Incidental Beauty
Monday, November 15, 2004
9 Minute Snooze
Back in 1956 when the snooze button was first introduced, alarm clocks had standardized gears. The snooze gear had to mesh with the teeth of the other gears. Due to the configuration of the gears, a nice, round 10-minute snooze cycle was out of the question, so the engineers had to choose between nine minutes or 10-plus minutes. As we all know, punctuality is a virtue, so the engineers went with nine minutes.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Pall Bearer
A pall refers to the cloth covering the coffin. A Yahoo! Image search on "coffin pall" resulted in a number of helpful illustrations. In the case of a military funeral, the pall is often a national flag.
The word can also be used in a general sense to refer to anything that cloaks, shrouds, or obscures. In ecclesiastical terms, the pallium refers to the robes worn by the Pope.
Coffin palls probably come from burial cloths. The practice of wrapping a body in a shroud dates from antiquity. Burial cloths make an important cameo in the Book of John.
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
17 year cicadas
These cicada usually emerge by the end of May in Maryland. At that time, the nymphs crawl out of the soil after 17 years of feeding on small subterranean roots and climb up tree trunks or other vertical objects where they shed their nymphal skin and emerge as adults. Adults live about four to six weeks with the sole purpose to mate and lay eggs. Only the males produce sound – a loud mating call of “song” – which can be heard from early morning to late evening as long as adults are present, usually until July. After mating, the female cicada cuts deep slits in small twigs where she lays her rows of 24-48 eggs. Adult cicadas die soon after they have mated and laid their eggs. After six weeks, the eggs hatch and the tiny nymphs fall to the ground where they burrow into the soil and spend the next 17 years below ground, starting the whole cycle again.
Thursday, March 25, 2004
The gaps are the thing.
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock -- more than a maple -- a universe.
Annie Dillard
Monday, March 22, 2004
ben johnson paintings
haunting landscapes - almost watercolor but with oil. wet on wet with a sense of early morning fog.
http://www.wanderingcrow.com/pages/home.html
Origin of last meals
In an obscure and abandoned Norwegian journal, we located a fascinating interview from 1999 about the custom of final meals. James Marsh and Mats Bigert thoroughly researched the issue of last meals, and both men made short documentary films dealing with the ritual. They offer their thoughts on its origin in this informative discussion.
Marsh points out that America and Japan are the only post-industrial nations that impose the death penalty and relates the tradition to Christ's Last Supper. Bigert traces the roots of the last meal even further back to the Greeks. The Greeks didn't want a condemned person to be hungry on the journey to the kingdom of death, lest an executed soul be stuck in purgatory with a case of the grumbles.
Both men recount interesting tales of the role of food in executions in Europe throughout history. Bigert summarizes the answer by saying, "I don't think there's one specific origin to the ritual. It's been used all over the world in different ways... "
A couple of sites may satisfy your hunger for information on prisoners' final meals. The Memory Hole preserved the all-time classic "Texas Final Meal Requests" page that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice excised from their site in 2003. Stepping into Texas' large void, Dead Man Eating now chronicles last meals from prisoners all over the nation.
http://www.thememoryhole.org/deaths/texas-final-meals.htm
http://www.deadmaneating.com/
Friday, March 19, 2004
pedals on a piano
Right pedal - The loud one. Also known as the "forte" or sustain pedal, it prevents dampers from descending on the piano strings, resulting in a rich, sustained chord peal.
Left pedal - The soft one or "una corda." A single piano note is normally created from two or three piano strings tuned in unison. This pedal shifts the hammer so that it hits only one or two strings, resulting in a more muted sound. Hence, "una corda" or "one string."
Middle pedal - The "sostenuto." This pedal selectively sustains notes, so that certain notes can ring out while others fade normally. It is usually found only on grand pianos.
Monday, March 15, 2004
Great Wall cannot be seen from space
China is rewriting its elementary school textbooks after its first astronaut came back to Earth and announced that the Great Wall cannot be seen from space after all
