. Through the ventilation grid outside my house, an automated voice recited, like a ghost: ‘There is a Brooklyn-bound… express train… two stations away.’ Then she fell silent.

Alan Weisman, the author of The World Without Us, was recently asked what would happen to New York City if ‘all humans vanished’:

Within two days, without pumping, New York’s subway would impassably flood. Within twenty years, water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s 4-5-6 trains would corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river. In the first few years with no heat, pipes burst all over town, the freeze-thaw cycle moves indoors, and things start to seriously deteriorate. Plugged sewers, deluged tunnels and streets reverting to rivers will conspire to waterlog foundations and destabilize their huge loads, toppling structures. Gradually the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one.

On Monday, the Staten Island Ferry was suspended, the trains to New Jersey cut off, the airports closed and Amtrak canceled its trains. The power company, Consolidated Edison, closed the steam energy facilities that provide hot water and heat to large swaths of high-rise Manhattan. (I had never heard of the steam energy facilities before.) As the storm approached landfall on Monday afternoon, the government cut off the bridges. The Statue of Liberty’s torch went black. Around 7 p.m., as the southern tip of Manhattan was engulfed in floodwater, ConEd flicked the switch and Lower Manhattan went dark. The darkness crept north. From uptown in Harlem we watched on YouTube the video of a transistor exploding somewhere on the east side, leaving the city dark as far north as 39th Street. City workers evacuated hospitals where back-up generators had failed.

Some beacons remained. We looked at the photo of the carousel with water lapping at its edges in Brooklyn Bridge Park, still somehow floodlit. At the tip of Manhattan the lights at Goldman Sachs headquarters in the waterlogged financial district burned alone through the night, powered by some sort of off-grid generator that was too big to fail.

Water cascaded across the city, although it had barely rained. The power in Harlem never went off, and we watched on our computers as water flooded the tunnels, the edges of Manhattan, the construction site at Ground Zero, the avenues of Alphabet City, where stranded taxis bobbed like rubber ducks. In Frederick Law Olmsted’s city parks the stately trees fell down. The emergency phone system was overwhelmed. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s charismatic sign language interpreter, Lydia Callis, became a celebrity, and Bloomberg’s custom of closing his press conferences with a summary of the most important points in mangled Spanish seemed suddenly heroic.

The day after the storm, the subways still closed, the lights still on, I read George Oppen’s poem ‘Of Being Numerous’:

We are pressed, pressed on each other,
We will be told at once
Of anything that happens

Feliz Dia das Bruxas >:-[

Happy Halloween >:-[

Hilary Mantel wins the WOMan Booker ;)

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 upper currents of the air. They pity no one. They answer to no one.

Their lives are simple. When they look down they see nothing but their prey, and the borrowed plumes of the hunters: they see a flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner. All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying; the beating off and the whipping in of hounds, coddling of tired horses, the nursing, by the gentlemen, of contusions, sprains and blisters. And for a few days at least, the sun has shone on Henry. Sometime before noon, clouds scudded in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops; but the sun re-emerged with a scorching heat, and now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.

As they dismount, handing their horses to the grooms and waiting on the king, his mind is already moving to paperwork: to dispatches from Whitehall, galloped down by the post routes that are laid wherever the court shifts. At supper with the Seymours, he will defer to any stories his hosts wish to tell: to anything the king may venture, tousled and happy and amiable as he seems tonight. When the king has gone to bed, his working night will begin.

Though the day is over, Henry seems disinclined to go indoors. He stands looking about him, inhaling horse sweat, a broad, brick-red streak of sunburn across his forehead. Early in the day he lost his hat, so by custom all the hunting party were obliged to take off theirs. The king refused all offers of substitutes. As dusk steals over the woods and fields, servants will be out looking for the stir of the black plume against darkening grass, or the glint of his hunter's badge, a gold St Hubert with sapphire eyes.

Already you can feel the autumn. You know there will not be many more days like these; so let us stand, the horseboys of Wolf Hall swarming around us, Wiltshire and the western counties stretching into a haze of blue; let us stand, the king's hand on his shoulder, Henry's face earnest as he talks his way back through the landscape of the day, the green copses and rushing streams, the alders by the water's edge, the early haze that lifted by nine; the brief shower, the small wind that died and settled; the stillness, the afternoon heat.

'Sir, how are you not burned?' Rafe Sadler demands. A redhead like the king, he has turned a mottled, freckled pink, and even his eyes look sore. He, Thomas Cromwell, shrugs; he hangs an arm around Rafe's shoulders as they drift indoors. He went through the whole of Italy – the battlefield as well as the shaded arena of the counting house – without losing his London pallor. His ruffian childhood, the days on the river, the days in the fields: they left him as white as God made him. 'Cromwell has the skin of a lily,' the king pronounces. 'The only particular in which he resembles that or any other blossom.' Teasing him, they amble towards supper.

The king had left Whitehall the week of Thomas More's death, a miserable dripping week in July, the hoof prints of the royal entourage sinking deep into the mud as they tacked their way across to Windsor. Since then the progress has taken in a swathe of the western counties; the Cromwell aides, having finished up the king's business at the London end, met up with the royal train in mid-August. The king and his companions sleep sound in new houses of rosy brick, in old houses whose fortifications have crumbled away or been pulled down, and in fantasy castles like toys, castles never capable of fortification, with walls a cannonball would punch in as if they were paper. England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors' covenant; peace is what they offer. Every household strives to put forward its best show for the king, and we've seen some panic-stricken plastering these last weeks, some speedy stonework, as his hosts hurry to display the Tudor rose beside their own devices. They search out and obliterate any trace of Katherine, the queen that was, smashing with hammers the pomegranates of Aragon, their splitting segments and their squashed and flying seeds. Instead – if there is no time for carving – the falcon of Anne Boleyn is crudely painted up on hatchments.

Hans has joined them on the progress, and made a drawing of Anne the queen, but it did not please her; how do you please her, these days? He has drawn Rafe Sadler, with his neat little beard and his set mouth, his fashionable hat a feathered disc balanced precariously on his cropped head. 'Made my nose very flat, Master Holbein,' Rafe says, and Hans says, 'And how, Master Sadler, is it in my power to fix your nose?'

'He broke it as a child,' he says, 'running at the ring. I picked him up myself from under the horse's feet, and a sorry bundle he was, crying for his mother.' He squeezes the boy's shoulder. 'Now, Rafe, take heart. I think you look very handsome. Remember what Hans did to me.'

Thomas Cromwell is now about fifty years old. He has a labourer's body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He has black hair, greying now, and because of his pale impermeable skin, which seems designed to resist rain as well as sun, people sneer that his father was an Irishman, though really he was a brewer and a blacksmith at Putney, a shearsman too, a man with a finger in every pie, a scrapper and brawler, a drunk and a bully, a man often hauled before the justices for punching someone, for cheating someone. How the son of such a man has achieved his present eminence is a question all Europe asks. Some say he came up with the Boleyns, the queen's family. Some say it was wholly through the late Cardinal Wolsey, his patron; Cromwell was in his confidence and made money for him and knew his secrets. Others say he haunts the company of sorcerers. He was out of the realm from boyhood, a hired soldier, a wool trader, a banker. No one knows where he has been and who he has met, and he is in no hurry to tell them. He never spares himself in the king's service, he knows his worth and merits and makes sure of his reward: offices, perquisites and title deeds, manor houses and farms. He has a way of getting his way, he has a method; he will charm a man or bribe him, coax him or threaten him, he will explain to a man where his true interests lie, and he will introduce that same man to aspects of himself he didn't know existed. Every day Master Secretary deals with grandees who, if they could, would destroy him with one vindictive swipe, as if he were a fly.

Knowing this, he is distinguished by his courtesy, his calmness and his indefatigable attention to England's business. He is not in the habit of explaining himself. He is not in the habit of discussing his successes. But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.

