Blogging since 2002
Best books that I’ve read in 2004:
The Bug by Ellen Ullman (here’s my writeup)
Time and Again by Jack Finney ( mentioned here)
Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin (to be reviewed soon)
Flicker by Theodore Roszak (to be reviewed soon)
Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York by Randy Kennedy (to be reviewed soon)
Central Park contains an amazing artifact commonly referred to as “Cleopatra’s Needle”. It’s one of the many Egyptian obelisks scattered all around the world, and one of the two that used to stand in front of the Sun temple in Heliopolis. A second obelisk is located in London these days.
In general, Egyptian obelisks were moved around the globe by different governments kind of like a college statues by drunken frat boys. The Romans moved the two Cleopatra’s Needles to Alexandria, and then as gifts from the Egyptians to the Great Britain and the US, the were moved by British and American engineers to their current locations. Overall the moves turned out to be amazing feats of engineering, especially with the British overcomplicated scheme of building a pontoon around the obelisk and towing it with another ship.
You can find it right across from the Met, on the 5th Ave. side approximately between 81st and 82nd.
The pillar does not give an impression of being an element of the Sun god’s temple. The 3500 year old monolith is gloomy, foreboding and downright Lovecraftian. The shadow play at sunset is especially spooky (that’s what I tried to capture in the above picture).
Cleopatra has very little to do with either obelisks. They were built by king Tuthmosis III (well, the king probably had some help from his slaves). Later everybody’s favorite pharaoh, Ramses II, seeing how there was a lot of space left on the obelisks added some of his own “press releases” to it:
The writing looks like a story of an alien abduction (with the flying saucers and wavy tractor beams), but as it turns out these are normal hieroglyphics. “Bird , Bird , Giant Eye … Cat Head , guy doing this” and so forth. I thought that there were thousands of glyphs, but it turns out that they are just an alphabet. So the flying saucers on the picture are “R” sounds, and the “tractor beam” is an “H”.
I was surprised to see the pharaoh being referred to as “Lord of the Two Lands, User-maat-ra”. What was he a user of? Well, as it turns out all pharaohs have ridiculous system of 5 different names. I mean, come on, a Horus name and the Golden Horus Name!? (Horus happens to be the Sun god, the one with the falcon head ) User-maat-ra happens to be the throne name, the one that one that the Greeks transcribed as Ozymandias.
So he’s the king from Percy Shelly’s “Ozymandias” sonnet. Yup, good ol’ Ramses was kind of like Donald Trump – liked to build things and put his names on things. Also, like a rockstar or an NBA superstar he had sex with hundreds of women, siring hundreds of children as Durex Ramses condoms were apparently not available back then. Last but not least he was apparently the “7 cows dream” and “let my people go” pharaoh of the Bible.
While we are on the subject of screws, here’s another thing that I learned about fasteners. As any know-it-all who pays attention to things like that I looked up why screws with what we called cross-shaped screws in the USSR are called Philips screws in the US (I wonder what they call them in other countries) are called so. Of course the answer was one web search away in the Straight Dope Classic Why did this guy Phillips think we needed a new type of screw?
I also purchased One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw used at Amazon. I learned that the screw and the screwdriver is a rather recent invention, interestigly enough one of the very few tools not known to the ancient Chinese.
Useless trivia aside, I hate both slotted and Phillips screws. Of course I would not even think of using slotted screws for anything other than period-correct Craftsman style or Art Deco hardware such as cabinet pulls or outlet covers. But the common Phillips screws, with their falling off from the bit (even the magnetic one) and stripping (not the good bachelor party kind) drive me absolutely nuts.
The solution? I bought a couple of boxes of hybrid Phillips/square screws from Rockler. You can use the regular Philips driver, or you can use a special square one. The benefit of a square bit is that the screw does not fall of the bit and does not strip easily. The kit also includes a bottle of suggestively named Rockler Screw-Lube. The paper box is rather sucky and unusable – the partitions lift up and the screws mix.
This here person wrote an essay on statues that get rubbed for good luck. He mentioned Dolly Parton’s statue , but forgot to mention the Wall Street Bull :
I always thought that there’s supposed to be a statue of a bear, but apparently it’s not so. I also thought that the bull was made much earlier than 1989. And I did not know that it was basically a Italian-born sculptor Arturo Di Modica’s equivalent of grafitti. Apparently the bull was involved in a traffic incident once. I would really like to see that dude’s insurance form.
Also not mentioned there The Statue of Three Lies.
Oooof. Finally fixed a rather nasty bug that was depressing me most of last week. This and a nice little poem by
There was no subway in Odessa, but we had buses, trolley buses and trams. Poorly printed pieces of bad quality paper served as tickets. The system was somewhat interesting: the driver wouldn’t check the tickets. You had to board with your own ticket and perforate it in a weird looking wall mounted press inside. If during a spot check you didn’t have a perforated ticket, you’d theoretically be fined. In reality everybody except the few unlucky loosers would perforate their ticket in the nick of time.
So, back to superstitions and luck bringing rituals. Every ticket had a serial number. A lucky ticket was considered to be one, in which the sum of the first three numbers of the serial would be equal to the sum of the last there. If you found a lucky ticket, to gain some good luck, germ or no germs, you had to eat it. Here’s what one (actually this is an even more special palindromic lucky ticket.) would like:
(image from http://iagsoft.nm.ru/ticket/chel2001.jpg)
Then there was the “Chicken God”. That was a name for a beach pebble with a hole in it. The hole was supposed to be of a natural origin. A chicken god could be worn on a necklace. To wish on it, you would look through the hole at the sun (getting half blind in the process) and speak your wish.
Update:
(picture from http://www.thegodsgrove.com)
Oh, and the black Volga. In the Soviet Union a black Volga GAZ 24 was a car of choice for various party functionaries and other important people. A kid who’d spot one would usually mutter a little rhyme “black Volga my luck, which nobody can pluck” (“чернаÑ? Волга, моÑ? удача, никому не передача”). Hey, I am no poet.
(image from http://autonavigator.ru/autocatalog/gaz/24-10.shtml)
Another little pearl from my collection.
Before the anthrax scare Kurt Vonnegut used to have a special PO box for fan mail. He also used to sign books sent there. And, apparently, he even read the letters. I sent him my tattered copy of “Cat’s Cradle”.
I don’t send brand new books for authors to sign. Only the ones that I’ve abusingly read a few times.
I am using a two-pronged depression fighting approach : drinking coffee and thinking about fishing.
I thought about fishing in the Black Sea. I remembered how I really wanted to catch three rare fish about which I’ve read in books: a fluke (Paralichthys dentatus), a sargan(Belone belone euxini) and a trigla (aka sea rooster) (Trigla lucerna).
I caught my first big fluke in the US, I think. I never caught a sargan, but this eel more than makes up for it. The trigla is a special story. I’ve only read about it in books. I’ve never even heard about somebody catching one. The books described it as an ultra rare, very tasty and beautiful fish. The pictures that I’ve seen in the books portrayed a brightly colored fish with huge iridescent fins. Trigla has an almost mythical status in the Black Sea area. It’s said that it brings bad luck if a fisherman doesn’t release it. Stuff of legends, really.
In the books I’ve read it was described as a fish that makes loud sounds under water. And I know one fish like that. Yes, the favorite prey of underwater hunting of
I find it kind of unsettling that the mythical fish I wanted to catch all of my life in Odessa turned out to be a lowly throwback fish here in the US. This must be symbolic of something or other, but I don’t know what.
A new book in my collection: “Modern Arms and Free Men” by Vannevar Bush. Just 30 bucks on abebooks.com . And it’s signed!
Interestingly enough, Vannevar Bush is a relative of the presidential Bushes (I think he was a cousin of Prescott Bush).
Ha ha. I didn’t know about the term “vannevar”.
I’ve finally stopped biting my nails (and I’ll write a detailed howto article about that in a little while). But as soon as I fixed that, I broke my one an only fake tooth.
You see, one of my childhood friends was chasing me (with the intention of beating me up for something or other), and caused me to trip. I chipped my front tooth. When I was already in the US, my former half-assed dentist talked me into killing off that tooth and turning it into a crown. The result of his work was pretty sucky — the crown came out in a year or so. But by then I had a really, really good dentist replace it. And that lasted my a good while.
But a few days ago I carelessly bit into a piece of chicken. There was a loud crunch and…..
Luckily my other childhood friend is a second year dental resident (yes, dentists have an option to go into residence, although it’s not required). I could not get a dental appointment with my regular dentist until the 18th, but my friend took that x-ray the same day.
In any case, I’ll need an implant (or a bridge, which I don’t want to do). For a couple of months I’ll have to wear a temporary replacement called a “flipper”. I know, har-har, flipper.
But at least the implant is cool. An implant is basically a titanium screw that goes directly into the bone. It’s installed by either a dental surgeon or a specialist.
Woohoo! Titanium! I’ll see if I can get a laser cannon, cell phone or a supercomputer mounted in there. We have the technology, right?
