Spooky Times

Posted on October 24, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

It’s that spooky time of the year here in North America. Folks in the U.S. alone will be spending close to $13 billion on holiday decorations, costumes, candy, and parties. I recently spent an afternoon visiting a nearby town that goes all out decorating homes and yards for Halloween. My little village is inundated on Halloween evening with young folks going door to door trick or treating for candy. Some of my neighbors spend hundreds of dollars on candy to distribute to the kids. We’re lucky that we live on the edge of town and have a very long driveway so we don’t get the hordes of costumed holiday makers.

Here’s  a collection of cute and quirky animated GIFs that all bring the Halloween spirit to life. Full of dripping blood, skeletons and ghosts, you’re sure to get a chuckle out of the holiday themed design.

Posted in Animation, Art, Music, USA | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Airport Affairs

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

As international airports go, New Zealand’s Dunedin International is a very small affair. I felt quite foolish showing up two hours ahead of time for my flight from Dunedin to Auckland since there was just one other flight that morning and combined check-in and security took all of ten minutes. So, I was tickled by the recent news story about the facility’s crackdown on lingering drop-offs.

A sign erected in the airport’s drop-off zone warns: “Max hug time 3 minutes. For fonder farewells please use the car park.”

Dunedin Airport chief executive Dan De Bono told national broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ) that warning messages at airport drop-off zones can be “quite intense” and include threats to clamp wheels or impose fines – something the airport wanted to avoid.

“We’re trying to have fun with it. It is an airport and those drop off locations are common locations for farewells,” De Bono told RNZ, adding that too many people were taking too long in the drop-off zone.

“There’s no space left for others,” he said. “It’s about enabling others to have hugs.”

 

Posted in Air Travel, Public Transport, Tourism | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Trans-Global Express

Posted on October 22, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

If you love train travel as much as I do, I’m certain that you will enjoy this charming, award-winning film about international train travel. Alan Dransfield had an inspiration for “Trans-Global Express” and here is his story:

“A tapestry of clips woven together during a overland journey from Hull to Valdivosko and back – observing and mapping cultural changes step by step as I strut through the cabins of trains. That’s right – I was going to strap a Gopro to my crotch.
Colours, faces, activities, language, attitudes, fashion and even train designs would represent the geographical locations I was to pass through.
As it turned out, the two years and 25000km of filming was only the beginning of this journey – it took a further seven years to pull it all together into the final film, oh la la!
But here we are – and it just won a bloody film festival =D
It’s like some huge loop has been closed – receiving acknowledgment for my efforts from such an awesome event makes it all worth while.”

 

Posted in Asia, Europe, Film, Public Transport, Tourism | Tagged | 1 Comment

Frankenstein Season

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

The Frankenstein Varorium is an online tool which allows the user to explore the iconic Science Fiction novel’s text through its various incarnations, allowing the user to select individual passages and see how they have evolved through different revisions of the work. “In the case of Frankenstein, the substantive changes that MWS made in her revised edition are so extensive that many teachers and students of Frankenstein consider 1818 and 1831 as two different novels.” Scholars do not agree on a single authoritative text, though the 1818 edition became more available from the 1990s onward in teaching editions, reflecting increasing interest in the earlier versions of the text. With this project, we offer a way to explore not just two but five distinct moments in the novel’s writing and re-writing, and they do not proceed in orderly stages. The following diagram summarizes the relationships among the manuscript and published versions of Frankenstein composed between 1816 and 1831 that we worked with for this variorum project.”  One does not need to be an English lit major or Sci-Fi fan to really want to get deep into Frankenstein,

Following are details on the origins of each text represented in this Frankenstein Variorum:

