Hippies think that dolmens, as well as being graves, are there to kill people on or point out the stars. I think it’s much simpler: nature is very bad at propping several stones upright and capping them with another, so a dolmen is a sign that there are humans around and they are smarter than…
Two brothers [illegible] one kingdom. One dreamed of peace for his country, the other fought valiantly for his ideals: This photo (scroll to no 25) is from the University of Hawaii’s brilliant Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands collection. Sfida al re di Castiglia (“The Tyrant of Castile”), a 1963 Hispano-Italian, helmet-clattering, bodice-busting epic featuring…
I once read some complete nonsense by UCD prof Clarence Major, so I do kind of wonder whether he’s got any evidence for the claim (Prentiss Riddle → MSNBC) that relates hip “to the Wolof verb hepi (‘to see’) or hipi (‘to open one’s eyes’)”. The Peace Corps Wolof-English dictionary (PDF) lists xippi, but they…
André Hazes, the notable (but not notably abstemious–he famously lit up in the no-smoking cinema in which his life-film was being premiered) Dutch singer, died yesterday morning. RIP, one would think, but the Dutch music industry is smart–and tacky–enough not to miss a fiscal-friendly moment like this: Enschede a/ Zee has scanned the condolence ad…
From Popbitch: Abu al-Zarqawi is the mastermind behind this week’s gruesome hostage beheadings in Iraq. By filming himself doing the beheadings and then selling the resulting snuff movies as DVDs all over the Middle East, al-Zarqawi has turned himself into radical Islam’s hottest celebrity. What nobody has pointed out is how influenced by hip hop…
There’s an article here which says that Cherif El-Shoubashy, first under-secretary for foreign cultural relations and president of the Cairo International Film Festival, has published a book called something like Long Live Arabic, Down With Sibawayh, Sibawayh being the Persian, Basra-trained linguist who, in al-Kitab, provided Arabic grammar with its tablets of stone. That was…
Waszynski’s extraordinary 1937 Dibuk still drifts into the occasional dream. Der Volf was written by another Polish Jewish artist, H Leivick at around the same time as the play on which Waszynski’s film was based. Both introduce the supernatural in order to help us understand why it is wrong to do wrong, but where Der…
Apparently I’ve been signed up for the local chess tournament for the next few Saturdays, otherwise this is where I’d really like to be on Saturday 15th: PHILADELPHIA, May 6 /PRNewswire/ — The Klingon Language Institute (KLI) invites Star Trek fans and anyone curious about Klingon language and culture to a small qep le’ (a…
No help for the beardless wonder in the search for Conan Doyle’s Reminiscence of Cricket, but I did find two wonderful poems by South Asian schoolboys. Cricket Teams by Raza Shahban Ali of Fatimiyah Boys School, Karachi would have been an outstanding review of the world scene, had his laudatory couplet about England not been…