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There is one last annual task to be done (which I dread—which is why I put it off until the very last day of the year)—which is writing the 2018 obituaries. Usually I use the last week of the year to write about people whose work was important to me or who were overlooked by big media outlets (which have a facile fascination with interchangeable movie stars and pop musicians). However, this year I lost somebody important to me, so the unmet artists, scientists, politicians, and celebrities who died in 2018 will have to find someone else to write tiny blurbs about their lives. I will only write one obituary, for my grandmother, Mary Rose Ferrebee (March 24th, 1927 – October 30, 2018).
As a nation, we tend to regard the crazy fearless people of the frontier and the wild west as lost into the distant mythologized past…but for me, I got to live up-close and personal with such people: my grandparents! Grandma Mary was indeed larger than life in such a fashion, but in an especially down-to-earth way which makes it hard to quantify the breadth of her legacy. Let me explain by giving you the portion of her biography I know about.
Mary Rose Ferrebee was born (Mary Rose Jarvis) in Granny’s Creek, West Virginia in the late 1920s. She had an adventuresome youth spent flouting conventional mores and stereotypes—a trend which culminated during the Second World War when she entered into a career in aviation manufacturing. She described this phase as when she was “Rosy the Riveter, painting the fluorescent yellow tips on [Grumman] Hellcats.” Coincidentally, it doesn’t sound like that glowing yellow Hellcat paint was especially wholesome, since health problems led her away from aviation and back to more traditional careers in short-order cooking, bartending, and cleaning. It was also during this era when she met Grandpa Dencil, back from the war early, who courted her with a banana (a rare and precious commodity during the war). Grandma apparently said “I don’t want a banana I want the real thing!” This high standard of honesty cemented their relationship, but it also sometimes led to tensions in an era when most people did not always express what was on their mind so openly.
The family traveled to the West Coast in the fifties (my grandfather decided to take up the, um, aerospace trade, painting missiles and ICBMs at Vandenberg), and then back to West Virginia where Grandma ran a bar/restraint/hotel (an inn, I guess). All sorts of folks from all walks of life came through there (Senator Byrd even played his fiddle at the Henry Clay Hotel, back in the day), but usually it was local people having a drink, playing pool, and gossiping.
I remember many exciting things from the hotel, like listening to “Whiskey River” on the jukebox, playing pinball and video arcade games (the first of my childhood), and listening to the tales about the secret lives and strange fates of everyone in the county. As the keeper of a public house in a small town, Grandma knew everything about everyone. She also, you know, ran a bar in West Virginia and she sometimes had to deal with particularly unruly patrons breaking pool cues over each other’s heads (for which eventuality she kept a chrome .357 Magnum snubnose somewhere back behind the bar, in order to invite unwanted customers to go home).
Operating the town’s beer hall privileged Grandma with a profound grasp of people’s desires and weaknesses and while other people maybe would have used such knowledge to aggrandize and enrich themselves, or at least to twist the knife with cruel taunts, Grandma more-or-less accepted peoples’ appetites, eccentricities, and flaws as a part of the broader tapestry of life (which is not to say she didn’t spend a certain amount of time feuding with people who had disrespected her). She was particularly blunt about sexual and bathroom matters and although this made me blush and blush as a child (and a teenager, and an adult…and now), it strikes me as a wise choice for living a more healthy and honest life. I wonder how many people live miserable lives or die long before they should because society has convinced them that ever talking about such earthy concerns is somehow indecorous.
Grandma always had time and resources for the people in her life…or for anyone who needed help. Growing up I often recall my parents being able to make important purchases thanks to Grandma’s largesse, and she likewise bestowed homes, cars, tuition, and mortgage payments to other children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Whenever I came to visit, she would give me cigar boxes of half-dollar pieces or rolls of two dollar bills from the bar safe. There were many such presents and much praise, Not only was she enormously generous, she was also fearless and she always stood up for those who could not stand up for themselves .