  • MS The manuscript notebooks at the Bodleian Library thought to be a “fair copy” of the novel preparing it for publication, drafted in 1816-1817. Facsimile views and manuscript encoding of each page surface are provided by the Shelley-Godwin Archive (S-GA), and the TEI encoding from this project provides one of the five bases for our machine-assisted collation. The Variorum Viewer provides deep links into each page of the intricate S-GA edition.
  • 1818 The first anonymous publication of the novel, published by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones in London, 1818. We worked with the 1990s HTML code of The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition of the 1818 text, transformed it to XML and corrected it against a photo facsimile of the 1818 edition so its markup would form the basis for locating chapter and paragraph boundaries in our collation.
  • Thomas MWS’s handwritten edits and marginal notes inscribed in a copy of the 1818 edition that MWS left in Italy with Mrs. Thomas nearly a year after the death of Percy Shelley in July 1822 and before she returned to England in August 1823. It is now stored at The Morgan Library & Museum. As we have indicated, since the notes in this book were not available to MWS later, the “Thomas copy” represents a divergence in the version history and raises interesting questions of how much it differs from her later revisions.
  • 1823 Inspired by the success of Presumption! or, The Fate of Frankenstein, the first staged melodrama adaptation of his daughter’s novel, William Godwin prepared a lightly edited version of the 1818 text for publication. Godwin’s 1823 edition, prepared before his daughter returned to England and without her assistance, is the first time the name of the author, “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,” appears on the the title page. With the help of Carnegie Mellon library with OCR page images, we prepared the 1823 XML text for incorporation in the Frankenstein Variorum.
  • 1831 MWS heavily revised the novel by 1831, and this revised version was first published in volume 9 of Bentley’s Standard Series of Novels (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1831. As with the 1818 edition, we again worked with the code of The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition for preparing our XML text and corrected that text by consulting a photo facsimile.

You may access and download the texts in various stages of preparation for this edition from the Data page of this website and from our GitHub repository for the project.

 

Posted in Books, ebooks, Europe, History, Libraries, Writing | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

“Get on the stick”

Posted on October 20, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

While I was watching the new Marvel spin-off TV series “Agatha All Along”, which revolves around a coven of witches, I wondered when witches were first depicted flying on broomsticks. Thanks to the net the answer involved the image pictured above, Witches illustrated in Martin Le Franc’s ‘Le Champion des Dames’ (1451) (via Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF)/Wikimedia).

The visual of the witch on a broomstick is so ubiquitous as to be benign. Before the Wicked Witch of the West or Harry Potter took flight on the spindly cleaning tool, the image first appeared in the 15th century. Two women in marginal illustrations of the 1451 edition of French poet Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des Dames (The Defender of Ladies), a manuscript now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), are soaring, one on a stick, the other on a broom.

According to Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History, edited by University of Pennsylvania history professors Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, Le Champion des Dames has “the first such illustration in the pictorial history of witchcraft.” Le Franc’s long poem about virtuous women is interrupted by a discussion of witchcraft, and the covered heads of the two women marks them as Waldensians. This Christian movement emerged in the 12th-century. With its tenet that any member could be a priest, even a woman, and perform sacraments and preach, the bloody ire of the Catholic Church soon followed. That these heretics would also meddle with the supernatural was not a leap, but why the broomstick?

Dylan Thuras at Atlas Obscura wrote that the “broom was a symbol of female domesticity, yet the broom was also phallic, so riding on one was a symbol of female sexuality, thus femininity and domesticity gone wild.” The two women in Le Champion des Dames importantly don’t appear deformed or grotesque, they are ordinary; their corruption cannot be visually perceived. And pagan rituals before the 15th century had involved phallic forms, so the shape of the broomstick between a woman’s legs had both a sexual and spiritually deviant meaning to the Church.

Yet it was racier than that. Richard Cavendish’s 1970 An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural cites a man, Guillaume Edelin, who confessed to flying on a broom in 1453 as the first known reference to the act. Just a few years later, in 1456, emerged the mention of “flying ointment.” Either given by the devil or crafted by a witch, the potion allowed a human to take flight, likely for a trip to the Witches’ Sabbath.

But the image of the witch on the broomstick combined anxieties on women’s sexuality, drug use, and religious freedom into one enduring myth.

via Hyperallergic

 

 

Posted in Animation, Art, Books, Europe, Film, History | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Geography Is Destiny

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

I am an open Geography nerd and have been since childhood. One of my most treasured possessions as a kid was my globe. And, my favorite game was actually called “Geography”. So, it will come as no surprise that I am a big time fan of the brilliant YouTube Channel “Geography Now”.

