Behold the World Loanword Database!
Coming to us from the fine folks at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, WOLD “provides vocabularies…of 41 languages from around the world, with comprehensive information about the loanword status of each word. It allows users to find loanwords, source words and donor languages in each of the 41 languages, but also makes it easy to compare loanwords across languages.”
Guess I’ve got my evening sorted, then.
THE OCEAN
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Ocean has its silent caves,
Deep, quiet, and alone;
Though there be fury on the waves,
Beneath them there is none.
The awful spirits of the deep
Hold their communion there;
And there are those for whom we weep,
The young, the bright, the fair.
Calmly the wearied seamen rest
Beneath their own blue sea.
The ocean solitudes are blest,
For there is purity.
The earth has guilt, the earth has care,
Unquiet are its graves;
But peaceful sleep is ever there,
Beneath the dark blue waves.
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, chosen to commemorate the date—January 27, 1945—that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Coincidentally, I started Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah last weekend. I’m not gonna lie: The nine-hour documentary, released in 1985, is hard to watch. But since the reward is participating in “one of the most important cinematic works of all time,” it’s well worth the emotional effort.
I can’t recommended this film highly enough. Purchase it on Blu-Ray or DVD here; streaming and renting options are available on Amazon, YouTube, Apple TV, et al.
Before my life of fame and fortune—a period I refer to on my résumé as “the wilderness years”—I did a lot of odd jobs. Like castrating bulls, for instance. Designing floral arrangements. Driving a Zamboni for a minor-league hockey team.
Then there was that time I worked the night shift as a janitor at a luxury department store: 10 hours of scrubbing toilets, mopping floors, cleaning mirrors, and…vacuuming. So. Much. Vacuuming.
That’s when I discovered Art Bell, “apostle of the paranormal” (New York Times) and “mysterious narrator of the American nightscape” (Washington Post). It was Bell who, through his late-night radio show, introduced me to the chupacabra and the Florida swamp ape; reported on the discovery of ancient ruins on the moon’s surface, evidence for which remains elusive because we never landed there in the first place; revealed how Jesus visited North America 2,000 years ago to “spread a secret message and hide an ancient device” (a dimensional gateway, obviously).
In other words, while I navigated a darkened 100-year-old six-story mannequin-filled building in the middle of the night with only a couple of other misfits for company, Art Bell was there for me. So when the missus and I found ourselves in Pahrump, Nevada last November, we decided to pay our respects.
And yes, I know there’s a typo on his tombstone. Seems fitting, somehow.
May I interest you in a 717-gigapixel scan of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch?
Before you say “No,” I should point out that it’s not only the largest, but also the most detailed photo of a work of art ever taken. How detailed? The distance between pixels is 5 micrometers. That’s 5 thousandths of a millimeter. Know what’s bigger than that? A human red blood cell.
The folks at Rijks Museum took 8,439 individual photos of the 1642 painting—each photo measuring 5.5 cm x 4.1 cm—using a 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D-400c MS camera. Then they stitched everything together with some sort of AI voodoo. The file size of the final image is a whopping 5.6 terabytes.
Now are you interested? I thought you might be. Read more about the project here.
“Another flaw in the human character,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus), “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
There’s a lot of truth to that. I mean, the “explosion in the growth of student leadership programs on college campuses” lately is clearly a response to growing demand, right?
But is the demand coming from those who want to be leaders, or from the credentialed class simply perpetuating—and protecting—itself? I’m hoping it’s the latter, if only because the idea of so many people actually wanting to be in charge is just too damn depressing.
Just remember: The world needs followers, too.
“Japan has around 300 brands of short-grain japonica rice that go by names like Yume Shizuku (Dream Droplet), Seiten no Hekireki (Bolt from the Blue), Tsuyahime (Shiny Princess), and Mirukii Kuiin (Milky Queen),” writes Kenji Hall over at Taste. But there’s a clear favorite: Koshihikari, which accounts for a third of the rice that’s planted annually and has outsold every other brand for years. “If there is an ideal style of rice for oyakodon or matsutake gohan, or to eat plain with only a side of pickles, Koshihikari comes close. In surveys, consumers say they prefer its ultrawhite kernels, sticky-soft chewiness, and mild sweetness.”
Swearing is good for you. “No one can tell me that there’s a better word than the F-word for relieving pain after stubbing your bare toe on the leg of your bed. There just isn’t. I’ve tried using, ‘Blast!’ and, ‘Confound it all!’—but they just don’t cut it.” (While we’re at it, so is drinking.)
When art runs out of ways to shock: “The assumption had been that artists were entrusted with the sacred task of ‘pushing the envelope,’ as [Edward] Albee insouciantly put it, but they were finding that the culture had gotten way ahead of them. And at the same time—and this was really unnerving to a certain type of artist—the culture revealed itself to be shameless, tawdry, and grotesque in ways that were supposed to be reserved for the avant-garde.”
Today’s the 15th anniversary of Michael Brecker’s death, and Ted Gioia has some thoughts:
Almost every saxophonist I met in the closing decades of the 20th century treated Brecker as a superstar at the pinnacle of the jazz craft. This was especially true of students at college jazz programs, where Brecker was a revered name, not far below John Coltrane in the hierarchy of jazz saxophony. And Coltrane, even back then, was a distant historical figure none of these jazz students had ever seen perform live. Brecker, in contrast, was a horn-playing god who walked among us.
I studied music at EWU back in the late 80s—and worked the occasional shift as a late-night DJ at the college jazz station—so I can confirm that Brecker definitely loomed large among my fellow band nerds and me. His 1988 album Don’t Try This at Home was a holy relic; when he and his rhythm section came to Spokane for a gig at Casa Blanca that year, we treated it more like a pilgrimage than a night out with drinks. He was, in a sense, our Coltrane.
Which makes this all the more interesting:
But, as Gioia suggests, the saxophonist’s appeal was far broader than any one genre. “Brecker had completely assimilated a populist attitude into his personal style,” he writes. “When he played over a rock or funk groove, he wasn’t trying to cross over, he was just being himself.” Take a gander yourself at this discography. (Keep scrolling—the list does eventually come to an end.)
Let’s close with a video played at Michael Brecker’s memorial service, held February 20, 2007 at Town Hall in Manhattan:
Words of wisdom from the 37th president of the United States, taken from his series of interviews with David Frost in 1977. (Nixon’s 109th birthday was Sunday.)
So Georgia and Alabama are playing in the college football national championship tonight, I guess? (Sorry—I can’t even feign interest in the NFL, let alone its farm system. The fact that these half-wits get full-ride scholarships at elite universities to…play games…is, not to put too fine a point on it, insane.)
Anywho.
I only bring this up because it’s an excuse to mention one of my favorite bands—Steely Dan—and how they’ve been trolling Crimson Tide fans for 45 years. You know the line, right? It’s from “Deacon Blues”:
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues
Only thing is, it’s not a compliment. In a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, co-founder, lead singer, and keyboardist Donald Fagen comes clean:
Walter [Becker] and I had been working on that song at a house in Malibu. I played him that line, and he said. “You mean it’s like, ‘They call these cracker assholes this grandiose name like the Crimson Tide, and I’m this loser, so they call me this other grandiose name, Deacon Blues?”‘ And I said, “Yeah!” He said, “Cool! Let’s finish it!”
I suppose this is the part where I should make a joke about how you can’t expect an Alabama grad to get the sarcasm. But honestly, I didn’t either. And it makes me love Steely Dan even more.
Now let’s enjoy a live version of Deacon Blues from 1993:
Did I manage to let 2021 slip by without my annual list of music recommendations? Somebody should probably fire me.
Without further ado, then, here are the 10 albums released last year that brought me the most pleasure (objectively ranked in order of awesomeness):
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra, Promises
Grateful Dead, Listen to the River: St. Louis ’71 ’72 ’73
Steven Wilson, The Future Bites
Lisa Bella Donna, Moogmentum
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, Carnage
Alice Coltrane, Kirtan: Turiya Sings
Lee Morgan, The Complete Live at the Lighthouse
Dan Weiss and Miles Okazaki, Music for Drums and Guitar
Bass Communion, Sisters Oregon
The Grid/Fripp, Leviathan
“In its prime, from around 1200 to 1550, Great Zimbabwe was home to about 10,000 people. The state covered 1,779 acres, more than twice the area of New York’s Central Park. UNESCO, the UN’s cultural body, declared it a world heritage site in 1986. At independence in 1980 Robert Mugabe renamed Rhodesia Zimbabwe (roughly ‘house of stone’) after the site. Yet it is far less visited, or understood, than Machu Picchu, say, or Egypt’s pyramids.”
Click here for the cool interactive feature; stay for the fascinating article. And if you’re really interested in the subject of medieval African history, this is a delightful read.
“Night owls are at increased risk for psychiatric disorders compared to early birds.”
That’s the headline over at PsyPost, anyway. But since they’re “only interested in accurately reporting research about how humans think and behave” rather than “over-generalizing or mischaracterizing research to get more clicks,” well…you’d better believe they know what they’re talking about.
Of course, a glimpse under the hood over at helveticka world headquarters is all the proof anyone really needs: CK, Linda, Carl, and Michelle are all self-confessed night owls, whereas Shirlee, Courtney, and I are the normal ones early birds.
Need I say more?
Happy 2022, everyone. What are the odds we’ll still be around to ring in 2023? I’m guessing somewhere around 11/10. So we might as well enjoy ourselves.
To that end, here’s a glimpse under the hood:
“If your only experience with a car engine’s inner workings is ‘How much is that going to cost to fix?’ this graphic is for you!”
Here’s a reminder of the wonders of nature:
“Like all salamanders, newts can re-grow a lost limb or amputated tail. This regenerative ability has long fascinated humans. It is a superpower we are eager to steal, a piece of real animal magic.…In 1994, Dr Goro Eguchi of the Shokei Educational Institution, Japan, and Panagiotis Tsonis at the University of Dayton, Ohio, decided to investigate this apparently magical ability for real. In the lab, they cut open the eye of a live Japanese fire-bellied newt (Cynops pyrrhogaster) and removed the lens to see if it would regenerate. It did, perfectly. And not from residual lens tissue but from epithelial cells in the iris. So they did it again. And again. Over the course of sixteen years, they cut out the newt’s eye no fewer than eighteen times. And each time, the poor newt grew it back, fresh, complete, in fully working order.”
And here’s a story of redemption:
“Maxie remembers the scene: teamsters, townies, sailors, loan sharks, and killers with callused hands all mixing together; the acrid smell of sweat and stale beer, the smoke hanging over everyone’s head like a storm cloud.”