After she retired, some disreputable folk down the river had a big ill-mannered fighting dog which ran around the river bottom snarling at people and forcing them to abruptly rush inside. Since this included Grandma’s little grandchildren and great grandchildren (who would be seriously injured or killed by a dog attack), she asked the neighbors to keep the dog fenced up or at least tied-up, but they laughed at the request of a seventy-something woman and went back to drinking and doing whatever else they were doing. One day these neighbors were in their backyard drinking, carousing, and ineffectually shooting at cans. Grandma went over and asked if she could shoot some cans too. They laughed and acquiesced, perhaps thinking to teach an old lady some pointers or to have a laugh at her attempts, whereupon she pulled out the trusty .357 and blew enormous magnum sized holes in the cans which they had not been hitting. “Tie up that dog!” she said as she left, and this time her wishes were followed.
She was large (not to say fat) and strong and she also had that .357, which taken in combination with her maverick personality make her sound like an intimidating person, however I think anyone who knew her would characterize her foremost as kind and generous to excess (and also as fun and funny). My mother would despair since she (Mom) would give my grandmother the gifts the latter wanted—fancy dishes, kitchen gadgets, or new towels or what have you—only for Grandma to give them away in turn. Grandma, however, seemed to think that owning a bunch of junk was not really the principal fun of life—another laudatory perspective which we could all learn from. With characteristic generosity, she decided that, upon her passing, she would donate her mortal remains to science (the medical teaching hospital at WVU). As she said “I sent so many people to college, that I decided I would like to go there myself.” Not only is this helping the family save some money (a final cigar box of cash), but it is helping a new generation of healers learn. However, it robbed Grandma Mary of a fitting eulogy, which is why I am writing this.
Frankly though, Grandma never yearned for the fame and universal acclaim which other people pursue so doggedly. I don’t think Grandma thought of greatness as being all that great (perhaps she recognized that “great” people have money troubles, erotic misadventures, and go to the bathroom like all other people). Or to explain it better, I think she saw that every life was great to the person living it and the glowing esteem of the world was a sort of political trick, mostly unrelated to the actual important business of life like making sure people are fed, children are cared for, and the sick or infirm have somebody to look after them.
When I was a child, I thought it was normal to always live in a glorious golden halo of love where people tell you how great you are and give you things. It is NOT the norm (thanks so much for the update, New York), but it always seemed like it, thanks to my family. Grandma Mary was an especially big part of that. I suspect everyone who knew her would say the same.
Grandma gave me so many things—big home cooked meals, toys, whatever book I wanted, tvs, video games, musical instruments, boxes of money, jewelry, a truck…you name it, and I took and took with both hands. But now that she is gone, it strikes me that what I would really like to have is her generosity, her warmth, her courage, and above all her loving heart (I think she would smile, too, to hear me still asking for more). She was such a big part of the world that I never really thought about how it would be with her gone. It is like the mountain or the forest or some other ancient & impervious force of nature vanished. However, her love is still here with all of her family and friends (who are numerous). Her tireless care, affection, and kindness are woven into the very fabric of existence, not like the ephemeral works of models, rappers, or tv charlatans, but in a truly integral way that sustains people for life and holds up the world.
Readers, I hope you don’t think I am ending on a down note for the new year. Grandma lived life to the fullest, and it is up to us to do the same in this new year and in all the others to come. Her gifts of generosity and compassion could indeed be ours too, if we just muster the strength of character to give with such an open heart.
Good bye Grandma, I love you.
Best wishes for a Merry Christmas. As a once-and-future toymaker, I got pulled into some Christmas projects and didn’t write as many year-end blog-posts as I wanted. Yet there is an upside: you get to see the projects I made! (in the future, I need to be better about featuring such stories in a compelling way online). Anyway, all of this is to say that here is the skateboard deck I made as a gift for my friend.
My friend studied classics in school, but then became a computer programmer. The word at the right says “the charioteer” because the charioteer was Plato’s metaphor for the human psyche. The charioteer is swiftly driving forward in a world of mortal peril. He has two horses pulling him–a bright white horse and a dark unruly horse. Often times they strain to rush in different directions and the charioteer is hard pressed to travel the desired direction. His chariot could come apart at any moment…but he is swift and powerful.
The charioteer is driving on top of a flounder (for that is my own metaphor for the interconnected world of all Earth life). In this instance the flounder is made of ones and zeros…since my friend did the programming for my online oracular flounder (if you want to give me a Christmas present, ask the fish questions and write your honest impressions below for we are making some changes in the new year!). Not only is the flounder made of ones and zeros…the ocean itself is too. In this new world, if you want to drive your chariot to creative success, the only way is to drive through a virtual realm! We are working on it…and so are you, why, I venture to guess you are looking at online content right this very moment. Maybe you should go enjoy some Christmas cheer in the real world…just as soon as you look at my damn flounder and make a comment below.
We could talk about my very favorite ceramics makers…but their nation is still prominent in the world (indeed they are the world’s most populous nation), so we will talk about Chinese porcelain some other day. For now, let’s instead concentrate on my second favorite ceramics artists—the astonishing and mysterious Moche people of Peru. Ferrebeekeeper has tried to explain the nature of Moche culture (as archaeologists currently understand it to have been) and we have also tried to put up some galleries of their exquisite waterfowl and their amazing bats (which I think are the best bat artworks extant).
For tonight though I am going to present a gallery of Moche ceramic vessels in the shape of animals without any comment. This is partly because I want you to experience the exquisite form of the ancient clay without any distractions and…it is partly because I got started working on Christmas projects and didn’t get around to writing this post until the middle of the night. I think you will agree as you look at this collection of vessels, that the Moche were astonishing at conveying animals in a way which was streamlined and simple yet also brings out the beauty and the personality of the creatures. These are not Walt Disney-esque cartoon animals of unnatural sweetness and broad comedy…and yet they are also animals which have distinctive emotional resonance and convey the distinctive character, intelligence, and temperament of these South American animals. It is a hard balance to get right, and yet I feel that the unknown potters and sculptors of long ago have done a superb job at bringing out what was real and what was magical in these creatures. I am not explaining this the way I wish, but just try sculpting some animals and you will soon see what I mean.
Tonight’s post is a special tribute to the extraordinary heroism of firefighters…and a heartwarming seasonal post about some pets which were saved from a fire (and I suppose also a cautionary tale about the dangers of leaving your Christmas lights on all the time). Firefighters in Conroe, Texas, a suburb to the north of Houston, arrived at a housefire and entered the premise to see if there were any lives which needed to be saved. There certainly were! The firefighters were stunned to find hundreds of snakes in large glass terrariums and vivariums. Unwilling to let the reptiles perish, they heroically carried the writhing serpents to safety. Some of the non-toxic constrictor snakes were quite large—but apparently, they were not bigger than the hearts of these brave first responders.
The Conroe fire chief summarized the strange and alarming situation by saying, “Not sure how many lizards we found, but the snakes were large enough to give anyone crawling through a smoke-filled house a heart attack…”
Good grief! What were these homeowners up to, anyway?
Unfortunately, some of these smaller lizards were beyond the grasp of even the most selfless firemen and an unknown number of small reptiles perished in the blaze, but the crew still rescued a large number of snakes. The Conroe Fire Crew’s deed stands as a reminder of the fundamental bravery, care, and respect which are still a staple of public service. It is also a reminder to be careful with your seasonal lights, to replace your smoke detector batteries, and, um, if necessary, to put a sprinkler system in your vast herpetological home collection.
I think we have all learned a little something. Merry Christmas to the firefighters of Conroe and best wishes to these poor homeless constrictors to find fine lodgings.
To celebrate the season, here is a special Christmastime Sunday space post! Discovered in 1948 Comet 46P/Wirtanen orbits the sun every 5.4 Earth years. The comet’s apoapsis (the point of its orbit farthest from the Sun) is out in the vicinity of Jupiter’s orbit, but the closest point in its orbit brings it to Earth’s orbit. Unfortunately, because of the dance of the planets it only in relative proximity to Earth every 11 years, and even then, it is generally barely visible except to hardened astronomers. The comet is also known as the Christmas comet because its periapsis (when it is closest to the sun—and thus, sometimes to Earth) is in December and because the comet has a distinct viridian tinge!
This year, 46P/Wirtanen’s periapsis is unusually close to Earth. Tonight, the comet will be a mere 11.4 million kilometers (7.1 million miles) from Earth. That sounds like a fairly large distance but it is quite close, astronomically speaking: only 10 comets have come in such near proximity to our home planet in the past 70 years! Filled with excitement, I glanced out my window only to see that it is raining in Brooklyn and the sky is filled with clouds. But don’t worry, the comet will nearly as visible for another week. If you have an internet connection (and if you don’t, how are you reading this?) you can go to this link and find the comet in the sky from your location (that link is an amazing resource, so maybe hold onto it).
So why is this comet such a delightful color? Comet 46P/Wirtanen is mostly melted—it consists of a solid kernel approximately a kilometer in diameter trailing a cloud of gases hundreds of thousands of kilometers long. The majority of these gases reflect light in green wavelengths. Additionally, the comet is hyperactive—which, in this case, does not mean that overpaid physicians will prescribe it unnecessary medications so it can learn rote facts. In an astronomical context, hyperactive bodies are emitting more water than expected.
Unless you are avidly examining the comet with a gas spectrograph, its color is likely to be a source of awe and reflection. Does the comet’s color reflect the seasonal green of Yuletide or is it an ironic reprimand for the envy and jealously which grip all of human society? Is it the eye of a great sky panther or a kindly celestial sea turtle (hint: actually more of a ball of gas with an icy nucleus). Whatever your conclusions, I hope you enjoy this close-up view of “the Christmas Comet” before it zips back towards Jupiter’s orbit. Season’s greetings to all of my readers. I will try to find some special posts for this solstice week, before we all take a much-needed Christmas break.
I have a confession to make: I have always though the classical Russian aesthetic of teardrops, ogee shapes, onion domes, and filigree was matchlessly beautiful. If I had the money to commission a manor house, people would probably think it was a Russian orthodox church or Putin’s dacha because of all of the onion domes, candy-colored towers, and gingerbread fretwork. Unfortunately, such eastern majesty is a bit outside of my budget until we sell a few more flounder artworks, and so for now I must content myself with a seasonal gallery post of Christmastime Russian crowns and headdresses.
Fortunately, crown-style headdresses are so much a part of Russian culture that there are all sorts of beautiful examples which fit the season perfectly. The high ornate headdresses miter-like traditional headdresses for women (kokoshniks/povyazkas depending on whether women are respectively wed or unwed). There are numerous regional variants which are sadly beyond me (has anyone noticed has enormous Russia is?) however this article isn’t really about actual headdresses or history…or really about anything. It is just a Christmas picture gallery. So enjoy these amazing Russian Christmas hats.
Of course, real crown aficianados are probably cursing me now for not really including any real crowns. I have no intention of doing so (we will explore the crowns of the Romanovs at some other point) however I will include some of the astonishing headdresses of Russian patriarchs. These archbishop’s caps look like they came from the Byzantine empire—and in a cultural sense, I suppose they did. They aren’t actually hats for kings and princes, but they are hats for princes of the Orthodox church, and just look how magnificent they are!
All of this winter headwear reminds me that we are quickly coming up on Christmas and the end of the year. Prepare yourself for the some Ferrebeekeeper winter’s fun and Happy holidays (sorry I already missed Hanukkah).
