Solo Synchronized Swimming was a sport at the Olympic Games between 1984 and 1992. It is surprising that it took the organizers three Olympics to realize that a person swimming alone cannot be synchronized with anyone else.
From Discontinued Olympic Sports
Yesterday evening I went to an event irresistibly entitled Everything You Wanted To Know About Zombies But Were Afraid To Ask Daniel Defoe. Geographer Amy Cutler gave a talk in which she explored similarities between Defoe’s A Journal Of The Plague Year (1722) and modern zombie films. She provided a handout in which quotations from Defoe are presented in a sort of multiple choice format, and it is so splendid that I take the liberty of reproducing it here:
DISTEMPER HAS STRUCK LONDON. I WOULD (PLEASE MARK)
Run about the Streets Naked except a pair of Drawers about my Waste, crying Day and Night, with a Voice and Countenance full of horror, a swift pace, and no Body cou’d ever find me to stop, or rest, or take any Sustenance.
Make a strange Hubbub, quacking and tampering in Physick, and invite the People to come to me for INCOMPARABLE Remedies.
Go to the Pye-tavern (in Aldgate), and in the middle of all this Horror, behave with all the Revelling and roaring extravagances, and make impudent Mocks and Jeers.
Break into a Store-house or Ware-house and seize upon an abundance of High-crown’d Hats, as they were no Bodies Goods.
Grow stupid or melancholy, wander away into the Fields, and Woods (of Camberwell), and into secret uncouth Places out of the Compass of the Communication, almost any where to creep into a Bush, or Hedge, and DIE.
Make use of the most excessive Plenty of all sorts of Fruit, such as Apples, Pears, Plumbs, and the cheaper, because of the want of People; eat them to excess, and be brought to Fluxes, griping of the Guts, Surfeits, and the like, and dye of it.
Cure my Body of the Plague with the violent Motion of my Arms and Legs when I throw down my Nurse and run over her, run down Stairs and into the Street directly to the Thames, throw away my Shirt, swim quite over the River to the Falcon Stairs (Southwark); where landing, and finding no People there, run about the Streets there, naked as I am, for a good while, when it being by that time High-water, I take the River again, and swim back to the Still-yard, land, run up the streets again to my own House, knock at the Door, run up the Stairs, and into my Bed again.
Go about denouncing of Judgment upon the City in a frightful manner, sometimes quite naked, and with a Pan of burning Charcoal on my Head.
Make my Boat serve me for a House (in Bow), and row down the River to Woolwich, and lay in little or nothing but Biscuit Bread, and Ship Beer, and die alone in my Wherrie.
Be absolutely overcome with the Pressure upon my Spirits, that by degrees, my Head sunk into my Body, that the Crown of my Head was very little seen above the Bones of my Shoulders; and by Degrees, loseing both Voice and Sense, my Face looking forward, lay against my Collar-Bone, and cou’d not be kept up any otherwise, unless held up by the Hands of other People.
With as little Baggage as possible, travel on from Wapping to Hackney until I came into the great North Road on the top of Stamford-Hill, and make forwards to Epping-Forest, and pitch my tent with an old Soldier, a Biscuit Baker, and a lame Sailor, and live like Hermits in Holes and Caves.
Being tyed in my Bed, and finding no other Way to deliver myself, set the Bed on fire with my Candle, and Burn myself in my Bed.
Two clips for your instruction and enlightenment. First, a Tesla Cage Of Death! Many thanks to Ed Baxter for drawing it to my attention.
Next, the radio recording of WNEW reporter Icarus “Ike” Pappas on the scene as Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on 24 November 1963. “Jack Ruby’s the name.” “Jack Ruby?” “He runs the Carousel Club.” “He runs the Carousel Club?” Holy mackerel!
Ludicrously obsessed as I am by the Kennedy assassination, my current reading is Vincent Bugliosi’s Four Days In November (2007), an extraordinarily detailed narrative of the events in Dallas forty-eight years ago. Bugliosi, famed as the prosecutor in the Manson murders, has won great respect for his “precise and definitive” account, “put[ting] all the pieces together”, carefully documenting his tale with thousands of footnotes referring to primary sources.
Yet here I am, on page 310, when we have arrived at 1.50 AM on Saturday 23 November, and I am ready to toss the book across the room in exasperation. Why?
