The Six Burgesses of Calais

The blog BibliOdyssey, one which awakes in me a sense of wonder, has compiled The Comic History of England. One of the engravings particularly calls a certain passage:

The Siege of Calais, or rather the blockade (for it was shut up both by land and sea), was the most memorable, as it withstood the efforts of Edward the Third a whole year, and was not terminated at last but by famine and extreme misery; the gallantry of Eustace de St. Pierre*, who first offered himself a victim for his fellow-citizens, has ranked his name with heroes.

* Eustace de St. Pierre (1287 - 1371), leader of the six burghers of Calais who, bareheaded and barefoot, with hopes around their necks, presented themselves to Edward III of England as hostages for the safety of Calais; they were pardoned at the instance of Queen Philippa.

From The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne

Hyper High-Tech

Walter Isaacson is optimistic about the "print" technology, in Edge's World's Question Center. And he is not veering towards a metaphor. Future electric energy outages will be more usual as no wasting water programs. So, books and moleskines should be the new trend in advanced technology. Everybody should stop the machines, sit onto a comfortable chair and, at a reach distance of natural light source, read post-post modern literature, as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (past-post-post, I admit) or the best sci-fi book ever written: Codex Seraphinianus.

Digression

What kind of motivation forces someone to spend hours looking for a supposedly Utrillo’s reproduction which has been shown in a scene of The Last Man on Earth (1964)? I was grasped by the remembrance feeling when I saw it at the first time behind Vicent Price… But the closest the free association of ideas could get was an Eglise de Pont-Saint-Martin: There is the spike, but not the two stories alley.

Nightmare City

Paul Theroux: In India a few months ago, as I was leaving my hotel in Chennai, I noticed a hotel employee shadowing me. He warned me that the sidewalks were so packed with people I would be swallowed up and stifled. He was right. And I was unable to cross the main street in Bangalore, a leafy city of under a million people in 1973 and now a hectically improvised sprawl of seven million. Mumbai’s population of nearly 20 million rivals that of São Paulo, Brazil, and Lagos, Nigeria — nightmare cities. (in The New York Times)

Brazilian Roots

This is the Spanish flu virus in 3D. Spanish? It was a Brazil fan?

Revelation

Daler Mehndi could be Dr Wickramasinghe's proof of concept...

From Kottke to SoAP

Anti-Semite and Control Freak

You are a new Latin American leftist? Then you better to recheck some of your myths. Begin with Salvador Allende, who was accused of being anti-Semite, mainly due to the fact of not taking in a famous Nazi. Thanks to Matt Webb, I’ve discovered that Allende was also a control freak, to the point of call Stratford Beer to develop the spurious Project Cybersyn.

This post is part of my new project: BLOG EVENTUALLY, DIE RESPECTABLY.

VW Bug is a Blobject!

Don Stewart, a visual artist, received a cease and desist letter from a law firm claiming to represent Volkswagen of America. You know why? He has made the following art over a VW Bug.


The VW Bug is an icon of America culture - it is an object. More precisely, it is a blobject. Here is a case of Copyright claim gone too far. Tooooooo far!

Toad Prince

Hey Mom! I'm inside a DECsystem-10, thanks to the PDP Planet, a Paul Allen project. The OS? It is a Tops-20 (Toad-1). It is very cool be personally inside of one of the machines described in the book "Hackers", by Steven Levy.

Unbelievable!

Real Fiction II

Life imitates art, as the evidences abound one more time. At least it is what one might deduct over the group of consultants established by FEMA "to complement traditional intelligence-based threat projections by taking an 'out of the box' approach that is achieved by drawing on the talents of a broad range of individuals, such as best-selling authors, academics, the military, and pop musicians." Well, the fictional character Turner belonged to a group exactly likewise...