I better wrap up before you realize I am pointing these things out because I think they are pretty but I have no real understanding about this at all. I will have to see if I can find a real Russian expert to explain some of the finer points of exquisite headdresses.
One of the real surprises to me in college was…bacteria. Now I had encountered these characters before (I guess everybody has, since more of the cells in a human body are symbiotic bacteria living inside of us than are…well our own actual cells). However, in college I learned the full history of life on Earth. It is mostly a history of bacteria: multicellular creatures only show up for the last 600 million years. For over 3 billion years, the world belonged to the bacteria alone. I also learned about extremophiles—bacteria that can live in boiling hot temperatures or in oxygen-free environments. Some extremophiles can metabolize inorganic things like sulfur and arsenic. They can live without the light of the sun in the fathomless depths of the ocean on poisonous elements. The oxygen we breath was created as a waste product by these first archaebacteria. The planet’s atmosphere was once a reducing atmosphere, where paper would not burn (assuming you had any…billions of years before trees plants evolved, much less paper-makers). Bacteria made it an oxygen world where things burn…including our metabolisms. They changed the world in a fundamental way that we industrial humans with our infernal carbons cannot match.
The archaebacteria sound like aliens (indeed, there is a real possibility they actually originally were aliens), but they are also our great-great-great ever-so-great-to-the-100th power grandparents. I don’t need to wonder whether evolution is real: I have seen it in a science lab when we put a pellet of penicillin on a petri dish and watched as the bacteria evolved resistance to it (not really a super-smart experiment in hindsight, but a super-compelling one). I wish I could impress upon you how astonishing bacteria are. They are the true sacred seed of life–the undisputed masters of Earth.
However, this is old news. The new news is that there are so, so many more bacteria than we realized. The earth beneath our feet is filled with bacteria…but the stone beneath that is filled with bacteria too. And the weird hot putty beneath that stone (the gabbro) is also filled with bacteria. There are bacteria in the depths of the world. Living bacteria have been discovered in the gabbro 1400 meters beneath the basalt floor of the ocean. There is a barely discovered world of secret life deep beneath our feet—a true underworld of secret unknown species of micro-organisms. The size of this ecosystem is enormous.
To quote a news article from..yesterday, “The record depth at which life has been found in the continental subsurface is approximately 3 miles (5km) while the record in marine waters is 6.5 miles (10.5km) from the ocean surface.”
If these are the true boundaries of the underworld bacteria biome, it means that there is a region of secret life twice as large as all of the world’s oceans combined. Based on past experience though, it is not unreasonable to doubt that deeper pockets of bacteria will be discovered as our drilling and bio-assaying become more sophisticated.
Most of the super deep bacteria spend enormously long periods in suspended animation. Sometimes they enter a metabolic suspension so profound that they seem dead or inanimate (which is maybe how we missed them for so long). At present, scientists and writers are calling them “zombie-bacteria” because of their half-alive status (which seems like an appropriate nomen based on their underworld habitat).
I wish I could tell you more about this realm of life on Earth, but I can’t. Not only am I not a bacteriologist or geologist, additionally we (meaning all of humankind) simply don’t know the answers yet. More research is necessary. Sadly, it is probably going to be slow to materialize. Our leaders seem incapable of grasping that surface life needs to continue longer than a few decades (at least if they hope for meaningful long term economic growth). I shudder to imagine them furrowing their brows at the concept of vast stone oceans of zombie one-celled organisms…and explaining to their constituents why we need to know more about such things. But we DO need to know. In the synthetic ecosystems of my youth, the lack of coherent sustainable bacterial communities was the root cause of disastrous failure. I don’t think our new underworld friends are going to fail or die any time soon, no matter what we surface beings do, yet if we want to take life elsewhere than Earth we are going to need to understand them much better. Perhaps life did not spring from some pool of irradiated scum or arrive on a comet from beyond the solar system. Maybe it came from the hot depths. Maybe we are all underworld beings.
