Anathema

ἀνάθεμα originally 'an offering' often to the Lord which came to flip its meaning to indicate that which is evil, accursed and to be shunned - something (doctrine) or somebody (sinner) against which The Lord has emphatically turned his face. I was down with Pat the Salt on my regular Sunday gig recently and he remarked that one of his collateral relatives, also ancient, was down to his last penny. This chap had, apparently, battened on to his mother's purse while young and lived the life of Reilly while leaving nothing at all for the other members of his family, including the mother.  Pat said that he had cursed this chap "by bell, book and candle" over many years and was delighted to see this work finally coming to bear fruit.

The ecclesiastical turn of phrase tumbled me back 50+ years to the time when I attended Sunday service morning and evening in Canterbury Cathedral [cloisters L] while I was at school getting my very expensive education.  Those services lasted a long time for a small chap and many of us diverted ourselves by reading the obscure parts of the Book of Common Prayer - the GoTo document for everything about the Church of England.  The math-wonks would try to make sense of the tables for predicting the date of Easter far into the future. The logicians would try to find inconsistencies in the Table of Kindred and Affinity, which began "A man may not marry his Mother, Daughter, Father's Mother . . . " followed by a long list of female relatives.  Back in the enlightened days of 1662, it was okay for a chap to marry his brother, it seems.

Another rich seam of interest was the Service of Commination, regularly scheduled for Ash Wednesday but allowable at other times as directed by the local bishop.  Commination is a word rarely used today but it is basically bringing down anathema on certain categories of sinner. Basically cursing them out; which was,  for cruel young bravos, a welcome change from goody-two-shoes Christianity . I can do no better than give you the list of categorised black-hats:

CURSED is the man that maketh any carved or molten image, to worship it.
And the people shall answer and say: Amen.
Minister: Cursed is he that curseth his father or mother.
Answer: Amen.
Minister: Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour's land-mark.
Answer: Amen.
Minister: Cursed is he that maketh the blind to go out of his way.
Answer: Amen.
Minister: Cursed is he that perverteth the judgement of the stranger, the fatherless, and widow.
Answer: Amen.
Minister: Cursed is he that smiteth his neighbour secretly.
Answer: Amen.
Minister: Cursed is he that lieth with his neighbour's wife.
Answer: Amen.
Minister: Cursed is he that taketh reward to slay the innocent.
Answer: Amen.
Minister: Cursed is he that putteth his trust in man, and taketh man for his defence, and in his heart goeth from the Lord.
Answer: Amen.
Minister: Cursed are the unmerciful, fornicators, and adulterers, covetous persons, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards, and extortioners.
Answer: Amen.

Quite so! Especially the miserable baastid who removed my land-mark.

Later on the Commination Service, having fingered everyone who has done wrong, the congregation is invited to consider their own position. "Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness . . . But lo, thou requirest truth in the inward parts . . . Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean" Purgative? we don't use them so much nowadays; it is "an agent that produces a vigorous emptying of the bowels, more drastic than a laxative or aperient".  The natural consequence of this supernatural shit-storm will require "thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow". Thus the Service of Commination is a useful, if metaphorical, cross between a launderette and a car-wash.

Saturday Night Theatre 120817

I've scratched up some super filmlettes this last week and the Colour Supplement tomorrow is chocka, so I'll lurry them in today:

• Tashi and the monk. Saving the few on the edge of Tibet: a chance at the beginning of life
• Dull Men’s Club There's life in the old dog yet: collecting milk-bottles, post-boxes, roundabouts, bricks is okay
•  Withnail and Us retrospective documentary: the principals talk about The Film
•  Five minutes with Richard E Grant. There's more to the boy than Withnail
• What happens after Sumo Only the few make it big; the rest have to make it somewhere.

Nightingales

There's a chapter in Surely, you're joking Mr Feynman in which the great physicist addresses the Two Cultures conundrum. His painter pal Jerry holds that "Furthermore, scientists destroy the beauty of nature when they pick it apart and turn it into mathematical equations." but Feynman claims a deeper sense of awe because it drags in more than how a thing presents "It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is."  Rather wonderfully the two friends agree to trade trades and teach each other to open the doors to the non-overlapping magisteria. As it happens Jerry doesn't learn much physics but Feynman becomes an accomplished painter [to add to his already manifold talents grrrr].

