Sunday, 26 October 2014

Specious mathematical encouragement for NaNoWriMoers

So I just did an experiment to see how fast I can churn words out, so long as I'm not being at all particular about the quality of said words. And the answer is:
  • 39 words per minute or 2337 words per hour
To be honest, I wasn't even trying hard. I kept taking sips of coffee, then using up my word count by moaning about how cold it was getting. But never mind that. These figures mean it should be possible - again, being totally unfussy about content and quality, to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November in any of the following ways:
  • by investing a couple of hours every Saturday and Sunday (+ a little bit)
  • by spending 45 minutes writing for each of thirty days
  • by giving the task one hour for every day of the working week
That all sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it? Doesn't it????

Okay, so the problem is that I would like to have something usable at the end of all this, not a bunch of disjointed garbage interrupted with coffee rants.

Monday, 20 October 2014

NaNoWriMo 2014

I must be nuts... novel #1, The American Dream is so nearly finished, I've signed up to scribble out the first draft of #2, The Darkness of the Heart in just 30 days. I've had about three attempts at NaNoWriMo and never won once. I am living proof that not winning at NaNo doesn't mean you'll never finish a book.

To make matters more embarrassing, those attempts were at times when my husband and daughter used to repair to America for Thanksgiving in the last two weeks of November, leaving me at home for my annual holiday. Trouble was, I used to spend the two weeks catching up on a whole year's exercise, sleep, R&R, miscellaneous projects, larger household maintenance and DIY.

This year, all I have to deal with is the rear end of a half term holiday and four weeks of the usual chaos of home life in London. Or, I could skive off to France just like old times. I haven't decided yet.

At least this year I have a plan even if it's not a very good one. I have a vague idea what is happening in Book #2, especially at the beginning and the end. I also know I run about 1000-2000 words to a writing session. So, I opened Scrivener, created files for 30 key scenes and that's it! What will happen in them, and how they'll eventually connect together is anyone's guess.

The other part of my plan involves finding time to write one of them every day. Even with total stream of consciousness stuff, I don't see this taking less than two hours. I also know that once I've finished a scene, I'll be drained for the day as far as that kind of creative work is concerned, so my plan is actually quite vulnerable. I'd be better off aiming for 25 scenes at 2000 words each, wouldn't I?

Okay, now I'm off to write a synopsis for a story that doesn't exist yet. Anyone else writing a novel next month?

Tuesday, 14 October 2014

Gyrth Russell's Yorkshire Coast Mystery Tour

Sometimes I like to know I still have my hand in on the art historical research front. I got a little practical test yesterday evening because a member of my family wanted to find out which bit of the Yorkshire Coast is represented in the British Railways advertising poster below, by Canadian-born artist Gyrth Russell.

We are Yorkshire coast-goers ourselves, but we tend more towards Scarborough. My aunt on the other side of the family prefers the more northerly villages and placed this as 'Staithes with poetic license' immediately. I came to the same conclusion but I had to do it the hard way. I'd correlated the hilliness and that particular style of architecture with the northern part of Yorkshire but after that, I was checking old photographs and paintings of every town or village between Staithes and Bridlington, not that there's lots of them. I was especially looking for that particular lifeboat station (I went through the list from the RNLI), that breakwater and that very noticeable blue house. Staithes had the best match for all those things, though it looks to me like Gyrth Russell rearranged the scene pretty freely, based on the contents of his sketchbook. Here's a realistic watercolour he made with the 'blue' house in it.

And here's Staithes harbour in the 1940s, before the breakwater was built. The lifeboat station appears to have been on the other side of the estuary even then.

Okay, so it took me a couple of hours to accomplish through research what probably took my aunt five seconds, but it was fun. Lots of Russell's other BR posters have specific place names on them. In this case, I suppose he thought he'd improvised a bit too freely to get away with it.

