Category: Culture

Thoughts about culture; arts, music, writing, sculpture, photography and more.

The Oldest Art: 40,800 Years Ago

Arts / History & Biography / Science & TechnologyOne Comment

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Paleolithic paintings in El Castillo cave in Northern Spain date back at least 40,800 years — making them Europe’s oldest known cave art, according to new research published June 14 in Science. That’s the lead to a fascinating story about the origins of art. Cave art seems to have been practiced 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. That age could make the artists either the first modern humans or even Neanderthals. That latter possibility is pretty exciting. We know from burials found in the Middle East that Neanderthal people practiced ritual burial and made musical instruments. This find suggests that ……… click below for more ↓

The Decline of Information Quality

Arts / Balderdash & Hoaxes / Media Issues / Memes; Internet & Social / Social Order & Disorder / Uncategorized2 Comments

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I’ve been troubled the last year or so by the increasing amount of trivial crap that is being presented on media sites as news, rather than what it really is: shallow gossip, pseudoscience, trivia, anecdote, voyeurism and personal experience. As titillating as some glitterati’s wardrobe malfunction might be, it is not front page news. In fact, it isn’t worthy of the description news even when relegated to a more appropriate location, buried deep inside the site. Gossip belongs with the horoscope, cartoons and word-search puzzles. Nor is a cute animal in some anthropomorphic posture news. Kitten and bunny wrestling? Why ……… click below for more ↓

What happened to the video business?

Arts / Collingwood / Film & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences3 Comments

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In the early to mid 1990s, Collingwood had three independent video outlets. Then it had two and one franchise (Rogers). Several variety stores also had a small video rental business. Then the independents closed and another franchise (Blockbuster) moved in. Now the two corporations are gone and there is no place in town to rent videos. I am deeply disappointed. What happened to the video rental business? Was it so unprofitable? Or is it just a plan by Rogers to increase revenue through it’s “on demand” service? Or to drive customers to Netflix and get more revenue from their overuse ……… click below for more ↓

Goodbye, Carlos Fuentes: 1928-2012

Arts / Books & Reviews / Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I was in a bookstore in Israel in 1980 or thereabouts, looking for a book in English to read during my visit. I found Terra Nostra, a 900-page novel by Carlos Fuentes, in a Penguin paperback edition. I had read another Fuentes’ book, A Change of Skin, a few years earlier, so I picked it up. I’ve carried Terra Nostra with me ever since that day in Israel. It’s still on my bookshelf. I don’t remember if I ever finished it. I remembered that book this morning when I read that the Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, had died last night, ……… click below for more ↓

A Delightful Farce Called Anonymous

Arts / Books & Reviews / History & Biography / Memes; Internet & SocialLeave a comment

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Watched a delightful, satirical farce last night, called Anonymous. It’s a spoof about the conspiracy theory that the Earl of Oxford (Edward de Vere) wrote the works of William Shakespeare. This conspiracy notion has a pop following, but lacks significant scholarly and any historical support. Like other conspiracy theories, it has gained ground on the Internet from the simple fact that most people are naturally superstitious and suspicious, and would rather not apply critical thinking or do any serious research to prove or disprove outlandish claims. As theories go, de Vere-as-Shakespeare is up there with the Elvis-is-still-alive, JFK-survived-the-Dallas-shooting or the-American-government-was-behind-the-9/11-attacks. ……… click below for more ↓

Fifty thousand words…

Arts / Books & Reviews / Municipal Politics / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading Now4 Comments

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This morning I crossed the 50,000 word mark in my book on Machiavelli’s The Prince for municipal politicians. It’s longer than I had originally intended, but I think it’s a reasonable length for the content. I’m pleased with the current draft and should have my reading and self-editing done by next Monday. Then it’s on to my next book, about e-government. I have an overhead of perhaps 2,000 words I could reduce it by through my own editing. Primarily that would involve deleting the addendum with the maxims from his Art of War and from Sun Tzu’s book of the ……… click below for more ↓

Machiavelli in popular art: Don MacDonald’s graphic novel

Arts / Books & Reviews / Municipal Politics / PoliticsLeave a comment

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A graphic novel about Niccolo Machiavelli… who woulda thought? It’s not like the Florentine was exactly the X Men or Mr. Natural as a comic book hero. Artist Don MacDonald has put together a graphic biography of Machiavelli on his blog, stretching more than 150 pages (so far) ranging through the entire span of Niccolo’s life. He even includes footnotes for some of the historical material he has drawn on, with sources listed. It does help to read his notes, and even more to have some familiarity of Machiavelli’s life. But even without it, it’s captivating. Well, of course I ……… click below for more ↓

It’s not an Apache blessing, it’s just a Hollywood script

Arts / Atheism & Spirituality / Language & Grammar / Memes; Internet & Social5 Comments

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“May the sun bring you new energy by day,” begins this saccharine saying that has enjoyed a continued life outside Facebook through the fridge magnet and huggable-puppies-and-kittens-on-posters and wedding planner industries. It gets passed off as an “Apache blessing” or “Apache wedding blessing” on Facebook, usually with some hunk-ish Indian brave pictures beside the words or some faux-Indian animal fetish images. The rest of the alleged “blessing” reads: …May the moon softy restore you by night; May the rain wash away your worries; May the breeze blow new strength into your being; May you walk gently through the world and ……… click below for more ↓

Please preserve the CBC: no more cuts!

Arts / Canadian Politics / Media Issues2 Comments

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Canadians who care about media content, journalistic integrity and fair reporting are anxiously watching for tomorrow’s federal budget announcements. Big cuts to the CBC are expected, according to this Huffington Post story: Cuts to CBC funding expected in the upcoming federal budget could have dramatic implications, touching everything from popular television programming to foreign news bureaus and eliminating hundreds of jobs, observers predict. The CBC’s own story about the predicted cuts doesn’t mention the CBC, but it does say, “…many public servants in Ottawa are bracing for staffing cuts, which may not arrive through relatively painless attrition or early retirement ……… click below for more ↓

Scribble, scribble, eh what?

Arts / Books & Reviews / Municipal Politics / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading Now7 Comments

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Just passed the 13,000 word mark on my current book about Machiavelli and municipal politics, this weekend. So far, I have gone through explanations of Chapters 1-10 of The Prince. The Prince has 26 chapters, so I’m about 40% of the way through my analysis, more or less on track for a 35,000-40,000 word book. It’s a little tough in places trying to fit Machiavelli’s words and ideas to modern issues and themes, but so far I think I’ve done a fair job of finding relevant metaphors, issues and events. The next chapter, on ecclesiastical states, might be a bit ……… click below for more ↓

Not a John Lennon quote… just another bad meme

Arts / Memes; Internet & SocialOne Comment

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Another unsourced, mis-attributed quote is going the rounds, found as are so many on Facebook, this one turning itself into another of those annoying, unsourced Internet memes that people love to share: “When I was five years old, my Mom told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wrote down “happy”. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life.” Nope, not by Lennon. Just another bad Internet meme, with no source ever listed, but ……… click below for more ↓

On translating Chaucer and the joys of Middle English

Arts / Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading Now6 Comments

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In my last two visits to the nearby Chapters, I picked up from the bargain books section two recent, hardcover, versions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. One is a new verse translation by Burton Raffel published in 2008, the other a prose translation by Peter Ackroyd, from 2009. These join the dozen or so other versions of Chaucer’s works I already have on my bookshelves: the Riverside Chaucer (third edition), several venerable Penguin editions (both original and translations), the New Cambridge edition, the Portable Chaucer, Hopper’s interlinear translation, and a few others. What always surprises me is how widely these translations ……… click below for more ↓

It wasn’t Einstein who said it…

Arts / Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Memes; Internet & Social5 Comments

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Yet another incorrectly attributed quotation is being passed around the Internet, this time on Facebook. This one is, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” A saccharine, touchy-feely, warm-puppy quote that appeals to some who take comfort in them, but Einstein never said that. According to Wikiquote’s page on Einstein, This gets almost 500k hits on google, but as far as I can tell, none has a source… Doing a Google book search and restricting the date range ……… click below for more ↓

The colour of the herd

Arts / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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I felt not so much like I was in a city full of undertakers, but rather in a city that was in casual but widespread mourning. A sombre, solemn city where everyone dressed in black in recognition of some great death, but one of which visitors were unaware. Standing at an intersection, the light would change and a wall of dark would approach, like a funeral procession that had just disbanded and was now going about its daily business in all seriousness. Okay, to be truthful, not everyone was in black. There were other dark shades among the herd: deep ……… click below for more ↓

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