Big Head Todd and the Monsters

Celtic musicians and a history of recorded Celtic music from an Italian doctor

Richard Thompson (Henry The Human Fly)

...Speaking in tongues without any rhyme
Ragged outcasts on the wastelands of time
Easy rider coming down the road, easy rider overload

Looking for sometime, somewhere, some place
Sometime, somewhere, some space
Sometime, somewhere, some grace,
But nowhere is their freedom...

Winwood/Capaldi 1994

the hereford Mappa Mundi
c. 1300, with Jerusalem at its center

Andrea McLean, in her capacity as artist-in-residence, created a series of paintings in Gloucester Cathedral which were later exhibited as The Flower of All Cities.

more Mappae Mundi here and here

hard to grasp for a lot of other fundamentalists, but Jerusalem is sacred in Islam, also

Update March18:
Jacquie McShee's Pentangle has a new CD, Passe Avant, the cover of which utilizes a detail from the Hereford Mappa Mundi.
Jacquie McShee's voice carries a dream of human grace, holds it and carries it on, ad astra per aspera.

Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration (excerpts)

Matisse, drawing.

Photo by Robert Capa, at photo-eye.

Ruskin's Triangle

Teukgyeong, ca. 1981

The teukgyeong (single stone chime) is a Confucian religious court instrument related to the p'yon-gyong(stone chimes), a set of 16 L-shaped slabs of jade stone. The counterpart of the bell chimes, it has played an essential role in court ceremonies since the 12th century. The stone slabs are the same size and shape but vary in thickness so that each has a different pitch. The thickest produces the highest pitch while the thinnest one, the lowest.

more here and here and here and here, and, in addition, here

Ray Troll's EvolvoVision

{Harper's Weekly Review says, "Sixty-eight percent of Americans believe in the devil, but only 48 percent believe that God created the universe; 28 percent believe in evolution." What those numbers mean is most Americans are nuts. What they taught us, what most of us still believe deep down, is that simply showing someone they're nuts should do it, should incapacitate them. But what I'm trying real hard to get across to those innocents is, no. Craziness has just as much survival value as sanity, in the appropriate conditions. Are these the appropriate conditions?
How about forging a kind of meta-sanity that transcends unimaginative horseshit? Can we do that? Please? Can we hurry? ta-da! Enter Mr. Troll.}

recent addition to the
TREE OF LIFE
web project:

Paris 1607

Marilyn Manson in a hat that *belongs* to someone else.
M. Manson has some trenchant comments on things.

Paolo Mietto of Padua University and his colleagues examined three tracks of footprints on the Roccamonfina volcano in southern Italy, known to locals as 'devils' trails'.
"Because they occur in volcanic rock, they have always been considered supernatural," says Mietto.

our Homo ancestors

Meton's approximation is off by just 2 hours 4.4 minutes! And it's bettered only by comparing 4,131 months to 334 years. Now consider the successive fractions (number of months divided by the corresponding number of years): 12/1, 25/2, 37/3, 99/8, 136/11, 235/19, 4,131/334. Those fractions, in turn, can be written in the following manner:



Such expressions are known as continued fractions. They can be used in designing gear trains, including those that might be found in a planetarium to simulate the relative motion of the sun and moon around Earth.

The so-called Antikythera mechanism, apparently constructed in the first century B.C., recovered in 1900 from a Mediterranean shipwreck, and analyzed just a few decades ago, is one of the most striking examples of such engineering in the ancient world. It contained a system of gears whose gear ratios corresponded to well-known astronomical cycles involving the moon, including the Metonic cycle. The mechanism was clearly a type of analog computer, using fixed gear ratios to make calculations displayed as pointer readings on a dial.

The Antikythera mechanism -- the sole survivor of what was undoubtedly a long tradition of astronomical automata -- served primarily as an elegant simulation of the heavens. It was a tabletop monument to Greek and Alexandrian astronomy. Such ingenious devices also illuminated the intimate link between mathematics and astronomy, especially the role of number in astronomical prediction.

link to Ivars Peterson's Math Trek at Science News Online furnished by the astonishing mimi smartypants who also shares with the world the 'anal' game, wherein cars on the road have their given names prefixed with 'anal'. Anal Cruiser, Anal Explorer, Anal Excursion, Anal Fiesta...

Sinus Persi

Babylon Yards

Modern Cities

The Marsh Arabs

{what is, possibly, the worst crime of Saddam, is, aside from its propaganda value, meaningless to most of the thugs involved in the current attack-program, because it's something they themselves would have done.}


The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger

A Reed Shaken By The Wind by Gavin Maxwell

Guardian UK news story,May 19, 2001

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek online

One Hundred Highlights of
including
The Book of Hours of Philip The Good

Penthesileia

Zeeatlas (Frankrijk, 1538)

Matisse spent the summer of 1905 in a French fishing village at the foot of the eastern Pyrenees (Collioure).
There he was introduced to Gauguin's friend Daniel de Monfreid. Gauguin had died in 1903 and his Tahitian
canvases, still unknown, were stored in Monfreid's house. Matisse was able to spend much time viewing
them. That summer, working closely with Andre Derain, he "broke the link between the painter's colors and
nature..."

Aesthetic Norms of the Twentieth Century in Words and Pictures

from a search for Jan Toorop

{I went looking for a Rimbaud translation for a new friend, and found this, translated and posted by Holly Tannen, who may well get auto da fe'd because of this link, which statement either measures my megalomaniacal puffed-uppedness, or the insane swamp-creatures my life is surrounded by now. I remember her from years ago and the dulcimers, the three string viol, the Golden Toad, Bob Thomas, Wil Scarlet, Lance Sterling, and a whole bunch of really cool people who were older than me a little and at least a little smarter not to mention a whole lot more educated about Important Things. it's nice to see her irreverent self presented here.}

Holly Tannen Mistress of Folklore

http://www.artmagick.com/images/p99999/redon/redon21.jpg