14:00 Have you ever had a day when the morning starts off quiet and then in the afternoon, everything everywhere seems to be happening all at the same time?
[I'm sure that's never happened before in the history of the world, Colin. Another first for you and Lois, and no mistake! - Ed]
Yes, today, we have a quietish morning, where we pop out to Hanley Swan Post Office to post some letters and buy some notelets, and then we stop at The Swan to book a table for a nice lunch for two there in a couple of weeks' time.
flashback to August: Lois and I enjoy a quiet lunch at the Swan,
and then go out to sit awhile by the famous duck pond
Then, after we come home, have a quick lunch and then go to bed for our afternoon nap, "all hell breaks loose" - not literally, but certainly a lot seems to be "going on". Just when we're trying to relax, our phones start beeping and buzzing and "diddling" like crazy.
It's
my phone that starts going off first, but I have to say, it does come up with some heart-warming news, and proof that nobody,
and I mean nobody, should be "written off" as a hopeless drunk.
My second cousin Ruth, who lives on the Welsh borders, has finally "seen the light" and decided to try "Dry January". Can I congratulate you on that, Ruth? It takes guts to admit that you've been wrong about anything, whether it's for 30 days, or for less even, isn't it, and, as I text Ruth in my comment, it's a case of Better Late Than Never.
Flashback to March 2005: we visit my Welsh second cousin Ruth (ringed),
crouching behind the sofa with her 2 daughters. On the sofa
(left to right) sit my mother, me and my sister Kathy
And this was how, according to my phone earlier today, Ruth took to the country's social media to break the news of her dramatic "recanting" of her years of boozing.
A word of advice to you, Ruth, however. Let me warn you - you're going to find today particularly hard going, but it'll be worth the sacrifice in the end. And it's only 12 hours now, at time of writing, till you can have your first post-dry-January "tipple". Then you'll realise that it's all been so very worthwhile.
More power to your elbow, Ruth !!!!
I hope also that you've gone into work today as usual, Ruth, because if you're going to be teetotal for almost a day, this is your big chance to "take over the company", like this local woman Caroline Miller did recently, over at the nearby village of North Piddle, according to influential local news website, Onion News.
That's certainly the way to get ahead nowadays, regrettable though it may seem. So why don't you go for it, Ruth? You have my blessing, child haha !!!!
14:30 And then just as Lois and I are trying to relax again, something else weird happens.
Have you ever heard your phone and your partner's phone "go off " at exactly the same time? As Lois and I settle back under the covers, we realise that our smartphones are "beeping", "buzzing" and "diddling" in sync under the pillow: typically mine "beeps" while Lois's "diddles" - or is it the other way round? [That's not really important, is it! - Ed]
our phones start diddling and beeping in sync
But it turns out that our phones have more good news, this time for both of us, which is nice.
When Lois and I were young, whenever we saw Native Americans on screen, they would always greet people with a poker-faced "How!" while holding up outstretched palms. Not only that, but they would punctuate their dialogue with lots of "-ums", and not just for hesitation purposes - as very much a functioning part of the verb-form, as in "Me wantum this" or "me wantum that". I should explain for younger readers that this was Native American for "I want this" or "I want that".
Remember this famous scene from "Superman", you know, the episode where poor Superman has to do everything that anybody tells him to do ??? You know, the one where poor Superman is completely "run ragged" by the end of the 30 minutes?
the famous episode featuring superhero Superman,
seen here fulfilling the multiple requests of a Native American
And incidentally, what a great hat that Native American guy is wearing in the above cartoon - did you notice?! All the best hats have feathers in, don't they.
flashback to yesterday - I don my medieval
"Renaissance Scholar" hat to showcase a mattress stopper
an 18th century "macaroni", a fashionable man-about-town, and the origin
of the term macaroni as used in "Yankee Doodle Dandy"
(acknowledgement to my American brother-in-law Steve, for this picture)
Get ahead, get a hat - and make sure it's one with feathers, that's the key takeaway here haha!
But here's the thing... have you ever wondered why Native Americans today, when interviewed on current affairs TV programmes and the like, only talk normal English today, just like you and me?
Happily Lois and I know the answer to this conundrum now. Yes, we've both been alerted by our phones to the sudden intervention of one of our favourite pundits on the quora forum website, linguistics buff Aaron Brown, who's been weighing in on the vexed question of "Why are Native Americans often portrayed as saying "How!"? "
Aaron writes: The natives of North America spoke 500 different languages in 57 different families, with 25 isolates. When exposed to English speakers, both the immigrants and natives developed pidgin languages consisting of highly simplified English with many loan words from different native groups.....
The various native American pidgins are very easy for English speakers to learn. They sound a bit like how very young children speak, with grammatical complexities like gender and tense ignored, and made-up words to supplement small vocabularies. But the pidgins actually have grammar rules and word meanings. For example, “heap” meant very and “chief” was a general word for any leader, so “heap big chief in Washington,” did not represent a childish view of the world, but a sensible statement in a pidgin that made use of a single intensifier word and a single word for all variants of leader.
If you watch many early Hollywood movies or listen to 1920s radio shows, you can hear authentic Native American pidgin, because many people still spoke it. It was quickly replaced by what has been called “Tonto-speak” or “Hollywood Injun English.” This was due to screenwriters and actors who had only heard a little of the pidgin, and did not understand its rules. By the 1940s, Native American pidgin was unfamiliar even to most Native Americans and people who lived near them.