I'm still reading Tim Dee's book The Running Sky [prev]. His April chapter is substantively about nightingales. For my sins I have a feed from www.quora.com where one of the FAQs is "What is the most British thing ever?" For me it might be writing an entire book about birds without a single use of the Latin name / Linnaean binomer. It's like those foreign johnnies aren't going to care which bird yer man is talking about; what's the french for twitcher? For the record nightingale is Luscinia megarhynchos or rossignol philomène / Nachtegaal / Nachtigall / sydnäktergal, its a sort of thrush with a notable song: no not that one; nor even that one; this one the birdsong.  A theme in Dee's book is assessing whether nature poets, notably John Clare [R before he went mad] the peasant poet, know whereof they write. He is certain that John Keats had listened with care and attention to the real thing before he wrote Ode to a Nightingale.  The cadence of the poem accords with Dee's own experience of hearing nightingales singing their hearts out in the gloaming. I wouldn't know about that because I have a tin ear and, for a biologist, a pathetic knowledge of birds but I do rate Keats. Indeed, when I was in my late teen wan poet phase looking for a garret in which to contract TB I would have gotten

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time 

I have been half in love with easeful Death, 

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, 

To take into the air my quiet breath; 

Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

tattooed on my chest, if I'd known where to find a tattoo parlour.

Dee appears a little conflicted. He tries to be terse, business-like and shipping forecast in his dealings with birds. "I banished all conversational allusion to the poetic bird when in front of the real thing, attempting to record my encounters only in the department of my mind stocked with metal filing cabinets: 21st May 1977, Ingelstone Common, Gloucestershire, wind light southerly force 2-3, 2230 Nightingale 3 H"  but it's hopeless and he continues "The H means heard. The anti-poetic minimalism didn't work. It didn't need to work. The nightingale doesn't require protection from poets. I realised I was only doing what Keats said I would. All variants of the bird - poems, musical settings, scientific investigations, plumage descriptions, song transcriptions, dreams - all our nightingales are are just accounts, the equivalent of a notebook entry, 3 H."  I find that profound, inclusive and quite humbling. As I've said before science is A way of knowing: not better than Keats just different.

I am become Mark

Interesting repost from Tywkiwdbi about charity-scamming.  Using the sprat of a $check$ you become caught as the mackerel that will keep being solicited`by the whores of the charity sector.  I've commented before about overhead in the fund-raising sector. You are exhorted to do some research before you Give: to ascertain how much of your donation goes to front-line services and how much filling the waist-bands of the CEO, the Board of Trustees, the Fund-raising Liaison Officer. We were naive enough to get some of our work published in what some have flagged as being a predatory journal - an academic journal which lives off the page-charges rather than for scientific credibility.

This has had the unfortunate effect of flagging my mail-box for "we'll have some of that money, stupid " campaigns. Targetting your mail-campaigns is less crucial now that you no longer have to pay to put a stamp on an envelope but being efficient must have some benefits. These solicitations have been quaintly illiterate and wonky on apostrophes and I will not be responding to them directly.  I enclose an editted list, so as to help you-the-reader get "your vast expertise and eminent contribution" Out There.

The breadth of subjects which some of these publications embrace is almost as butterfly-like as The Blob: aging, badgers, calendars, drugs, engineering, flags, genetics, haematology, islands, jokes, karyotypes; languages, maps . . .

