Scribal Terror

Nuzi: a written language of the women of Jiangyong

Nuzi, or "women's characters", were found in Jiangyong, Central China's Hunan Province in the 1980s and amazed anthropologists around the world.

"Nuzi is the only women's written language found in the world," says Cao Xuequn, a research fellow with the Hunan Provincial Museum. "We have found about 700 nuzi characters."

During the seminar on women's role held in Guiyang of Southwest China's Guizhou Province, Cao gave a speech on the past and present standing of nushu, a special term including the literature and decorative items with nuzi.

Cao says that nuzi was created by and studied among the women of Jiangyong, most of whom had no opportunity for education. Such characters, which have been used in Jiangyong and its neighboring areas for centuries, were not known by men or outsiders.

In the past, women in Jiangyong often studied nuzi after spinning and weaving. They used nuzi to document local stories and write about friendship among women. . . .

Mechanical housefly

Technology Review reports:

A life-size, robotic fly has taken flight at Harvard University. Weighing only 60 milligrams, with a wingspan of three centimeters, the tiny robot's movements are modeled on those of a real fly. While much work remains to be done on the mechanical insect, the researchers say that such small flying machines could one day be used as spies, or for detecting harmful chemicals.

Via Cellar

Crime spree

Two Englishmen travel the US, determined to break every stupid law they can find, from peeling oranges in a hotel in Los Angeles to hunting whales in Utah. The picture above shows one of the culprits brazenly playing cards with a Native American in Globe AZ.

Where's the pot of gold?

End of the rainbow located in Iceland. Via Arbroath

Whoopie Pie exposed

At Carin's

(For anyone who missed the conversation yesterday, Ana got sick on one of these. Luckily her haz bucket.)

Baaaad English

Via Kamangir

Pardon me boy . . .

John at FYE posted this picture of a Welsh train station. It's on Paperclip's itinerary later this week.

The Wheel of the Innocents

Beginning in 1445, this grate located on the outside of the Ospedale degli Innocenti served as a drop-off point for the foundlings of Florence. This is what happened when a woman abandoned her baby here:   

She turned the wheel. The child spun around in turnstile like a pack of cigarettes at a 24 hour deli. Once on the other side, the child began a short slide down a chute into "the basin of abandonment". On either side of the basin kneeled two terra-cotta figures. For looking over the basin was Mary and Joseph, the basin doubling as a manger. The child is quickly picked up and brought to be wet-nursed. But for one brief moment the child is Jesus himself.

The Ospedale degli Innocenti has cared for over 375,000 in its five and a half centuries, and continues to help care for abandoned children today.  

-- Curious Expeditions

The use of the wheel ended in 1875, but the idea itself survives:

Technicians [in Rome] are designing a high-tech version of the traditional “revolving crib”, or “foundling wheel”. Half of the wheel will be outside the hospital wall and the other half inside. Staff inside the hospital will turn the wheel to collect the infant without seeing who has left it.

Grazia Passeri, the head of the Italian Civil Rights Association, said that the first modern “foundling wheel” would be installed at a leading hospital by Christmas. “We have to face the fact that a lot of women simply cannot cope with being mothers or become pregnant by accident or through rape,” she said.

Green roof, Manhattan

Via Wikipedia. See also, Cabinet of Wonders.

"The most arrogant man in France"

The Wikipedia entry for Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) begins: 

Best known as an innovator in Realism (and credited with coining the term), Courbet was a painter of figurative compositions, landscapes, and seascapes. He also worked with social issues, and addressed peasantry and the grave working conditions of the poor. . . . Courbet believed the Realist artist's mission was the pursuit of truth, which would help erase social contradictions and imbalance.

But Courbet was much more than that. He described himself as "the most arrogant man in France," and as a self-promoter he made P.T. Barnum look meek.  A new biography of Courbet, reviewed in today's New Yorker, reveals:

Courbet relished scandal as a shortcut to prominence at a time when, for artists, official honors and patronage were losing cachet to notoriety in the popular press and success in the commercial markets. His calculated affronts flaunted his impunity as a bona-fide hero of French culture. In 1870, he was duly awarded the Legion of Honor and delightedly spurned it, calling the offer an impertinent “usurping of the public’s taste” (the many-headed new god) by artistically incompetent, hidebound authorities. Controversy also drew attention to the artist’s huge anodyne stock-in-trade, chiefly landscapes, which catered to many tastes—as he instructed an agent, “highly colored, serious paintings for Vienna, pleasant subjects for London.” Sideline specialties included virile hunting pictures and such outright pornography as the legs-spread closeup “The Origin of the World” (1866), which he painted for a Turkish collector with particular appetites. (It was owned for a time by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who kept it behind a little wooden door that he would slide open for visitors.)

And, by the way, if you Google him, be warned: L'origine du monde and some of his other works are NSFW.