Scribal Terror

Name that stuff

What is it? Rock snot, for your wading enjoyment.

Diamond encrusted fruit cake

I don't understand it either.

Chinese mountain cat

Cuter than the iriomote? You decide.

The golem of Prague

Curious Expeditions has come across the grave of Rabbi Judah Lew ben Bezalel, called the "Maharal," creator of the golem of Prague:

In 1580 the Jewish community was under attack, and was about to be accused of a ritual child murder, a common way a arousing public hatred against Jews and inciting a mob to anti-Jewish violence. It was also an excuse often used to expel the entire Jewish community from a city. Worried, the Maharal asked God what to do. That night in his dreams he was given instructions on how to create a Golem: a creature made of clay.

Even for the holiest of men creating life is forbidden by Jewish law, but in this case an exception was to be made. The task would be a dangerous one. He was to use the "Shem Hameforash", the true name of God, a word so powerful that it could easily kill its speaker. After purifying himself, the Maharal went to the river, and by torchlight sculpted a giant body out of the river clay. After performing the complicated rituals from his dream, he wrote the word Emet, meaning God's truth, across the muddy forehead. The Golem's fiery eyes snapped opened to his master.

The Golem is soulless and unintelligent, a brute enforcer. It is said the Golem successfully defended the Jewish community against its aggressors, but that as it grew larger and larger it began attacking Gentiles and terrifying Prague. In some tales the Golem turns even on the Jews and its own creator. Eventually the Maharal was forced to destroy the creature by wiping off the first letter written on its forehead, changing the word from Emet, or God's truth, to the word Met or death. However the body of the Golem was to be stored in the attic of the Synagogue in Prague. Perhaps the Golem still resides there today, waiting for the word, waiting to be summoned.

The illustration is from  Zwoje Scrolls

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 Dadaist poem, parody, cento, dirty joke, amusing  syllepsis, haiku, dirty haiku . . . to share. 

Japanese wildcat

Nearing extinction, according to National Geographic, but isn't it cool?

Lucy in the sky

Confirming what the Beatles always knew, astronomers have actually found a diamond in the sky - directly above Australia. It is the biggest known diamond in the universe, in fact.

According to American astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, a white dwarf star in the constellation of Centaurus, next to the Southern Cross, has been found to have a 3000-kilometre-wide core of crystallised carbon, or diamond.

It weighs 2.27 thousand trillion trillion tonnes - that's 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a 1 followed by 34 zeroes. The biggest earthly jewel is one of the British crown jewels, the 530-carat Star of Africa.

However, this cosmic jewel is hidden beneath a layer of hydrogen and helium gases, with the diamond core making up between 50 and 90 per cent of its mass. "It's the mother of all diamonds," said astronomer Travis Metcalfe, who led the team of researchers that studied the star.

"Some people refer to it as Lucy, in a tribute to the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

Known officially as BPM 37093, the star confirms a theory, first raised in the early 1960s, that cool white dwarfs should have a diamond core. -- The Age (2004)

In tangentially related news,

Miners in South Africa claim they have unearthed the biggest diamond in the world.

The giant 7,000 carat jewel is said to be the size of a coconut and worth at least £15million, reports the Daily Mirror.

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 Dadaist poem, parody, cento, dirty joke, amusing  syllepsis, haiku, dirty haiku . . . to share. 

Three ways of listening to Shakespeare

"It was a lover and his lass," by the Deller Consort, Maxine Sullivan, and Cleo Laine, via Minnesota Public Radio.

It's . . . alive

According to Live Science, "The oldest living thing has been discovered in the form of 600,000-year-old bacteria extracted from ice cores":

The trick, the discovery suggests, is for organisms to keep some metabolism going over the millennia, so that they can keep their DNA in repair while awaiting a more favorable environment in which to multiply. The other approach, complete dormancy, would cause DNA to be damaged and perhaps destroyed over such long periods of time.

The scientists isolated long chains of active DNA from the bacteria.