At home in his city house at Austin Friars, his portrait broods on the wall; he is wrapped in wool and fur, his hand clenched around a document as if he were throttling it. Hans had pushed a table back to trap him and said, Thomas, you mustn't laugh; and they had proceeded on that basis, Hans humming as he worked and he staring ferociously into the middle distance. When he saw the portrait finished he had said, 'Christ, I look like a murderer'; and his son Gregory said, didn't you know? Copies are being made for his friends, and for his admirers among the evangelicals in Germany. He will not part with the original – not now I've got used to it, he says – and so he comes into his hall to find versions of himself in various stages of becoming: a tentative outline, partly inked in. Where to begin with Cromwell? Some start with his sharp little eyes, some start with his hat. Some evade the issue and paint his seal and scissors, others pick out the turquoise ring given him by the cardinal. Wherever they begin, the final impact is the same: if he had a grievance against you, you wouldn't like to meet him at the dark of the moon. His father Walter used to say, 'My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he'll gouge your eye out. Trip him, and he'll cut off your leg. But if you don't cut across him, he's a very gentleman. And he'll stand anybody a drink.'

Life of Pi - trailers

The mapping of Africa

thank you, The Guardian DataBlog :)

Münster:

Ortelius:

Blaeu:

Moll:

Hase:

Clouet:

Cary:

Tallis:

Levasseur:

Andriveau-Goujon:

(idem)

Be that cat

The Pigasus! (post to be seen listening to Pink Floyd, obviously :)

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."

The astounding Art of Daniel Kukla, or... California!

Here

On Banned Books, by Grant Snider

Life of Pi - the film

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 collects world religions the way other kids collect stamps. "They were my superheroes," he says, checking off a list of deities. Such good karma, sad to say, doesn't necessarily make for good drama. You're almost grateful for the arrival of the storm that sinks the boat bearing Pi, his family and their animal entourage to the new world, leaving the boy alone on a boat with one of his father's tigers. They are soon pacing around one other with the same mixture of wariness and hungriness last seen on the faces of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Lee's 2005 Brokeback Mountain.

One of the things that tells you the director is in his prime – a model of creative evolution – is that his films feel like total surprises when first announced but fit snugly into his oeuvre once you've seen them. Immersing himself in the latest technology — 3D, digital paintboxes, motion capture and control – as Martin Scorsese did in last year's Hugo, Lee summons delights with his fingertips. But where Hugo was cold to the touch, Life of Pi feels warm-blooded, the perfect summation of the principle powering Lee's entire career: still waters run deep. You see it both in the Zen minimalism of his compositions – check out the shots of sky reflected in a glassy ocean, the boat suspended in the middle as if hanging in thin air – and the sonar-like skill with which he sounds out the emotional depths of Martel's tale. Lee's pixels are animated by empathy.

Life of Pi feels so simple, yet knotted with resonance, that you wonder why Lee bothered with the framing narrative in which a grown-up Pi chews over the spiritual implications of his tale with a writer in Toronto. For one thing, the argument they come up with for the existence of God turns out to bear a suspicious similarity to an argument for the all-round grooviness of magic realism. For another: Toronto. A nice city, but its neat patches of parkland and grey high-rises are no match for breaching whales, phosphorescent fish and crouching tigers, or the sight if Pi, howling like Job into stormy skies.

Hollywood has been waiting for this movie. Get ready for the year of the Tiger. 

International Music Day ;)

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 with special focus on organizing musical events, radio and television programs and press recordings. Amidst all this the onus is also on building up an environment more conducive and hospitable to music-on the practice, consumption and the general aura of music. So, an important zone of interest is also struggle against the pollution of the sound environment and quite interestingly the IMC proposes that each country should maintain a few moments of silence on the International Music Day, and use that silence to listen to music played out in main city squares.

On International Music Day, the desired aim is to create a global atmosphere of music, a platform for people to come together with their diversities and mingle to make one unified whole. Like any other artistic or cultural celebrations the day is generally to celebrate art and to successfully realize these activities, it is essential to mobilize all means at our disposal in the 21st century-the radio and television, concert societies, opera companies, amateur societies; a great many different types of localities should all be used to their best advantage.

