I first saw this print on the wall of a coffee shop. There was no title or information of any kind on it, and so I was very pleased with myself when I tracked it down. It’s from a pamphlet, first published in 1804 and written by Etienne Gaspard Robertson, a Belgian balloonist and showman famous for his magic lantern displays. Although the Wikipedia article makes him sound quite respectable, this article gives a rather different impression. He was certainly flamboyant - he apparently boasted of trying to conjure up the devil, and even his tomb depicts winged skulls and a flying skeleton. There’s a fairly good biographical sketch here.
Although he may have exaggerated his ballooning accomplishments, Robertson’s flight of 1806 was impressive enough to inspire a series of poems by H.C Oersted, best known as a physicist and chemist who was the first person to make aluminium. This also suggests that Roberston’s ‘phantasmagoria’ were a source of inspiration for Goya.

And finally, back to the picture. It shows La Minerve, a giant balloon designed by Robertson which was, unsurprisingly, never built. It was to have a crew of more than sixty people, and was meant to include a library, a church, a gymnasium and a music room, all connected with silk ladders. The thing hanging underneath is apparently a keg of beer (explained, presumably, by the fact that Robertson was from Belgium, not France), although I’m less sure about the giant chicken on top.

This cane map of Boston was recently brought to my attention, which got me thinking about canes with things hidden inside them. Sword canes, undeniably the most famous cane-borne technology, are of course still being produced, but a little searching reveals they are far from alone. Walking cane violins apparently stretch back at least as far as 1850, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped people from attempting to patent the idea rather more recently. Cane guns, too, were popular in the mid-1850s but were given a modern twist as a proposed (rather awkward looking) stun-gun cane in 1990. In fact the idea for a map in a cane itself was already old by 1940, but it too has been re-envisaged for the current era.

I like the gradually growing sense of horror you get with this site.

I was very impressed by this tribute site to the 70’s TV show ‘Android Kikkaider‘, based on the superhero of that name. It’s worth reading for the translated episode titles alone - ‘Pink Tiger’s Amusement Park Assault’, for example, or ‘A She-Devil? Pink Armadillo’. Even better, however, are the pages devoted to individual villains from the series, such as the terrifying White Bone Flying Squirrel.

On a more depressing and completely unrelated note, this excellent blog post discusses the north Mexican musical genre known as narcocorrido, or ‘drug ballads’, and the way that this music, in conjunction with sites like Youtube, seems to be contributing to a new spiral of gang violence. Of course, leaving the musical aspects aside for a moment, this is not just a Mexican phenomenon - this  rather sensationalist  Guardian article is about gangs in Liverpool using Youtube, and there seems to be something fairly similar in Australia, with an especially nasty racist slant.

I’ve been thinking a bit about numerology recently. This was partly inspired by reading an old Barbelith thread about the dust-up over a (long since banned, thankfully) member’s ramblings about how hidden numerical patterns made it clear to him that an international Jewish conspiracy had been responsible for 9/11, or some such nonsense. His particular brand of numerology was apparently based on gematria, where each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is assigned a number, and various texts (the books of the Old Testament, for instance) are then compared and analysed numerically. Incidentally, the last time I remember encountering gematria was in a not-very-good scifi thriller called Dante’s Equation, where it was used to send a bunch of CIA agents and theoretical physicists through a wormhole to a hell dimension. Or something.
A rather more interesting take on numbers and how they can be used to search for deeper meanings came up when I was reading ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, an essay by Italo Calvino. This is mostly a mediation about literature (and stories more generally) as a combination of discrete semantic and semiological units of meaning. In passing, however, he mentions Raymond Lully, also known as Ramon Llull. Llull was born in Majorca in 1232, and went on to write various works on mathematics, philosophy, botany and alchemy, as well as one of the earliest European novels. His most important work, however, was probably the Ars Generalis Ultima, the ‘Ultimate General Art’. This was designed to persuade Muslims to convert to Christianity, using logic alone. It was apparently inspired by a device called a zajira, used by Arab astrologers. Llull came up with his own mechanical devices, too. From the Wikipedia article:

Llull also invented numerous ‘machines’ for the purpose. One method is now called the Lullian Circle, each of which consisted of two or more paper discs inscribed with alphabetical letters or symbols that referred to lists of attributes. The discs could be rotated individually to generate a large number of combinations of ideas. A number of terms, or symbols relating to those terms, were laid around the full circumference of the circle. They were then repeated on an inner circle which could be rotated. These combinations were said to show all possible truth about the subject of the circle. Llull based this on the notion that there were a limited number of basic, undeniable truths in all fields of knowledge, and that we could understand everything about these fields of knowledge by studying combinations of these elemental truths.

Llull’s philosophy, interestingly, seem to still be inspiring people. This website not only hosts a lot of his writing, but also has freeware computer programs based on his ideas. And it also has a piece on the importance of Llull’s ‘art’ by Fr. Bernard de Lavinheta, first published in 1523:

… it is useful on account of its general and transcendental character because its principles belong to the highest order of generality and are true, necessary and primordial (as has been shown) and the principles of other sciences can be tested with them.

Thus, the Art is a way to gain access to any faculty of study, and not only in speculative areas such as theoretical physics, mathematics, metaphysics and theology, but also in the fields of psychology, the moral sciences, linguistics, mechanics as well as medicine, canon law and civil law. 

I’ve just finished reading Mother London, by Michael Moorcock. I was interested to see that the Wikipedia page makes only the briefest mention of this book or its sort-of-sequel, King of the City, save to describe them as ‘mainstream’. In a way, I suppose that his is true. Mother London was, I believe, shortlisted for the Whitbread, and the LRB certainly published a rave (and borderline incomprehensible) review of King of the City, written by Moorcock’s friend Ian Sinclair.

Mother London is certainly rather different to the psychedelic swords and sorcery stuff that makes up a big chunk of Moorcock’s huge bibliography. In a way it’s reminiscent of a compressed Dance to the Music of Time, covering about fifty years and containing a huge cast of characters, most of whom come in and out of the story in a way that I found very pleasing. Someone will begin as a very minor character, but will then pop up again and again in a variety of settings, revealing new aspects of themselves each time. It’s a longish book, at just under five hundred pages, but it feels absolutely gigantic, epic.

It’s a book of many different aspects, one of which is a history of London. Throughout, Moorcock argues for a history that incorporates both the everyday and the mythic: “Such stories are common amongst all ordinary Londoners … By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of who we are.” This article sees the book as a work of pyschogeography, an attempt to “construct an order upon the multiplicity of London life”. Certainly, i don’t feel that it’s much of a stretch to see many of the central characters, with their constant walking and story-gathering, as flaneurs.

I would say, however, that this is only part of what the book is. It certainly has political aspects, with Moorcock’s love for anarchism being made very clear in parts. It can also be read as an incredibly sophisticated, very subtle superhero story. In a way, then, there are similarities with Alan Moore, another anarchist, although Moorcock seems to be unabashedly celebrating the idea of individuals possessing some kind of unique power, whereas Moore is often much more skeptical (think Watchmen, or Miracleman).

On an only mildly related note (there’s only a little bit of cottaging in Mother London, and it happens in parks; but I suppose they’re both related to the idea of specific city-spaces being used, experienced and understood in different ways by different people), I quite enjoyed this article (you have to use the download link on the left-hand side to read it) on literary representations of gay cottaging in public toilets. There’s a review of a book covering similar ground here, which offers an upside to World War 2:

Recently I’ve become aware of the Steampunk Workshop, a website “Wherein the craftsman demonstrates the construction of artifacts from an age of steam and brass.”; or in other words, some guy modding his computer to look like something from a steampunk novel like The Difference Engine. For someone such as myself who believes technology (along with men’s fashion) reached a sartorial peak sometime between 1920 and 1940 (who could possibly disagree that a Zeppelin is the most stylish way to travel ever invented?), this is all very cool. The keyboard mod in particular reminded me of something I saw a few years ago, the ElectriClerk.

More ambitious than any of the Steampunk Workshop’s mods, the ElectriClerk is a total conversion of a 1988 Mac computer into something resembling a prop from the Terry Gilliam film Brazil, incorporating a c.1923 Underwood typewriter. Perhaps the weirdest thing about the ElectriClerk is its reason for existence - a “yet to be played” game of the live action roleplaying game “Cthulhu Lives!”. Contrary to the common perception of LARPS (well, mine anyway) - a bunch of people running around in the woods, wearing elf ears and self-knitted chainmail shirts, hitting each of other with nerf swords - Cthulhu Lives! is mostly about really, really, really detailed props, especially prop documents. Based on the paper rpg Call of Cthulhu, which is itself based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu Lives! seems to me to basically be an excuse for grown men and women to play dress-up. But with helicopters and herds of horses. And I think that’s pretty awesome - especially since they include a bunch of prop documents as free downloads, which is perfect if you ever need to pose as a Prohibition-era Treasury agent or drive a car in 1929 Massachusetts. And who hasn’t wanted to do that?

The Great Firewall of China is, of course, well-known and much discussed; something that I wasn’t aware of until recently, though, was that the Chinese also appear to be systematically jamming shortwave radio broadcasts. Known as the “Firedrake Jammer”, the signal consists of Chinese classical music, and is thought to be aimed at preventing Taiwanese broadcasts. However, it has also been affecting shortwave radio enthusiasts from Alaska to New Zealand. There are some recordings here, and here are some enthusiastic German radio enthusiasts detailing their attempts to get the Chinese government to cut it out.

The BBC have news regarding the clouded leopard, including some nice photos.

I was reading an excerpt from the Life of Gildas, by Caradoc of Llancarfarn, and came across the verb ‘contemn‘, which I have to admit I don’t remember encountering before. It means to despise something (I suppose it’s from the same root as contempt); anyway, I googled it, and came up with this rather odd pair of sites:

http://www.contemn.org/

http://contemn.gertalblogs.com/

The internet is a strange place. Anyway, the Life of Gildas is pretty good:

He abstained from milk-foods and honey: flesh was hateful to him: fresh-water herbs were rather a favourite dish with him: he ate barley-bread mixed with ashes, and drank spring water daily. He used not to take a bath, a habit very much in favour by this nation. Thinness appeared in his face, and he seemed like a man suffering under a very serious fever. It was his habit to go into the river at midnight, where he would remain unmoved until he had said the Lord’s Prayer three times.