The Michelangelo Code

Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner: The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican HarperOne [Harper Collins], New York, 2008.

Take one Renaissance artist, add one set of occult symbols, and combine to produce what will become, with luck, a best seller. That the artist may have no connection to the code means little, as long as one can remain faithful to the recipe.

That, in essence, is The Sistine Secrets, which is presented as a non fiction book, but which is in truth a farrago of irrelevant truths, suppositions presented as evidence, some basic art history, and some whopping inaccuracies. The premise of the book is that Michelangelo, remaining in the traditions of Renaissance art, embedded a detailed iconography in his paintings–which in the case of Michelangelo is for the most part the ceiling and altar wall frescoes of the Sistine Chapel–but which, in the case of Michelangelo, were secretly derived from Kabbalah and covertly denounced the Vatican and the Catholic Church of his own day. There is more probability to this than anything linking Leonardo da Vinci to the Priory of Sion, but the proof quickly breaks down into improbabilities as vast as anything in the DaVinci Code.

Where Moron was invented

I figured this fun fact would be of interest to the Moronosphere.

A rather puzzling legend, which seems neither aimed at tourists nor connectet to the APA, unless very tenuously, reads: Here Vineland – famous for its contributions to our knowledge of the feebleminded. Another arrow elucidates: Here the Vineland Training School and Vineland State School.These were influential schools in the field of mental health, and is in fact here that the term moron was coined. Vineland was also the location of the Palace of Depression (not a reference to the mental state, but to the financial crisis and also dubbed America’s strangest house, completed for $4 in 1932, burned down in the ‘sixties and now being rebuilt).

At the tail end of this post on Strange Maps

The Chinese Paradox

Found via Strange Maps

ts size and its penchand for autarkism dictate China’s three main geopolitical objectives:

* maintain unity of the Han heartland;
* maintain control over the non-Han buffer zone;
* deflect foreign encroachment on the Chinese coast.

Clearly isolationist, these objectives also condemn China to poverty: as a densely populated country with limited arable land, China needs internatioal trade to prosper. The paradox is that prosperity will lead to instability. Prosperity will tend to be concentrated in the areas trading with the outside world (i.e. the coastal regions), creating economic tensions with the poorer interior. This might destabilise the Han heartland.

The paradox lies in the fact that despite its immense size and the fact that it borders fourteen countries, geography isolates China from the rest of the world–to the north, the tundras of Siberia, to the west the deserts of Central Asia, to the southwest the Himalayas, and to the southeast the mountainous jungles that lie on the northern side of the Indochinese countries. Land access is limited to the Pacific littoral on the north (Siberian Pacific) and south (Vietnam) and the thread of the ancient Silk Road traversed by trading Moslems and adventurous Europeans. So all foreign contact–and therefore the prosperity that comes with trading–is confined to the coastal areas, while the interior regions remain poor, leading to instability that threatens the whole of China.

See the link for details, including how Tibet, Mongolia and other areas that form modern China’s border regions fit into this.

Medieval Pr0n

Catapult pr0n

Mead pr0n

And jousting videos here and here

With thanks to Dr. Nokes of Unlocked Wordhoard, whence came one of the videos, the other links, and this bit of advice

Warning: Do no operate catapults under the influence of mead. In legal terms, this is known as a CUI, or “Catapulting Under the Influence.”

to which I would also add a warning against JUI–Jousting Under the Influence

booknotes

Mao’s Last Revolution

Roderick Macfarquhar and Michael Schoenhals

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2006

Empire of Blue Water

Stephan Talty

Crown Publishers New York 2007

Read this week two books, both of them ultimately unsatisfying.

Shakespeare’s Wife

Germain Greere: Shakespeare’s Wife. Harper Collins, New York, 2007

My public library is, to put it mildly, rather dilatory about getting in new books with any claim to scholarship higher than the latest political tell-all. So this book, a biography of Ann Hathaway (Dr. Greer prefers to Ann to Anne, Annis or Agnes) is a pleasant surprise–brand new!) Just for that reason I would have checked it out.