iggy pop bbc6 2023-05-21

• Mick Harvey - "Suitcase in Berlin" - strangely sad, slow, synthy song
• Ennio Morricone - "Il Clan Dei Siciliani (Main Theme)"

Claire Cock-Starkey - "How Much Is a Smidgen?"

 https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/how-much-smidgen

 

 

The beauty of the stone as a unit of measure was that any locality could identify a rock of decent dimensions and adopt it as the local stone in weight. Since antiquity a stone had been used as a measure, although it did not need to be assigned an actual value. Instead, any good-sized stone could be used as a counterbalance to ensure that commodities could be equally split, meaning that this system could be used in societies where arithmetic had yet to develop. Across northern Europe stones were used in this way to measure dry goods, with the earliest examples dating back to the Roman Empire. (The pound of weight also originates in the Roman Empire, where it was known as libra pondo. It derived from the Latin word libra, which like the sign of the zodiac meant a balance or scale but was also used to refer to a measure—pound by weight. This Latin word is the reason why pounds are abbreviated as lbs.—a shortening of the word libra. There was little standardization, and the weight of stones could vary from country to country, region to region and even village to village, ranging from as little as 4 lbs. all the way up to 40 lbs. It was not only the location which af­fected the weight of the stone; sometimes the weight varied depending on the goods being weighed. For example, an English statute from around 1300 set a London stone at 12.5 lbs.; however, a stone for weighing lead was said to be 12 lbs., while a stone for measuring beeswax, sugar, pepper, cumin, almonds and alum was 8 lbs., and the stone for weighing glass was 5 lbs. The inconsistent and archaic use of stones continued in Britain for some time. An example of this can be seen in the system used by British butchers: the stone used for measuring the weight of livestock was generally accepted to be 14 lbs. but the resultant meat was measured with an 8 lbs. stone. It is thought that this was because butchers would return the dressed meat from an animal carcass back to the farmer stone for stone—the weight difference meant that the butcher could keep the blood, offal and hide as payment. Butchers at Smithfield Meat Market in London continued to employ the 8 lbs. stone right up until World War II.

 

Ewan Wilson - "The folklore roots of Sekiro's anus-ball snatching enemies"

 https://www.eurogamer.net/the-folklore-roots-of-sekiros-anus-ball-snatching-enemies

 

 

The kappa relate to bums in more ways than one. These yōkai are the source of many an ancient horror tale. Matt tells me they're known to "emerge from the depths to drown swimmers or passer-bys for their shirikodama (literally 'small anus ball')".

"The shirikodama is a mysterious organ said to reside in the human colon, and kappa love to extract them from unwary swimmers the hard way: by hand. Or claw." Matt tells me that in times of old kappa were often blamed for drownings.

 

Jorge Mazal - "How Duolingo reignited user growth"

 https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth

One often underappreciated risk with aggressively A/B testing emails and push notifications is that it results in users opting out of the channel; and even if you kill the test, those users remain opted out forever. Do this many times, and you’ve destroyed your channel.

Dennis Duncan - "Index, A History of the"

Amazing book about indexes and their history.

baindex.org - blog from a professional indexer

concordance; a list of all the words of a book/pamphlet and where they appear

subject index: index containing concepts and ideas (and where to find them), even when these are not literally mentioned/used in the text itself.

Two people came up with two important types of indexes roughly around the same time (11th/12th century). How that came about? From monks studying for days, people started to become more eloquent, to need to be able to read and find things themselves. Various "fraters", brothers (not monks!), e.g. Dominicans and Franciscans, preached in the common tongue. A growing demand for new, more efficient ways of reading, of using books.

Ptolemy's capital was the newly founded city of Alexandria, and it was here, around the beginning of the third century, that he built an institution in which the greatest scholars of the age would live, study and teach. It would be rather like a modern university - this is not the last time that the development of the university will prove pivotal for our story - and it would be dedicated to the muses, hence the name Mouseion, or in Latin Musaeum, which gives us our modern word museum.

Meanwhile, we may quibble over whether the Latin indices or the Anglicized indexes is the correct plural in English, but at least history has not plumped for the Greek: sillyboi.

the principle of the distinctio, of taking a topic - e.g. stone - and anatomizing it, exploding it into a variety of distinct sense, much like a dictionary entry will list the multiple meanings attached to a single word.

I am in the Bodleian Library in Oxford with a small printed book open on the desk in front of me. This is the text of a sermon, and it was printed in 1470 in Cologne a the printshop of a man named Arnold Therhoernen. The book is no larger than a paperback, and the text itself is short, just twelve leaves - twenty-four pages - long. But sitting here in the library with the book before me and opened on its first page, I think, the most intense experience that I have had of the archival sublime, that sense of disbelief that something so significant, something of such conceptual magnitude, should be here on my desk among my own workaday effects - laptop, notebook, pencil. It feels astonishing that I should be allowed to pick it up, hold it, turn its pages as though it were a novel I purchased at the train station. Why is it not under glass, sealed off, labelled and exhibited where crowds of schoolchildren might look but not touch? There's a name for this feeling: Stendhal Syndrome, after the French novelist who, on a visit to Florence, described the palpitation he experienced at being so close to the tombs of the Renaissance masters. I feel like I am on the verge of tears. [the J on the page is the first printed page number]

Most of the time, when we talk about books, about literature, we have no particular form in mind. It is not the actual book, the material object, but rather the text-in-the-abstract - words, plots, characters - that concerns us. Your copy or mine, first edition or cheap reprint, hardback, paperback or digital download, it doesn't matter: Jane still marries Mr Rochester in the end. But, reader, there is no such thing as an immaterial text. And however it is instantiated - whatever physical form it takes - we need to know that it works, that the words it delivers up to us are the right ones in the right order. What Calvino's [If On a Winter's Night a Traveller] novel does is remind us of the book itself, foregrounding its physical sequencing - something we take for granted - by removing it.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

Third in Park Chan-Wook's triplet about vengeance.

Girl forced to take the blame for a kidnap starts executing her revenge plan; first by pretending to be a saint in prison, then taking out people one by one, ending in her giving all parents of the children he abducted, a chance to maime/murder him.

Same actors as Oldboy

Oldboy

too long ago I saw this, was good to rewatch.

Second in the vengeance trilogy by Park Chan-Wook.

Man gets freed after being jailed for 15 years by a stranger; he has 5 days to find him. Stranger turns out to be an old class-mate. Protagonist spread a rumour that he got his sister pregnant, and she killed herself. Through hypnotism, the man falls in love with a girl who helps him, but who turns out to be his daughter. The monster will never get salvation.

Also, great score.