NB! · Art · Observations · Humour
Winged creature in a detail of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch
A winged creature waits for you to open the window with no mosquito net. Hieronymus Bosch
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Observations · Palaeontology · Nature · Ethnography
I read a post on an anthropology channel about Elliot Smith and hyperdiffusionism, which among other things hints at the penetration of Egyptian culture into America, explained by the presence of images of elephants in Mesoamerican art…
I shall not hold forth at length on Mesoamerican art and Egypt, still less on the views of Elliot Smith. I will say only that there were, of course, elephants in America. And of the most various kinds. If we speak of the family Elephantidae proper, America was widely populated
Interviews · Books · London · Monarchies · Observations · People
Sarah, Duchess of York, interviewed about her first adult novel Heart for a Compass
Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, photographed by Holly Fernando for The Telegraph. From the interview we learn that she is now the author of 77 books (for children) and has at last written a novel for adults, Heart for a Compass, about the vicissitudes of court life in the Victorian
Geography · Maps · Books · Monarchies
Sergey Nikitin, in his book "The Land of Names" (NLO, 2020) on historical onomastics in Russia, relates, for example, that Paul I, soon after his accession, renamed Yekaterinoslav, Feodosia and Sevastopol, all named under Catherine the Great, to…
Novorossiysk is, in principle, clear enough: the new name was tied to that of the whole region, Russia's southern Russian acquisitions. But Kafa and Akhtiar? The former is found as early as Afanasy Nikitin; it was what the Genoese called Feodosia, and after them the Turks who seized
Faith · Art · Monarchies · Observations · People
Portrait of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna by François Flameng, 1894
Did you recognise her? I could not, without a prompt. The sublimely melancholy young woman in François Flameng's portrait of 1894 is a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, aged thirty, the elder sister of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the wife of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich: Grand Duchess Elizabeth
Architecture · Observations · Society · Paris · Humour
Open-air urinals installed on Place de la République in Paris and criticism of Anne Hidalgo
I would like to send a retching emoji, but I am genuinely impressed by the creative potential of Anne Hidalgo, tireless disfigurer of the French capital. Open-air urinals have been installed on the Place de la République, which prompts the thought that it might be renamed La Répu de
NB! · Observations · Science · Humour
When the author of a scholarly article cites Wikipedia
NB! · Humour
Thanks, I Don't Smoke
Observations · Palaeontology · Nature
Sicilian dwarf elephants stood no more than 1.8 metres tall and 1 metre at the shoulder
Sicilian dwarf elephants stood no more than 1.8 metres tall and 1 metre at the shoulder. They are believed to have descended from a population of a large-bodied species, as did certain other dwarf elephants and mammoths that lived locally on the islands of the Mediterranean. Normal, large
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White church with a bell tower amid water and green shores, aerial view
NB! · Architecture · Faith · Geography · Heritage
This is a church in the village of Krokhino, near Beloye Lake on the River Sheksna
This is a church in the village of Krokhino, near Beloye Lake on the River Sheksna. In 1961 it was flooded during the creation of the Sheksna Reservoir. Funds are now being raised for the restoration and conservation of the remains of the church, which rises above a small islet.
Observations · Society · People
Over forty years of watching ships from a dacha window and their changing names
Alla Demidova on Ships and Their Names:. For more than forty years now I have watched this picture from my dacha window, as the ships sail past. We had a game: who could make out a name first. Little by little I grasped a certain regularity: the two-deckers were