You should read this for 2/23/2018: Undersea paper art, Amazon, money laundering and fake books; Old English glosses and The Tremulous Hand scribe, wine, Sicilian culture, and caves. The Gate to Hell is a gas, and women who scribe.
Art and Film
Colorful Paper-Cut Sculpture Captures the Diversity of a Coral Reef
Get to know the Dora Milaje, Black Panther’s mighty women warriors
Books, Writing, and Language
Via Krebs On Security: Money Laundering Via Author Impersonation on Amazon? “Patrick Reames had no idea why Amazon.com sent him a 1099 form saying he’d made almost $24,000 selling books via Createspace, the company’s on-demand publishing arm. That is, until he searched the site for his name and discovered someone has been using it to peddle a $555 book that’s full of nothing but gibberish.”
Old English masterclass at the British Library
In the 13th century, a mysterious annotator with shaky handwriting made marginal or interlinear notes (glosses) in around 20 manuscripts which belonged to Worcester Cathedral Priory. The Tremulous Hand — as he is now known — was from one of the last generations of people who could understand Old English. He is thought to have suffered from a nerve condition called ‘essential tremor’, a type of uncontrollable shaking that mainly affects the hands, which today affects around four out of 100 adults over the age of 40. His glosses show that he was concerned that knowledge of the past, as well as knowledge of an earlier form of his language, should not be lost.
The FBI’s War on Black-Owned Bookstores “At the height of the Black Power movement, the Bureau focused on the unlikeliest of public enemies: black independent booksellers.”
Food and Drink
Prehistoric Wine Discovered in Inaccessible Caves Forces a Rethink of Ancient Sicilian Culture “But the fourth jar held the greatest surprise: pure grape wine from 5,000 years ago.”
History and Archaeology
This Roman ‘gate to hell’ killed its victims with a cloud of deadly carbon dioxide “Is it possible to walk through the gates of hell and live? The Romans thought so, and they staged elaborate sacrifices at what they believed were entrances to the underworld scattered across the ancient Mediterranean. The sacrifices—healthy bulls led down to the gates of hell—died quickly without human intervention, but the castrated priests who accompanied them returned unharmed.”
Society
Anti-vaxxers prey on parents’ fears
Trump’s plan to replace food stamps with food boxes is his meanest idea yet
Now comes President Trump, with the meanest and dumbest approach to food stamps in recent memory. Trump’s budget proposal, released on Monday, calls for replacing half of the monthly cash benefit for most recipients with a Department of Agriculture food box containing “shelf-stable milk, ready-to-eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit, vegetables, and meat, poultry or fish.”
Women’s Work
Women Scribes: The Technologists of the Middle Ages
Lesbian couple sues feds for thwarting their chance to foster refugee children
During an informational phone call with the organization in charge, Catholic Charities of Fort Worth, they say, they were told that same-sex couples are ineligible to apply because they don’t “mirror the Holy Family.”
💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰
Trump’s Furious Tweetstorm Backfires “The president tried to distance himself from the story of Russian interference—and in the process, thrust himself right back into the center of the narrative.”
Over a series of tweets, Trump attacked the FBI; politicized the Parkland shooting for his own vindication; suggested collusion was no big deal; blamed Obama for the collusion; and said the real collusion involved Hillary Clinton. He undermined his national-security adviser; lied about denying that Russia meddled in the election; and finished with an appeal to numbers, citing an infamously unreliable pollster.
Do check out this NPR article for some close analysis: Trump Denies Woman’s Allegation Of Unwanted Kissing In Trump Tower. It’s telling that Trump’s Twitter denials in odd ways serve to corroborate various women’s allegations.
Is anyone listening? This Trump accuser keeps asking herself that. But she plans to keep talking about that day in 2006.
Despite her story, and the similar stories of more than a dozen other women, nothing had changed. Trump, who had denied all of the accusations, was still president of the United States, and Crooks was still circling back to the same moments on Jan. 11, 2006, that had come to define so much about her life.
