A slide show from yesterday’s trip to Logee’s greenhouses – a great bit of greenery in a season of ice, sand and salt.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Three from English Russia
English Russia is one of those blogs I check once in a blue moon, then kick myself for not subscribing to their RSS feed. As Bullwinkle says, “This time, fur sure!” Three wicked pisser posts, among many.
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These days is a great day for the dwellers of Northern regions of Russia. The polar night lasting many days before when the Sun didn’t come above the horizon and the land was covered with the darkness ends. People come from all the regions to celebrate.
The main fun during celebration is the deer race. People bring their best deers and race, race, race. The looser deers are being eaten then, like, they did not satisfy the expectations, giving the big meals to everyone.
No mention of amanita, but a boy can hope…
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A French explorer Guillaume Herbaut has found a group of amazons hiding in the woods of Ukraine. They live together, dress like locals, study martial arts and their idol is Ukrainian lady minister Julia Timoshenko.
No mention of White Tights, but a boy can hope…
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Photoshop awesomeness.
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The future – here, but not widely distributed
Three quick forward-looking links.
Crooked Timber is doing a Charlie Stross book event.
A New Year, a new Crooked Timber book event. But instead of one book, we’re covering a dozen or so, all written by Charlie Stross, exploring different forms of the SF genre from postcyberpunk to alternate history and beyond. For this we need an all star cast, and, in addition to several CT regulars (Henry, both Johns and Maria), we have contributions from Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong and Ken MacLeod. Between us, we’ve managed to cover nearly everything. Glaring exceptions include the Laundry series, which every fan of Len Deighton and HP Lovecraft should read, and Glasshouse. I’ve added an open thread at the end of the seminar, for those who want to discuss what we missed.
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Geoff Manaugh is getting close on the BLDGBLOG book. Close enough, in fact, that he’s posted some Wordle word clouds – looks like it’s going to be an interesting read.
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At City of Sound, The Personal Well-Tempered Environment.
SUMMARY
- A real-time dashboard for buildings, neighbourhoods, and the city, focused on conveying the energy flow in and out of spaces, centred around the behaviour of individuals and groups within buildings.
- A form of ‘BIM 2.0’ that gives users of buildings both the real-time and longitudinal information they need to change their behaviour and thus use buildings, and energy, more effectively. An ongoing post-occupancy evaluation for the building, the neighbourhood and the city.
- A software service layer for connecting things together within and across buildings.
- As information increasingly becomes thought of a material within building, it makes sense to consider it holistically as part of the built fabric, as glass, steel, ETFE etc.
Wordly Wise
merkin – a pubic wig (usually for women).
The Oxford Companion To The Body traces the merkin back to 1450, a time when the bidet was a distant prospect and personal hygiene fell well short of the mark. Pubic lice were common – so some women, fed up with the constant itching, just shaved the lot off and then covered their modesty with a merkin.
Prostitutes, too, were frequent wearers. In the days before penicillin, it didn’t take long to become infected with sexually transmitted diseases. They knew it was no work, no pay, and didn’t want to scare the customers off with their syphilitic pustules and gonorrhoeal warts. So the merkin was used as a prosthesis to cover up a litany of horrors.
The Oxford Companion recounts an amusing tale of one gentleman who procured the disease-riddled merkin of a prostitute, dried it, gave it a good comb and then presented it to a cardinal, telling him he had brought him St Peter’s beard. *
Today’s Wordly Wise is inspired by a bit of Twitter fun. Yesterday @boasas re-tweeted a message from @Beard_of_Cloud – folks who follow @boasas figured out instantly what was going on. @boasas is Steven Cloud, author of Boy on a Stick and Slither; @Beard_of_Cloud is his beard’s Twitter stream (or micro-blog , if you prefer). I loved the idea – thus @Beard_of_Doc_H was created. While basking in Cloud’s reflected glory, I was saddened to think of the 51% of the population who are shut out of the fun. “Not so fast”, thinks I, “there are some possibilities…”
One definition of beard works logically, but not practically. @Beard_of_Tina_Vitale is another person – Danny Rose. On we go to another sense of beard – from there it’s an instant connect to a favorite old word.
Two famous merkins:
Del’s Merkin – a Permit and Bonefish fly, meant to imitate a crab, tied with Aunt Lydia’s Rug Yarn.
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Merkin Muffley, last President of the US
“My fellow merkins…”