Scribal Terror

Albino whale shark

Beautiful! Now that's a great white shark . . . From the Daily Mail via Dorkafork.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little BatLewis Carroll

 

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

How I wonder what you're at!

Up above the world you fly,

Like a teatray in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle—

Scribal points for explaining what made hatters mad.

JWebb responds:

I do not know from hats,
or their millinery mental vapors.
Nor do I know of mercury gas
but for compact fluorescent tapers.
But I do know a bit about bats,
and their nocturnal feeding capers.
For their copious digested gnats,
require sharp guano scrapers.

Homer's eclipse

In the Odyssey, Homer refers to an eclipse that presages the massacre of Penelope's suitors. According to Scientific American:

In the 1920s researchers speculated that Homer might have had a real eclipse in mind, after calculating that a total solar eclipse (in which the moon blocks out the sun) would have been visible on April 16, 1178 B.C. over the Ionian Islands, where Homer's poem was set. The idea languished, however, because the first writings on Greek astronomy did not come until centuries later.

If these findings are correct, they testify once again (see the location of Troy, etc.) to the astonishing power of the oral formulaic tradition, the means by which preliterate societies pass on their legends and histories from generation to generation. The Odyssey is generally dated to about 800 BC; the eclipse would have occurred three centuries earlier.   

Air on a G string

Phillip Achille on harmonica.

My favorite demonstration sport

Too bad I wasn't around for the 1912 Olympics. Of course, I'd be dead by now, but it would have been worth it just to see how this was done. (Via Manolo's Food Blog)

Carmen on trombone and trumpet

With Christian Lindberg (trombone) and Hakan Hardenberger (trumpet)

Beautiful ukelele

"Beautiful" and ukelele" are words you don't often hear together . . . but Jake Shimabukuro makes it happen. Via Japundit

Fashion victims of the ancient world

Here's how Herodotus (a Greek historian of the fifth century BC) sums up the Persian penchant for adopting other people's customs:

The Persians welcome foreign customs more than any other people. For instance, they decided that Median dress was more beautiful than their own, and so they wear it. They wear Egyptian breastplates for their wars. Whenever they learn of employments of all sorts, the adopt them for their own practice. From the Greeks they have learned to lie with boys. (Book I, sec. 135, translation by David Grene)

Nokulunga Buthelezi can move

Aurora australis

Near the McMurdo Station and Scott Base in Antarctica, from Antzartica.