We have a lot to talk about this week, but, as a Monday treat in the December darkness, there is a lot of news (and, yes, inflammatory pseudonews) from outer space. Let’s get down to it and proceed through this grab bag of tidbits.
The big headliner is something which has been in the offing since 1977. According to NASA, the Voyager 2 space probe has left the heliosphere, the protective “bubble” of radiation and charged particles which surrounds the entire solar system, and the craft is now proceeding through interstellar space. The spacecraft is only the second probe with any working instruments to accomplish this feat (the first was Voyager 1). Based on telemetry, it seems that Voyager 2 crossed the Heliopause on November 5th (2018). This occasion gives us reason to look back at the stupendous accomplishments made by the probe during the main stage of its mission. As it traveled through the Solar System, the craft visited all four gas giant planets and discovered 16 moons in addition to mysterious phenomena like Neptune’s Great Dark Spot, previously unknown rings around Neptune and Uranus, and cracks within the ice of Europa. Perhaps it will provide a few more momentous discoveries as it heads into the great darkness between stars.
A second astonishing space headline is the existence of a recording of the wind on Mars. NASA’s InSight lander (which we have been following here on this blog) captured the audio a few days ago and the space agency released the clip to the world this past weekend. This is the first recording of sound from a different planet. You can listen to it here if you want to know what another world sounds like.
OK…those were great stories, but by now you are probably asking where is the pseudonews which was promised in the opening sentence. Pseudonews is news-like material designed to evoke a strong emotional response. The stories are actually revealed to be conjecture, opinion, propaganda/public relations material, or just straight-up celebrity dreck. A cursory scan of the top media sights reveals that many—or maybe most–of the most visited and commented upon pieces are exactly this sort of fatuous puffery, so I thought I better throw some into Ferrebeekeeper to see what happens. For some reason the world can’t get enough of this folderol so let me know what you think!
The first of these newslike stories is actually pretty interesting…if it is true, and I can’t find much confirmation of that. Apparently the Southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu has plans to launch an artificial moon in 2020 to obviate the need for streetlights in the metropolis. This plan is theoretically feasible, in the 1990s the Russians launched the Znamya experiment, which showed that satellites could be used for reflected illumination. Yet the Znamya experiment didn’t produce much illumination…and the costs (bot known and unknown) of such a solution as Chengdu proposes would be outrageous. The idea is worthwhile as a fantasy concept about planetary scale engineering, but until we hear more details I am dubious.
Speaking of dubious, let’s end this article which started with such promise on a truly leaden note. Professional athletes in America are often famous dullards—these are, after all, adults who are paid astronomical sums for running around playing children’s ball games. The ignorant, misleading, and inflammatory declarations of athletes are a constant source of amazement and disgust. Which brings us to the story. Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors (a contemporary basketball team) has announced that humans never visited the moon. This conspiracy theory is common enough around the country, which is filled with people who lack the inclination or aptitude to assess whether fundamental truths are true or not, but it still makes me angry. Do big media companies print this stuff so that “Steph” Curry fans will turn their back on the great accomplishments of the space program during the 1960s or does CNN just want people to believe less in science in general?
Of course not, major news sites are reporting this “news” merely for clicks. I guess technically I am too, although I would be stunned if any Stephen Curry fans read this blog (if you do, please go elsewhere), yet I also have a more noble purpose in talking about this stupid Curry story. In our age of information saturation, it is becoming more difficult to evaluate news sources. Educational failures in public schools and political dysfunction have combined with the information revolution to cause ridiculous drivel to proliferate. The closest analogy I can think of is the era after the printing press became widespread in Europe and crazy tracts appeared everywhere causing wars, confusion, and mayhem (although this previous information breakthrough ultimately led to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment as well). Society is working through another unruly adolescent growth spurt where we try to figure out how to build society-wide consensus out of all of the new tools and discoveries we have made. The process is working out pretty unevenly so maybe we should stop publicizing the rantings of willfully ignorant and malevolent actors like Curry as “news stories”, even if they garner ratings. What’s next, a president who doesn’t believe that vaccines help people? We will revisit these dark fruits of the information era soon, but first there is enormous news from right here on Earth. Tune in tomorrow when we talk about discoveries made right under our feet.