In various countries the day is the perfect opportunity to organize grand concerts by roping in the greatest musical artistes of our. Also common are random musical events and talent shows to seek out the new and emerging musical artistes- to build up a treasury of the old and new in the world of music. Music after all is the greatest unifier in humanity and all significant social events have musical pieces dedicated to it. No event is better recognized or defined than by music which defines and completes a perfect human social and aesthetic experience.

International Translation Day 2012 ;)

Contos em Lisboa

Pussy Riot's Punk Prayer, translated

This week's poem is Punk Prayer by the Russian feminist punk bandPussy 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 singers, objection to their absurd and horrible sentence, and annoyance with the cynics who accuse them of staging a PR exercise. In another context, dramatic acts of self-sacrifice for a cause are known as martyrdom.

Punk poetry without performance is an oxymoron. Still, it was an interesting challenge to try and inject a little of Pussy Riot's performance-style into the words. The song brings together two different musical genres. It has a hymn-like opening chorus, very melodic and redolent oftraditional Russian Orthodox chanting. The mood soon changes, though, and everything erupts into punk rant, a slam of hard-hitting images connected by minimal syntax. The chorus returns, exhorting the Virgin Mary to become a feminist, and finally, with its original plea for Putin's banishment, it concludes the song.

I deliberately used archaic language for the chorus: "banish" rather than "drive out" and "we pray thee", a supplication not in the original. Elsewhere, I did a certain amount of syntactical joining up – perhaps a little too much. I'd like it to sound punkier. But I aimed at a poem, and a poem needs more than a list of images. I hoped the message would be emphasised and not anaesthetised by some added syntax.

The first verse centres on a vivid symbol of the unholy alliance of church and state: the priestly robes and the militaristic gold epaulettes. The antithesis is repeated in other unlikely pairings, such as the black limousines ("cars" in my translation), with their mafia associations, processing with the cross. Pussy Riot's performance in consecrated space is itself a further metaphor of this culture clash.

For the verses, I went for short lines, mostly trochaic. There are some obscurities in the original lyrics, such as the reference to the missionary who goes to school and gets paid, which I couldn't solve. The penultimate line in the penultimate verse was another tricky one. It translates literally as "the belt of the Virgin cannot replace meetings". I have guessed that this belt is a sacred accessory, and therefore a ritual object. The meeting referred to I think must be a protest meeting. Hence my "Fight for rights, forget the rite". But it's rather a long shot.

Finding a short version of the Patriarch's name wasn't too difficult. Kirill Gundyayev (he who allegedly called the Putin era "a miracle of God") becomes "Gundy". The nickname in the original is similarly harmless. But a heavy insult lies in waiting: "suka", meaning "bitch". This doesn't work as a masculine insult in English. So, for the sake of a rhyme with "virgin" and a zoological reference, I went for "vermin".

The Russian word "sran" becomes English "crap" in my version, rather than "shit". This line, particularly offensive for some, has been translated as "shit, shit, the Lord's shit". Not only is this ambiguous (it could mean either "the Lord is shit" or "shit from/of the Lord"), it's inaccurate. Derived from Gospod, meaning Lord, "gospodnaya," is an adjective. It could be translated as "religious", though I tried something different. "Crap" has a stronger metaphorical dimension than "shit" and comes a shade closer to "bullshit". The song is simply saying that all this state-controlled religious stuff is bullshit. It's interesting that these disgraceful sentiments would have represented, until recently, the official Communist party view ofreligion.

I'm not claiming the translation is anything special. Feel free to take it apart! And the original lyrics aren't wonderful poetry, either. Artistic comparisons with Joseph Brodsky are far-fetched. It's the absurdity and dishonesty of the judgment that recall Brodsky's trial, and also the fate ofIrina Ratushinskaya, viciously punished, in part, for poems expressing her Christian beliefs. How horrible to find that, post-perestroika, rampant capitalism and artistic repression are somehow able to cohabit. Pussy Riot have explained that their protest was not primarily against religion but against the Russian Orthodox Church's support for Putin. The lyrics they wrote for Punk Prayer bear out the truth of this claim.

(Chorus)
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin,
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish him, we pray thee!
Congregations genuflect,
Black robes brag gilt epaulettes,
Freedom's phantom's gone to heaven,
Gay Pride's chained and in detention.
KGB's chief saint descends
To guide the punks to prison vans.
Don't upset His Saintship, ladies,
Stick to making love and babies.
Crap, crap, this godliness crap!
Crap, crap, this holiness crap!
(Chorus)
Virgin Mary, Mother of God.
Be a feminist, we pray thee,
Be a feminist, we pray thee.
Bless our festering bastard-boss.
Let black cars parade the Cross.
The Missionary's in class for cash.
Meet him there, and pay his stash.
Patriarch Gundy believes in Putin.
Better believe in God, you vermin!
Fight for rights, forget the rite –
Join our protest, Holy Virgin.
(Chorus)
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin,
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, we pray thee, banish him!


Punk Prayer, English version by Carol Rumens

Terra de Magalhães, from Strange Maps

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 undulating upward from the South Pole, which in the projection popularised by Mercator is smeared out along the entire bottom of the map. However, this map, from Petrus Bertius' [2] Tabularum Geographicarum Contractarum (1616) audaciously places the entirely imaginary continent at the centre of the map.

The continent is labelled Magallanica, sive Terra Australis Incognita: 'Magellan's Land, a.k.a. the Unknown Southern Land'. The name of the Portuguese explorer [3] was attached to the hypothetical continent because he supposedly skirted it in 1519, but the putative existence of a large mass of land in the southern hemisphere had been posited by Aristotle (4th century BC) and elaborated by Ptolemy (1st century AD).  

You read those dates right: the idea that the Earth was a sphere was much more common in Antiquity (and even throughout the Middle Ages) than one might think. But the idea that the 'Arctic' continents on the northern hemisphere needed an 'Ant(i)arctic' counterweight on the planet's southern half was based on a false analogy, and the bitter disputes about whether those places were habitable [4], or their inhabitants doomed [5], sound completely nuts these days.

As the Age of Discovery rolled back the outer limits of the unknown, world maps started showing the Terra Australis Incognita in various shapes - initially quite far north, into the habitable zone. Discoveries of land near the Southland's potential extension, were seen as proof of the Southland's existence. Tierra del Fuego, Java, New Guinea and the northern coasts of Australia were at some point all included in the shoreline of Magellanica. Other expeditions, like Dias' rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, kept pushing the imagined continent further south.

This map is late enough to catch some of these improvements, before Schuiten and Le Maire's 1616 expedition around Cape Horn would shrink Magellanica, Tasman's 1642 voyage south of Australia detached its northernmost extension, and Cook's second voyage in the 1770s relegated what was left of it to the uninhabitably cold polar region. The Bertius map links a few separate discoveries to the single landmass that isn't Magallanica. On the map, the regions mentioned are:

• Terra del Fuogo (i.e. Fireland), which was to the left [6] of Magellan's journey through the Strait.
• Promontorium Terrae Australis (the Cape of the Southland), maybe based on a sighting of South Georgia [7]?
• Terra Psittacorum (Parrot Country), south of Africa [8].
• Beach Provincia, just south of Java: a mistranscription of Locach, a kingdom mentioned by Marco Polo as being abundantly endowed with gold. Possibly based on a sighting of what is now Australia [8].
• New Guinea is tentatively attached to the mainland of Magallanica.

Over the centuries, and while it shrank, Magallanica was known by a number of different names: Terra Australis Incognita (or Ignota), Bresil Inferior, la Australia del Espiritu Santo, Mowalanijia (on Jesuit-produced Chinese maps), Jave la Grande,  etc.

Eventually, in much-reduced state, and divorced from its original 'function' as balance for the northern continents, it would be discovered and named as Antarctica.

This map was found here on the website of Princeton University Library. It has an eerie similarity - also qua mistakes - with Mercator's map of the North Pole (see #116) 

__________

[1] pronounced [FEHRN-veh].

