Things I learned while looking up other things, 2025.01.11
Dear friends,
“Earth’s average temperature climbed more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in 2024.” Which probably means we shouldn’t be surprised by the LA fires — just rightly horrified. And no matter where you live, if you haven’t updated your emergency supplies: it’s time. (If you’re in LA and lost a musical instrument or music equipment to the fire, there’s a grant to replace at least something that’s been lost.)
You might be feeling dread in your chest, but did ancient Mesopotamians? “An analysis of cuneiform texts shows that these ancient people felt disgust in their shins, suffering in their armpits and sexual arousal in their ankles.”
“His memory was wonderful. He never forgot what a necklace looked like or the kind of wine they served or somebody's cigarette falling off the ashtray and burning the doily.”
When I was in Edinburgh last year I took a picture of a sentence (“What is the language using us for?”) that was carved into stone in a small courtyard. The author of that line, poet W.S. Graham, died almost forty years ago, but it’s never a bad time to read poetry, is it?
The captions on videos are called chyrons in the US and astons in the UK, both words taken from the names of the corporations that made the tools to create them.
It turns out that your cancer can get cancer, a phenomenon known as a hypertumor.
In Greek epigraphy, the stoichedon style (where “letters are aligned in rows vertically as well as horizontally”) fell out of favor in the third century BC, as the “disjointed style, in which consecutive lines are not in register with one another, letters are proportionately spaced, and each line tends to begin with a complete word or syllable”.
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin