Things I learned while looking up other things, 2025.11.11.
Dear friends,
I don’t know when I first came across this poem, but every November I remember it again. (Usually the line “No comfortable feel in any member—”, occasioned by me forgetting my gloves.) There’s a monument to the poet, Thomas Hood, in Kensal Green Cemetery. It used to have a bust of him on top and “bronze roundels” on all four sides, but both the bust and the bronze roundels have been stolen.
I was lucky enough to see Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Madonna of the carnation” on a recent trip to Munich (it’s in the Alte Pinakothek). While looking up “why a carnation” I discovered that Da Vinci is thought to be the first artist to draw the thyroid and that the Madonna in this picture shows “a swelling at the base of the neck suggestive of a diffuse thyroid goiter.”
A uzulang is a programming language used for making patterns, usually time-based patterns.
Henry McBride in the New York Sun, reviewing Peggy Guggenheim’s 31 Women exhibition of 1943, said that it was unsurprising that women artists were good at Surrealism because it was “about 70% hysterics”. (Sometimes I think it’s good that I don’t have a time machine, because I’d probably just use it to go back and punch people. Related.)
Alexander Calder created a memorial for the Almadén mercury miners. It’s a fountain of pure mercury, and you can see it at the Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona (where it’s behind glass so it won’t poison you).
I’ve added another gem to my list of delightful names: John L. Senior, Jr.
“Cheiloscopy is a forensic investigation technique that deals with identification of humans based on lips traces.”
Jean-Louis Scherrer, a Paris couturier, “is mainly noted for being the first couture designer to be sacked from their own-name label”.
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin