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Biblical text-writing may have poisoned monks
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News. Medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries reveal that monks who wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials may have been exposed to toxic mercury, which was used to formulate just one of their ink colors: red. The study, which will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, also describes a previously undocumented disease, called FOS, which was like leprosy and caused skull lesions…scientists believe the monks were either contaminated while preparing and administering medicines, or while writing the artistic letters of incunabula, or pre-1500 A.D. books…

Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

The lonely goatherd asks: Why is Sulpicio Lines still operating? Why hasn’t it been forcibly disbanded? With a record like theirs—some 7,000 passengers killed in about 23 years—why does anybody still travel with them? And has President Arroyo repeated President Aquino’s “No stone unturned” promise yet?

(1) I DON’T KNOW, but if someone has a sound theory, do post it. (2) Uhh, because its defenders argue that there aren’t enough vessels working in these 7,100 islands and a shipping line with a Titanic-type body count is better than no shipping line at all? (3) As far as I know, more people died in the sinking of Doña Paz than on 9/11, but no one declared war on unsafe transportation. It’s “bahala na” at its deadliest. (4) Aargh.

Saffy is reading. . ., originally uploaded by 160507.

1. Stalin the Soviet dictator had many pseudonyms, including “K. Safin”. Saffy’s full name is Saffron Sassafras Safin.
2. Saffy answers to Stalin’s nicknames “Koba” and “Soso”.
3. Saffy constantly claims territory of her fellow cats Koosi and Mat.
4. Saffy very suspicious of Mat the aristocrat, accuses him of oppressing her.
5. Saffy is a terror.
6. Saffy believes she owns the means of production; sits on my keyboard while I am working.
7. Extreme charm alternating with extreme nuttiness.
8. Loves books, curls up on them.
9. Constantly plotting.
10. Likes poetry, especially if all the words are replaced with “meow”.

Pannonica and Monk, originally uploaded by 160507.
The scene is a dark, smoky club in Greenwich Village, New York in 1958. Onstage a quartet is performing a complicated piece of music. Everyone is smoking and drinking; it’s the Fifties and cigarettes and alcohol are socially-acceptable substances. It’s the music that is not quite acceptable—that Jazz and the men who play it. They are African-American musicians in the time before the civil rights movement. Many of them are known drug users.

A murmur goes through the crowd, and the musicians acknowledge the new arrival. “Hi, Nica,” they call out, “Hey, Baroness.” The woman they’re addressing is wearing a leopard-skin coat and a patrician air. She carries the formidable name of Baroness Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter. She’s aristocratic and white, and she is the Jazz musicians’ patron and fierce protector.

My article on Pannonica in The National, Abu Dhabi. 

Truffaut directing Léaud, originally uploaded by 160507.

In their teens they worshipped at the church of Cinema. They called themselves “Hitchcocko-Hawksians”. In their 20s they defined the New Wave in French cinema. They reviewed each other’s work. They promoted each other tirelessly. Then Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard had a falling-out. Auteur Wars by Richard Brody. 

Brody quotes from a vitriolic letter Truffaut had written to Godard. More of the letter:

“Jean-Luc. . .I feel the time has come to tell you, at length, that in my opinion you’ve been acting like a shit. . .Phony. Poseur. You’ve always been a poseur, as when you sent a telegram to de Gaulle about his prostate. . .a poseur even now when you claim you’re going to show the truth about the cinema, those who work in the background, who are badly paid, etc. When you had a location, a garage or shop set up by your crew, and then you would arrive and say, ‘I don’t have any ideas today, we won’t shoot’ and the crew would have to take it all back down again, did it never occur to you that the workers might feel completely useless and rejected?. . .You’re the Ursula Andress of militancy, you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, you make two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery. . .”

I watched the six-part BBC series Ancient Rome in one sitting (It was the day I did not get a single text message). Unlike the HBO/BBC series Rome, this one was based on actual accounts by Roman writers (which assumes that writers don’t embellish or exaggerate, haha), and does not contain graphic sex and nudity (Blast). Like the fictional series it contains plenty of violence, cause that’s how the Romans achieved world domination.

Stuff I learned from Ancient Rome, the series:

1. According to the series advisers, Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned, he tried to save it. When Rome stopped burning he was advised to move the capital, but he insisted on rebuilding Rome. He envisioned it as a center of art. Unfortunately he was bonkers, and thought of himself as a great artist. He insisted on performing in public. In contemporary terms, that’s like “Queen Elizabeth as a pole dancer”. Try reviewing your emperor’s performance poetry. His reconstruction plans bankrupted Rome.

2. Tiberius Gracchus was the first populist tribune. He pushed for land reform, which angered the aristocrats. The Romans were deeply suspicious of anyone who might aspire to be king (as Julius Caesar would find out). He was clubbed to death with the leg of a stool.

3. Ed Stoppard (Cute!) who played Flavius Josephus, the Jewish revolutionary turned Roman historian, is the son of Tom Stoppard the playwright who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the literary model for Rome with its fictional heroes Vorenus and Titus Pullo.

4. The Goths who sacked Rome were not really barbarians or savages. Their leader Alaric did not want to sack Rome, but after the Goths had served the empire in various campaigns, they were screwed over. Alaric’s brother-in-law Athawulf ended up marrying the emperor’s sister.

5. There were many squabbling Jewish factions during the rebellion against Rome, not unlike the Judaean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judaea.

Are nerds born or are they made? Now that geeks rule tech companies, lead billionaire lists, and are the auteurs, subjects and stars of Judd Apatow movies, has it become cool to be a nerd? Even people who must’ve been popular in high school now claim that they were nerds. If everyone was a teenage outcast, then who cast them out?

I do not like these belated claims of membership in the tribe.

Here’s an interview with Benjamin Nugent, author of American Nerd.

Who is singing the role of Imelda Marcos in the album of David Byrne’s musical Here Lies Love?

Cyndi Lauper.

Brilliant choice. Cause girls just wanna have fun, and couture, and jewelry, and buildings…

The account in David Byrne’s journal: “Cyndi Lauper came in to the studio last week to sing 1½ songs for the Here Lies Love album. She was about an hour and a half late to the session, so I fully expected to be in for some prime diva behavior. But, as I’d run overtime on the earlier brass sessions, it all worked out great, and Cyndi gave an amazingly fine-tuned performance. Not only is she a wonderful singer from a technical point of view, but she can tailor her attitude and performance to suit the character and the character’s emotional state.

“This is exactly the skill set I need for this project. After giving Cyndi the back-story on a particular song and establishing the context of the lyrics, I would give directions like, “Yes, she’s a little angry, but also heartbroken and confused.” Cyndi would then incorporate these complex emotions into her performance with seeming ease. She’d ask, for example, “You want more anger in this verse?” And sure enough, she’d dial a little more in. Very impressive.”

Thanks to the LUA for the link.

“Gold of Ancestors” exhibition at Ayala Museum, originally uploaded by 160507.

I have an article in the new issue of Newsweek (the print version is out on Monday) about the Gold of Ancestors exhibition at the Ayala Museum. The exhibition features 1,059 gold artifacts that are believed to be up to a thousand years old. They were found in the Philippines; the question is, Who made them? And if our ancestors made them, what can they tell us about who we are?

Gold of Ancestors is part of Crossroads of Civilizations, which opens at the Ayala Museum in May.

Note: The piece is in the May 5 issue, now on the stands. George W Bush is on the cover, title “Turning Green”.

Banana Bag, originally uploaded by 160507.

“For generations, the banana has been embraced and celebrated in pop culture: “Yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas today!” But it took muscle and outright carnage to turn this fragile tropical treat into the most popular fruit in the United States. The banana is “the yin and yang of American culture and blood,” Koeppel says. The fruit became his obsession and the subject of his book, “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.”

“Surprisingly, Koeppel isn’t the only journalist of late to light out to the tropics and come back with tales of the banana’s bloody role in history. For Peter Chapman, a Financial Times reporter, who spent years covering Latin America, the great banana company, United Fruit, which later became Chiquita, prefigured the rise of the modern multinational corporation. “It’s interesting, isn’t it, that something we would imagine as innocuous as bananas has produced as many exercises in regime change as has ever been enacted in the name of oil,” says Chapman, whose book is called “Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World.”

When bananas ruled the world in Salon. Histories of Latin America remind me that the Philippines is in the wrong continent.