Oh wow! It is that time again: the time that Pantone announces the color of the year for 2019. As you will recall from years past, Pantone is a corporation taste-makers and of fashion insiders which crafts palates that allow all the world’s different corporate concerns to align their offerings with each other. That way consumers can buy matching outfits and housewares in a given season, but can’t find anything that remotely matches any of it the next. Pantone’s offering last year (which is to say the 2018 color of the year) was ultraviolet, a lovely mid-range purple with some blue notes.
Purple is one of my favorite colors…but it seems like the colors are just getting better, because this year features a real winner–“living coral”, a beautiful pinkish red which looks like it is alive. Not only do I love this color…I might actually BE this color (at least if I get out of a very hot shower, or spill allergens on my delicate flesh).
Pantone usually includes lifestyle blather with its color selections, and this year is no different. According to their press kit, the pinkish orange is a “reaction to the onslaught of digital technology and social media,” which represents our collective “need for optimism and joyful pursuits [and] authentic and immersive experiences that enable connection and intimacy.”
That is a lot to load onto a color, but Living Coral fits the bill if any color does. Looking at it just makes me feel happy…like I really did get out of a hot bath and then found some money lying on the ground (although that scenario sounds less good as I look at it on the page). You can read what else Pantone has to say about their selection elsewhere, but in addition to being a near-flesh color, “Living Coral” makes me think of axolotls, sunsets, summer melons, and roses.
This last choice probably makes you scratch your head, but my favorite hybrid tea roses were created by a mad German nurseryman in the mid-sixties and both of his timeless greatest hybrids were this same extraordinary orange pink. One was named “Tropicana” (above) and it was a large showy rose which was (and is) unequaled in looks. The other (pictured below) was smaller and more delicate but it had the most heavenly aroma, which is why it was known as “Fragrant Cloud.” It was my grandmother’s favorite rose and I remember it growing all around her house (and appearing in vases within) during the halcyon summers of my youth.
I poke some fun at Pantone for their florid language and their misfires like “Sand Dollar” (a lifeless ecru from 2006 which did not even have the visual interest of a dead echinoderm), however I think they actually do a good job. Thanks Pantone for the memories of summers past. Maybe 2019 will have some of the rosy happiness of “Living Coral) and if anyone sees a shirt that color, I definitely want one (although I think I might have once had one during those same summers of yore.
The day has escaped me today, but there is still time for a short and visually potent post which I have been saving up. This is a model of the Royal Crown of the Ryukyu Kingdom, which ruled the Ryukyu Islands and unified Okinawa (and, sporadically, some other islands in the East China Sea). Located between China and Japan, the little kingdom began as a tributary state to China (which is why the crown has the characteristic shape of a Ming royal headdress. During its 400 year history, Ryukyu was generally a tributary of China, Japan, or both, until it was annexed by the Empire of Japan in 1879. After the annexation the former King of Ryuku moved to Tokyo and became a Japanese noble. He brought one crown with him (this is an exact model of the original which is at the Naha City Museum of History and is only shown on special occasions). Confusingly, a second historical crown was kept on Okinawa until the island fell to United States forces near the end of World War II and the royal treasures were hidden in a drainage ditch. An American intelligence officer “found” some of these treasures and carried them off to Boston, however they were returned during the 1950s as the friendship between Japan and the United States solidified. The Okinawa crown however was never discovered…so if you find a thing like this in a Boston yard sale you should buy it up (although you may also be sucked into strange diplomatic games with the United States and Japan). In addition to a large gold hairpin, the Naha crown has 288 ornaments made of gold, silver, crystal, and coral.
ferrebeekeeper 