The Hollywood representation of native Americans and immigrants speaking to them using the word “How” spoken in an artificially deep voice with the right hand held up palm outward, is not a standard greeting in any known regional Native American Pidgin or sign language.
Fascinating stuff isn't it !!!!
And the only dissenting voice so far on the website is South Dakota resident Rich Jensen, who comes up with a slight correction, but nothing major, luckily, so I think that with Aaron's masterly mini-thesis, we can mostly "take it as gospel", which is nice.
Point taken, Rich - and good intervention!
20:00 Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom. When she emerges we wind down for bed-time with another of crazy art critic Waldemar Januszczak's idiosyncratic arts "lectures".
Lois and I don't think we've ever heard of Western Art's so-called "Mannerism" period, which was "sandwiched in" or maybe just "awkwardly wedged in", during the gap between Renaissance Art (finishes c. 1520) and Baroque Art (starts c. 1590).
But who better to "fill us in" on this forgotten era of Mannerism Art than crazy critic Waldemar. After all, what other art critic does a piece-to-camera while stuffing his face with a plate of ricotta cheese. You've got to admit it, he's a bit of a character, isn't he. My goodness !!!!!
art critic Waldemar Janoszczak demolishes
a plate of ricotta cheese
Many Mannerism paintings have something not quite right about them, like the famous "Madonna With The Long Neck" by Italian mannerist Parmigianino from the 1530's.
Italian mannerist painter Parmigianino's
painting "Madonna With The Long Neck" from the 1530's
Presenter Waldemar has done the maths - scaled up to real life, the Madonna's neck measures a whopping 10 inches. She's sitting down for the session but if she stood up she'd by 9 ft tall. The Baby Jesus is actually the size of a teenager. The angels are all about 4ft 6in, and St Jerome - seen in the bottom right-hand corner is massively too short, by, like, a billion miles. Waldemar doesn't give us an exact measurement for the tiny but perfectly formed Jerome , but I think the oddness of his appearance is pretty self-evident isn't it.
Many mannerist paintings look like the artist has been "on a bender", Waldemar says, but then I suppose there was no such thing as a Dry January in those far-off days. Take this painting of French king Henry IV's mistress Gabrielle d'Estrées (right), sitting naked in a bath and holding a ring, and having one of her nipples pinched by her sister, a duchess.
What a madness it all was !!!!!
Gabrielle d'Estrées and her sister (c. 1594)
Mannerist paintings were often very colourful - and here Waldemar compares for example, Leonardo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel to the colours of Opal Fruits that so entranced him as a boy. Lois and I remember Opal Fruits, with the commercial's catchy jingle "
Opal Fruits - Made To Make Your Mouth Water - remember that!!!?
Waldemar instinctively thinks of Opal Fruits (seen here
in his hand) whenever he sees the Sistine Chapel
And look also at the crazy Opal Fruits-style colours on Contorno's altarpiece (see picture below), says Waldemar. Incidentally Contorno "painting-bombs" the work, making it a kind of selfie. I think Waldemar says it's Contorno up there top right.
Contorno's Pucci altarpiece:Madonna and Child with
Saints (1516), with the painter "painting-bombing" at top right
There's often a weird kind of unexpectedness to many mannerist paintings. Waldemar particularly likes Italian mannerist Pontorno's works, and especially "The Visitation", which features the Virgin Mary and her ageing relative Elizabeth. Both women are pregnant, expecting, respectively, Jesus and John the Baptist.
Pontorno's "The Visitation" depicting the Virgin Mary and
her ageing relative Elizabeth, both pregnant, with their
two maidservants in attendance
The weird thing about the picture is the two figures at the back - presumably maidservants of the two expectant mothers. Waldermar comments how extraordinarily similar they look to their respective mistresses. Why didn't Pontorno depict them with random features? And they're looking at
us, the viewers of the painting.
Lois's theory is that it's supposed to be an image of how the Mary and the Elizabeth were really feeling, at this point, slightly anxious and nervous about what was shortly going to happen to them: both births were going to be miraculous, after all, so a bit of an unknown quantity - Mary was a virgin, and Elizabeth was too old to have babies.
I wonder.... !!!!
Fascinating stuff, though, isn't it.
Men in mannerist paintings tended to get younger, and nuder with the passing years. The martyr St Sebastian starts off being depicted as a grizzled old man, but, in order to show his martyrdom - he was shot by a bunch of arrows - he had to stripped off, and, in order for him to be made to look sexier he gradually became younger and younger.
The Martyrdom of St Sebastian,
by Tommaso (early 16c)
There's also quite a lot of food in mannerist paintings, and Vincenzo Campi in particular liked to depict the lower classes stuffing themselves.
Vincenzo Campi's "The Ricotto Eaters" (c. 1580).
You'll often see people eating beans - but Lois and I didn't know that this was all about sex. In "The Bean-Eaters" (below) a couple are seen eating beans with the woman holding their baby, and beans were thought to be an aphrodisiac. Anything that gave you wind, not just beans, but also cabbage, peas and artichokes, were thought to potentially inflate the penis.
They were the medieval equivalent of Viagra, which we didn't know. Grooms used to eat beans the night before their wedding, just to be on the safe side, it seems.
What madness!!!
Vincenzo Campi's "The Bean Eaters"
If you see figs in these paintings, you have to remember that people saw those too as aphrodisiacs, and cherries, also, were seen as very suggestive: popping somebody's cherry and all that kind of malarkey.
What a crazy world they lived in in those far-off days !!!!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed !!!!! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!
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