fiddler

Utah throws everything at the wall to see what sticks

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by Doctor Science — who blogger.com has decided to let in again Adam Liptak at the NY Times doesn’t *have* to mock the Utah Attorney General’s office arguments against marriage equality (aka same-sex marriage), they come pre-mocked for your convenience: “A substantial body of social science research confirms,” the brief said, “that children generally fare … Read more

Return of the Sexuality of Christ

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by Doctor Science

I was pleased to see Lee Siegal’s article in the New Yorker, Pope Francis and the Naked Christ, because it’s about one of my favorite books: Leo Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. Coincidentally, one of my holiday presents the year was a copy of the second edition — my copy of the first seems to have gone walkabout, and I’ve wanted to read Steinberg’s expansion for many years.

I read the first edition (published in 1983) some time in the late 80s, IIRC, and was an instant fan. In a nutshell, Steinberg’s thesis is that Renaissance artists created images of Christ’s Infancy, Baptism, and Crucifixion that focused attention on his penis. They did this to demonstrate the completeness of Christ’s Incarnation: that He became a human man in every respect, even those that to us fallen mortals seem shameful.

I gather that many art historians and other readers were shocked and resistant to Steinberg’s argument, but my reaction was a relieved, “Aha! Explained at last! It wasn’t just me!” Steinberg was discussing something that had been bothering me for decades — since I was 8 years old, in fact.

Cut for images of Great Art of the Western World that may not be safe for your work and/or eyeballs, and for anatomical terminology.

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The Case of the Perry Mason Genres

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by Doctor Science

Atlantic reporter Alexis Madrigal wondered how Netflix comes up with their weirdly specific genres, so he (with the help of Atlantic contributor Ian Bogost) reverse-engineered Netflix’s classification system, and how its 76,897 (!!) genres are put together.

Along the way, they discovered a strange pattern in the data: the footsteps of [dum dum dum dum-dum] Perry Mason. Madrigal thinks it’s a glitch, a ghost in the machine, but I propose to connect all this up, Your Honor.
 
Direct YouTube Link

A modern re-mix of the “Perry Mason” musical theme. Yes, the title sequences really were that slow-moving, not to say ponderous. But the pacing of the actual scenes isn’t too bad, and all the actors can actually *act*.

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Beginning anew-ish

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by Doctor Science Happy New Year! Wij komen er uit! by M. C. Escher. I’m not sure if it’s a bookplate, a New Year’s card for 1947, or both. The caption means “We’re getting out!” and obviously refers to recovery from WWII. There have been a bunch of changes for me in the past couple … Read more

Race slavery in history and in modern Mauritania

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by Doctor Science Via Andrew Sullivan, I see Joshua Keating’s profile of modern abolitionist Biram Dah Abeid of Mauritania. Dah Abeid says: There are two types of laws in Mauritania. You have the “slave code,” which legitimizes and codifies slavery, and which gives the law a sacred aspect. These are books that were written in … Read more

All the “Eating” Holidays

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by Doctor Science Some friends once described their style of Jewish/Christian marriage as, “We observe all the ‘eating’ holidays.” We follow the same guidelines here, at least in regard to the winter solstice celebrations. Later today I will expand this post, hopefully with pictures of some of the delicious cholesterol-bomb cookies we’ve been making, by … Read more

Into the darkness again

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by Doctor Science

In honor of the darkest day of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere) (when I started writing this), I’m going to give some advice relevant to a post that’s currently going around tumblr:

The problem with a history of depression and anxiety is that you can never know if you’re “just having one of those weeks” or if you’re sliding back down into those places you swore you’d never go again.

This is not actually true. As someone with >more depression-mileage than most on tumblr (as in, diagnosed and dealing with it for more than 20 years), I can say that no, you *can* know if you’re “just having one of those weeks” or if it’s more serious.

This advice is for people who’ve already been diagnosed with depression or depression+anxiety, gotten a bit better, and now wonder if they’re relapsing, just having a bad week, or whether they’re in a situation where feeling depressed is the normal human thing to do.

StarryMoonlit

Starry Moonlit Deep Winter Night, by Stephen Remick. I found this picture via google image search, and picked it because it so accurately evokes how moonlit snow can glow while the sky above is dark, as though the light of the sky is down and the earth’s darkness is up. It’s very New England.

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Leveling up in cooking

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by Doctor Science The other day Sprog the Younger was reading a story in which a character — a rather manly kind of man — was trying to bake a cake, despite having no prior experience. She LOLed, and then thanked me for teaching her these critical life skills, so that she, at least, knows … Read more

Misconceptions on the way to the Supreme Court

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by Doctor Science

As you would expect, I’ve got my own take on Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby Stores. Last week, Eugene Volokh did a series of posts about the case; I made some comments, which I’ll repost here, along with some other information I’ve dug up.

Williamsonfjhetty

Dinah Consoling Hetty in Prison, a sculpture by Francis John Williamson illustrating a scene from George Elliot’s Adam Bede. Spoilers [highlight to read]: Hetty is in prison for the crime of “child-murder”: she abandoned her new-born baby in the field where he was born. In the end, her sentence is commuted to transportation to Australia, along with the child’s father.

This illustration, like all others I’ve seen and like the BBC production, gets the characters’ looks fundamentally wrong. Dinah is rather cool and bland — not to say boring or plain — in appearance, while Hetty is extraordinarily *cute* — Elliot keep comparing her to kittens, lambs, etc. Jenna Coleman is the look they should be going for. But also [highlight to read]: Hetty is attractively “plump” — enough that no-one realizes she’s pregnant.

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Back to Georgia

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by Doctor Science

I’m back from our Thanksgivukkah trip to Georgia, to get together with my husband D’s 3 siblings and their children (there are 2 each). We haven’t been all gathered as a family since their mother passed away almost 10 years ago, so this was quite a big deal.

Though they grew up in the Atlanta suburbs, we didn’t gather there — we rented a couple of cottages on Tybee Island for the holiday. Our nuclear family flew into ATL on Tuesday, and back on Sunday; we rented a car and drove down to Tybee.

Neither D nor I had ever been to coastal Georgia before, and I’d only been as far south as Macon (D’s late father’s home town) once.

As I’ve said before, I love seeing how the landscape — the forms of land, vegetation, and houses — changes as you travel. The trip from Atlanta (in the Piedmont) through Macon (on the Fall Line) to Savannah and the Georgia coast is naturally parallel to the familiar trip from central New Jersey to the Jersey shore, but with many interesting differences.

ATL-Tybee

ATL to Macon to Tybee, on bing.com aerial view with no labels. I find that if Google and Bing have the same level of magnification in their satellite maps, I usually prefer Bing. People who aren’t familiar with this part of the US may wish to pull up a map for their own location at a similar magnification, to compare.

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