What I learned from the Hugo book

Damn it, I loved the Hugo flick. I want to go see it again after reading the book, probably by myself so I'll feel free enough to sit and cry because, damn it, Georges Melies deserves recognition, man and I'm so glad he's getting it plus that damn automaton storylne, watching Melies destroy his film props and the little orphan kid just slay me.

So, a few random things I learned from Selznick's companion book:

• Martin Scorsese actually remembers the first movie he ever saw, David O. Selznick produced Duel in the Sun. This caused me to think hard on the first movie I saw and....I have no idea. The first one I remember seeing in the theatre was a Bruce Lee flick. I'm pretty sure I made it about 20 minutes before being bored stiff and demanding to leave. In my defense, I was 4 so this was pretty much the inevitable outcome.
• Speaking of Selznick, yes, he is related to the author.
• To create the dust in the train station, the cinematographer Robert Richardson used shredded goose down and blew it around with fans.
• Melies did really own several automatons. They were popular with magicians (which Melies was) around the turn of the century. Just like in the movie, he donated them to a museum where they were stored in the attic and destroyed by water damage which is too painful to contemplate very much.
• Melies' family owned a shoe factory which he sold to buy a theatre from another magician named Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin. Yes, the name isn't a coincidence. The Hungarian magician Ehrich Weiss was inspired after seeing him to change his name to Houdini.
• Houdin owned an automaton named Antonio Diavolo that performed a trapeze act. I'm not sure if the original version still exists. Here is a reproduction:

•  In 1739, the inventor Jacques de Vaucanson invented an automaton duck that could flap its wings, eat and apparently shit. Which probably would have been cool to see until you realized there is quite enough bird shit in the world already, particularly if you work in an office park with a pond.
• Around 1800, the Swiss mechanic Henri Maillardet created some automatons that wrote and drew pictures, just like in the film. You can see video of one of his automatons here.

Jean Clottes' Cave Art

I checked this book out from the library on a recommendation from the Slate Spoiler Specials podcast on Herzog's documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (which is as amazing and overpowering as the critics say, see it in 3D.) I wanted to write down just a few of the things I learned from the book.

Jean Clottes has written several books on caving, including some on Chauvet Cave (the subject of the Herzog film.) He is a world expert on paleolithic cave art and has a small appearance in the movie-alas, he's not the guy in the animal pelt playing the Star Spangled Banner on a bone flute. That guy ruled.

Here is a picture of Jean Clottes in Chauvet:

Paleolithic cultures are named for the French sites where they were first discovered. 95% of documented cave art is in France and Spain.

Cave art is a characteristic of the Upper Paleolithic (45,000-10,000 BC) and may be divided up as follows:

• Aurignacian culture (Wikipedia has different dates than Clottes. I'm just going to use his): 35,000+-28,000 years ago. This is the age of Chauvet (Ardeche, France.) Named after the Aurignac site.
• Gravettian culture: 28,000-22,000 years ago. The "Venus" portable figures become popular during this era. Clottes also says that "Venus" isn't really the correct name. Named after La Gravette in Dordogne.
• Solutrean culture: 22,000-17,000 years ago. This is the age of Lascaux (Dordogne, France.) Named for the Solutre site in Saone-et-Loire. Solutrean art appears to mostly in France and Spain.
• Magdalenian culture: 17,000-11,000 years ago. Named after the La Madeleine in Dordogne. This is the age of Niaux (Ariege, France.)

To improve adhesion to the walls, the pigment was sometimes mixed with stone powder called extender.

Aurignacians and all of their successors are homo sapiens sapiens.

What I looked up thus far for The Coroner's Lunch

The book takes place in October of 1976. This means the Pathet Lao takeover is about a year in. Although considered the equivalent of the Viet Minh or Khmer Rouge, they never seemed to be as bad or, at least, they never made the news if they were. They certainly were bad news for the Hmong, who had collaborated with us. The numbers aren't clear but thousands fled the country following Communist takeover by crossing the Mekong into Thailand-the town on the Thai side by the way is Sri Chaing Mai which is evidently the spring roll capital. There are refugees scattered all over-in the States, in Australia, in Thailand (where they've been having troubles recently.) There have been efforts to both improve US-Laos relations and repatriate the Hmong but the results are mixed. According to Wikipedia, the Hmong were called Montagnards by the French because they lived in highland areas but they shouldn't be confused the the Vietnamese Degar, who were also called Montagnards.

Pathet Lao just means "Lao Country."

The Laotian Civil War lasted from 1953-1975. This means it pretty much had been going on ever since the French officially withdrew after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The battle was actually very close to the Laos border:

After 1953, the history gets too complicated to summarize well but there's more here. There were various coups and corruption caused by an influx of US aid. We of course were freaked out by the creeping Communist umbrella. According to the article. Laos is the most bombed nation in the history of war.

The article says the LPRP (Lao People's Revolutionary Party) is still in control but they have been enacting economic reforms since 1986. They are a poor country with lots of debt. The Lonely Planet once again assures me this is an great, cheap and low crime place to travel.

Comrade Kahm tells Siri that he knows the cause of his wife's sudden death: her addiction to lahp, a raw meat dish. Apparently, it can also be served cooked. Which is good news for Laotians. Lahp seems to just mean "minced." You can even have tofu lahp. Here's the recipe.

She actually died from cyanide poisoning, the almond smell being the standard dead giveaway. I'd read various mystery novels for years where someone sniffed the cadaver's breath for an almond smell but it was only recently that I learned why that smell was connected to cyanide.

The almonds we eat are Prunus dulcis, the ones that produce cyanide in significant quantities are Prunus amara. Turning the original poisonous version into the key ingredient for Almond Joy is the result of a simple human-induced genetic mutation. Plants produce cyanide as a defense mechanism. Some other common foods that contain cyanide (reduced to safe amounts such as selective breeding) are lima beans, soy, spinach and cassava. There are people in Africa whose diets, principally due to war and famine, consist mainly of cassava who suffer from a low-grade form of cyanide poisoning called konzo. 

In passing, Siri mentions the Anusawari Arch. I wanted to go into a little more detail because it's quite striking and because the back story is funny.

First here it is:

It looks old but it was built between 1957-1968 and is a monument to those who died in the battle for independence from France. It's also known as Patuxai or "Victory Gate." Evidently, it was built with American money and cement that was intended for an airstrip. Oops. Well, at least it's pretty. It is sometimes known as "the vertical runway" for that reason.

It's mentioned a few times about people being sent to Vieng Xai (or Viengsai) for re-education. This was the stronghold of the Pathet Lao during the insurgency and where the took shelter in the cave system during the US bombing. It's supposed to be a very lovely place. Here and here is some more information about traveling there.

From the Iron Age to a clock that eats time

Some various stuff I learned from podcasts this week--

On the BBC's "In Our Time", Melvyn and guests discussed the beginning of the Iron Age in Europe and what it meant. It's difficult to pin these types of dates down (this is especially true for the Bronze Age) as they aren't homogenous even within Europe. It began between ~1200 and 1000 BC in Europe (around a century earlier in the Near East.) It followed a period called the Bronze Age Collapse, which was caused by the collapse of some Near Eastern kingdoms like the Hittites and the disruption of Egyptian rule in places like Syria. The importance of trade routes from the making of bronze was that a big source of tin was Afghanistan although it also came from sources closer to home, like the Czech Republic. The trade routes were already in place from such other precious goods as jade. Jadeite hand axes have been found all the way to Scotland. Here is a longer story about why the switch from bronze to iron made sense. Other than the problem of tin supply, bronze is hard to work with. And here is an article on why dates are hard to pin down and sometimes the Iron Age is broken into First and Second.

Guardian Science Weekly had a story about a new clock on display at the British Museum called the Chronophage, or Time-Eater as you can tell from the etymology. It was created by a British engineer and inventor named John Taylor who had previously designed heat elements in electric tea kettles (apparently ~75% of such kettles in England contain his handiwork.)  He was inspired by the work of 18th century British clockmaker John Harrison who was bedeviled by how to make a clock without gears that needed oiling. The oils available at the time were limited and costly and/or inappropriate. Goose grease, for instance, freezes rock solid when it gets cold.

Taylor's clock was inspired by the escapement (the source of the ticking sound) in an old clock of Harrison's. Taylor meant it both as an homage to Harrison and to remind people that their time is ticking away. Here is a video of the sister clock at Corpus Library, Cambridge. Here is what just the escapement looks like:

You can clearly hear it plugging away in the video although the grasshopper on this one (this is the Science Museum version) looks a little less scary. And also looks more like a fly.

Finally, I listened to an episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge called "Nature Stories" and the whole episode was good. A scientist called David Rothenberg recorded himself playing the clarinet in a duet with some humpback whales who responded to the music. They can respond to new sounds much more agilely than birds. I also didn't know that only male whales sing, although it's no longer clear that it's for mating purposes as was first thought.

Next was an artist called Jennifer Angus who collects insects to use in her artwork, large scale mural-like installations. Some people are disgusted, some are disgusted and intrigued and at least one said it was wrong of her to cause the insects to die for her art. She says she sees them as ambassadors for their species. One thing the audio program couldn't do was show me what her art looked like so here's a link to the Google image search and an example:

Nature writer Anne Fadiman talked about how she and her brother enjoyed collecting and killing butterflies as children. She said it didn't dawn on her immediately she was killing them (or rather, the implications of killing them) but she said they were horrified when it dawned on them. She said it must be what hunters feel like, to own a piece of nature.

Finally, Christopher Benfrey, an English professor, wrote a book about how New England went hummingbird crazy in the 19th century. This includes writers from Emily Dickinson to Mark Twain. There was also a painter named Martin Johnson Heade (pronounced "heed") who painted them. They said his paintings were really color saturated, almost impressionistic. I was curious:

 Wow! You can see this in person at the National Gallery in Washington.

He says that Emily Dickinson often mentioned hummingbirds in her letters and how reading was akin to their actions except the reader "sips words." The interviewer asked if that wasn't appropriate since her poetry had a hummingbird-like quality.

Timeline for The Gods Will Have Blood

Here is a timeline of the French Revolution to aide in enjoyment of Anatole France's The Gods Will Have Blood. Mainly taken from Wikipedia.


·         1774: Louis XVI’s coronation
·         1789: Robespierre is elected to the Estates-General at the age of 30 and moves to Versailles.
·         July 14, 1789: Bastille Day
·         August 26, 1789: National Constituent Assembly publishes Declaration of the Rights of Man (proposed by Lafayette)
·         October 5-6, 1789: Women’s March/October Revolution. The Royal Family is forced out of Versailles by an angry mob. They move to the Tuileries, escorted by Lafayette.
·         July 12, 1790: The Civil Constitution of the Clergy makes all clergy employees of the state. By November, all clergy must swear an oath of loyalty to this. The Pope does not like it.
·         July 17, 1791: Champ de Mars Massacre. A crowd gathers to protest the National Assembly’s decision to create a constitutional monarchy. Between 12 and 50 people are killed by royalist troops under command of Lafayette.
·         August 27, 1791: Declaration of Pillnitz. The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and Frederick William II of Prussia call on European powers to intervene if Louis XVI’s life is endangered.
·         September 13-14, 1791: Louis XVI formally accepts constitution
·         September 30, 1791: Dissolution of National Constituent Assembly
·         October 1, 1791: Legislative Assembly meets for the first time with many young and inexperienced members.
·         March, 1792: Guillotine adopted as means of execution
·         April 20, 1792: France declares war on Austria.
·         April 25, 1792: First use of guillotine.
·         April 28, 1792: France invades Belgium (Austrian Netherlands)
·         July 30, 1792: Austria and Prussia begin invasion of France.
·         August 10, 1792: Paris Commune uprising. Royal family arrested. End of the Bourbon monarchy in France until the 1814 restoration.
·         August 19, 1792: Lafayette flees France, surrenders to Austria
·         August 22, 1792: royalist riots in Brittany, La Vendée and Dauphiné.
·         September, 1792: half of the Paris prison population is massacred. Many are clergy. Marie Antoinette’s close friend the Princess de Lamballe is torn apart by an angry mob.
·         September 22, 1792: first day of the Revolutionary Calendar (Napoleon will officially abolish in 1806)
·         1793: The first Bourbon king, Henry IV’s, tomb is ransacked and his corpse is decapitated (it was reinterred with his body this year.)
·         January 21, 1793: execution of Louis XVI
·         March 11, 1793: establishment of Revolutionary Tribunal, the court that try political offenders during the Reign of Terror.
·         April 6, 1793: Committee of Public Safety established. This will be France’s de facto government during the Reign of Terror
·         June 10, 1793: Jacobins gain control of the Committee of Public Safety
·         July 13, 1793: Marat assassinated
·         July 17, 1793: Charlotte Corday executed
·         July 27, 1793: Robespierre, a Jacobin, is elected to Committee of Public Safety
·         September 5, 1793: Reign of Terror begins
·         October 16, 1793: Marie Antoinette executed
·         October 21, 1793: a law is passed that allows execution of priests and their supporters on sight
·         October 31, 1793: 21 former Girondist leaders executed
·         March 24, 1794: Jacques Hebert, the editor of the radical left newspaper La Pere Duchesne, is executed for criticizing Robespierre for being too moderate
·         April  5, 1794: Georges Danton executed
·         May 7, 1794: Robespierre launches his new religion, The Cult of the Supreme Being
·         May 8, 1794: Antoine Lavoisier executed
·         July 27-28, 1794: The Thermidorian Reaction. Robespierre is arrested and guillotined without trial, along with other members of the Committee of Public Safety. Ironically, the end of the committee makes the public more safe. The Reign of Terror officially ends.
·         1799: Napoleon becomes First Consul of France
·         May 18, 1804: Napoleon crowned Emperor of France
·         April 6, 1814: Bourbon Restoration of Louis XVIII (Louis XVI’s younger brother)
·         March 20, 1815: Beginning of Napoleon’s 100 Days; Louis XVIII flees France
·         June, 1815: following defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon surrenders and is exiled from France for the second time to St. Helena where he will die in 1821. Louis XVIII returns to the throne.

Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola style

I watched Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette flick this week. I liked it, for the record. The problem as with most historical flicks is that I didn't know who many of the cast actually were. I was also curious what happened to many of them. The film concluded with the October Revolution in October, 1789 as the royal family fled Versailles for the Tuileries. It's a good place to end it. I did not need to see Kirsten Dunst beheaded.



So--

--Ambassador Mercy (Steve Coogan)  was an Austrian minister and a powerful court advisor. He became Governor of the Austrian Netherlands in 1792. He was appointed Ambassador to England in 1794 but died shortly after arriving there.
--Madame DuBarry (Asia Argento), Louis XV's mistress, was beheaded in 1792. I'm going to be typing that a lot. Her last words, "Encore un moment" have become famous in existential circles.
--Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis) was a court flunky whom Marie Antoinette nicknamed Madame Etiquette for her obsession with it. She and her husband were beheaded in 1794.
--Princess de Lamballe (Mary Nighy) was married to some rich French guy briefly and then became Marie Antoinette's confidante at court. She was moved to La Force prison for her safety when the revolution broke out as the people hated her for being a close friend of the queen. She was convicted in a revolutionary tribunal in 1792 and then was apparently torn apart by an angry mob.
--Aunt Victoire (Molly Shannon) was Louis XV's sister. I spent the whole movie wondering who this bitch was. She did survive the revolution with her sister, Adelaide, and became something of a fugitive in Italy, terrified that assassins of the Revolution would find them. She died of breast cancer in 1799. Also, the king's sisters were apparently such bitches that Marie Antoinette made her daughter play with poorer children so she wouldn't grow up to be that way herself. Also a bitter irony, she may have been the true source of the "Let them eat cake" line.
--Marie Therese, Marie Antoinette's daughter, survived the terror and was extradited to Austria in 1795. Her story is too long to recount but she never seemed to recover from the Revolution. She lived in exile in Britain, returned briefly during the Bourbon Restoration in 1815. Lots of political gerrymandering follows during which she was briefly the Queen of France, her family leaves France for the last time in 1830, living first in Edinburgh and then Prague. She died childless in Vienna of pneumonia in 1851.
--Count Fersen (Jamie Dornan) was a Swedish count who was indeed suspected of having an affair with Marie Antoinette like in the movie. He survived his part in the Revolution but was himself killed in a monarchic revolution in Sweden in 1810 where he was trampled to death.
--Louis Joseph, the Dauphin, died, apparently of tuberculosis, in 1789.
--Louis Charles became the Dauphin automatically when his brother died. He too died officially of tuberculosis in 1795 while imprisoned. The cause of death is controversial. There were also rumors he had escaped and various "real" Louis' popped up over the intervening years, causing lots of grief for Marie Therese.

Is this the most depressing blog post ever? Everyone dies horribly and/or alone-except for those that are dismantled by angry mobs of course. No wonder existentialists look to this moment in history for inspiration. Gloomy motherfuckers.

I didn't mention them but of course poor Louis XVI was executed in 1793, followed by Marie in October of the same year just a few weeks from her 38th birthday. Her sister-in-law Elizabeth was executed in 1794.

More from The Last Kingdom

It's like porn for history nerds and Anglophiles.

The subject today is the town of Gyruum, now called Jarrow on the northeast coast of Britain. The first monastery was founded there in 674, per the Cornwell reader blog. The Venerable Bede wrote his history of the English Church there, finishing around 731.

The blog mentions the monastery was destroyed by the Vikings around 860 which doesn't totally jive with the books dates (It's off by around 8 or 10 years?) But why quibble? It would take some doing to dig into the minutiae of this event and Cornwell clearly has done a lot of research. At any rate, Ragnar and company return from conquering East Anglia (leaving Alfred's Wessex the only sovereign English kingdom left) to quell some civil unrest in York, their home turf. Take it away, Bernard:

It seemed six Danes, all of them masterless men, had gone to Gyruum and demanded to see the monastery's treasury and, when the monks claimed to be penniless, the six had started killing, but the monks and fought back and, as there were over a score of monks, and as they were helped by some men from the town, they succeeded in killing the six Danes who had been spitted on posts and left to rot on the foreshore. Thus far, as Ragnar admitted, the fault lay with the Danes, but the monks, encouraged by this slaughter, had marched west up the river Tine, and attacked a Danish settlement...

And there, people were tortured and killed in what the monks had decided was now a holy war. Women were raped by monks while nuns cheered them on. Ok, the Danes are doing the same shit themselves but I love this cheeky history for pointing out the Church proper was often (or never) any better than their opponents. As retribution, Ragnar finds out where the biggest monasteries and convents in the area are and his men burn them to the ground and rape and pillage, etc. Which all leads to this funny coda from Uhtred:

The tale is still told as evidence of Danish ferocity and untrustworthiness, indeed every English child is told the story of the nuns who cut their faces to the bone so that they would be too ugly to rape...I remember one Easter listening to a sermon about the nuns, and it was all I could do not to interrupt and say that it had not happened as the priest described. The priest claimed that the Danes had promised no monk or nun would ever be hurt in Northumbria, and that was not true, and he claimed that where was no cause for the massacres, which was equally false, and then he told a marvelous tale how the nuns had prayed and God had placed an invisible curtain at the nunnery gate, and the Danes had pushed against the curtain and could not pierce it, and I was wondering why, if the nuns had this invisible shield, they had bothered to scar themselves, but they must have known how the story would end, because the Danes were supposed to have fetched a score of small children from the nearby village and threatened to cut their throats unless the curtain was lifted, which it was.

None of that happened. We arrived, they screamed, the young ones were raped, and then they died...Still priests have never been great men for the truth and I kept quiet, which was just as well.

(disclaimer: Needless to say, I do not endorse rape, murder and pillaging in general and certainly not against monks and nuns.)


One of the recurring themes in the book is the Danes' befuddlement at Christianity. There is another great scene where Edmund of East Anglia surrenders to the Danes but demands they be baptized and become Christian as a condition of his surrender which the translator conflated with "washing" which confused the Danish side. Ivar finally understands with Uhtred's help and having asked earlier about a picture of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian says he will agree to become Christian if Edmund, too, can live after being pierced by arrows. Ivar isn't even being cruel here, he genuinely wants to know. And it's logical, really. If the English god can protect you from arrows, it's worth switching sides or adding him to your pantheon at least. Edmund, the poor schmuck, agrees when he realizes he's talked himself into a corner and Ivar and his men shoot him with arrows. The results were predictable. As to the fate of the real Edmund, it's not clear. Also predictable, he's considered a martyr too.

It's a famous subject in Renaissance art, the Sebastian story. Like many a tale of Catholic miracles, it's rather anti-climactic since he after the arrows didn't work, the Romans allegedly clubbed him to death.

Here is Sebastian, in happier times:

As always, the loincloth is holding on just enough to spare us pubes.

What I've looked up thus far for The Last Kingdom

Bernard Cornwell is insanely prolific. He is British and worked for several years for the BBC before meeting an American woman and moving here. He started writing when he couldn't obtain a Green Card. The Last Kingdom is the first book in his Saxon series. There are 5, I'm not certain if there will be more. He's also written about the Napoleonic Wars (his Sharpe series which has over 20 books and was a BBC series with Sean Bean), the Arturian legend and the 100 Years War.

So, The Last Kingdom is narrated by a boy from Northumbria (now Northern England and South-East Scotland) named Uhtred. His father and older brother get killed in a skirmish with the invading Danish Vikings at Eoferwic (York) and Uhtred becomes a Viking prisoner of sorts, although he's really more of a foster son for one of their leaders. His continuing observations on how Christianity makes the English weak are amusing. I hope the story doesn't turn on some boring Churchy epiphany that makes him turn in his Thor charm.

Cornwell does a good job of making the history immediate and accessible. What most impressed me is that he makes the battle scenes understandable. To me this is traditionally where a narrative gets hopelessly jumbled. And bonus, there is a map.

{Side note, I heard a BBC World Book club podcast the other day with the Indian author Kiran Desai. One reader said it's people's responsibility to look up relevant maps and other research, not the author's while a woman in her book club disagreed. Since Desai says even people who have read her book The Inheritance of Loss think it's about India's border dispute with Pakistan (it's Nepal) and coupled with how shitty most Americans' grasp of geography is, it's a no brainer to me more books should have them. And yes it's ridonkulous people can have read the book and still not be able to keep that shit straight.}

Uhtred's family home, Castle Bamburgh, is now Bamberg and the county seat of Northumberland today. The Castle still exists and is a tourist site. Schedule your wedding there today. Nothing like the site of several ancient bloody sieges for the exchange of vows. Pass the ladyfingers.

The story is a retelling of the exploits of Alfred the Great of Wessex, as seen through Uhtred's eyes. The story opens in 866 AD. Alfred ruled from 871-899. He is of course the Anglo-Saxon king who turned the tide on the Danish invasion of Britain. Wessex, in South-West England, is considered to have lead the unification of Anglo-Saxon England after Alfred's death. It's also where Thomas Hardy was from.

I wonder, if Alfred had failed and Christianity had faded into the dustbins of theology (can't decide if that would be good or bad) and Odin worship were instead the norm would Marvel be putting out The Mighty Jesus comic books these days? I can't imagine they'd be that interesting without Mjölnir.

My understanding is that Alfred is considered a Catholic saint in some quarters but not officially. Nevertheless, Catholic Encylopedia has an article about him.  In addition to beating back the Vikings, he also translated Boethius and Bede (among others) into Anglo-Saxon. There's more info about him here on the official British Monarchy site. Of course.

I'm really digging learning the old Anglo-Saxon names for towns in England. My favorite thus far is Snotengaham which you might conclude by looking at long enough is Nottingham. And look at what I found--a whole blog dedicated to deeper understanding of Cornwell's novels. Apparently Boots (available at select Bath and Body stores) is headquartered there.

Philomathia: Gojira's roots

Ok, so maybe talking about Godzilla is not in good taste these days however NPR ran a story recently about how days after the Fukushima incident began in Japan, he became a trending topic on Wikipedia. That's....just odd.

One thing that really caught my attention during the story was a real event inspired the movie. Namely, the Castle Bravo test on Bikini Atoll in 1954. It's just impossible to imagine anyone thinking it would be acceptable to detonate a nuclear weapon-much less a hydrogen bomb-above ground although both the US and the Russians obviously have long histories of that. The yield was 15 megatons which was over double what they anticipated. In the process, they irradiated a Japanese fishing boat and their entire cargo of fish. At least one sailor died as a direct result. Even worse, after the US tried to cover it up, they later admitted around 100 additional fishing boats had been exposed and some of the Marshall Islands had to be evacuated. This story has some Chernobyl-esque touches to it, no? Fucking assholery. I don't even know who to blame so I've decided to hate on the late Edward Teller (the man Carl Sagan blamed for the hydrogen bomb and a whole lot of bullshit that followed.)

Curious about the crater? Naturally, someone has mapped it. 

I'm tempted to end on a positive note and mention my favorite Godzilla movie. I wonder if that's in bad taste.

Well, fine. It's Godzilla Versus Ghidrah, the Three-headed Monster From Space-which I am a proud owner of thanks to the Friends of the Library discard sale. My second favorite is that Arrested Development episode.

What I've learned from Nothing to Envy thus far

First of all, Barbara Demick can write her ass off. Which is good because otherwise this book would be too bleak to finish (the one chapter about the famine-Wandering Swallows-oh my God I wish I hadn't read page 164.) It's interesting to compare between her and Sonia Shah, who wrote the book I just finished, The Fever, about malaria. Both well researched and interesting topics. Demick is clearly the better writer though and elevates the material literary fiction levels. It's interesting to complement non-fiction by saying it reads like fiction but I've noticed I'm not the only one who makes that comparison. That's why Capote invented the genre of literary non-fiction after all.

The book was written in 2010 but mainly deals with the famine of the 90's. All of the main characters, who all defected to South Korea, are from Chongjin. Demick picked it first to focus on one part of the country in detail. And also because Pyongyang is a city reserved for party faithful and showcase North Koreans (one character says her neighbors were kicked out of the capital because their son has dwarfism.) Pyongyang is also likely to be the only city in the DPRK that Westerners have seen, and few at that-excepting some border towns where South Koreans are allowed in more peaceful times to flow in and out of a bit easier. Hyundai plays an interesting role in that, btw.

Journalists are highly respected because they are the party mouthpieces. This also puts them in the unique position of actually seeing some of the unexpurgated news from the outside, which they can't of course report. But they have to filter it to report only the bad stories from the rest of the world. Doctors are respected but, at the time of the novel at least, not that well paid and expected to gather their own medicinal herbs in the springtime. As in, they take a month or more off to harvest herbs from the countryside. As the economic crisis turned into an energy crisis and the lights went off in the whole country, the factories weren't able to produce drugs and these herbs became more important.


When Kim Il-Song died in July, 1994, the famine was already starting. People stood in mourning lines sometimes two or three times in a row to get the rice cakes they were handing out. There are videos on YouTube of the hysteria. Some of it was genuine and some of it was just due to the psychological nature of hysteria being contagious. But it was also apparent that the inminban (the neighborhood Party spies) were watching to make sure people were mourning sufficiently. The people Demick interviewed described how it became a contest to see who could look the most grief-stricken. One defector who was a kindergarten teacher said she thought one of her students was approaching hysteria and then realized she was spitting on her hands and wiping her face because her mother had told her she was a bad person if she didn't cry.





North Korea is fucked up, yo. When is someone going to pull a Romanov style assassination on that family?

They also reconfigured the calendars a few years after Kim-Il Song's death. Now they use some jive shit called the Juche Calendar. Year 1 is the year 1912 when Kim-Il Song was born. The Gregorian calendar is still used for dates prior to 1912. No wonder South Korea is not ecstatic about the notion of re-unification. How many orders of magnitude worse would this be than the German re-unification?

However, South Korea does have a policy that all North Koreans are South Korean citizens so if you defect, you are a South Korean de facto. However, China doesn't want refugees flooding over their border (and apparently they have been known to catch them and send them back to certain death if found) so you can't defect to China and then request asylum at a South Korean embassy. The Chinese border is of course easier to cross than the DMZ.

Speaking of Juche (the seriously misguided North Korean notion of superiority and self-reliance), some scientist there invented a fabric called Vinalon which is also called the Juche fiber. Like everything in the DPRK, it is shabby and suicidally depressing. It's some cheap shiny fabric that doesn't hold color well so most of the time you will see it in black or gray. If you live above the 38th parallel, you probably have a wardrobe-full of this stiff, uncomfortable, dreary cloth. How comfortable could pants or sheets made from anthracite coal and limestone be?

(apparently in Europe you can buy pet towels made from it.)

During the famine, it was reported that Kim Jong-Il was eating meals of simple potatoes. This isn't true. He has notoriously gourmet tastes and was eating imported lobster and shit. Meanwhile, his subjects were literally combing thru animal shit trying to find some undigested plant material. Nice.

What was good about the famine is that it presented people who were able to survive it with unprecedented freedom to move about a country where normally travel permits are required to go anywhere. This in a country where you had to have a permit to travel and had to inform the local inminban where they were staying. You needed a permit to stay in a motel (and woe betide the single woman travelling alone.) It kind of reminded me of my favorite book that I read for my contemporary Arab literature class, The Story of Zahra by Hanan Al-Shaykh. The Lebanese Civil War brought similar freedom to Zahra, a young unattractive woman from a repressive family in Beirut. There can be moments of exhilarating liberty in the utter collapse of society.

Finally, as long as I'm speaking of shit--North Korea was short of fertilizer in the 90's (maybe they still are) so it was every family's job to collect "night soil" and bring it to a collection center for credits. Night soil is human shit someone had to collect from the toilet that they used to fertilize the crops. How does everyone not have cholera? Anyways, yeah. Gross. I liked how Mrs. Song's daughter got around it though. She would go to the collection center and steal a bucket (because, as the author reasoned, who would guard a warehouse full of buckets of poo?) and then present it for the food credit.

Philomathia: Spartans!

I was listening to a podcast about the story of the Battle of Marathon which got me thinking about Sparta (and Gerard Butler in the days before he starred in wanker romantic "comedies" about vibrating panties. So read the title of this post in a testosterone-laden Scottish accent.)

But first, the Battle of Marathon took place in 490 BC between the Greeks, specifically the Athenians, and Persians of course. John Stuart Mill said it was a more important battle to British history than the Battle of Hastings (the Brits do love their classical Greek history and Latin grammar.) The runner story (his name was Pheidippides) is probably apocryphal but at least he got his name on an Atlanta running store for it.

But what I didn't know is that the whole Battle took place because the Athenians had gone to Darius I in 507 and asked him to become their ally against Sparta. Darius accepted but apparently considered himself the ruler over Athens instead which was kind of a drag so by 499 the Athenians in Asia Minor has burned Darius' capital there, Sardis. It just took the Persians a few years to get around to attacking Greece because of problems in Egypt and by that time leadership had passed from Darius I to Xerxes. Kind of fitting I suppose that the Spartans ended up not helping in the Marathon battle.

