History – Page 5 – Allegra Sloman's blog

Supplemental: Getting on and staying on are two different things.

On another subject entirely = with Scott to the Pole.

Today in history

Drinking at a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, Jack McCall notices Wild Bill Hickok playing poker at a corner table. Then he calmly walks over to the table and blows a wide hole in the back of Hickok’s head with a .45 revolver. The professional gambler and onetime lawman was holding a pair of Aces and a pair of eights, now known as the “Dead Man’s Hand.”

I am dancing in Tahrir Square

Thanks to the magic of the internet.

Oh people of Egypt, tell the army that you’ll split the difference of all the money you recover from Mubarak. That man needs to sit in front of a judge.

Last night at the Vogue, Eno gave an illustrated talk (with some truly charming and useful on the spot illustrations) about art and his relationship to it. A number of interesting points came up, most of which will probably lose their sharpness for you because they were filtered through me.

He said that English is missing a word. We had theatre, and then we had film, and those two disciplines are quite separate. They have their own words and their own understandings both aesthetic and technical. When performance music split from recorded music we got no such division in words, which is a loss. I was immediately thinking about filk, and the emphasis on performance. Anyway, he believes that they are two different disciplines and should be as distinct as theatre and film in how we speak of them as well.

Another thing he said is that art has been shaped very dramatically by three pivotal changes in the human world view, at least as expressed as an outgrowth of ‘Western thought’.

One was Copernicus; hey guess what, we’re not the center of the universe. One was Darwin; we are at the top of the food chain because of evolution, not God. The last was the development of complexity theory, including cellular automata which allow you to see without equivocation how complexity can proceed – in fact, must proceed – from extremely simple rules.

At the end he talked about how his work slides along the Control at one end and Surrender at the other end Axis. Once again, a good working image.

He talked for two hours and Jeff and I came home.

How John would have loved this map.

Harlem in the 30’s.

300 nukes

That’s how many were detonated across the earth by the time I was born.

A month before I was born, Edward R Murrow made this speech

And hell yeah.

Today is the anniversary of the death of Emperor Norton

RIP, you stoutly crazy old bugger.

I love my brother

He rented me “A Midwife’s Tale” an American Experience documentary. OMG it was SOOOOOOO GOOOOOD. Really. I can think of many people who need to see this. He and I and Keith watched it.

The books that didn’t get written

This is an interesting little squib, from Ovid to Austen.

Roundup

Darth Vader has a little fun with Luke Skywalker.

I’m Asian? Why didn’t anyone tell me????

A sad moment in Canadian naval history.

Organlegger update.

Thoughtful silverback is thoughtful.

New giraffe in Abbotsford. Cute!

New police brutality in Abbotsford. Not so cute!

Oh, how nice. The VPD will move into a building made for the Olympics.

Ashton Kutcher’s recent tweet: Barbra streisand is at my house. I have to admit I’m a little nervous. Ashton is aplusk on twitter. Yes, his spelling and capitalization suck; he’s an ecktor, not a friggin English teacher.

Also from twitter, William Gibson’s wife (whose name I should know but has not turned up in my research) recommends this video of an angry dude at a roadside pull over request. I’m sorry, even though I knew it was coming I still laughed. She also recommends this one too. I looked it up, Cullman Liquidation really exists. Also from Ser Gibson, the following link. Tibetan time lapse mandala. William Gibson is GreatDismal on Twitter.

I have written in homilies and other places about how the disappearance of a language is a marker for genocide. Here’s some good news internationally.