“Most of Dallas is asleep when Ruby finally enters the KLIF building after Russ Knight gets back from City Hall and opens the door. Several of the guys on duty are glad to see Jack’s big paper sack full of corned-beef sandwiches and soft drinks. “I figured you guys would be hungry,” Jack tells them, “and I brought these up for you.” Knight and DJ Danny McCurdy were intrigued by Doctor Black’s celery tonic in its peculiarly shaped bottle and expensive-looking gold foil, which neither of them had ever seen before. Whoever heard of a soft drink with celery in it? Jack explains that it’s something you normally get only in New York and is especially pleased when McCurdy thinks it’s the best soft drink he’s ever had.”
There is, of course, no such drink as “Doctor Black’s celery tonic”. Bugliosi is confusing it with Doctor Brown’s celery tonic, also known as Cel-Ray. If he cannot get that right, if he muddles Black with Brown, how can we trust anything he says in this bulky doorstop of a book? Such inaccurate flimflam is enough to have me signing up to the absurd and paranoid Oliver Stone-Jim Garrison theories about the case.
McCurdy may have asked “Whoever heard of a soft drink with celery in it?” but a more pertinent question is surely “Whoever would have thought that a soft drink with celery in it would prove so crucial a factor in the Kennedy assassination?”
From today’s cryptic crossword in the Grauniad, I learned that “narcoleptic” is an anagram of “Eric Clapton”. This is as pleasing a music-related anagram as “Presbyterians” and “Britney Spears”.
UPDATE : Fats Waller waterfalls.
Work continues apace on my forthcoming Encyclopaedia Of Eggs. Here, just for the hell of it, is an entry under the heading “Fiction, Eggs In, Quotations Regarding”:
She gave him his own egg, but he was so overwhelmed that he froze and, holding it well away from his body, repeated the word ‘egg’ with great difficulty.
Patrick Harpur, The Rapture (1986)
I have been thinking of drawing a Venn diagram showing all possible Venns. There is John Venn himself, the invenntor of the diagram, also notable for having built an automatic cricket-ball-bowling machine which was used to great effect in Cambridge in 1909 against a visiting Australian XI. There is red ochre-stained Diggory Venn, the reddleman from Hardy’s The Return Of The Native (1878). And there is a hamlet in Saskatchewan called Venn which, in its glory days, had a wood crib grain elevator.
There, that is three Venns to be going on with, sufficient for a diagram. Time to get the coloured pencils and paper!
My sister, a librarian, on old new technology:
“But papyrus scrolls feel so much better!”
Such were the cries of lamentation heard across the ancient world as papyrus scrolls were replaced by that new-fangled Roman invention the codex, or book.
“Why do I have to flip these – what are they called? pages? The scrolls ran so smoothly under my hand, they signified a seamless flow of knowledge, a noble tradition, now it’s all chopped up into scraps signifying nothing …”
The Luddites’ fretful complaints drone on down the centuries, ever eloquent in bemoaning the end of civilization as we know it, while civilization as we aren’t quite used to it yet is busy being born. The invention of the printing press was the work of the devil according to these doomsayers, and maybe they were right because it did spread those dangerous things called ideas to the previously unlettered masses. They began thinking for themselves, founding new churches, having revolutions, writing novels that sent Victorian ladies into a swoon, and reading everything from the Bible and Shakespeare to tabloid gossip and vampire boyfriend sagas. Where will it all end? Not with a bang or a whimper apparently, but with a tweet.
A ouanga bag confiscated by Marines in 1921 near Gonaives is described as follows:
It was a hide bag, and in it were these objects : luck stones, snake bones, lizard jaws, squirrel teeth, bat bones, frog bones, black hen feathers and bones, black lamb wool, dove hearts, mole skins, images of wax and clay, candy made of brown sugar mixed with liver, mud, sulphur, salt, and alum, and vegetable poisons.
“From The Author’s Notebook”, appendix to The Magic Island (1929) by W B Seabrook (1884-1945), an “American Lost Generation occultist, explorer, traveller, cannibal, and journalist”, says the Wikipedia. Oh, also an alcoholic, a sadist, and a suicide.
A thing which had a different, a horror-like beauty like a mad Goya etching, occurred when the black priestess did her death dance with the huge white turkey. Though far from feeble, possessed of great vitality, she was a slender woman, slightly formed, whose nervous strength lay not in muscular weight. When the turkey’s wings spread wide and began to flap frantically above her head as she whirled, the great bird seemed larger and more powerful than she; it seemed that she would be dragged from her feet, hurled to the ground, or flown away with fabulously into the sky. And as she sought finally to tear off its head, sought to clutch its body between her knees, it attacked her savagely, beating her face and breasts, beating at her so that she was at moments enfolded by the great white wings, so that bird and woman seemed to mingle struggling in a monstrous, mythical embrace. But her fatal hands were still upon its throat, and in that swanlike simulacre of the deed which for the male is always like a little death, it died.
So savage had this scene been that it was almost like an anticlimax when the sacrificial goat was now led through the doorway to the altar…
W B Seabrook describes his voodoo blood baptism in Haiti in The Magic Island (1929)
To celebrate St Patrick’s Day, here is Michael Burleigh, writing in Sacred Causes : Religion And Politics From The European Dictators To Al Qaeda (2006):
Then there is ‘the culture’, which should not be confused with the occasional minor Irish poet winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Various provincial cliques and coteries, whether eccentrically Anglo-Irish, or just plain Irish, are inflated out of all proportion to their actual significance by their admiring fellows in the metropolitan British media. It is also depressing that the only celebrated visual art is the political graffiti – known as Muriels in Belfast – that adorns the ends of terraced housing. Hollywood contributes its quotient of surreal movies about nobly moody Irish terrorists allegedly facing agonising moral dilemmas, rather than the reality of intimidating drunks cutting (Republican Catholic) people’s throats in Belfast bars for such grave offences as spilling their drink, a practice that assumed global notoriety after the slaying of Robert McCartney (1971-2005). It can depict Irish-American cops as crooked or psychopathic in such movies as LA Confidential or Internal Affairs, but realism departs once the movies are about the emerald isle. Drink plays a large role in what is a deeply unattractive fusion of sentimentality and violence, where people are quick to take offence as Robert McCartney and Brendan Devine discovered (senior Belfast IRA figures stabbed and battered McCartney to death in Magennis’s bar after Devine had made an observation about one of the females in their company). Speaking of bars, dingy Irish theme pubs are ubiquitous in Europe, with their fake swirling Celtic tat and Guinness, and giant monitors for football and rugby, Gaelic or otherwise, which only partially drowns out the relentless, mindless gabbling known as ‘craic’. Some evenings these places are given over to interminable fiddle and jiggy music, or to tear-jerking rebel songs, although a truly weird cultural format, consisting of boys and girls hopping up and down with their arms rigid at their sides, has even made it on to the West End stage in London.
A letter to John Waddington Ltd…
I understand your firm is the leading manufacturer of playing cards and games and that you are always on the look-out for novelties in this field.
Enclosed herewith please find reproductions of two pages from an ancient Aztec codex; kindly take a look at them.
I am a philosopher-psychologist, former lecturer at the University of Budapest. For the past few years I have been engaged in some rather abstruse socio-anthropological research. In the course of this work, as a sort of ‘spin-off’, I happen to have cracked the code of the Aztec-Maya-Omec Tonalpouhalli (‘ritual year’). This, even if I say so myself, is quite an important academic achievement and will undoubtedly create quite a stir in the appropriate circles when I publish my findings.
For your information – in case your acquaintance with the extinct Meso-American cultures is no longer up to specialist standard – the Tonalpouhalli was a ‘year’ consisting of 13 20-day ‘months’… The Nahuatl word ‘Tonalpouhalli’ translates as something like ‘the arithmetic of destiny’ and it forms the foundation of the Tonalamatl (‘The Book of Fate’) which consists of pictures only…
The reason I am telling you this is that, with the riddle solved, the Tonalamatl lends itself eminently well to a transformation into a game akin to the phenomenally successful Monopoly, as well as to an ordinary card game, as well as to a divinatory system similar to the Tarot cards… I feel that this holds considerable commercial possibilities.
A letter from Dr Charlotte Bach to John Waddington Ltd, quoted in Who Was Dr Charlotte Bach? by Francis Wheen (2002). Wheen notes “Messrs Waddington felt otherwise”.
Let us now praise Googie Withers, seen here puffing a fag.
Invisible Beings is a gallery of spirit photographs by Georgiana Houghton. You can read about her at Ptak Science Books, which tells us, inter alia, that she was in spooky ethereal contact with one Henry Lenny, a deaf and dumb artist who also happened to be dead.
The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but there is at least once certainty to which we can cling. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, but every day Outa_Spaceman staples into place a new cardboard sign. And I am inordinately pleased with the latest one, for obvious reasons:
