felis_ultharus

Earth Day

Yesterday was Earth Day. Most media didn't notice. The environment has fallen out of our collective narrative again - it just won't stick. CBC noticed, but hardly any of the papers I read in the cafe at the office before work seemed to be aware of it.

Metro newspaper noticed, though. For the occasion, they dyed their dead tree pages green like it was Saint Patrick's Day. I watched a man throw it in the garbage as I left the metro on my way home, after he'd finished his Sudoku puzzle.

Meanwhile, one of BP's oil rigs marked the occasion by exploding in the Gulf of Mexico. An ecological disaster, undoubtedly, though they're still tallying up the damage.

Also In The News...

Dear Thailand: the world stands with you in your fight to restore free and fair elections, and overthrow the military dictatorship that holds your country. Naturally we prefer to stand over here where we don't have to do anything but offer advice.

And may I offer some advice? You might want to name your pro-democracy movement something other than the Red Shirts. We Star Trek fans know what happens to Red Shirts. It sounds defeatist.

Might I suggest a more optimistic name - one more likely to suggest survival? Like the Two-Weeks-to-Retirement Squad? Or the Gay Men, Black Men, and Women Who Have Sex in Horror Movies Battalion?

Work

Today I worked out of our accountant's office. It's usually messy, but today it looked ransacked. I try not to look, but a drawer was hanging open in front of me. And of all the things I expected to see in our accountant's office, the last thing I'd have guessed was the poetry of Sylvia Plath.

I feel that it's not a good sign for a company's finances when your accountant is reading Sylvia Plath.

Medieval Witch-Hunters

This week I encountered the most disturbing image ever committed to print. And I speak as someone who's read The Naked Lunch, Beautiful Losers, manga, the comments on news sites, and the /b/ forums on 4chan.

It was in The Malleus Malificarum, the medieval witch-hunter's manual. It was made all the more squicky by the fact that the authors seemed to think this was the sort of thing you were likely to encounter in real life, during - say - a walk in the woods.

I almost posted it, then thought better of it. Too disturbing even for the internet. For anyone interested, it's in the Malleus Malificarum, Part II, the first Chapter VII - Part II has two chapter sevens, for some reason - about two-thirds of the way through.

I take no responsibility for those who find it, and will not pay for brain bleach.

I just finished a book entitled Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill. I gave it as a gift once and it seemed interesting, so I bought a copy for myself as well.

Cahill's built a career as the optimist's historian. What interests him aren't the wars, political struggles, glories, and evils, but the remarkable, positive moments -- like how Irish Catholic monks copied and preserved technically heretical Classical texts so as to keep them alive and in memory.

Mysteries is kind of a random sampling of the people and places he finds interesting, and which tend to get forgotten in the modern view of the Middle Ages as a sterile and superstitious age. He covers the City of Alexandria, the first universities, Hildegaard of Bingen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Francis of Assisi, Dante, Giotto, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Héloïse and Abelard, among others.

( Review continues )