a sensible banker, and whinnying explained

In 1517, Raphael couldn’t finish the Villa Farnesina frescoes because he kept playing hooky to go chat up the baker’s daughter down the street. So his patron, Agostino Chigi, had Raphael’s girlfriend kidnapped.

(This backfired, of course. “Raphael got depressed and stopped painting entirely. Chigi gave up and moved the woman INTO the villa. Genius move. Masterpiece completed.”)

wait, Agostino Chigi? Wasn’t he that banker with the alum fortune who showed up last year in Wolf Crawl Hall…? Yes! He would host these huge banquets, and then:

“In order to show his contempt of money, he was said to have all the silver dishes thrown into the river after the end of the parties; however, his servants were secretly ready to recollect them with nets draped under the windows.”

sensible fellow. he reminds me of the intro to Daniel Kolak’s translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “And what are the rules? Ask me and I will strike you because you are not looking; I will have decapitated you without your knowing. One can try to formulate obscure theories to avoid playing the game or one can play the game to win.”

(I think the portrait above was painted by Sebastiano Luciani)

We recently figured out that when a horse whinnies, the trick is biphonation (producing two different sounds at the same time). “One is a deep tone created by vibrating the vocal folds, similar to how humans sing. The other is a high-pitched whistle generated inside the larynx, something never before confirmed in a large mammal.”

tldr - Horses are singing like people while simultaneously whistling like rats!

How prove? By piping helium through a dead horse’s larynx, of course of course-

“Because sound travels faster in helium, whistle frequencies shift higher when helium is used, while sounds created by vibrating vocal folds remain unchanged… [so w]hen helium flowed through the larynx, the high frequency component rose in pitch, but the low frequency component stayed the same.”

if both components were being produced as one sound, we’d expect the helium to affect them in the same way. Since it affected them differently, they must be being produced separately.

It’s a cute trick, actually! Even if you do have to imagine squeezing colorful helium balloons into the mouths of squeaky-voiced My-Little-Pony-esque horse carcasses.

Francis Bacon (disambiguation), to me, has always been the philosopher - y’know, champion of inductive reasoning, father of the scientific method, that guy.

but then I discovered Francis Bacon the artist! (via Brief, Generalized Tremors by C.R. Calabria.) such awful melting figures, nightmare fodder, gotta love it

this section is included entirely as an excuse to create that mashup pic above, kthxbye

short stories I recently read and enjoyed

• Jennifer's Daughter by Sara S. Messenger (via Ozy Brennan) (teenage girl raised by a zombie monster. Loneliness and isolation and the terrified projections of wounded parents.)

  • …which reminded me of The House of Aunts by Zen Cho, one of my an all-time favs, about a girl being raised by her pontianak aunties

• The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain (god he was the master of writing voice without it being annoying or cumbersome)

• Lara’s Theme by Madhuri Vijay

• Prayers to the God of Progress by Andrew Graham Martin

  • “I was busy massaging the kale for my lunch salad so I didn’t have a free hand to jiggle the mouse to make the little yellow dot on my screen go green so my coworkers could see I was being productive. So I attached a third arm to my ribs on my left side. Contrary to what you might think, it didn’t start trying to jerk me off right away; it took a couple hours.”

• The Dissection Question by Emma Cairns Watson (wonderfully homoerotic and creepy, not available online, but ordering a physical copy is only $2.50 and very very worth it)

perfect sentences (and snippets)

• “If you’re studying prairie dogs, you get plague.” - Dr. Daniel Blumstein, Ologies: Marmotology

• “Give me the ghost of my wife but just the bad parts.” - Chris Fleming (via)

• “It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.” - G.K. Chesterton (via)

• “What more can you do to a creature, short of killing it, than prevent it from finding what it can find?” - Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary