Scribal Terror

How to say those clicks

This guy is a great teacher!

Mukkuri

This ancient Ainu instrument is more versatile than it looks. Keep listening -- it gets curiouser and curiouser.

The door is open

Come on in and talk.  Or drop off one of your random bursts of verbal energy -- poem, limerick, story, top ten list, clerihew, essay, alliterative poem, rant, Surrealist or or Dadaist poem, parody, cento, dirty joke, amusing  syllepsis, haiku, dirty haiku . . . to share. 

The night owl is curious

About pranks and hijinks,
musings and mutterings.

And the door is open all night.

Did you know?

Somewhere close to a quarter of the total of the world's languages are spoken in the New Guinea region-about 1100 languages. The New Guinea region as defined here includes the whole of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands like New Britain, New Ireland and Japen and Biak, as well as the adjoining areas of eastern Indonesia, especially the islands of Timor, Alor and Halmahera. Within the New Guinea region are found two large groupings of languages: Austronesian languages, which belong to the far flung Austronesian language family stretching from Southeast Asia to Hawaii and number about 300 in the New Guinea region, and Non-Austronesian or Papuan languages, restricted to the New Guinea region and numbering some 800 languages. -- Bill Foley, DELP (Documenting Endangered Languages of the Pacific)

Middle Jomon flame pottery

 

Take a close look at this incredibly complex and beautiful "flame" pottery jar from the Middle Jomon period (2500-1500 BC) in Japan. It's made with coils of clay, just like in kindergarten, but taken to a whole 'nother level.

Lions and tigers, oh my

Sorry about the irritating music

Mermaid silk

One of the most valuable fabrics in the ancient world (which continued to be produced on a small scale into the last century) came not from silk worms but from mollusks. It was known as byssus or sea silk. According to Wikipedia:

Sea silk is an extremely fine, rare and valuable fabric produced from the long silky filaments or byssus secreted by a gland in the foot of several bivalve mollusks (particularly Pinna nobilis L.) by which they attach themselves to the sea bed^.

. . . The shell, which is sometimes almost a metre long, adheres itself to rocks with a tuft of very strong thin fibres, pointed end down, in the intertidal zone. These byssus or filaments (which can be up to 6 cm long) are then spun and, when treated with lemon juice, turn a beautiful golden colour which never fades.

The cloth produced from these filaments can be woven even finer than silk and is extremely light and warm  . . . It was said that a pair of woman's gloves could fit into half a walnut shell and a pair of stockings in a snuffbox.

The Manopello image, a beautiful artifact but probably not the veil of St. Veronica, is a byssus fabric. 

Byssus enjoyed a vogue in China during the Han dynasty when it was imported from the Roman Empire. They called it "mermaid silk." (Wikipedia)

Thylacine and cub?

This Australian cave painting is believed to depict a thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) with her cub -- 6000 years ago.

Neolithic goddess

The goddess of Catal Huyuk (seventh century BC) kind of scares me, but she kind of makes me feel good about myself too.

What is it? A chunk of arsenic

I read about people using arsenic in bronze compounds and wondered what it looked like as a rock, rather than a seemingly-innocent powder that old ladies poison the guests in their lodging houses with.

Captain's log, stardate . . .

...late thirteenth century BC. The book above was found in a Bronze Age shipwreck and is on display at the Bodrum (Turkey) museum, along with an incredible array of materials from that ancient time: statuettes, copper ingots, hippopotamus teeth, this elegant gold cup:

 

The skeletal remains of the crew were also found. And a completely intact ostrich shell. Read more about it here and here (somewhat imperfectly translated, but understandable and informative).

Shakespeare's hapax legomenon

Honorificabilitudinitatibus

The door is open

Come on in and talk.  Or drop off one of your random bursts of verbal energy -- poem, limerick, story, top ten list, clerihew, essay, alliterative poem, rant, Surrealist or or Dadaist poem, parody, cento, dirty joke, amusing  syllepsis, haiku, dirty haiku . . . to share. 

Bronze casting the old-fashioned way

Umha Aois is an experimental group in Ireland that tries to recreate Bronze Age technology. Here they are making a Celtic axe head.

World's largest norias

What's a noria? According to Wikipedia, it's a machine for moving water from a lower elevation to a higher one. The huge norias pictured above are in the Syrian city of Hama (ancient Hamath) on the Orontes River and date to the Byzantine era (14th century). They were originally used to move water from the Orontes into an aqueduct.

Copper Age hoard

This treasure trove was found in the Judaean desert, hidden in a cave. It's from the Chalcolithic period, or Copper Age (4500-3300 BC). Osnat Misch-Brandl writes:

[The cache] contained 429 objects which had been wrapped in a woven mat and then hidden in a Judaean Desert cave. Copper is the base for the majority of the objects, with five made of hippopotamus ivory, one of elephant ivory, six of hematite, and one of limestone.  Most objects were made of arsenic and antimony copper, a durable and malleable material. The technical and aesthetic qualities of these tools and vessels, molded using the lost-wax process, are so sophisticated that in many cases they still astound modern artisans. Mace heads, maces, standards, scepters and crowns form the bulk of the copper hoard, yet the variety, shape and decoration of each is so unusual that no two objects are identical. Many are so strange that they defy proper definition.

Neolithic plastered skull

This skull is from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Jericho, 7220 to 5850 BC, "apparently [from a] cult involving the preservation of human skulls, with facial features reconstructed from plaster and eyes set with shells in some cases." Image from educational  link.

Spicy eggplant soup

This is a real mood-elevator. Laura says it's Thai-Indian fusion soup, which  describes it pretty well, maybe with a touch of Japanese or Korean:

Ingredients:

2 thin “Thai” eggplants, salted, drained and cubed
1 medium sized yellow onion, chopped
1 clove of garlic, mashed
1 ½ inch thick slice of fresh ginger, mashed (comes to about a tablespoon)
1 ½ quarts of chicken stock (more if needed)
10  cooked fish balls, disks should work fine as well -- you can find these at any asian food store with a freezer section. Squid rings would work too.
salt to taste
handful of chopped cilantro
½ tsp coriander
2 ground cloves
T ground cumin
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp turmeric

Directions:

Sauté garlic and onion until translucent
Add spices, sauté until covered uniformly
Add chicken stock, simmer for ½ hour
Add eggplant, cooked fish balls, and cilantro
Cook until hot, about 15 minutes
Serve over rice noodles

This is heavenly the next day, but don't try to save it with the noodles -- they'll dissolve.

The door is open

Come on in and talk.  Or drop off one of your random bursts of verbal energy -- poem, limerick, story, top ten list, clerihew, essay, alliterative poem, rant, Surrealist or or Dadaist poem, parody, cento, dirty joke, amusing  syllepsis, haiku, dirty haiku . . . to share.