The Water Bearer, by Lorna Simpson

I've been aware of Lorna Simpson's The Water Bearer for some time, but I saw it 'in person' as it were, in Newcastle this June. Once seen, it isn't forgotten, even in a room of works by the same artist, in a similar style. But what about the interpretation? What I really like about this piece is that you can 'get it' with a minimum of context, but the more you know, the more it gives.

I found the title and caption had strong but rather imprecise associations. The title reminded me of the star-sign Aquarius and the importance (and danger) of fetching water in the European folk cultures I grew up with. I thought there might be something in the Bible. I couldn't pin it down to anything precise, but I got the general message: something bad happened by a river and the black female witness's testimony was discounted. I hadn't seen this discounting of black testimony as the central problem of racism in the American justice system today, but I was aware it was a problem. I remember the way the witness in the Trayon Martin case was treated and how her appearance and accent were used to dismiss what she had to say. I thought Lorna Simpson's photograph might relate to a specific incident in American affairs which I wasn't aware of.

This American reviewer is also vague on the classical context of the piece but she associated water bearing with labor, the lion's share of which she recognized as being done by African-Americans in her culture. So she also ended up 'getting the message' in a broad sense.


What's really cool about The Water Bearer is that the more you delve into its associations, the more you get out. I didn't know until I did some research for this post that the classical Aquarius myth concerned the death of a young man named Hyas. This fragment is from Ovid's Fasti:
When the down was new on his cheeks, he scared away
The frightened deer, in terror, and a hare was a good prize.
But when his courage had grown with his years, he dared
To close with wild boar and shaggy lionesses,
And while seeking the lair of a pregnant lioness, and her cubs,
He himself was the bloodstained victim of that Libyan beast.
His mother and his saddened sisters wept for Hyas,
And Atlas, soon doomed to bow his neck beneath the pole,
But the sisters’ love was greater than either parent’s:
It won them the heavens: Hyas gave them his name.
In the 1980s Simpson made several pieces about the vulnerability of black men to violence, often from individuals or a society which claims it's defending itself. The theme could hardly be more current in 2014. The Aquarius myth says Hyas was torn apart by wild animals and his sisters grieved for him which earned them a place as the star cluster called the Hyades. The Water Bearer feels like a very grieving kind of piece, in a way that's both cathartic and limited. In Ancient Greek culture, mourning was one of the few public roles allowed to women. The Hyas myth and its original social context feed into the meaning of the piece in quite poignant ways. African American culture (including expressions of grief or anger at injustices) is influential on an international scale but actual social and economic justice and equality seem to advance at snail's pace.

Lucas Cranach's Justice
via Wikimedia Commons

I gather some viewers automatically associate The Water Bearer with the figure of Justice. I didn't, but the guide at Newcastle drew my attention to the resemblance, and she'd apparently had it straight from Lorna Simpson a few days earlier. Once she'd pointed it out to me, it did seem kind of obvious.

Here again, The Water Bearer can derive a lot of reliable meaning from comparison with a familiar archetype. Every detail - the black woman with her back to us, instead of a white woman facing us (sometimes blindfolded), the simple dress instead of the classical drapery, the lack of a weapon - is up for interpretative grabs. Most importantly, nobody could miss the allegation of injustice, and almost anyone will respond to that.

I thought the iconic qualities of The Water Bearer and its many layers of meaning were as rewarding as they were unforgettable. Not that I'd failed to notice the string of current affairs incidents and statistics revealing racial inequalities in law enforcement and justice, but The Water Bearer pulls them together and focuses them in the way art should.

Sunday, 12 October 2014

In which British military intelligence promotes skepticism in Ireland by lying about black magic

Richard Jenkins has just published a book, Black Magic and Bogeymen, showing how a British military intelligence division deliberately fabricated evidence of black magic and satanism for the purpose of social control and to vilify Irish paramilitary organisations.

The tactics seem to have involved:
  1. Tapping into pre-existing beliefs in the local population. Without this vulnerability to exploit, the attempt would have come across as merely comical.
  2. Planting false evidence of witchcraft or satanist events and rituals. In itself, this is little better than schoolkid pranking, but they were able to back it with authority (see below).
  3. Leaking false stories of black magic or satanic rituals or beliefs to the press. I suppose they were able to get away with this because the press treated them as a trustworthy source, and the public were willing to trust the press!

    There's a moral here: certainly, these are slanderous, exploitative means and I doubt they justify the end, but until such time as they can be curtailed, skepticism seems like the only defense.

PS: It's sad that having had its five minutes of fame, Black Magic and Bogeymen has quite a few accessibility faults: it's expensive, there are no previews and no electronic versions. I think I'd rather enjoy reading it if some of that could be fixed.

Other stories about malicious fabrication of supernatural incidents:

In which Pastor Ezeugwu uses an angel to promote witchcraft belief in Nigeria.

How not to debunk an idea

Warning: this is a rant and consequently, it has a nasty tendency not to follow its own advice.

A certain number of articles I've read over the past year or so have annoyed the hell out of me. They have ideas to debunk, and their modus operandi is as follows:
  1. Spend 80% of the article telling the readers what the author imagines they think.
    a) often get it wrong as far as many people are concerned,
    b) often focus on out-of-date or eccentric ideas, espoused only by those who are ignorant of the subject.
  2. Then spend 20% of the article telling the readers why they're wrong.
This is a bad idea, worse than that, it's probably a cover for writers who need to make copy. Or even worse, it's just a form of super-trolling. At best, it's egocentric and lazy: anyone who can't quote an individual, publication or statistic in support of what they imagine 'everyone' thinks may well be the only one thinking it*. Let's face it, if an idea is truly universal, writers don't need to dwell on it. If most people believe the Earth is roughly spherical and someone wants to present exciting new evidence that it's actually cylindrical, why waste words on telling 'everyone' how wrong they are for having thought it was flat? Debunking for fun and profit is an excellent venture, but it doesn't sit easily alongside the promotion of new ideas. 

There are actually some very good reasons for this. Linking a belief, perhaps a loosely or unconsciously held one, with a reader's sense of self makes it harder for them to change their mind - although linking a belief which is probably false with any social group the reader may identify with (by religion, race, nationality, etc.) is worse. In fact it's such a stupidly ineffective thing to do that words fail me!** It strongly encourages readers to associate themselves with, and defend, the belief the writer has just proposed to them, rather than consider the evidence for the new one. At best, they are likely to find the writer manipulative and obsessive. The most effective way to introduce people to a new belief is to draw as little attention as possible to any contradictory ones they may hold. If this results in them experiencing a little cognitive dissonance, writers had best come over all discreet and let them deal with that by themselves. It's an inevitable part of the change process.

So much for readers who do hold a belief to some extent. Readers who don't may justifiably feel their intelligence and/or education has been insulted. Alternatively, they may take the writer to be ignorant and lose their respect for him or her. Or, if they're the nasty type, they may feel encouraged in their sense of superiority towards all those other pitiful readers who have allegedly bought into the debunked idea***. In all of these cases, the debunker's writing is the epitome of what the word 'divisive' means and being divisive for the lulz makes the perpetrator a troll and a waste of space.


* Laziness and vague quoting of sources: at least the phrase 'a certain number of articles' doesn't imply they all do this. Nor does it posit writing such articles as the systematic behavior of any individual or class of persons. I may start naming and shaming individual cases at some point if I feel like it, but in the meantime, if you haven't noticed any, feel free to assume I have a bee in my bonnet.

** More laziness and lack of proper evidential support: as even Wikipedia would say, 'citation needed'. I'm pretty certain citations are available but I couldn't be bothered to find any right now.

*** If you don't fall into one of the four or five categories of reader enumerated here, this just isn't about you okay? Perhaps it just means you're not a real reader anyway, have you thought of that? Maybe you should just consider yourself lucky I didn't write this post as though you were practically bound to be the wrong sort of writer. In fact, I avoided writing most of it in the second person altogether, but I ran out of self-control by the time I reached this footnote.

Friday, 10 October 2014

The CEO of Microsoft brings us magical thinking on how to get a raise

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has just made himself famous by responding to a question about how women should ask for raises thusly:
Sadly, Nadella reveals the all too common belief that he lives in a social system which is inherently and basically fair, barring exceptional abuses. Despite the fact this is probably a fundamentally human psychological response, shared by those it serves and those it penalises, no idea could be easier to call into question. A look through any history book will show that fair social systems are far from being the norm. It's rather incumbent on a system which considers itself the exception to prove its case. Here, it seems doubtful, and Nadella's remarks add to my suspicions for reasons I'll explain below. We're not finished with his superstitions yet:

To make matters worse, Nadella enjoins others, especially the likeliest victims of unfairness to inaction by referring to a spiritual belief about the self-correcting properties of social systems:
Not asking for raise, he added, was “good karma” that would help a boss realise the employee could be trusted and should have more responsibility.

It doesn't really matter whether he means 'karma' in the Hindu sense of the word or the Californian New Age sense because either way, no such thing exists - our social systems are not self-correcting, people don't automatically get what they deserve, and in this case, it isn't 'the system' which hands out rewards, it's people*. People like Nadella who make discretionary choices.

Taking Nadella at face value, one leaps to the conclusion that as a boss, he has a distaste for obvious ambition in his staff. He prefers employees of all genders to patiently do their assigned jobs to the best of their abilities, while he observes them and singles out the cream of the crop for promotion. If they seem too 'grabby', he has said, he will be disinclined to trust them and it's easy to imagine he might pass them over for promotion on those grounds.

So what are ambitious female employees left with? Pure faith that Nadella will not overlook them because not one fibre of his being fails to envisage women as normal and natural managers of divisions or future CEOs!!

Well... I would hate to hold him to a standard few have attained, but in any case, it's just so unusual to hear the CEO of an IT company decrying ambition. I would love to get into an alternate universe, find Nadella and ask him unawares how men should ask for a pay rise... or employees in general. I'm finding it rather difficult to have faith that I would have got the same answer. I suspect pushy women make Nadella uncomfortable whereas un-pushy women will indeed go unnoticed.

* On the other hand, I sincerely believe that where the Windows operating system is concerned, our society has got exactly what it deserves. I admit that whenever it crashes, my personal karma must be the cause, since there has never seemed to be any other good reason.

Thursday, 9 October 2014

Fantasy fiction about the founding of London

These days, cities usually get destroyed in fantasy novels. I don't know what that says about us, but back in the old days, people were far more concerned to make up implausible but honorable myths about their cities' foundation. Although it's called The History of the Kings of Britain, one book, written in 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth, is, well, frankly made up. Or possibly based on some traditional folklore and legends as well as earlier versions of some stories also told in the obscure Historia Brittonum.

Monmouth says that round about 1100 BC, a mythical Trojan named Brutus, descendant of the equally legendary Aeneas, brought a fleet of ships to Britain after many, many adventures. There were only a few giants living there at the time, and besides, the island had been promised him by a goddess, so he helped himself.
After that he had seen his kingdom, Brute was minded to build him a chief city, and following out his intention, he went round the whole circuit of the land in search of a fitting site. When he came to the river Thames, he walked along the banks till he found the very spot best suited to his purpose. He therefore founded his city there and called it New Troy, and by this name was it known for many ages thereafter, until at last, by corruption of the word, it came to be called Trinovantum.
About a thousand years and many mythological kings later, just before the arrival of the Romans, Trinovantum was due for renovation.
The Truth about the founding of London:

Although there were people in Britain long before Geoffrey of Monmouth believed the Earth was even formed, London was founded by the Roman occupiers, soon after 54BC. They didn't do it because they wanted fancier palaces than the ones in any of the other places they'd conquered either. In fact, it seems they didn't systematically found a city at all (as they did in other places). They just strung a few pontoons across the river at the lowest possible crossing point, as a shortcut on their way to Colchester. There had been nothing much there before, but Londinium grew up in an organic way (as cities often do) around the north side of the bridge, with a smaller settlement on the south side, and eventually took over as the Romans' capital city in Britain.

Tuesday, 7 October 2014

Inspiration for urban fantasy writers: Brodsky and Utkin, Calvino

If you're in London, you can see Brodsky and Utkin's fantastical paper architecture in person at the Tate Modern. Otherwise, try on the internet, because the book of their work starts at $245!! These two artist/architects are part of a movement called Paper Architecture, buildings which exist only on paper. Which is pretty much what fantasy writers do as well. Their work really got me excited about the world-building aspect of urban fantasy all over again.

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is like a catalog of imaginary urbanism: cities on stilts, temporary cities, cities of earth... Did Marco Polo visit them on his travels or is he really telling Kublai Khan about fifty-five different versions of Venice? Who knows, but each one of the cities could be the basis of a whole novel. I was going to quote from one of them, but this little snippet of conversation seemed to go best with the Brodsky and Utkin above.
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.'

Opt-in or opt-out on organ donation: the right thing to do should be the default thing to do

For a while now, I've been wanting to begin a series of posts I'm calling Magic Society, on the subject of magical thinking with regard to social issues (the politically correct term is non-evidence-based thinking). The name Magic Society is derived from the UK Conservative government's Big Society, a scheme to bring about adequate government of a large and complex system by 'integrating the free market with a theory of social solidarity based on hierarchy and voluntarism.'

My kick-off post is just what it says, a little reflection on how to optimize a tiny part of our society, saving lives in the process. 

Since organ donation has become so successful, we are all aware of the difficulties of long waiting lists for transplants. I just signed a petition to ask the UK to switch to an opt-out system, which means people would be considered willing donors unless they've specifically indicated they don't want to be. There are ongoing campaigns to bring about opt-out systems in the US and Australia as well.

Since it seems kind of obvious that organ donation is the right thing to do, I thought I would like it to be the default. The problem is that nobody wants to mistakenly take the organs of someone who would have opted out, but somehow failed to make their choice known (just as so many of us fail to make our preference for being donors known). It might seem we could address this with an extensive public information campaign, special liaisons with religious groups likely to opt out, and so on, but I think there would inevitably be accidents and oversights.

It seems to me that the real 'right thing to do' is to make sure everybody has a declared preference and that their choice is accessible to medical professionals at points where it will be needed. That would mean a single organization (probably the NHS) actively soliciting that choice from everyone in the country, double-checking it from time to time, and making sure it appears on identity documents most people are likely to have (or make it accessible by other means).

It's a system that would be easier to arrange in some countries than others. Unlike some state health systems, the NHS has rather given up on prevention and prefers to see most of us as little as possible, making it hard for them to collect information from us. Since the British are very resistant to carrying identification cards, we can't push for the relatively easy and inexpensive solution of getting this information displayed on them. We certainly don't want to rely on multiple organizations to hold this information: a driving license authority here, a medical insurance there, because of the risk of people giving different choices. The right default involves a single authority soliciting everyone's decision and allowing them to change it at will. This could be one of those situations where a lack of existing social infrastructure forces Britain to hover between two non-optimal solutions - meanwhile, people die who didn't need to ...

Monday, 6 October 2014

How to make magic water




  1.  Exorcise all the dark forces out of some salt.
  3. Exorcise all the dark forces out of the water.
  5. Add the salt to the water and stir thoroughly. 
    The consecration of water on the Theophany. Kustodiev
    For contrast, this is one of the rites of the
    Eastern Orthodox Church
    , which I didn't
    have time to write about.
    The Consecration of Water on the Theophany
    by Boris Kustodiev, via Wikimedia Commons.













    Here is the shorter (and recommended) version:






    Lucas Cranach d. Ä. 007
    via Wikimedia Commons




    Sunday, 5 October 2014

    Remedial Christian Studies

    According to my daughter, her Religious Studies teacher told her there are two approaches to animal rights in Christianity. One group believes we should be kind to animals because God went to the trouble of getting them onto Noah's Ark, thus saving them from his own flood. The other group believes we can do what we like with animals because God created us first!!!!!

    Really, when my daughter's time is being consumed by this subject within the context of a public school, I think I'm in my rights to expect the teaching to be accurate. Everyone should know, especially a Religious Studies teacher, that the order of creation in the Bible is 1) light, 2) the heavens, 3) earth, which God commanded to produce plants by itself, 4) the sun and moon, 5) animals who live in water and fly, 6) land animals, followed by man and woman who come last.

    The piece of Christian belief the teacher is probably trying to refer to is based on what God said to the humans after he made them, apparently assigning them dominion (authority) over living things.
    Some Christians interpret this as an absolute gift which humans can dispose of as they please, up to and including destroying living species, let alone treating animals in whatever way suits them. Other Christians interpret it more as a stewardship, granting humans the management of living things but with the assumption that mis-management, destruction and cruelty are not likely to be what God had in mind.

    It actually ties in quite nicely with the spells for stopping bees from swarming which I posted about earlier this week. The second spell/prayer, from the more Christianized Middle Ages, basically reminds the rebellious bees 'God said you should do what I told you!'

    Friday, 3 October 2014

    Banksy's Birds

    Subtitled, another fine failure at anti-racist art!

    It seems to be open season on 'racist' art in Britain these days. Brett Bailey's Exhibit B didn't make it to opening night at the Barbican but triggered an outpouring of debate on whether it would or would not have been racist if it had. My views on that one are here.

    Now we have Banksy, who goes around painting very expensive graffiti on walls, hitting Clacton-on-Sea with the mega-million buck masterpiece shown below. Clacton could have sold it to buy themselves a new sea wall, but instead it seems they have destroyed it because a member of the public complained it was 'racist and offensive'.

    Jonathan Jones at the Guardian isn't buying this story. He thinks Banksy's piece is 'quite plainly an eloquent attack on racism'. Since he suspects the good people of Clacton-on-Sea of significant ingrained racism due to the fact that a UKipper is about to stand for election there, he believes the only reason they would tear the mural down is because 'it hits too close to home' and makes them feel squirmy.

    By the way, I think we might be talking about xenophobia here rather than racism, but since the former seems to be considered acceptable by so many, I'm choosing to cynically believe we're using the word 'racism' to try to trigger appropriate responses in people. Just like Banksy really, but was his painting likely to work?

    Let's imgaine a member of the public completely unfamiliar with Banksy and his work, yet familiar enough with the anti-immigration political discourses going on in his or her town, and disapproving on them. Will it really be so obvious to them that the art work is on their side?

    I'm not so sure about that. What Jones is overlooking is that the only eloquent things in the painting are the racist pigeons and what they're saying is exactly what the racist politicians and their supporters in the same environment are saying. How can the piece be effectively anti-racist when it offers no counter-arguments, no condemnations, but just sits there reinforcing the same old local racist messages? How can it be effectively anti-racist if it's only method (apparently) is to hope its viewers find the swallow small and sweet enough to start feeling sorry for it?

    Now imagine a resident of Clacton-on-Sea who knows nothing about Banksy but is vehemently anti-immigration. They regularly hand out messages like those on the placards with no sense of shame whatsoever. They see no benefits or attractions in the smallness or sweetness of swallows in Britain. Does a 'confrontation' with this painting on a wall actually give them a communication about how others perceive them and why they should stop? Or does it confirm them in their actions? It seems to me the only really convincingly negative thing about the pigeons is the message on their placards but to see that you have to be the type to perceive those messages negatively!

    Now imagine you're an immigrant in sunny Clacton-on-Sea. I think the message the painting conveys is, at best, that you'd better just sit tight while other people decide whether you're small and sweet enough to be allowed to stick around. At worse, it's just a reminder of a message you may already have heard: 'There's some big fat pigeons around here who don't want you!'

    Sorry Jonathan Jones, I think you and I only know this piece is 'plainly anti-racist' because we know who Banksy is and we move in circles where the messages on the placards meet with open disapproval.

    I'm sure anti-racist art can do better than this, so I'm now officially on the lookout for excellent pieces. Anyone want to send me one for review?

    You may also be interested in:
    Why I think Brett Bailey's Exhibit B is not a good idea
    The misuse of a work of art in promoting murderous witch-hunts in Nigeria

    Thursday, 2 October 2014

    In which Pastor Ezeugwu slanders an angel, though this is the least of his sins

    This story should start in the proper place, with a rather beautiful artwork by Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. It's a fibreglass angel fallen to the ground, shown at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2009, though there have been other versions in other places:

    Not very Nigerian looking, not very female looking and not very witchy, I think you'll agree. Pastor I.C. Ezeugwu, has a whole different angle on the thing, quite literally.

    Frame it so the face is hidden, darken the skin a bit, and write a little story underneath it, and lo and behold, you have a dead Nigerian witch on your hands. Pastor Ezeugwu provides the little story (emphases mine):
    On the eve of the crusade, I had a revelation where three elderly women came to me and told me to cancel the crusade. On the morning of the crusade, I held a brief counselling session. An elderly woman who came for counselling on a white robe told me that "her members don't want me to hold the crusade". That was what her interpreter told me as she couldn’t speak English. I asked why? She said because they rule the land. I told her interpreter to tell her that they don't rule the land, JESUS rules the land. She said they'll kill me and I told her I'll kill them first hence the crusade was titled "Operation Kill the Witches". The crusade was meant to hold for 4 days but later lasted for 7 days as a result of the testimonies the people were sharing.

    Eight days after I went back to my base, I received a telegram from the leader of the organising committee informing me that the head of the witches was dead after suffering a partial stroke for 2 days.
    Note the little details, the white robe and the allusion to the death of the 'head witch' intended to help the inattentive link the story with the picture without going quite so far as to assert they are one and the same. I won't tell you to note the fact that this believer in Jesus is going around threatening elderly ladies with murder, I'll trust you to notice that for yourselves.

    This debunking of this piece of maliciousness was brought to us by Richard Bartholomew who apparently heard about the whole thing from Leo Igwe, and passed it on to Ophelia Benson, from whom it reached me. It's a pretty pathetic and dangerous scam. I mean come on, if you want to believe in witches, believe in this, by the same artists:

    That is an amazing piece of art I would have loved to have seen. And this is only a tiny part of it. It's called Dear and was shown at the Galerie Perrotin in Paris.

    Other stories about malicious fabrication of supernatural incidents:

    British military intelligence lie about black magic among Irish paramilitary organisations. 

    Didgeridoo and orchestra: Sean O'Boyle's River Symphony and more

    I really, genuinely, couldn't figure out what kind of music I wanted to listen to today, then I found this:

    William Barton on the didgeridoo with the Australia Youth Orchestra. After a bit of poking around I'm pretty sure this piece is Concerto for Didgeridoo, composed by Australian Sean O'Boyle. He also did River Symphony which is if anything even more amazing. Or to put it another way, overwhelmingly brilliant.

    Letting your work get uploaded to YouTube isn't a waste of time. I'm so in love with this, it's going on my Christmas list, even if it means I have to have a physical CD when I would much prefer an MP3.

    There is more. Here are two of my favorite instruments together, didgeridoo and violoncello. I'm in such ecstasies, you'll have to excuse me from actually finding out what I'm listening to.


    Wednesday, 1 October 2014

    How to keep honey bees from swarming by magic

    I'm not sure how many old European magic spells were ever written down, but prominent among the survivors are a couple for controlling our one of our few domesticated insects, the honey bee.

