And Did Those Feet

The British Museum has a host of wonderful relief carvings collected from Assyria in the 19th and 20th Century.  They are free to see, easy to get to on the ground floor, can be enjoyed without much insider knowledge, and nor is it necessary to spend long reading labels. Now the Museum has put some of them together with a whole load of objects from the store. The net result is a very satisfying exhibition which gives a pretty good background to the enjoyment of the reliefs. The carvings are amazing, and look very good with the black backgrounds and relief lighting.   These two, are larg scale sphinx to the left and to the right the head of a diety half animal half human. Ashurbanipil was also something of a star student, and is, in one notable relief, depicted with a pen in his waistband.  (picture to the right).  Archaeologists have found shelves and hundreds of clay tablets showing that the King had a large library.    The displays...

A  morning trying to update myself. Timothy Morton's book Hyperobjects being the subject.  What I like about it is a philosophy that makes the world not homocentric, one in which things have their own reality, and where we are not at the centre of everything.   The philosophy is called  Object Orientated Ontology (OOO). In a way it seems another moment in time like Corpernicus's discovery that the Sun does not go around the Earth.  Now OOO allows us to ignore philosophers who tell us things can only be known by the senses and therefore their existence depends on our cognition. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course it does.  But, I coming from the no nonsense school of philosophy,  have always believed in the 't he possibility of unperceived existence ' and have objected to the subjectivists. So thanks to the OOO for bringing this back into reality. Now Morton  has used OOO to atta...

So if you judge someone you are doing this in Anglo-Norman derived from Latin, in English you deem or doom.  A judge is a deempster.  If you are called to the Bar,  made into a Barrister and facing trial in a Court these are all anglo norman words from Latin. In English Jesus was crutched or crossed in Latin Cruxified. A roman officer controling nearly 100 people is called a centurion. In English he would be a hundreder. A lot of decisions were made in the lead up to the King James bible where a lot of decisions went the latin way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_equivalents_in_English

https://londonist.com/london/history/18th-century-queer-london?utm_source=Today%27s+posts+from+Londonist&utm_campaign=7ca5d986e9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_21_04_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_acfd22879f-7ca5d986e9-219853617