[2] Latinised name of the Flemish cartographer Pieter de Bert (1565-1629), brother-in-law to fellow mapmakers Hondius and Van den Keere. Building upon his personal involvement with Arminianism, he published a theological tractate that went down badly with the mainstream of Dutch Protestantism; Bertius lost friends, influence and jobs, and left for France. He converted to Catholicism, which allowed him to work as a geographer, mathematician and historian at the royal court and universities of Paris. 

[3] Ferdinand Magellan - in his native Portuguese Fernão de Magalhães (1480-1521), led the first, Spanish-sponsored circumnavigation of the globe, although he was killed before his crew completed it. Magellan named the Pacific Ocean, discovering it after sailing through the narrows that still bear his own name. This Strait of Magellan separates the mainland of South America from Tierra del Fuego.

[4] People had a very hard time imagining what people who lived 'upside down' would look like: with feet where their heads should be, and vice versa? And why didn't they simply fall off the planet?

[5] Some geographers in Antiquity thought that the Earth had two habitable zones, in the north and south, separated by an impassably hot zone around the Equator. Later Christian thinkers thought that this either meant that Jesus would have had to make a second appearance in the southern hemisphere, or that those who lived in that impenetrable part of the world were automatically condemned to the fires of hell. 

[6] That's port for all you sea dogs out there. The right hand side of a ship is called starboard.

[7] For more on the world's remotest inhabited island, see #519. 

[8] The name of Australia, for a long time also called New Holland, was popularised by British explorer Matthew Flinders in the early 1800s; he thought the name had a better ring to it than the rather clunky-sounding 'Terra Australis'.

Strange Maps/Big Think

Wuthering Heights

“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

Tiro com Arco 2012

Let the Games Begin!

“I am no bird, and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you"

- Jane Eyre

(The Word Made Flesh)

RIP Ray Bradbury

(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

Time-lapse Map of Europe

Eye Opener (or, why are Americans obese? Because they eat boatloads? Yes. Because all they eat is poisoned with this? Oh yeah)

Via: Medical Insurance

Deep Time

Just click to access a bounty of knowledge :)

Pink Floyd: Amethyst-rubbed pork, asparagus jelly, moon-dried tomatoes, pumpernickel.

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 cheeseburger, mescaline pesto, sourdough bread.

Yes: Smoked ham, sprouts, candied foxgloves, braised fawn, dandelion greens, grilled fly agaric, irradiated kamut roll.

Allman Brothers: Honey-bourbon brisket, potato chips, Milk Duds, dandelion greens, seeded bun.

Pink Floyd: Amethyst-rubbed pork, asparagus jelly, moon-dried tomatoes, pumpernickel.

Jethro Tull: Roasted king bolete, ginger chutney, hempseed bread.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Ham, grape jelly, everything bagel.

Van Morrison: Lamb kebab, yogurt, thistle butter, Tupelo honey, jelly roll.

Simon and Garfunkel: Fried pork cutlet, ketchup, mustard, parsley, sage, rosemary, flour tortilla.

Bruce Springsteen: Cheesesteak, peppers, grilled headband, ketchup, seeded bun.

ABBA: Reindeer paté, candied rose petals, white bread.

Guns ’n Roses: Bacon-double cheeseburger, bittermelon jelly, Rogain aioli, sliced glazed donut.

The Who: Roast beef, boiled guitar strings, dinner roll.

Neil Young: Cubed ham, Kraft macaroni and cheese, blackened Anaheim peppers, 18-grain Anasazi bread.

Rolling Stones: Beef tongue, caviar, platinum-coated fried onions, ketchup, white bread.

Tom Waits: Boiled racehorse brisket, mustard, dark rye bread.

Roxy Music: Tandoori chicken breast, kalamata olive and sun-dried tomato tapenade, fried dragonfly wings, mache, sprouted bun.

Brian Ferry: Chipotle/cocaine-rubbed pork shoulder, herbed goat cheese, french roll.

The Cars: Pepsi-braised hamburger, Roquefort dressing, white bread.

Neil Diamond: Brandy-marinated ham, cheese spread, cherry pie filling, Texas toast.

Queen: Fried Corinthian leather, Pop Rocks, sprouts, mayo, baguette.

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Alligator sausage, ketchup, relish, seeded hot dog bun.

