the floating world

a place to archive my special interests

Susan Sontag directed a candlelit production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo during the Bosnian Genocide

I have done more asinine things than that to convince other men of less important truths. -The Problem of Cell 13 by Jacques Futrelle

quipu was a rope along which beaded strings hung and was used as an accounting and story-telling aid, read by quipucamayocs. Unfortunately, the method to decode them was lost to Spanish colonialization of the Inca

hobby comes from the word for an Irish pony, a hobby. Later, toy rocking horses were called hobbyhorses. Over time, people compared their amusements to riding the hobbyhorse in their youth... by the 19th century, the word as shortened to hobby and used in the modern sense.

volvelle were rotating paper disks secured in the center that could be used to calculate astronomical and calendrical events

Samuel Clemens took his penname Mark Twain from the oft mispronounced phrase mark the twine, as a weighted length of twine was used to sounded the depth of rivers. Clemens, who worked as a riverboat pilot, would have heard it addressed to him many times.

from 1450 to the 18th century, children were taught how to read from a hornbook, a paddle with a sheet of translucent horn or mica afixed atop in a way that a lesson sheet could be slipped between. This lesson sheet was usually the alphabet, but could also include a syllabary, verse, etc.

Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of You? - Franz Fanon

a xylothek was a wooden library, quite literally recording arborial biodiversity by make fake books out of the timber, the spines made of the tree's raw bark, which could still open on a hinge and contained a recess to store a sample of the tree's leaves, acorns, roots, etc.

Kampfreine was a book made by Uwe Wandrey during the 1968 student riots in West Germany, the first book to be designed to also be a weapon, as the edges of the cover were sharp metal. In Wandrey's own words, I've often been told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but what if the book is the sword?

Law is strong not because the police are really omniscient (there is still nothing easier than to commit a crime and go unpunished) but because the myth of Law has its temple in our mind. - Andre Maurois

Souperism refers to protestant bible societies giving out soup to starving Irish children during the Irish Potato Famine, on the condition that they receive protestant instruction and eventually convert

Arpeggio literally means as played on the harp, as sweeping the strings on a harp will naturally produce a successive chord

To turn flax into linen, you must remove the seed, break the stems, scrutch the stems (scraping), and hackle the fibers through increasingly fine nails. What is left among these nails is called tow, shorter broken fibers, and what you have left in your hand is line flax.

When spinning linen, if the twist is not tight enough the line is thick and prone to fraying. When weaving, these looser sections are called slubs, and are a sign of poor quality spinning.

Sarajevo Roses refers to mortal blasts that damaged roads in Sarajevo during the Bosnian Genocide in the 1990s and were later filled in with red resin as a memorial. The concusive splashes look like roses, or spilt blood