Category Archive 'Uncategorized'
15 Sep 2022
The above vissage is said to be the death mask of a never-identified young girl found drowned in the Seine in Paris in the late 1880s. The pathologist in the Paris morgue, the story goes, was so taken by her beauty that he preserved her features with a plaster death mask.
Wikipedia:
In the following years, numerous copies were produced. The copies quickly became a fashionable, albeit morbid, fixture in Parisian Bohemian society. Albert Camus and others[who?] compared her enigmatic smile to that of the Mona Lisa, evoking much speculation as to what clues the seemingly happy expression, perceived as eerily serene, on her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society.
Critic Al Alvarez wrote in his book on suicide, The Savage God: “I am told that a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on her.” According to Hans Hesse of the University of Sussex, Alvarez reports, “the Inconnue became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot was for the 1950s. He thinks that German actresses such as Elisabeth Bergner modeled themselves on her. She was finally displaced as a paradigm by Greta Garbo.”
L’Inconnu has additionally been referenced repeatedly in European and American fiction, in film, in ballet, and in music.
And finally,
The face of the unknown woman was used for the head of the first aid mannequin Resusci Anne. It was created by Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal in 1958 and was used starting in 1960 in numerous CPR courses. For this reason, the face has been called “the most kissed face” of all time.”
15 Sep 2022
Isaac Levitan, Autumn. Hunter, 1880, Tver regional picture gallery, Tver.
HT: Sea Run.
14 Sep 2022
Last November, the information came out in connection with a secret internal report that Yale now had more administrators than faculty or students:
The numbers:
4,664 undergraduate students
4,962 faculty
5,042 administrators
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“I think we don’t yet have a Vice President for the rights of the left-handed, but I haven’t checked this month.” — Professor Leslie Brisman.
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The report discussing this astounding proliferation of bureaucracy (and its negative impact on teaching) was never released and quickly swept deeply under the Woodbridge Hall rug.
But these things have a way of coming out, despite coverup efforts and, what do you know? somebody evidently leaked the damaging report to the alumni reform organization “Fight for Yale.”
Sample:
“[T]here are currently 31 people with the title of ‘Vice President’ (or ‘Associate Vice President’) at Yale and also 7 with the title of ‘Vice Provost’; this may be compared to only 5 Vice Presidents in 2003-4 and 14 in 2012-13. Table 4 provides some
other counts of people with titles with the words ‘student affairs,’ ‘student engagement,’ ‘student life,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘strategic initiatives,’ or ‘sustainability’ in their job titles. …”
13 Sep 2022
This, this! is running for the Senate from Pennsylvania.
John Fetterman’s last name sounds like the name of a good old Pennsylvania Dutchman, but take one look at him. He’s got a skinhead and a billy goat goatee. His arms are covered with tattoos. And he’s out there giving speeches, running for the highest office in the Commonwealth, wearing workout clothes. The SOB looks like a recently released brig rat running for head of the local outlaw biker chapter, not for Senator.
Unbelievable! Who would vote for that?
On top of everything else, he’s a Gen X-er who is really more like a millennial. He sponged off his parents until he was 49 (he’s now 53), and like fellow leftist Bernie Sanders from Vermont, he went from being a bum to being a town mayor, after winning the primary by one vote and then running as as a democrat unopposed.
Even better, running in Pennsylvania, he’s pro Gun Control, wants to release more felons from jail, and he hates fracking. You can imagine his position on Coal.
Fetterman belongs in California, not PA.
12 Sep 2022
Babylon Bee:
LONDON — In his first official royal decree, King Charles has replaced Meghan and Harry in the line of succession with two of the late Queen’s corgis.
“Fluffy here shall immediately assume the title of Duke,” said Charles, presenting the corgi with a scepter. “There now! Who’s a good future King of England?”
The nation of England erupted into celebration upon hearing the news. “After the sadness of the past week, it feels good to have something to be happy about,” said citizen Gerald Funderburk. “The thought of the monarchy falling into the hands of Harry or Meghan, those blithering idiots…we can all rest a little easier tonight knowing the kingdom will be in good hands. Or paws.”
RTWT
12 Sep 2022
Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, Entry of Pope Urban II into Toulouse in 1096, 1900, Capitole de Toulouse.
12 Sep 2022
The Daily Mail reports:
The royal beekeeper – in an arcane tradition thought to date back centuries – has informed the hives kept in the grounds of Buckingham Palace and Clarence House of the Queen’s death.
And the bees have also been told, in hushed tones, that their new master is now King Charles III.
The official Palace beekeeper, John Chapple, 79, told MailOnline how he travelled to Buckingham Palace and Clarence House on Friday following news of The Queen’s death to carry out the superstitious ritual.
He placed black ribbons tied into bows on the hives, home to tens of thousands of bees, before informing them that their mistress had died and that a new master would be in charge from now on.
He then urged the bees to be good to their new master – himself once famed for talking to plants.