(and yes, I reference 300 in the title of this post which is actually the Battle of Thermopylae which was 10 years and force mulipliers later.)

Also, Marathon means "fennel" in Greek. It was a field of fennel so at least the battle smelled good. And fennel "seeds" are apparently actually fruit. And, someone who loves Spartan culture can be called a laconophile.

Actually, the point of all this is I was wondering what became of Sparta? Apparently, it still exists but it is called Sparti. Unlike Athens, it seems to have faded into relative obscurity. Only about 14,000 live in the town itself. They have a museum if there is a laconophile (or Frank Miller fan) in your life. It boasts this claim to fame:

The Museum of Ancient Sparta is the only museum built in Greece between 1874 and 1876 by architect G. Katsaros.

Well, that's....specific. 


And one more note on the philomathia versus epistemophilia. What's the difference? I hadn't really seen the word philomath before so, there's that. Until that is, I read the Dark Horse anthology of Archie comics firsts (I just wish Katy Keene, Sabrina and Josie weren't in separate volumes.) Archie at one point is being hazed by a group called the Philomathians, which is also one of the first appearances of Reggie. Cmon, I can point to being inspired by an Archie comic? No contest. 

More I learned from The Fever

Where were we?

Perhaps the discovery that mosquitos spread malaria. For years it was presumed that swamp gas and miasmas caused malaria (hence, of course, its name.) In 1880, a French surgeon stationed in Algeria named Alphonse Laveran first saw Plasmodium in action on a blood slide, seemingly by a random accident of timing. He prepared an infected blood slide and wandered off for 15 or so minutes. In this time the blood had cooled, tricking the parasite into thinking it had returned to an Anopheles's body. The males had sprouted flagella and were looking for wimmen and were squiggling about.

Around the same time, a Scottish physician named Patrick Manson stationed in China had figured out that a type of disgusting worm parasite called filariasis was transmitted by mosquitoes, although he was fairly wrong about a number of things (he thought mosquitoes only bit once in their lives and that the disease was caused by drinking water containing the bodies of contaminated mosquitoes.)  He teamed up with a doctor in the Indian Medical Service named Ronald Ross who apparently was a tool and kind of an idiot. At least, the author thinks so:

Ronald Ross was like many other docs in the British Raj's Indian Medical Service. He professed no particular interest in public health or medicine, or even India, and wasn't especially accomplished.

And his personal correspondence seems to bear out the author's opinions. With disdain for both victims of malaria and naturalists who would know about their vector candidate, he set about trying to prove Manson's theories in India but mainly succeeded in making all the locals distrust and avoid him, for good reason. It was really two Italians who discovered the correct link.

The builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand De Lesseps, had tried to build a canal in Panama too (note: where is the date? The author only says they abandoned the effort in 1889. Sloppy, sloppy.) He wanted to protect his workers from the scourges of yellow fever and malaria and invested money in building hospitals with watered gardens and hospital beds with legs that sat in buckets of water to prevent spiders and ants from getting into the patients' linens. Instead, he of course created an even more perfect mosquito habitat and the project was abandoned and his company went bankrupt. Poor dude. He lost his wife and child due to malaria while building the Suez Canal.

Finally of course the Panama Canal was built to the Americans with the help of an Army surgeon named Gorgas. The author does not think as highly of him as Wikipedia does, particularly with his (well, the whole US Government's) racist treatment of non-white canal laborers. BTW, the Panama Canal is how malaria was introduced to Barbados as the infected workers brought it home.

What I've learned so far from The Fever

I've already written about Plasmodium's origins as a protozoan. It started in Africa (of course) and went through several mutations. It evolved from Plasmodium to P. malariae. It wasn't very efficient because it took so long to do its development inside of the Anopheles (on the plus side, it could lie dormant inside a human body for decades as well just waiting for the right mosquito to bite.)

P. malariae  is still around by the way and is referred to as the "benign malaria" or "quartan malaria." Shah refers to quartan fever through the book but never explains what it means. That means the fevers occur at 3-day intervals as opposed to tertian fever, which is the 2-day interval caused by other forms of Plasmodium.

It eventually mutated into a more successful form, P. vivax, that is also still around today. That version could make the round trip from sporozoite to gametocyte in the victim's body within 3 days so it would be ready to spread as soon as 3 days after the victim was bitten. P. vivax was foiled for a while by a human genetic mutation now known as Duffy cells-they are the absence of proteins on the red blood cell's surface which means the parasite can't grab hold. Don't get too excited though because this mutation isn't universally available-Caucasians and Asians generally don't have it. This mutation makes no functional difference to the humans who have it, unlike a later mutation. Which brings me to...

The parasite mutated again into P. falciparum (pronounced fal-SIP-ar-um) which could bypass the Duffy cell mutation and was much more successful at its hemoglobin munching and immune cell evasion. The sickle cell mutation is in response to this form of Plasmodium.

Quinine was known as an antidote for centuries and was guarded as a secret by the Spanish (and that now explains why they were more successful than that ill-fated Scottish colony at Darien in Panama.) It comes from the bark of the cinchona tree which is indigenous to the Andes. Kind of curious that the cure for an African protozoan would be found in South America. How old is this thing? Does it date back to when these continents were attached?

(Holy shit. I just found the most amazing site with a map of the Pangea breakup. If somehow the tree and the parasite are related, that would mean it's as old as the Jurassic period at least, so ~ 130 million years.)

So, quinine. It did start to catch on but various attempts to transplant it and cultivate it elsewhere were met with Spanish resistance and difficulties in cultivation. The Dutch finally got a quinine-rich variety growing in their colony on Java after much trial and error. The problem was they cornered the market and were charging ridiculous prices. The US tried to sue them for antitrust violations in the 1930's but the Dutch Kina Bureau didn't give a shit. What finally broke their monopoly was WWII. The Germans seizes the Netherlands while the Japanese seized Java. This led to the invention of chloroquine (and the less successful quinacrine which apparently turns your skin yellow and can cause psychosis. It is still being used in some cases so try not to catch Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease or eat poo, like my roommate did in Syria.)

