From the category archives:
‘Tis the season, so I designed a card. 
(You may purchase it here if you like. Or any other comparably inappropriate product. I do feel more people ought to confound loved ones by gifting them my socks.)
On to further scholarly matters! [click to continue…]
It’s been a busy month for John and Belle. Certain difficulties involved, as you can see from the photo. Hope it’s been a good month for you and yours and that Santa brings you many appropriate gifts.
Happy Hari Raya Haji/Eid al-Adha to all our Muslim readers! I live very near a huge mosque, and all the parking in the opposite lot is taken up, and all the street signs are full of locked bicycles, and the sidewalk is bordered with scores of scooters and motorcycles, and you can hear the call to prayer for a change. Normally Singapore more or less mutes it in the name of religious harmony–that is to say they forbid loudspeakers so the muezzin is singing alone, and so desperately quiet over the traffic noise and the inevitable jackhammering going on in Singapore at all times. The Indian ceremonies in which someone is blowing on a conch is frankly louder, and don’t get me started on drumming in Chinese temples or lion dances at CNY. I feel as if the men with the white caps that indicate they have been on the hajj have a little swagger today. Today on my hike I noticed the other men have generally worn embroidered and beaded black caps to keep up appearances. For those of you who don’t know, the feast celebrates both the ending of the hajj and the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ismail. Ibrahim and Ismail are said to have made the Kaaba later at the source of the miraculous spring which appeared when the earth was struck by the angel Jibra’il (or alternately much earlier where Hagar collapsed in prayer after wandering, in the hopes of saving her child from death from lack of water). It’s called the Zamzam Well, which is literally the coolest name ever. The day includes the sacrifice of a big valuable animal which is divided for a ritual feast, in commemoration of the ram substituted for Ismail. Lots of the many Singaporean Muslims with family in Malaysia travel there for the feast, where the cows or sheep or goats are more easily available (though of course they are shipped into mosques here.) People raise funds for charity also. Anyway, happy day!
“Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called “soul” is a myth …”
– H.P. Lovecraft, “Herbert West – Reanimator”
Years ago I made a parody Christmas book mash-up of Lovecraft/Haeckel/Clement Clark Moore. I called it Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness: A Visitation of Sog-Nug-Hotep. I made print versions but then took them down (they weren’t quite it.) Yet it lived, lurking beneath the surface, in the form of a perennially popular pair of Flickr albums and this old Hilo post. Hidden, winter sun-dappled tide pools of hideous, unfathomable, happy depths for kiddies to dip their toes in! But 2016 is the year of fake news. You can’t spell ‘fake’ without the ‘Haeckel’. So my fraudulent yet innocent concoctions have wandered and, eventually, been mistook for genuine Victoriana. Oh, well. I can’t completely blame them. Real Victorian X-Mas cards are often dark and weird. Hence the joke.
Caliginous gloom is the best disinfectant. If, as some whisper, ‘even death may die’, then perhaps it is possible to quash a rumor that Haeckel actually designed X-Mas cards. Accordingly, I have seized the seasonal opportunity to republish and set the record straight. A new, improved version of the print edition is now on Amazon! It is also available on Kindle. Somehow Amazon not seen the connection yet, but I imagine that will resolve itself. (Also, I made slightly different covers for the two editions. Which do you prefer?)
For impoverished urchins, with nary a penny to spare, yet high-speed internet access, I have updated the Flickr galleries with some higher quality images. The old ones were skimpy. My most popular images, Blue Boy and Feeding Birdies, are available in larger sizes. Some others, including several of my favorites. (Maybe I’ll get around to doing all of them. But not today.)
Went to see Moana. Mild plotspoilers under the fold: [click to continue…]
Life has been keeping me too busy. I’ll be back soon. But don’t forget! Tonight is the night Roy comes, to give toys to good girls and boys. Happy Incept Date!
Here’s a Christmas post from my blog in 2004. The theme is that nothing about Christmas ever changes, so it’s a repost of the same post from 2003. Looking back from 2015, the only change I can see is that the complaints about inclusive language to which I referred as “old stuff by now” have now become codified, as the “War on Christmas”.
I’ll add one new thought that the use of “War on Christmas” rhetoric reflects a larger problem for Christianists: should they be asserting their privileges as a majority (as in the demand that their particular holiday be recognised as primary) or demanding their rights as a minority (as in their unwillingness to accept equal marriage). The two strategies undermine each other.
In anticipation of at least a short break, let me wish a merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and a happy New Year to everyone (at least everyone who uses the Gregorian calendar).
Read on for my unchanged Christmas message
Discuss.
The older daughter has a Holiday TV Special thought: “Isn’t it ironic that Bill Watterson wouldn’t commercialize his stuff, but Calvin would have loved to have his face plastered on everything. Charles Schulz licensed everything about “Peanuts” to go on everything, and Charlie Brown would have hated that.”
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Oh, and Merry Christmas! (Been a hectic holiday season for the Holbo/Waring clan. Good and bad. Leave it at that. So I went off the grid.)
Here’s a bit of Crooked Timber, captured in Takoma Park, MD.
Bit late, but a family-oriented, all-American blog like Crooked Timber should have a Thanksgiving-themed post.
This semester I was teaching ‘topics in aesthetics’ and we ended up doing a unit on fakes and forgeries. I read a bunch of stuff on the history of famous cases. Lots of fascinating material, of course. I like the story of Lothar Malskat and the Turkeys In The Schwahl, entertainingly retold in Jonathan Keats, Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age
Long story short: this guy Malskat was a fake and a fraud! He was supposed to restore the painting in this here 13th Century church cloister but it was, basically, like, gone. Nothing left. So he made it up! Here’s an excerpt: [click to continue…]
Motorboat!
Sailboat and biplane!
For some people, anyway. I don’t normally post photos with people, but this little girl was born right on this blog and look at her now! All grown up and going to Martha’s Vineyard. Everyone’s glad to be home in Singapore eating roti prata and murtabak, though. Well, no, I miss real summer like that. High dunes and cold water and fresh corn and berry cobbler and lobster rolls. But if you read my aunt Laura Wainwright’s book Home Bird you can hear that it gets wickedly cold in the wintertime.
Later when I’m not tired I’ll make it be so you can click on a high-res version, this one is kinda lame but it busts the margins otherwise…
It’s cool that Chris and Ingrid were meeting up recently; Maria came here to have roti prata with me and John in Singapore just the other day. Maybe someday in the future perfect subjunctive all the CT authors could have met one another. Maybe someday we could all meet up at once and have a killer party! I would like it to be…on Ortygia in Syracuse, I think (the one in Sicily). It would be OK if it were in a different city too. HK would be cool. Mataram isn’t exactly a city, but it still might be nice to meet on Lombok somewhere. I took this photo on Lombok week before last, looking East off the Southwest coast. If it were clear and you looked to the left you could see Bali across the Lombok strait, three mountains one behind the other, about as big as the knuckle line of your fist held out at arm’s length. This is also the Wallace line, which divides Eurasian flora and fauna from Austronesian. Storms marching towards us across the marsh and then the river, and up the bluff, and then whiting out the screened porch with rain and then hammering the tin roof with a thousand pebbles taught me as a child that clouds get really full and black and then water up and falls out the bottom. It’s just science.