• Dear Dr. Bob Scientist, Greetings for the day!! I am glad to reach you on behalf of World Geochemistry 2017 Organizing Committee, after having a view at your vast expertise and eminent contribution in the research relevant to Geochemistry. We urge you to speak . . . wide range of subjects, to foster learning, inspiration and wonder . . .Warm Regards,, James Michael, Program Manager 
• Dear Dr. Bob Scientist, Greetings of the day! In view of your past publications & research areas, we would like to invite you to the special edition on Community Medicine: Population Health. We are also receiving articles for our Special issues on Entertainment-Education, Community Mental Health Services, Cortisol, Upper respiratory tract infections, Undernutrition, Anaemias. Grace Christy. Jacobs Journal of Community Medicine
• Respected Bob Scientist, Hope this mail finds you in jovial mood! Dentistry [Journal Impact Factor: 1.08] Journal editorial team is in quest of clinical and research articles in subjects such as Prosthodontics, Operative dentistry, Implantology, Endodontics, Periodontics and Dental materials. Kindly let us know your interest towards our invitation. We are waiting for your response. Suruchi Ahuja, Journal Coordinator, Dentistry.
• Dear Colleague,  Greetings from Pollution Control 2017. We have attempted to contact you earlier regarding the Conference and as we are aware of your busy schedule and your engagement in many other activities, we would like to take the pleasure of contacting you again regarding registration towards Pollution Control 2017. It is to inform you that we are providing huge discount on registration packages. Katherine McKnight, Conference Manager.
• Dear Dr.Bob Scientist, I hope you are doing fine. I am pleased to introduce you to the Journal of “Archives in Chemical Research” .The journal is inviting eminent personnel’s for the contribution towards the upcoming Issue. Best Regards, S.Shreena, Journal coordinator, Archives in Chemical Research.
• Dear Author/Researcher, International Journal of Medical Research and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Invites you to submit your research paper for publishing . . . Editor in Chief:
• At least that's blunt and impersonal rather than faux-chummy.
• Attn: Bob. How are you today ?. I have an urgent transaction i want to disclose to you and which will be of great interest to both of us. Thanks. Mr. patel Hassu. READ BELOW CONTENT AND GET BACK TO ME. You may have heard about huge sums of money being stached away and some hidden in private houses,water tamks,warehouses and some shops in shopping malls in Nigeria, Recently Nigeria Government placed certain percentage etc etc.
• Dear Bob Scientist B, Greetings from the Journal of Climatology & Weather Forecasting. Please consider this friendly reminder! It’s a great privilege to write an expert like you about our journal ‘Journal of Climatology & Weather Forecasting’ comprehends focused and broad areas of research . . . Oceanography, Sea surface temperature anomalies, Flood, Thunderstorm, Radar reflectivity, Vertical wind shear . . .in Climate and Weather. With regards, Jerry Pinto, Journal Manager
• Dear Dr.Bob Scientist, Greetings from Advanced Materials 2017! We are happy to bring to your notice that Conference Series is hosting the “13th International Conference and Exhibition on Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology”. Regards, Karthik Daniel | Program Coordinator | Advanced Materials 2017.
• Dear Dr. , Hope you are doing great! We are pleased to inform you that we are launching “Special Issues” for the journal of Virology & Retrovirology Journal. We respectfully invite eminent expert like you to handle (as Editor) a special issue of your interest mentioned below. Looking for your response on publication and your recent project you are working on. Many thanks, Hinemoa Grace.
• Dear Hope this email finds you well! We are pleased to announce a Regular Edition on "Pollution". At the onset, we cordially invite you to submit a manuscript to the upcoming edition on “Pollution.” Jenny Meyer, Editorial Office- SM JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL TOXICOLOGY (SMJET)
• Dear Colleague, We are currently accepting submissions for Original Articles, Reviews, Short Communications, and Case Reports. We also have a Special Section that includes Letters, Experiences, Interviews and other type of publications from all fields of International Journal of Nursing Didactics (IJND), Journal of Medical Biomedical and Applied Sciences (JMBAS). Best regards, Dr Vivek Daniel Editor.
• Dear Bob Scientist, On behalf of Editorial Board of the British Biomedical Bulletin, I invite you to submit a manuscript to be considered for upcoming issue. The journal aims to publish articles in all aspects of research on Women’s Health, Issues and Care that include topics such as Cell Biology, Developmental Biology, Genetics, Computational Studies, Biophysics, Immunology, Translational Medicine Biomedical Research, Physiology, Pharmacology, Biochemistry, Personalized Medicine, Surgical Instrument etc.
• Dear Dr.Bob Scientist, The Committee welcomes papers on Journal of Aging Research And Healthcare. Manuscripts submitted before July 23, 2017 will be published within in 14 days. Each invited author should make every effort to present his/her paper in this journal by presenting the best innovative article.With warm regards, John Abraham, Editorial Office, OAP 616 Corporate Way, 

This extra traffic is not enough traffic to annoy me and it would be easier to delete this nonsense quietly. But there is a research project here trying to identify, by house style "Greetings of the day!!!!" etc., the journals which come from the same stable. You may imagine that the corporate overheads are less than the "National Cancer Research Institute": probably no more than a hard-working entrepreneur in Bangalore with a cousin in the US who is prepared to check the PO Box in Austin TX which at rare intervals receives a manuscript. You should no more believe that Mr Enterprise O'Bangalore (BA Bombay, failed) is called Grace or Katherine than my call-centred pal who identified herself as Attracta Looney. I guess on the face of it, I'd rather become a Mark for these wannabee Maxwells than like J. Robert Oppenheimer "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds"

