Beautiful gallery of medieval magic ceremonies, re-created in a book from the 1960s. I ordered my copy today! From The Nonist:

Can you begin to imagine the amount of time spent by the human race in pursuit of magic? I am not speaking metaphorically here. I mean can you imagine the sum total man-hours devoted to actively invoking, incanting, intoning, beseeching, divining, scrying, summoning, chanting, conjuring, and casting? And though, so far as we know, not a single minute of all that feverish sorcery yielded the intentional result with greater efficiency than chance, magic continues, and will continue, probably forever. And do you know why? Well, setting aside the fact that the whole endeavor is damn poetic specifically because of its futility, fascinating because of its baroquely fanciful trappings, pathos-packed because of its provenance, and let’s face it, pretty hilarious on the whole, there is another, simpler reason; one which I believe will be self-evident if you take a gander at what I’ve set out for you below…

As you can see the simple answer is- Because its fun! I mean come on! In what other context do sad old dudes get to prance about waving wands over nubile flower-carrying virgins, flanked with skulls and incense and sheer fabrics? At what other point in their lives do most older women get to heft daggers and dance around naked together and point longswords at blindfolded initiates? The occult is just too damned fun to disapear. Not so much for the goats and chickens, granted, but for humans? A really swell time.

Here’s Nick Kristof:

Here’s a forecast for a particularly bizarre consequence of climate change: more executions of witches.

As we pump out greenhouse gases, most of the discussion focuses on direct consequences like rising seas or aggravated hurricanes. But the indirect social and political impact in poor countries may be even more far-reaching, including upheavals and civil wars — and even more witches hacked to death with machetes.

A longer discussion at Freakonomics.

Via WonderCabinet.

From Wikipedia: “In 1972, Jacobs collaborated with Bob McClay and Chris Koch on a series of half-hour television programs for San Francisco public television station KQED. “The Fine Art of Goofing Off” was a sort of philosophical Sesame Street; each program would develop an open-ended theme, like “time” or “work” in an unpredictable collage of brief episodes in a variety of different styles of animation.”

The above images are from the DVD included with a new book of Jacobs’ work by “Important Records.” Make the jump for Youtube clips of “The Fine art of Goofing Off.” Henry Jacobs Book + DVD on Amazon

[Via VLU]

Continue Reading »

Illustrations from an old book of of futurist essays by Harry Harrison called Mechanismo. From the remarkable blog The Nonist. More images, because they’re THAT GOOD:

Continue Reading »

A great data-mining project by Virgil Griffith: He went to Facebook, found people’s favorite books, and plotted them against the average SAT score at their college. Do check out the link—the chart is massive. But some thoughts on Lolita as the highest-brow choice:

Continue Reading »

So earlier, Jim posted an introduction to a series of posts we’ve planning, titled the Year in Racism. The starting point was Jim’s observation that the black rage of Kara Walker and Clarence Thomas—on display in a recent museum show and book, respectively—come from similar places.

The themes they offer have huge overlaps. Both Thomas and Walker direct their anger at the whites that committed the original sin of slavery and their paternalistic, patronizing, politically-correct descendants. But Thomas and Walker are at their most unsparing and strident when addressing the role that blacks play in their own plights. They point out that black Americans have signed away some of their dignity by accepting guilt-stained handouts, while playing out their own self-hate in violence against fellow blacks. Racism isn’t a one-way street. It’s a morass that shows everyone involved in the worst possible light.

Given those similarities, we offer you, DG reader, a sample of Walker’s art, annotated with quotes from Thomas’s autobiography.

Continue Reading »

The year of nappy-headed hos, the year Eddie Murphy kept quitting, the year of the Jena Six, the year Bill Cosby quit being funny (Or was that more like ‘83?), the year of Barack Obama’s potential, we also learned that Kara Walker and Clarence Thomas are seething with a black rage nearly indistinguishable from each other. Walker’s show won near-universal praise–indeed, I rated it my favorite art show of 2007 (post forthcoming)–while Thomas’s won, predictably, near-universal condemnation. (”The problem with black-and-white portraits is also that they produce cartoons where there might have been nuance” is actually a line from a review of Thomas’s book.) But the anger (and sometimes loathing) seem to come from the same place in black psychology. In some upcoming posts, the Ghosts will look for these similarities, as well as elaborating on the year in racism that was.