Cream: Curried goat ribs, marmalade, lettuce, ruby powder, spelt bread.

Beach Boys: Grilled chicken breast, mustard, lettuce, SPF-50 sunscreen aioli, crispy fried peyote bits, white bread.

The Doors: Beer-battered fried chicken, mescaline ketchup, Navajo fry bread.

Huey Lewis and the News: Butterflied hot dog, pizza sauce, Cheez-Whiz, Dutch crunch.

Hall and Oates: Tuna salad, diet coleslaw, pomade, hamburger bun.

Prince: Braised peacock cheeks, lavender spread, mustard, mayo, baguette.

Grateful Dead: Lemon verbena sorbet, peanut butter, clarified hemp butter, deep-fried brownie bites, M&Ms, stale focaccia.

Kiss: Low-sodium smoked turkey, Velveeta, braised $100 bills, sequined bun.

Meat Loaf: Turkey meatloaf, lettuce, fat-free mayo, deep-fried silk, whole wheat bread, pint of dipping gravy.

Styx: Chopped hot dog, Cheez-Whiz, butter, poppyseed bagel.

Heart: Stewed cloud ear mushrooms, jalapeño mustard, mayo, arugula, hexagonal gold-embossed cornbread.

The Police: Smoked trout, horseradish-Viagra mayo, white bread.

Rush: Seagrams-marinated grilled flank steak, carbonated pineapple-jalapeño cheese spread, maple-wasabi aioli, hand-milled laser-cut 37-grain flatbread.

U2: Olive loaf, Tasmanian honey, shade-grown arugula, free-trade coffee-balsamic reduction, wheat bread.

Nick Drake: Ptarmigan tears, nettle spread, rice bread.

David Bowie: Curried snow leopard, mayo, garlic naan.

The Kinks: Roast beef, balsamic cigarette-butt reduction, dark rye.

Squeeze: Pickled herring, Dijon mustard, Silly String, pumpernickel.

Can: Flash-fried hummingbird, sliced gruyere, shredded kelp, curry ketchup, seeded roll.

John Cage: Silence, warmth, indirect sunlight, the memory of lettuce, the idea of bread.

Velvet Underground: Salami, cheddar, shredded pre-war 1000-Deutschmark bills, oil paint, heroin gravy, French roll.

R.E.M.: Vegan chicken tenders, small-batch barbecue sauce, pickled rutabaga, dinner roll.

The Residents: Ham, cheese, playing cards, nickels, rye bread.

Bjork: Sliced narwhal, mustard, whole wheat bread.

Pixies: Hamburger, ketchup, crispy hemp leaves, Belgian waffle.

Sonic Youth: Roast beef, cheddar spread, brie, pork sausage, soy sausage, almond butter, curried prawns, barbiturate mayo, Asian coleslaw, shredded coconut, sprouted wheat bread.

Fugazi: Cold Tofurkey, radicchio, frozen capers, rice bread.

Kraftwerk: Vegan peppered ham, cucumber slices, baked microchips, sprouted wheat bread.

Aphex Twin: Stilton, Colman’s mustard, wasabi paste, adrenochrome jelly, baked Polaroids, dinner roll.

Ministry: Cheeseburger, pickles, lettuce, WD-40 aioli, cocaine-dusted bun.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Vegan brisket, raw horseradish, mascerated ghost pepper dressing, whole baguette.

Venom: Burnt goat marrow, black sand, iceberg lettuce, scarab-husk bread.

Bauhaus: Baked tofu, hemlock spread, black mustard, French roll.

The Cure: Turkey ham, mayo, Chanel No. 5, sparrow feathers, wheat bread.

Depeche Mode: Chicken breast, Swiss cheese, grilled suede, fried onions, mascara aioli, seeded baguette.

The Smiths: Vegan ham, mustard, mayo, bacon wrapped in lettuce, white bread.

Joy Division: Stilton, nightshade jelly, zucchini bread.

The Clash: Moroccan eggplant tagine, marmite, soda bread.

Sex Pistols: Deep-fried Frank Sinatra LP, Russian mustard, spackle, tacks, stale rye bread.

