Tesla and his cat (1939)
But I was the happiest of all, the fountain of my enjoyment being our magnificent Macak—the finest of all cats in the world. I wish I could give you an adequate idea of the affection that existed between us. We lived for one another. Wherever I went, Macak followed, because of our mutual love and the desire to protect me. When such a necessity presented itself he would rise to twice his normal height, buckle his back, and with his tail as rigid as a metal bar and whiskers like steel wires, he would give vent to his rage with explosive puffs: Pfftt! Pfftt! It was a terrifying sight, and whoever had provoked him, human or animal, would beat a hasty retreat.
In respect to water, Macak was very fastidious. He would jump six feet to avoid wetting his paws. On such days we went into the house and selected a nice cozy place to play. Macak was scrupulously clean, had no fleas or bugs, shed no hair, and showed no objectionable traits. He was touchingly delicate in signifying his wish to be let out at night, and scratched the door gently for readmittance.
Now I must tell you a strange and unforgettable experience that stayed with me all my life. Our home was about eighteen hundred feet above sea level, and as a rule we had dry weather in the winter. It happened that one day the cold was drier than ever before. People walking in the snow left a luminous trail behind them, and a snowball thrown against an obstacle gave a flare of light like a loaf of sugar cut with a knife. In the dusk of the evening, as I stroked Macak’s back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.
My father was a very learned man; he had an answer for every question. But this phenomenon was new even to him. “Well,” he finally remarked, “this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.” My mother seemed charmed. “Stop playing with this cat,” she said. “He might start a fire.” But I was thinking abstractedly. Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back?
The president’s budget plan as it arrived on Capitol Hill on Monday. J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
'Faux-cul' point
February 1, 2015 11:10 am, FM said:
I knew that “faux-cul” literally means “false ass”, but why is it an insult? Apparently this phrase was used in French for what in English was called a bustle, a “framework used to expand the fullness or support the drapery of the back of a woman’s dress”. The French phrase then apparently picked up the extended meaning of “hypocrite” — unless this was an independent development?
Even while knowing the bustle meaning of faux-cul, I’d always assumed its use as an insult was derived from faux-jeton, with cul substituted for jeton for expressive purposes, as very often happens with all manner of swearwords.
In private, sure, but we haven’t gotten to the point where even retired politicians talk this way in television interviews.
This kind of language is certainly not usual in television interviews in France either, but Jean-Marie Le Pen has always been known for his use of strong language and provocative discourse, sometimes resulting in legal action against him.
P.S. The term trombinoscope, dated 1873 by Le Petit Robert is rather frequent in companies, schools and other institutions which keep a photo directory of their members. Its improbable etymology derives from trombine, a colloquial word for English face (somewhat equivalent to mug).
Mark Liberman: So trombinoscope basically means “facebook”!
The glow pear
Radu Zaciu. “Die Glühbirne,” 2015.
German slang for light bulb is “die Glühbirne,” or “the glow pear.”
Remedial education
This essay considers the process of remediation in two North American reproductions of the song-and-dance sequence “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” from the 1965 Bollywood film Gumnaam. The song was used in the opening sequence of the 2001 U.S. independent film Ghost World as a familiar-but-strange object of ironic bewilderment and fantasy for its alienated teenage protagonist Enid. But a decade before Ghost World’s release, “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” had already become the lynchpin of a complex debate about cultural appropriation and multicultural identity for an “alternative” audience in the United States. I illustrate this through an ethnographic analysis of a 1994 videotape of the Heavenly Ten Stems, an experimental rock band in San Francisco, whose performance of the song was disrupted by a group of activists who perceived their reproduction as a mockery. How is Bollywood film song, often itself a kitschy send-up of American popular culture, remediated differently for different projects of reception? How do these cycles of appropriation create overlapping conditions for new identities—whether national, diasporic, or “alternative”—within the context of transcultural media consumption? In drawing out the “ghost world” of Bollywood’s juxtapositions, I argue that the process of remediation produces more than just new forms and meanings of media, but is constitutive of the cosmopolitan subjects formed in its global circulations.
The demo for “Blank Space”