The strange ritual is underpinned by an old superstition that not to tell them of a change of owner would lead to the bees not producing honey, leaving the hive or even dying.
RTWT
Telling the Bees, Wikipedia entry.
11 Sep 2022
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Let’s compare service round bullet sizes.
The AR-15’s .223 Remington cartridge (the virtually identical civilian version of the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge) fires a 60 grain bullet at roughly 3000 feet per second.
The .30-06 Springfield’s (used in WWI and WWII) 110 grain service round bullet was fired at 3400 feet per second. A deer hunter is likely to use a 150 grain bullet (2900 feet per second) or a 180 grain bullet (2700 feet per second).
Correction: US service rounds were primarily 150 gr. I guess the 110 gr. surplus ammo I remembered must have been from some other country. Thanks for the correction in Comments. Complete .30-06 data here.
11 Sep 2022
CBS News:
Credit card industry representatives have cleared the way for a new means of tracking firearm and ammunition purchases, a move that supporters say will help flag suspicious sales and reduce gun crime.
The International Standards Organization, which sets rules across the financial services industry, agreed to create a new merchant category code for gun and ammunition retailers at a meeting this week, and announced the decision Friday. The decision came amid mounting pressure on credit card companies by Democrats in Congress who urged the code’s creation.
Merchant category codes are made up of four digits and are used across all sorts of industries as a means to classify retailers, while not revealing individual product purchases. Credit card companies currently lump firearm retailers in with other outlets, classifying them as either “5999: Miscellaneous retail stores” or “5941: Sporting Goods Stores.”
With a new code for firearms merchants, potentially suspicious purchasing patterns could be flagged to law enforcement — much the same way banks and credit unions made more than 1.4 million suspicious activity reports in 2021 for other types of transactions that might suggest anything from identity theft to terrorist financing. …
Mastercard, American Express and Visa initially resisted the creation of a merchant category code for gun and ammunition retailers according to an investigation by CBS News in June.
RTWT
Leftist members of Congress have funding to hire lots of staff, and they are obviously good at putting very smart, intensely ideologically-engagée activists on the payroll who leave no stone unturned in the effort to disarm then socialize and control all of us.
11 Sep 2022
Apart from the gratuitous (and blindly partisan) dumping on Trump, Andrew was in his best form, doing a fine job of eulogizing Queen Elizabeth that even we rebellious colonials can appreciate.
Elizabeth Windsor was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human — for the rest of her life.
The immense difficulty of this is proven by the failure of almost every other member of her family — including her husband — to pull it off. We know her son King Charles III’s views on a host of different subjects, many admirable, some cringe-inducing. We know so much of the psychological struggles of Diana; the reactionary outbursts of Philip; the trauma of Harry; the depravity of Andrew; the agonies of Margaret. We still know nothing like that about the Queen. Because whatever else her life was about, it was not about her.
Part of the hard-to-explain grief I feel today is related to how staggeringly rare that level of self-restraint is today. Narcissism is everywhere. Every feeling we have is bound to be expressed. Self-revelation, transparency, authenticity — these are our values. The idea that we are firstly humans with duties to others that will require and demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings seems archaic. Elizabeth kept it alive simply by example.
With her death, it’s hard not to fear that so much she exemplified — restraint, duty, grace, reticence, persistence — are disappearing from the world. As long as she was there, they were at the center of an idea of Britishness that helped define the culture at its best. Perhaps the most famous woman in the world, she remained a sphinx, hard to decipher, impossible to label. She was not particularly beautiful or dashing or inspiring. She said nothing surprising. She was simply the Queen. She showed up. She got on with it. She was there. She was always there.
Whatever else happened to the other royals, she stayed the same. And whatever else happened in Britain — from the end of Empire to Brexit — she stayed the same. This is an achievement of nearly inhuman proportions, requiring discipline beyond most mortals. Think of a year, 1992, in which one son, Andrew, divorced, a daughter-in-law, Sarah Ferguson was seen cavorting nude in the tabloids, a daughter, Anne, separated, another son’s famously failed marriage, Charles’, dominated the headlines, and your house burns down. Here is how Her Majesty “vented”:
1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis.’
Dry, understated, with the only vivid phrase ascribed to a correspondent. Flawless.
She was an icon, but not an idol. An idol requires the vivid expression of virtues, personality, style. Diana was an idol — fusing a compelling and vulnerable temperament with Hollywood glamor. And Diana, of course, was in her time loved far more intensely than her mother-in-law; connected emotionally with ordinary people like a rockstar; only eventually to face the longterm consequences of that exposure and crumble under the murderous spotlight of it all.
Elizabeth never rode those tides of acclaim or celebrity. She never pressed the easy buttons of conventional popularity. She didn’t even become known for her caustic wit like the Queen Mother, or her compulsively social sorties like Margaret. The gays of Britain could turn both of these queens into camp divas. But not her. In private as in public, she had the kind of integrity no one can mock successfully.
You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.
RTWT
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