Ramones: Sliced hot dog, amphetamine ketchup, mustard, relish, white bread.

Misfits: Pizza sub with pepperoni, mozzarella, olives, and fried bat nuggets; Kaiser roll.

Black Flag: Smoked turkey, mustard, shredded griptape, black spraypaint, sprouts, wheat bread.

G.G. Allin: Cubed grilled hammerhead shark, KY jelly, chunky peanut butter, stale tortilla.

Bread: Bread.

McSweeneys

Beautiful

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.

I was left to tell everyone I know, we know, we knew or would possibly meet that the wedding was called off. It was my job to do this because he didn’t. It was my job to bring the bad news to everyone, to tell the story I had so little answers for, to state his irrational reasoning. 1 point for him.

I cried so much for the first few weeks that I thought I would get dehydrated from all the water loss. I cried at any moment I could get alone, and around people with whom I felt comfortable. After a while, I started to feel “comfortable” crying around anyone. Subtlety was not something I was practicing at this time. I bet he cried, too. I hope he cried. I guess we’ll put that as 0 points for both of us.

I had no appetite. I almost stopped eating all together. My mind was so wrapped up in processing the situation that eating wasn’t a priority. Therefore, I lost a lot of weight. Shit. That’s a point for me. I bet he lost weight too, but that’s not cool for guys, right? 0 for him.

He stopped loving me. 1 point him, 0 for me.

Everything I own has his memory attached to it. We were together for almost five years and were planning a wedding and a future. That off-white sweater he bought me for Christmas; that song where it says Nothing else will do, I gotta have you; the love notes he wrote me; that 89.3 radio poster he sent with me before I went abroad; his books with notes in the margins: all covered in him. I thought about getting rid of things or at least putting them away for a while, but I realized that the strongest memories were the ones in my head. There was no way to throw those out. I bet he thought of me sometimes, but without love attached to it. 1 more point for him.

He told me we should stop communicating. We wouldn’t see each other because we were living in different towns at the time anyway. There were no phone calls unless I was the one who rang. The person I shared every last detail of my life with, and who did the same with me, suddenly didn’t care anymore. I was left to write my thoughts, cry my thoughts, and be with my thoughts alone. 1 point him, 0 me.

I bought a wedding dress. 1 point him, 0 for me.

Let’s see where we’re at so far. 6 points him, 1 point me. That looks to be a little in his favor, wouldn’t you say? Looks like a loss is coming my way.

When I see other couples holding hands, when I turn on sports, when I hear his name, when I dream of his touch, when I get another invitation to a fucking wedding, I am jolted with a pain that knocks me off my feet for a bit. It’s an empty hole in my body that feels bottomless some days, and will never be filled. 0 points for me, 1 for him.

Waking up in the mornings has hurt since the day he left me. I’ve never really been a morning person, but coming out of my subconscious into reality is a painful endeavor that I start with every day. The in-and-out of consciousness experienced with sleeping-in takes its toll. I used to love sleeping-in. I’m guessing he’s sleeping pretty well, having this bombshell off his conscience. 1 point him, 0 for me.

On the other hand, I’ve gotten much closer to my mom through all of this. She is my listener, my body to cry into, my wise adviser. My relationships with my sister and brothers have grown as well. We talk more often and I feel their love everyday. My dad has been able to get angry at him when I wasn’t able to. Dad is there to protect me. My friends have been amazing; their love has shattered every wall and wrapped me with grace. I feel taller and stronger because I have and continue to make it through everyday. I am confident in what I want from life. I was vulnerable to love and conquered it with honesty, respect, and faithfulness. None of this would have happened had I not met him and fallen in love. I guess I have to award a point to everyone who was there for me. That’s 100 points for me. I don’t know about him.

It looks as though the total count is in: 7 points for him and… 101 points for me? Shit. Everyone was right. I guess it is his loss. Or is it possible that we both experienced a loss? Does that mean it’s a tie? I think what I’ve learned is that neither of us won. The loss is real and cannot (and should not) be rushed. The healing process takes time. Time is all I own.

— Megan

McSweeneys