The Gävle goat and other things

In the news

• Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo is sentenced to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power."
• The Gävle goat (pictured), a 13-metre (43 ft) high yule goat in Gävle, Sweden, is burnt down in the 24th such arson attack since 1966.
• The Supreme Court of Pakistan orders the government to recognize hijras, intersex and transgender individuals, as a distinct gender.
• Luis Francisco Cuéllar, governor of Caquetá Department in Colombia, is found dead after being kidnapped at gunpoint.
• Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, one of the leaders of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and a senior dissident, dies at the age of 87.

-from Wikipedia.

the story of a crime (1962)

The original title is История одного преступления. Apparently "Story of a crime" is considered a somewhat important short animated film, if it having its own Wikipedia article demonstrates that this is so, although I guess that's an arguable proposition.

It was the first animated short made by one Fyodor Khitruk(1917-), at the age of 45. I gather he worked as an assistant for other animation directors beforehand. (Apparently he's still around, having published a book on animation in 2008.) This is part 1, above. Part 2 is directly below.

Are you a Gossip?

Today's featured article

George H. D. Gossip (1841–1907) was a minor American-English chess master and writer. He competed against most of the world's leading players in chess tournaments between 1870 and 1895, but with only modest success. The writer G. H. Diggle calls him "the King of Wooden Spoonists" because he usually finished last in strong tournaments. Gossip was also a noted writer. His 1874 treatise The Chess-Player's Manual—A Complete Guide to Chess was harshly received by the critics, largely because he had included a number of informal skittles games that he had (atypically) won against stronger players. He developed a lifelong enmity toward chess critics, attacking them ferociously in his books. However, his 1879 book Theory of the Chess Openings was well received, becoming one of the standard opening works of the time. He made his living primarily as a journalist, author, and translator, writing for publications in England, France, Australia, and the U.S. At various times he lived in each of those countries, Germany, and Canada. In 1898 and 1899, two publishers issued his only non-chess book, The Jew of Chamant. Published under the pseudonym "Ivan Trepoff", it was virulently anti-Semitic. Chess writers have often mocked Gossip's play. However, a modern assessment system, Chessmetrics, concludes that at his peak he was close to grandmaster strength. (more...)

from today's Wikipedia front page.

Forest Hill House, 1909 postcard

via Hugh Manatee(?) at Wikipedia

Michael Pacher's devil

at the Alte Pinakothek museum, Munich

Michael Pacher , 1498. I have seen this painting referred to as Saint Wolfgang and the Devil as well as Saint Augustine and the Devil. I'm inclined to believe it's Wolfgang, as the devil's butt would quit smirking if he was dealing with St. Augustine. What do you think?

Plus, Augustine was probably black, although a 15th c. European painter could be reasonably expected to paint him as a caucasian, as he might reasonably expect to get into hot water otherwise-- or so I imagine.

A Monday night miscellany

The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about animal testing (vivisection) that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of London University medical lectures by Swedish women activists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that reportedly divided the country.
[...]
Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled in Battersea in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provocative plaque — "Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?" — leading to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called "anti-doggers". On 10 December 1907, 1,000 anti-doggers marched through central London, clashing with suffragettes, trade unionists, and 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square, one of a series of battles that became known as the Brown Dog riots.

Tired of the controversy, Battersea Council removed the statue in 1910 under cover of darkness, after which it was allegedly destroyed by the council's blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour. A new statue of the brown dog was commissioned by anti-vivisection groups over 70 years later, and was erected in Battersea Park in 1985.

the BBC on how to boil an egg(!).

Justin Raimondo, American Conservative magazine(2006):
Hillary the Hawk: the Democrats’ Athena only differs from Bush on the details.

John Caruso:
"The one thing that Democrat-hugging progressives must never forget"

Here's former Democratic operative and current MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell, speaking in An Unreasonable Man:

If you want to pull the party--the major party that is closest to the way you're thinking--to what you're thinking, YOU MUST, YOU MUST show them that you're capable of not voting for them. If you don't show them you're capable of not voting for them, they don't...have...to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn't listen, or have to listen, to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go.

Norman Mailer

As you may already know, Norman Mailer died yesterday. So I suppose if there's an afterlife he may well meet Marilyn(the Time cover is from '73. I think you can barely make it out if you're an abnormally good squinter.). Incidentally he came out with a novel earlier in 2007, his 1st in about 10 years, The Castle in the Forest. The stubby Wikipedia entry describes it as

"the story of Adolf Hitler's childhood as seen through the eyes of Dieter, a demon sent to put him on his destructive path. The novel explores the idea that Hitler had no Jewish heritage but was the product of incest."

You can decide for yourself whether or not that sounds promising. (Just based on the description, it sounds to me like psychic displacement masquerading as literature, designed to reassure readers that People are Basically Good and Hitler was a mere aberration. But hey, what do I know. If you've read it, feel free to comment below.)

I take a certain amount of perhaps morbid comfort from the fact that he somehow made it to 84, and lucidly, in spite of not seeming to have taken terribly good care of his health, although I suppose his reputation in that area may be exaggerated. There's an NPR interview with him (from January 2007), here: approx 11 minutes.

Bruegel's triumph of death

The Triumph of Death, c. 1562, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Don DeLillo once suggested that J. Edgar Hoover was fascinated with "The Triumph of death,"above. Today's news(via MTH) that the democrats defeated their own attempt to impeach Cheney made me think of this painting too. I also found myself wondering what Cheney and Rumsfeld might think of it(Somehow I don't see Dubya as an art-liking sort).

oh yeah, THAT Glauberg plateau

the English language front page of Wikipedia has a section, perpetually refreshed a little before midnight, called "did you know"(from wikipedia's latest articles). Today's(10.14.2007) page:

From Wikipedia's newest articles:

...that archaeological finds from the German Glauberg plateau include a life-sized statue of a warrior (pictured) dating from around 500 BC?

Louis Agassiz rejected Darwinism

photo: U.S. Geological Survey

And you can see what happened to his statue.

wikipedia sez: After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Stanford President David Starr Jordan wrote, "Somebody—Dr. Angell, perhaps—remarked that 'Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.'"

speaking of Wikipedia, perhaps you've heard of conservapedia, a wiki knockoff. They bill themselves as a "corrective" to the supposedly P.C. tone of Wikipedia. I don't quite know what to make of it, as some of the entries seem to have a satirical undercurrent, and I mean besides the unintentional sort you might expect. Presently they're recording the number of page views at the bottom of each entry. Here are some tallies, as of approximately 11pm central time:


Kelo desicion 15 times
Joseph McCarthy 273x
Rudy Giuliani 179x
Hillary Clinton 5781x
Charlton Heston 12x
(blogger)Jon Swift 1,130x

1,130 views? Either that's his mom, or somebody's pulling a swift fast one. I wonder how many people read Jon Swift and think he's a conservo, a la Ayn Clouter. Ayn, if you're reading this, please come visit and make fun of me if you feel the urge.

Of course, given its collaborative nature(like all wikis), it may be both a sincerely conservo venture and a put on. They've just started out, and lots of things and people still don't have entries, like John Wayne. Yeah, I know.