Merry Christmas (Buon Natale)

In the late nineties, way back before the turn of the century, I was friends with some professional musicians around the Dallas area. Todd and April were brother and sister playing bass and drums respectively in a popular alternative rock band.

One day going to lunch, Todd queued up a song with Dennis (the frontman singer in their group) and a girl he had just started going out with. If I recall, it was the song 'Whole New World', which was a duet between Dennis and his new girlfriend who was singing her part exceptionally well.

I only seem to have three super powers, and on this occasion I invoked the first one. My first superpower is the ability to recognize a singing voice of anyone that I've heard singing before regardless of the context. This is in fact well documented among my friends. And it works on the hard to identify singers, not just the easy singing voices like Sheryl Crow or Gilbert Gotfried.

Anyway, the woman's voice I recognized as Lisa Layne from Vince Vance and the Valiants. It was quite exciting since Lisa some years earlier had recorded my favorite Christmas song ever. Click on Lisa's link here to see the video in case you might have been living in Myanmar helping the poor for the past 15 years, or perhaps in a coma.

Here is the video.


















Dennis and Lisa eventually parted ways and she is now in Branson, Missouri. Other artists have tried to recapture the magic of the original recording, but to me the clarity of her voice and production values of the first can't be matched. I told her as much in an email, and she got a good chuckle out of that. Maybe I can get my friends on city council to hire her for an acoustic set for the tree lighting next year? I'll put in more than my fair share.

I hope the season is good to all of you, and Merry Christmas!

Cosmati

In a very minor way, tonight I took a few small footsteps in the journeys of the great Cosmati. Who were the Cosmati, you might ask? If you answered 'the secret society in the film Tomb Raider', that is not correct, however you get extra credit for making me think of Angelina Jolie in shorts with pistols.

















The Cosmati were families of artistic stone workers sharing the name 'Cosma' around 1000 years ago. Several generations of people in the family made very mathematically complex mosaics. Many of their works are geometric styled with triangles, circles, parallel-o-grams, and yes, even rhombuses.
Some typical examples of their work...















Not only known for just architectural mosaics that had the effect of showing you what you see when you rub your eyes way too hard, but they were also well known sculptors and art dealers.

The wealthy and powerful revered their work in the early and even late middle ages. Well heck, even now if I count myself, right? For example, Pope Iulius II had his logo done in their style (he was the 'warrior' pope who layed the first brick of the brand spanking new 'St. Peter's Cathederal' in Rome around 1500).













All manner of medieval palaces used their flooring, for example Ca d'Oro in Venice, not to be much outdone by St. Marks cathedral, had a nice Cosmati styled floor put in on their canal entrance.

An art mosaic project I'm working on requires traditional stones that the Cosmati used once upon a time. I have had some tiny pieces of green serpentine left over, so I've made some of these into triangles like those typically used in the pavements of the Cosmati. I was thinking of making a replica Ca d'Oro floor, but for now, I will just use these triangles for making some 'Cosmati' cufflinks.















That's the kind of thing Bored Neoclassical Guy would do, right?

All My Style Went Into the Sweater (Tutti i Miei Moda per il Maglione)

So I went clothes shopping not too long ago. I'm the kind who goes into the store, gets what I need and am out again with the surgical precision of a special forces commando. I don't go often, but when I do I like to buy everything that is necessary for at least half of a year.

In Italy, I was very impressed with their clothes shops. Of course without a discount, some of the clothing in the window can be quite expensive. I've always admired Italians and their love of clothes and fashion, from people walking on a Saturday afternoon in Salerno to strolling the wide avenues of Pompeii in 79 AD. Sometimes I wish that there was no need in the US for websites like this.

All that being said, I've recently found a blog which combines two great things, style and ancient mosaics. To take some style cues from Maggie at Mosaicology, I have painstakingly handcrafted a sweater with guilloche.















Are my color choices great, or do I need to go back to the mall?

It's Cold Outside (Il Suo Freddo)

Global warming and rising ocean levels were a problem the ancient Romans might have dealt with to a degree. They were a few shades closer to the last ice age and didn't build as frequently as the 'strip malls' which go up here in the modern US every day. I worry about water levels in Venice destroying great architecture and history whenever I go to Italy.

Modern handwringing about the loss of ice caps and glaciers prompted me to think about the situation.

















People say 'global warming' but really the only observable phenomenon I see are less ice and some upper atmospheric changes. Since my 'junk science' thinking can't come up with anything at the moment for the upper atmosphere, indulge me my ramblings about ice today...

When fresh water is floating around in salt water, what is the actual mechanism for melting scientifically speaking? Well if you are like most people and said a rise in temperature, then you are partially correct, on the surface. But consider that the ice is floating in near freezing cold salt water, which is actually colder than freshwater ice (back in ancient times, they say the Romans made ice cream with salt water to make things even colder).

And, there is no shortage of volume of that colder-than-ice salt water compared to the thin ice crust. Even large glaciers are not nearly as tall as the depths of the Arctic Ocean, right?

So I understand the melting of freshwater ice in salt water to be related to the edges (of the ice that is). The salt particles contaminate the freshwater ice and lower its freezing point, which if the temperature is just under freshwater freezing, the freshwater ice melts away. The ice on the caps is replenished with weather systems (dropping fresh water rain, aka 'snow'), but maybe that's not enough? What if there are other particles (air delivered chemicals or residue) which lower the freezing point of the polar ice like salt does?

My half-baked solution to all this would be create enormous desalinization / filtration plants at the poles to remove contaminants; a kind of 'Santa's Workshop' of fresh water. The fresh water would then be pumped onto remaining polar ice where it could refreeze because it is still colder than freezing in those places.












To do this on such a large scale to affect ocean levels would require enormous power, and nuclear fission springs to mind. Of course, that generates large amounts of heat which could be counter productive unless it was used really really efficiently. Does anyone have a cheap limitless power source that operates at low temperatures to be used in this project? Will you give that to me for free?

The First Pitch Service (il Primo Tiro)

I would like to take this opportunity to announce the availability of my official 'First Baseball Pitch' service which will be available to any major league baseball game held in a stadium with projected attendees of 35,000 or more.
Sure, you could go with a President of the US, a former hall of fame athelete, or some other celebrity, but why do that when Bored Neoclassical Guy could bring a stunning 57.5 mph fastball high and away?














For an extra $5000, I'll even ride out to the pitcher's mound on a two horse chariot.

Way to go this season, Texas Rangers! And, SF Giants, not bad either!

Bees and the Birds (Api e Uccelli)

Do you ever stop and think about bees?

I don't usually but I was prompted to as I was doing a bit of late night sleep-inducing reading through 'Georgics', a relatively new bestseller* by Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil).

*relatively, in geological time

Whilst he was busy making his 2000 year old points about how weather can affect a hive, I started thinking about how hot it gets here in the Texas summers. Do their wax cells give way and the bees all ride out in a tsunami of hot honey and melted wax? Is this one reason there seem to be fewer bees now? Does 'hot honey and melted wax' sound like an adult film title?

These and other questions were now keeping me awake, thoroughly counteracting the tranquilizing effect the book had on me just moments before.

I guess people have been using the fruits of bee labor for a while now. After artisans of thousands of years ago painted fresco walls, Vitruvius recommended using wax mixed with olive oil over it. I do this for all my pompeii style frescoes.
Wax seemed to have many uses back in antiquity, as an adhesive additive, flavorless and odor free chewing gum, a disinfectant, a carving medium for bronze casting, the list goes on.

I like to eat honey, particularly over Greek style yogurt for breakfast, what about you guys? Greek legend said that Pythagoras (the triangle dude for the geometrically challenged) ate only honey.

The symbolism of bees is ever present through history, sometimes at the highest levels. Napoleon used it on his coat of arms, and before him the Merovingian (French) monarchs going way back to mid fifth century. Even the Egyptians used the bee symbol as a hieroglyph and to indicate lower Egypt.
















The ancient Greeks at Delphi had a beehive shaped stone that the priestess sat in front of as she alledgedly divined the future (some scholars indicated she was refered to as the 'bee of Pythia'). To digress, I've actually seen that stone. Not the original one, which hasn't been seen in years, but the replacement ordered from the Omphalos Store (tm).

Near Valencia in Spain a cave drawing made before recorded history was found with remarkable detail, especially for back then without Photoshop or Etch-a-Sketches or anything.













For more interesting esoteric bee-and-honey-in-antiquity knowledge and postulations, check out Andrew Gough. He draws an interesting link between bulls, bees, and stars, and there's even a Latin lesson in there somewhere.

While you are doing all of that, I might go have a Michelob Honey Wheat or two, you know, like Pythagoras would have done. But if I'm in a hurry, maybe a Mickey's?



ps - Is it just me or is there a resemblance between beer and honey?

Fore! (Davanti?)

It was a sunny pleasant afternoon riding along in the golf cart on the oceanside course, Punta Borinquen. Four of us had decided to play, and so far we were all shooting well. Except for that one guy who had only played once before and was having trouble.












Azure and light green water lapped up the beaches on the north and west sides of the seventh hole. The views were amazing, even with the nearest edge of the hurricane hundreds of miles off to the east. The golf course itself was located next to an old US airbase now being used as a small commercial airstrip. I looked over my right shoulder to see a twin prop taking off. Just a great time on a fantastic course.












Two of us had teed off already and were leisurly driving up the fairway. I took a swig of the local beer when suddenly the roof of the golf cart seemed to collapse on my head. With excruciating pain and finding it difficult to breathe for a few seconds, I jumped out of the cart with hands on head. 'Stunned' and 'disoriented' were the words which best described my state of mind. Once I realized the roof hadn't collapsed and I had not been either shot in the head or struck by lightning (there were dark clouds to the south), my attention turned to the novice player who had just teed off.

Newbie was 50 yards away and had hit the ball extremely hard. The ball had rocketed at precisely the correct trajectory both underneath the roof of a moving cart, yet above the back windshield with a godlike precision that would shame NASA, JPL, and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories combined.

We are talking about a moving target less than the size of a dime, because the ball had struck the middle back part of my ballcap right where the little metal brad thing was located. The little metal thing in the center of the ballcap functioned much like a chisel to focus all the energy of the golfball to the one spot on the back of my head. I can take quite a bit of pain, but that was just ridiculously bad.

I pieced together that it had riccocheted off the metal brad and had hit the plastic top of the cart with enough force to make a large 'bang' sound. So that was why I thought the cart top had collapsed on my head. Within seconds, I had a huge lump and was a bit worried about concussion or brain swelling. Luckily, I still had some room in my skull, particularly evident since I went golfing with a newbie and didn't think to stay behind the tees when he was dealing this sort of death and destruction.