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Semi-isolation, day 16
Mar. 31st, 2020 10:14 pmI do not have a complicated report on my day today, because it was an okay day. Some work got done. My basils got repotted, and are now being brought in overnight because they don't seem to like the cold snap we're having. (Am I over-attached to these basils, the only living thing in this appartment except me? Yes.) I made spag bol and was comforted by it. I set up some of the IKEA fabric boxen (the ones that go in the Kallax shelves i haven't assembled) and now my shoes, and my miscellaneous folders of Important Papers, are corralled in boxen.
Two amusements:
1. As you may all have seen by now, Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device, for which piece of incredibly finely crafted journalism Naaman Zhou deserves a Walkley.
Perspective: no matter the dubious societal value of 'postdoc in Chaucer studies', at least I'm not sticking magnets up my nose during an epidemic.
And a commentary which I presented to Twitter (and to my Dad) this morning:
2. I spent about an hour this afternoon (more dedicated focus than I've managed on anything for a long time!) tracking down the source of this image, which a friend's student had sent her but been unable to find attribution for:
After a long and peculiar chain of search strings, all the way down to a dubious demonology facebook page and then back up, I tracked it down: it's Jupiter castrating Saturn (medieval iconography conflated Saturn and Chronos), but *not* from a manuscript of Ovid's metamorphoses (where most of the similar images come from). It's from something called Le Satyre Megere, in Chavannes-pres-Rennens, Archives Cantonales Vaudoises, P. Antitus, f. 18v. The weird demonology facebook page had got 2/3 of the attribution right, even - it left off the place name, so I wasted a lot of time because I looked at e-codices, saw only the Bibliothèque listed for Lausanne, and concluded the Archives hadn't been digitised and this mad facebook page was probably very wrong. It wasn't until I went back to the Archives website that I realised they are sticklers for their location in Chavannes (which is like... oh I don't know. Do Macquarie Uni attribute their manuscripts, if they have any, as Epping, Macquarie University Library, or do they put Sydney because that is, as far as anyone not from Sydney is concerned, where they are??').
Other people correctly identified the myth, but I got the manuscript, and I feel very smug.
Early in the process I flipped through Genève MS fr. 176 in e-codices and thus found my new favourite medieval image ever: Venus with duck (f. 220r)
Two amusements:
1. As you may all have seen by now, Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device, for which piece of incredibly finely crafted journalism Naaman Zhou deserves a Walkley.
Perspective: no matter the dubious societal value of 'postdoc in Chaucer studies', at least I'm not sticking magnets up my nose during an epidemic.
And a commentary which I presented to Twitter (and to my Dad) this morning:
I still can’t get over how much this should be a parody but isn’t.
Vetinari: The Archchancellor, of course, will have Ankh-Morpork’s best and brightest working on the problem night and day.
Vimes: Sir, this is a disease, not a magical—
Ridcully: magical or material, we shall Rise to the Occasion! Even now, our best minds are- well. Ponder can fill you in.
Ponder: Ah. Hex is demanding more lavatory paper again. And the Astro-thaumaturges are sticking magnets up their noses.
Vetinari: very good, I expect a report next month.
*Exit wizards*
Vetinari, to Vimes, Mrs Palm, and the head of the guild of barber-surgeons: That’s got that lot out of the way. Now, what are your proposals?
2. I spent about an hour this afternoon (more dedicated focus than I've managed on anything for a long time!) tracking down the source of this image, which a friend's student had sent her but been unable to find attribution for:
After a long and peculiar chain of search strings, all the way down to a dubious demonology facebook page and then back up, I tracked it down: it's Jupiter castrating Saturn (medieval iconography conflated Saturn and Chronos), but *not* from a manuscript of Ovid's metamorphoses (where most of the similar images come from). It's from something called Le Satyre Megere, in Chavannes-pres-Rennens, Archives Cantonales Vaudoises, P. Antitus, f. 18v. The weird demonology facebook page had got 2/3 of the attribution right, even - it left off the place name, so I wasted a lot of time because I looked at e-codices, saw only the Bibliothèque listed for Lausanne, and concluded the Archives hadn't been digitised and this mad facebook page was probably very wrong. It wasn't until I went back to the Archives website that I realised they are sticklers for their location in Chavannes (which is like... oh I don't know. Do Macquarie Uni attribute their manuscripts, if they have any, as Epping, Macquarie University Library, or do they put Sydney because that is, as far as anyone not from Sydney is concerned, where they are??').
Other people correctly identified the myth, but I got the manuscript, and I feel very smug.
Early in the process I flipped through Genève MS fr. 176 in e-codices and thus found my new favourite medieval image ever: Venus with duck (f. 220r)