Lack for nothing

In the Spring, at one of the weekly Heritage Group meetings in Tramore, Pat the Salt and I were told that the Waterford slang for a girlfriend is ‘Lack’. Everyone around the table, men and women, seems to be agreed on that. It was news to me, because I'm younger and not Waterford. One of the Heritageers found an article in an antient newspaper claiming that the term derives from the Russian word for ‘girl’ or girlfriend. It all stems from the days 100+ years ago when Waterford pig-processers were shipped to Czarist Russia as experts and brought that term back with them. Lack seems a long way from Подруга = Podruga, the Google-translate for girlfriend or amie. But my network is wide and I put the problem to Sergej one of my ex-students, an ethnic Russian with a Lithuanian passport who was often the smartest man [including me] in the room in class at The Institute. His reply was not absolutely negative but not wholly convinced / convincing either.
L, A, S (because C in Russian gives sound S), and K, it will be first four letters from the word ласковая = laskovaya - “sweet, soft, etc”.

And that's where I had to leave it in May.  Three months later, following the projects of Michael Fortune folksie film-maker from Co Wexford, I came across a few of his videos of Wexford travellers speaking De Cant or Gammon. This is a cryptolect spoken by the travelling community of Ireland who share neither genetics nor history with the Romani / Gitane / Gypsy people. There are just some commonalities with roamin' life-style and a common experience of distrust / hostility from the settled community. It is a topic fraught with political and linguistic problems starting with what it is currently okay to call them a) as insiders and b) as outsiders.  In my life-time the polite form of description of Americans with a better tan has been [I think! - any of the following terms could be now or have ever been deeply offensive to someone] negroes, coloured people, blacks and Afro-americans. It is now streng verboten to refer to travellers as tinkers; and there are many and worse terms that I cannot write down.

ANNyway here is a very brief lexicon for Shelta / De Cant / Gammon
Feen = man
Byor  = woman; also spelled beeor, beure, beoir
Golya = child
Sooblik = boy
Lackin = girl
Conundrum solved. The plain people of Waterford are unknowingly speaking Shelta: the language of the despised and dispossessed. The word Shelta is probably derived from Irish siúladh = those who walk. And the plain people of Cork use beoir and feen in their argot.

Hokusai

I've spent my whole life trying to get an education: if you start off on that journey, I guess it never finishes. Like for my home-educated daughters, the coverage is patchy: stronger on women in science or islands than on dinosaurs or dragoons.  My father was a painter with a better eye for landscape than for the human figure but I was/am utter crap at painting anything more intricate than a fence. Part of this is because I live in my head and draw how things must be rather than how they actually look: my buckets have flat bottoms and circular tops. I know nothing of art but I know what I like:  Dial M for Mondriaan - Matisse - Munch - I'm only here because I googled Hokusai parody and got the meld of Hokusai, Munch and van Gogh [R]. The Great Wave off Kanagawa part of the collage is perhaps the only work by Hokusai which is widely recognised in The West. I had it as a poster on my wall when I was a student but my eye was so superficial that I didn't twig that one of the waves was Mt. Fuji.

I'm on a Hokusai jag today because last week I had a hot date with The Beloved at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Castle, where there is an exhibition The Art of Friendship Japanese Surimono Prints until the end of August. Hokusai features extensively in the prints on display but I find I prefer the [more accessible] hand of his contemporary/teacher Totoya Hokkei. Early 19thC Japan, like early 19thC Ireland, was a grossly unequal society and the highly educated idle rich exchanged New Year gifts with each other; often as illustrations counter-poised with poetry. Your status was commensurate with the fame of the artist and poet you could commission. I show [L] an example Dancer with hand puppet of horse CBL J 2234  from the exhibition catalog. The reproduction quality is lousy but if you look at the blown up inset, just above the two white lines of the bridle you can see the characters for 二 2 四 4 七 7 九 9 十 10 and 十二 12 below the symbol 大 [large]. This was essential information for organising you tea-parties, ikebana and visits to your favorite geisha during the coming year because it told you which of the lunar months were set for 30 days [大] and which for 29. With everyone being super sophisticated you wouldn't want your servants to be privy to this information as they tidied up your papers.  It was as if Tom Cruise commissioned a short-print-run graphic novel for Christmas with pics by Alan Moore and text by Neil Gaiman.  This is terribly appealing to the puzzlist in me: I don't know any artists or poets so I'll have to generate something really obscure myself for next year's New Year cards.

I'll share with you another piece of clever clogsery in CBL J 2169 The dry-shallows shell = minasegai [pic]  a print by Katsushika Hokusai and poems by Tsuru Hinako and Yomo Utagaki Mugao, one of which goes

mimachi kara  

nagusami katera

sebumi shite

kasumi no umi ni

hitohi asoban

waiting for the snake / to beguile the time / I wade the shallows / of the sea of mist / and enjoy the day.  The reddened first syllables of each line form an acrostic for the name of the illustrated shell mi-na-se-gai.

Hokusai is quoted as saying something inspiring for those too old to win the Fields medal: "I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature." I am firmly of the opinion that old chaps like me should retire early to make room for the younger generation. But when I articulate this, people say "Oh no, your experience is such an valuable asset". True, dat and Hokusai seems to say that, for things which matter, only experience can generate true depth of sensibility. But our ould-fella experience and, well, wisdom, is valuable but not invaluable; new ideas matter too.

Self love

We have Dau.II staying for a few days [home is where they have to take you in, when you have to go] which is pleasing. In consultation with her sister, she made us all sit in a row on the sofa last night to watch What we Do in The Shadows [trailer] a mockumentary in the Spinal Tap tradition which follows the trials and tribulations of a group of vampires sharing a house in Wellington NZ. It features as writer, actor and producer Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords: an acquired taste which I share. One of the funny scenes in WWDITS hinges on the fact that the boys need to primp themselves up before going out on the town but, being vampires, the mirrors don't work; so they have to help each other out as to hair-style and costumes. Me, I'm a vampire with the mirrors - I just never look in one except on the rare occasions [full moon coming up] when I am trimming my facial hair. But I know people, men and women both, who spend a chunk of each day occupying the bathroom checking that their eyebrows are still present.

Two snippets which recently appeared on the blogosphere suggest that I should really spend more time in front of the mirror to find attractive people to hang out with. The first is a study, originally from Plos One in a paper called Is Beauty in the Face of the Beholder? Here a bunch of couples were asked to rate how attractive they found photos of their partner. The researchers photoshopped the images to include an increasing percentage of the viewers own facial features. The answer is that you like your partner best if they have about 20% You about their image. Like Goldilocks - not too much because we're not into incest but not random because that would be miscegenation. The scale on which these two sins are balanced varies according to cliché - backwoods swampies are always shagging their sisters but lynching any tanned chaps who want to take those sisters to the store for a soda.  I got annoyed that the optimal % similarity is reported as 22% when there is a detail-swamping amount of variation in the data: better to call it a fifth 1/5 or 20%.

This basic idea was picked up by a bunch of tech whizzes at National Geographic who used covert surveillance cameras to capture faces and photoshop them, on the fly in real time, into test images on a bank of ipads. The punters rated images that incorporated some of their own features more highly that unretouched pictures. What disturbs me most about this is the technological possibilities in a world where CCTV cameras watch our every move [more in the UK than any other country by all accounts]. The Nat Geog study implies that operatives can, on the fly in real time, modify the CCTV footage of a robbery so that the perp gets a darker complexion. The pictures on the left are from a Buzzfeed study where the same woman had her self photoshopped by experts across the world to establish Global beauty standards in 25 countries. There's a bit of cliché here too: guess which countries cover those naked shoulders. But there are also some useful controls where different photoshoppers from the same country have come up with a different gestalt for beauty. I guess there is something in these investigations but we really need to polish up our crap-detector when assessing the results: reject studies with inadequate controls or too small a sample.

A rather different example of self-love popped up in a featured article in Wikipedia a couple of days ago: The Letter Name Effect. The science of letter preference started out in the world of marketing. If you want to sell more laundry detergent what letters should you have on the packet: is it better to call the stuff Swamp, Surf, or Sodium-triphosphate? It turned out that the letter prefs varied according to whether they appeared in the punters own name: the initials, yes, but also the letters that came in other places in the name. Jozef Nuttin, from Belgium, started the scientific ball rolling in 1985 when he noticed that he preferred car licence plates which included J, Z, F and N. That study has been replicated numerous times, with different alphabets, in different places. The effect is sufficiently strong that it has been used as a measure of self-esteem: if you don't rate yourself you don't recognise your initials. Apply skepticism to these tail-wagging-the-dog meta-studies.