The educational and entertaining channel was launched 10 years ago this month by Paul “Barbs” Barbato. A longtime geography nerd who was disappointed by the lack of country-by-country educational content on the platform, his Geography Now! series set the ambitious goal of making one in-depth episode for all 193 UN-recognized sovereign nations. Following a basic four-part structure (Physical and Political Geography, Demographics, and “The Friendzone” for foreign relations), the early episodes slowly expanded in size and scope over time, incorporating motion graphics, increasingly absurd vexillological running gags, myriad side topics, faux-country April Fools, fan content from “Geograpeeps”, special correspondents and history skits from eclectic friends from around the world, and even on-location specials in select countries — deep dives into culture whose breezy humor revealed a deep love for the world and all the people in it.

Now, ten years after it started, Barbs has released the final episode in the series: Zimbabwe. While he’s implied the channel may evolve into a travel-focused one (perhaps modeled on his moving “Letter to…” series of travelogues), for now you can check out the completed A-Z playlist on YouTube to experience the impressive journey for yourself.

Posted in Africa, Asia, Canada, Europe, Maps, Middle East, South America, Tourism, USA | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Kafka for Kids

Posted on October 18, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

 

Posted in Art, Books | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Do we ever really learn from history

Posted on October 17, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

LEARNING FROM HISTORY

David Ferry

They said, my saints, my slogan-sayers sang,
Be good, my child, in spite of all alarm.
They stood, my fathers, tall in a row and said,
Be good, be brave, you shall not come to harm.
I heard them in my sleep and muttering dream,
And murmuring cried, How shall I wake to this?
They said, my poets, singers of my song,
We cannot tell, since all we tell you is
But history, we speak but of the dead.
And of the dead they said such history
(Their beards were blazing with the truth of it)
As made of much of me a mystery.
Posted in Books, Europe, History, Writing | Tagged | Leave a comment

Every October it becomes important, no, necessary

Posted on October 16, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

Leaves by Lloyd Schwartz

                         1

Every October it becomes important, no, necessary

to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded

by leaves turning; it’s not just the symbolism,

to confront in the death of the year your death,

one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony

isn’t lost on you that nature is most seductive

when it’s about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its

incipient exit, an ending that at least so far

the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain)

have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe

is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception

because of course nature is always renewing itself—

the trees don’t die, they just pretend,

go out in style, and return in style: a new style.

2

Is it deliberate how far they make you go

especially if you live in the city to get far

enough away from home to see not just trees

but only trees? The boring highways, roadsigns, high

speeds, 10-axle trucks passing you as if they were

in an even greater hurry than you to look at leaves:

so you drive in terror for literal hours and it looks

like rain, or snow, but it’s probably just clouds

(too cloudy to see any color?) and you wonder,

given the poverty of your memory, which road had the

most color last year, but it doesn’t matter since

you’re probably too late anyway, or too early—

whichever road you take will be the wrong one

and you’ve probably come all this way for nothing.

3

You’ll be driving along depressed when suddenly

a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through

and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably

won’t last. But for a moment the whole world

comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—

red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,

gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations

of burning. You’re on fire. Your eyes are on fire.

It won’t last, you don’t want it to last. You

can’t stand any more. But you don’t want it to stop.

It’s what you’ve come for. It’s what you’ll

come back for. It won’t stay with you, but you’ll

remember that it felt like nothing else you’ve felt

or something you’ve felt that also didn’t last.

Posted in Books, Writing | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Wildlife

Posted on October 15, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

I was captivated by Wildlife Photographer of the Year Shane Gross’s amazing image above of tadpoles. Like many young lads, I often would wade into murky creeks and ponds to collect jars of tadpoles to examine. Gross won the title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year with the shot after he snorkeled for hours before obtaining this photograph, which highlights both the young toads and their environment.

Check out Smithsonian Magazine: You can see 15 winning images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.

 

Posted in Photography, USA | Tagged , | 1 Comment