    My favorite bee book (French only)
    by Eric Tourneret
    I think it's possible that there are people today who don't really know what a bee swarm is, or why it matters. Swarming is how a honeybee colony reproduces. It's a special event during which the queen, rather unusually, lays fertile female eggs which will develop into new queens. Having done so, she will abandon the old colony herself, taking more than half her workers with her, but leaving her daughter with an established infrastructure. For bee-keepers, uncontrolled swarming is a thing to be avoided at all costs. Bees left to their own devices will leave them with a reduced hive of unproductive bees struggling to re-establish itself and the loss of more than half their 'livestock' into the wilds.There are few things more beautiful than a wild honeybee hive (see left), but try telling that to bee-keepers and said hive's human neighbours! I suppose it's true that if you do a Google image search for bee swam pictures, swarms do seem to get into some rather anti-social places.

    Our ancestors were obviously more than willing to resort to begging, threatening and pleading to prevent this. I find the Old English of this spell so beautiful, I had to do my own translation to capture the rhythm of the exhortation. There are more linguistically accurate translations here and here.

    Sitte ge, sīgewīf,
    sīgað tō eorðan,
    næfre ge wilde

    tō wuda fleogan,
    beō ge swā gemindige,

    mīnes gōdes,
    swā bið manna gehwilc,
    metes and ēðeles.

    Be still, shield-maidens,
    stay earth-bound,
    don't fly off wildly,
    through the forests,
    but instead think you kindly,
    on my welfare,
    as all mankind thinks,
    of hearth and home.

    The Lorsch Bee Blessing is formatted more like a prayer or invocation, but it was meant for the same purpose. It sounds a lot more fraught to modern ears.

    Kirst, imbi ist hûcze
    Nû fliuc dû, vihu mînaz, hera

    Fridu frôno in munt godes
    gisunt heim zi comonne
    Sizi, sizi bîna
    Inbôt dir sancte Maria
    Hurolob ni habe dû
    Zi holce ni flûc dû
    Noh dû mir nindrinnês
    Noh dû mir nintuuinnêst
    Sizi vilu stillo
    Uuirki godes uuillon
    Christ, the bee swarm is out here!
    Now fly, you my animals, come.
    In the Lord's peace, in God's protection,
    come home in good health.
    Sit, sit bees.
    The command to you from the Holy Mary.
    You have no vacation;
    Don't fly into the woods;
    Neither should you slip away from me.
    Nor escape from me.
    Sit completely still.
    Do God's will.

    Or, as my daughter put it: 'BEES! Stop what you're doing and work for me!'

    Unfortunately, it was eventually discovered that honey bees are largely impervious to human poetics.The way to deal with swarming bees is, as usual, by knowing stuff.

    27-alimenti, miele, Taccuino Sanitatis, Casanatense 4182..jpg

    Traditional Hives via Wikimedia Commons.

    What the swarm is looking for a new hive. You could have the best new hiving spot in the district all ready for them and hope they pick it, but that's kind of primitive. To be really modern, you would sprinkle alluring bee pheromone all over it. You can physically capture the swarm and get them into your new hive. There are lots of ways of doing this, from the primitive to the high-tech, provided you know them. You can clip the queen's wings to prevent her flying, making sure the attempted swarm never gets far from the original hive. This is the only method which is actually considered desirable, as a stop-gap measure.


    This relies on knowing why bees do what they do. If a colony has grown past a certain population density, has plentiful supplies of food and future bees, and a sufficiently mature queen, it will quite likely prepare to swarm. Bees want to swarm. It's how they reproduce. But if you can trick them into thinking population density is low, and resources uncertain, they may defer reproduction until times look better. Alternatively, you can use 'controlled swarming' techniques, such as permanently or temporarily splitting the colony, or creating a mini-colony around the old queen - a kind of mini-swarm. Some techniques rely explicitly on making the bees think they have swarmed when in fact, they've returned to their old hive. Deciding what to do with the cells containing new queens is a secondary issue - their fate will no longer have an impact on a colony's decision to swarm.

    That's the basic theory and the reason the practice is complicated is that there are several ways of doing all of these things, but the response of the bees is variable and no method is absolutely reliable. Or perhaps we still don't know enough stuff.