Some famous people who died of malaria include Alexander the Great (probably),  Genghis Khan (ditto), Lord Byron and 4 popes within 100 years in the Middle Ages. Oliver Cromwell died of it in 1652 although the quinine remedy was known-due to the remedy being advocated by Jesuits, he thought it was some kind of Catholic plot and died which is some beautiful karma at work. Oddly enough, his successor Charles II died of malaria too in 1685 (wikipedia says kidney failure but Shah's book is footnoted.) Charles actually did take the cinchona bark remedy but it wasn't until 1820 that two French chemists (Pelletier and Caventou) isolated the compound and figured out how to extract it. Depending on the age or species of cinchona bark you select to munch upon, you might get a mouth full of splinters and no quinine.

There was a statue in France commemorating Pelletier and Caventou's achievement but the asshole Nazis melted it down to make munitions during the War.

Epistemophilia: quasars and the Catholic Church--both destructive in their own way

So, I was listening to an Astronomy Cast recently about quasars. Here's the thing--I never really understood them. Typically people say something like, "Well, no one does." And this is on the happy occasion that I'm talking to someone who knows what a quasar is, vaguely.

Yes, I know it stands for "quasi-stellar object" or, originally, "quasi-stellar radio srouce" because it was first discovered by radio telescopes in the 1950's and the energy looked like a star but it was red-shifting like a galaxy. The degree of red shift indicated it was moving away from us very fast. Now they are considered high energy galactic nuclei. Wikipedia says that a galaxy hosting an AGN (active galactic nucleus) gets its radiation from the supermassive black hole at its center (I also learned that astronomers originally referred to these as "angry monsters." I like it.)

Wait, does this mean the Milky Way is an active galaxy? We have a supermassive black hole too. NASA says no. An active galaxy is any that emits enormous amounts of energy (xrays, gamma radiation, etc.) caused by an object at its center. I guess we don't emit enough. I expect that's a good thing, to understate.

So, quasars and black holes aren't the same thing, y/y? Correct. The current thinking is a quasar has a spinning black hole at its center. This site explains it well. The intense luminosity comes from gases in the accretion disc. All of the energy in a galaxy added up would equal one of the brighter quasars. They say a large star would have had to collapse to create its black hole.

Ok, on to something completely different. Nicaea. I heard it mentioned recently in a story about the Crusades and I realized I didn't know wtf it actually is. Greece? Turkey? Syria?  It's Turkey, Western Turkey. The town is now called Iznik. It was the capital of the eponymous Empire. One of the Byzantine emperors hid there during the Fourth Crusade-the one where Rome illogically decided to attack Constantinople in 1204. The Catholics then formed the Latin Empire which lasted until 1261. The Byzantines returned to power Michael VIII but Byazntine fell to the Turks under the rule of Constantine XI.

All good preparation for when  I eventually get around to reading Lost to the West.

In A Corpse in the Koryo, Inspector O meets a Finnish/Chinese prostitute named Lena who is also an intelligence operative living in North Korea. The obvious question as to why the hell anyone would live in North Korea on purpose is never addressed. But she mentions growing up on the shores of Lake Keitele in Finland. It's a lake in what Wikipedia says is central Finland (it looks like southern Finland to me.) Alas, I couldn't find anything really interesting about it but it's pretty. Here is a painting of it by a (surprise!) Finnish painter from 1905. The blue of the Scandinavian Cross in the Finnish flag is said to represent the many lakes of Finland.

More research for The Devil You Know

About midway through the book, Felix goes to Bunhill Fields to clear his mind as he says it's a cemetery for dissenters that hasn't been used in a long time so it's free of ghosts. This is a real place. It was a burial place for anyone outside of the Church of England and includes some famous graves like William Blake, John Bunyan and George Fox-a  founder of the Quakers.

Speaking of Fox, here is a nice quote from him:

"The Papists they cry, Conform.
And the Turk, he cries, Conform.
And did not the heathen Emperors cry, Conform?
And the Presbyterian, he cried, Conform.
And the Independents...
So everyone that gets the uppermost, and gets the staff of authority, commands...
But no law of Jesus requires it, who said, 'Freely you have received, freely give.'"

The word "Bunhill" incidentally derives from "Bone Hill." And it hasn't been used as a cemetery since 1855. There is also a large Quaker cemetery nearby. 

He also mentions John Owen and Isaac Watts are buried there, like the reader should know who they are.   Anyways, looked them up. John Owen was a 17th century theologian. He wrote a lot. He doesn't seem very exciting from a historical perspective. His contemporaries probably had the same reaction.

Isaac Watts was just a kid when John Owen died. He was a prolific hymn writer and wrote some books on logic. 

Carey refers to them as "the reservoir dogs of 18th century theology" (although Owen was 17th century.) I love the Tarantino flick. I don't get the joke.  Damn British humor.

Epistemophilia: useful idiots and a buggering Amis

I listened to Part II of a BBC documentary on useful idiots, which is what Lenin supposedly called people in the West who unquestioningly supported his regime and parroted his propaganda. Part II dealt with more recent examples of the phenomenon. People in the British and US governments upheld the Pinochet regime in Chile and apartheid in South Africa because they were supposed bastions of anti-communism. They also interviewed a journalist who had written about China under Mao. He said anyone who lived in Hong Kong during the early 1960's would have known how severe the famine caused by Mao was because bodies would regularly float downstream to Hong Kong. He said that he and select other journalists were invited to tour China during the Cultural Revolution and were taken to schools and shown smiling children in classrooms. The only problem was there WERE no children going to school during this period in China. He reminded himself then of the bodies in Hong Kong. He said Mao probably killed or directly caused the deaths of 40 million people. That defies imagination. Who could top that number? Stalin, maybe?

They also interviewed some journalists from Focus, an Iranian English language news agency. They had until recently been given free reign but during the elections last year, the government cracked down on what and how they could report. One reporter quit and then during the protests he called his old office and asked if they were covering the protests. For that, he was sentenced to 117 days in prison. Over 100 of those were spent in solitary. He was subjected to torture and was forced to apologize to the Supreme Leader. While he was there, he was interviewed by a reporter from Focus. The BBC reporter was clearly offended by the notion of a journalist interviewing another journalist in a prison where they were being tortured and not reporting it.

I wonder was there any real value we gained by supporting Chile and South Africa. The Soviets were a general threat to us (and the rest of the world) certainly-we're only now learning how close we came to war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's easy to look back and blame but I wonder if there was any genuine good that came out of turning a blind eye to a bad thing or was this just more venal stupidity bereft of benefit like the McCarthy hearings? Then again, look at that story about Iran again. Democratic values are useless if they are only sustained by supporting bullshit like that. You end up like the deluded Richard Nixon, criticizing Carter's treatment of the Shah who had been a "real friend" to the US. A real friend to us he may have been but to his own people, not so much. And look how much both the US and Iran has suffered because of our support for him.

It's so hard to get to the real truth of world issues. Science is much easier. Sometimes. I guess the question of whether a Goldilocks planet was really found orbiting Gliese 581g continues and will for some time as more data is analyzed.

Speaking of Stalin, here's a happier story from the BBC about Russia's women fighter pilots during WWII. The Germans called them night witches and spread rumors that they had been injected with some drug that allowed them to see better at night. One German pilot who was shot down by one supposedly refused to fly again when he found out a woman had shot him down. 


On The Guardian Books, they discussed authors who make appearances in their own works. Examples were Milan Kundera, Will Self and Martin Amis. The last one was funny because Kingsley Amis said this was a way of "buggering the audience." I knew vaguely that Kingsley was critical of Martin's work but some didn't realize the extent of it till I googled. The quote is funny but really, poor Martin.

Epistemophilia: unexpected consequences of meddling

I heard an interesting story about CIA blowback on Matt's Today in History about the Nationalization of Iranian oil in 1951. Iran was a British colony at one time and had a long history of squabbling with the British on the issue of profits (btw, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company eventually became BP.) Then in 1950, the Iranians learned that the US agreed to split their oil profits 50/50 with the neighboring Saudis. The British government refused to do the same. The Iranians voted to nationalize their oil and elected Mohammed Mosaddeq as their Prime Minister. This event should have been a great victory for democracy and it was unique for the time in Southwest Asia.

Alas, the British were having none of it and froze Iranian assets and cut off exports. They even took their case to The Hague but the court found in Iran's favor. Eventually, their financial squeezing took their toll on the population. Meanwhile, the Brits stirred up anti-communist elements in the US government (already you know this story doesn't have a happy ending) and we collaborated with them successfully to overthrow the democratically elected government in favor of the Shah (or Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as his friends called him)-who had technically been on the throne since 1941 and had started out as a secular reformer but became a real dick. He had an infamous secret police, the SAVAK, who also were supposedly trained by the CIA. There is actually a torture museum in downtown Tehran with dioramas showing people being tortured while distinctly American looking mannequins look on.

This event is called the 28 Mordad coup d'etat in Iran.  Mossadeq was arrested in August, 1953, served three years on some kind of jive charges and kept under house arrest until his death in 1967. It's unclear exactly how complicit the Shah was in all of this.

Anyways, this killed democracy in Iran. People hated the Shah and eventually supported the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Some people had dreams of it being a democratic revolution. No religious revolution, alas, is ever democratic. I'm not sure democracy is even a value compatible with religion. It also was just one in a dismal chain of events that fucked up our global image and the people of Iran once again get shafted. It lends a little more insight into why they hate us so much in the Middle East. Who knows how different things might have been if the Brits would have just split the freaking profits with them.

Epistemophilia: BBC pepper pots

I am mourning the fact that BBC Radio 4's History of the World in 100 Objects has come to an end. But I'm still only on object 30-something so at least I'll be catching up for a while.

(also, I have a huge crush on its host and British Museum director Neil McGregor but that's incidental.)

The other night he talked about an object called the Hoxne Pepper Pot (or on the BBC's site, here) This is the most beautiful object so far and it's story is fascinating. Pepper was evidently highly prized and costly in Roman times. The Visigoths were paid off not to sack Rome in 410 with a ton of pepper. It wasn't grown anywhere in the Roman Empire and had to be shipped from India along a lengthy and dangerous trade route over the Indian Ocean and through Egypt. This pot was found by a farmer in Suffolk in 1992 with a metal detector. He was looking for a lost hammer. And instead he found a huge cache of Roman era objects. His hammer, btw, is also now part of the British Museum collection. I don't know why but this makes me laugh.

What I continue to love about this show is how Neil McGregor makes you think about the object as a contemporary from the period would. The family in question appears to have been Christian guessing from the engraving "VIVAS IN DEO" on one of the objects (engraved unicamerally of course as the Latin alphabet was at that time) and Christians in Britain-or at least rich ones-would have been in particular danger. As McGregor said, there were no Swiss banks so what else would you do with your valuables besides bury them? The fact that they obviously never came back for their valuables makes me sad. Did they flee back to Rome? And what did they find there if so? Did they miss their little silver pepper pot with golden lips that would sparkle in candlelight? Not to mention the pepper in it. I guess the return of bland food was another consequence of the fall of the empire.

BTW, the pot is so named because it came from the village of Hoxne (pronouned "Hoksen") in Suffolk. It is part of a group of artifacts called the Hoxne Hoard.

Epistemophilia: William Pitt(s)

William Pitt were a father and son team that were big in 18th century Britain politics and both served as Prime Minister. And within two days, I listened to a Matt's History podcast on the father and then saw a Modern Marvels at the gym about his son. So I have one cool anecdote about each. And I'm glad I looked it up because until I did I thought there was just one dude.

Following the French and Indian War (or the Seven Years War according to the Brits), the British government enacted the Stamp Act on the Colonies to pay for it where they were taxed for any paper that changed hands. This rightly pissed them off as there were already other taxes like the Molasses Act and stirred the whole Taxation Without Representation pot that would be a big deal later. In 1766, Pitt the Elder, in the House of Commons at the time, gave a speech in defense of the colonies saying, "I rejoice that America has resisted." He went on to say they were members of the Empire and shouldn't have a special financial burden imposed on them for their defense and they had the same rights as other Englishmen.

Tea originated in China waaay back in a ridiculously high BC year. By the 18th century in England, it was the rage but due to exorbitant taxes it was difficult for most people to get legally. The vast majority of tea in England was drunk illegally. Unfortunately, it had toxic chemicals in it and sometimes even sheep dung (for color.) William Pitt the Younger, then Prime Minister, as one of his first acts in office in 1784 reduced the tax from 119% to 25% with the India Act. It also organized the British East India Company. I'm sure this probably had negative repercussions down the line, like for India. But what I want to point out here is that he appeared to have good intentions and also people in England weren't drinking sheep dung tea anymore.