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The head of the Buccellati(see previous) jewelry family, Gianmaria Buccellati has died after a period of sickness.  It wasn't until reading the notice that I realized that his brother is is Georgio, who has published one of the best modern Akkadian grammars, A Structural Grammar of Babylonian.

(source)

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Bibindex is one of those fantastic projects of the internet, where you can search for something that used to be only available to scholar of a specific field.  In this case it's a corpus of 400,000 biblical refernces in Jewish and Christian literature of late antiquity throught the middle ages.  You pick the chapter and verse, and optionally the author, country of origin or date, and it pulls up every reference to that section in those texts.  The UI is pretty poorly done, the + button means "select this thing and give me an optional other" which is entirely non-obvious, but it is powerful.  Free, but registration required

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This was made as part of a presentation for a class on the Crusades. It's as much a demo of the technology as anything else

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Now with actual Indians!  The rights to the name The East India Company were bought up by Sanjiv Mehta, an Indian businessman, in 2005 and it is once again selling fine foods in England.  One of the more unusual things that comes with the name is the right to mint coinage, and they have restarted the minting of the Mohur, a gold coin whose name means "seal" and was used throughout the sub-continent.  In this case it's 11.66 grams of 22K gold, about 26mm in diameter.  The large emblem of the EIC is on one side and a lion before a palm tree on the other, a motif first seen on the first gold Mohur minted in 1835.



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Or perhaps a sign of the success of Damien Hirsts' penetration of the popular consciousness, at least in Paris, is this carefully executed "dot" message.  Say what you will, but I bet this one was painted by the artist...


(photo by Laurence Billiet, found on Vandalog)

Yes the 2010 award is given at the beginning of 2012, they take an entire year to look over the coins that were issued with 2010 dates. Anyway, the final award "Coin of the Year" has been awarded to an Israeli 2 Sheqalim (technically New Sheqalim, but nobody uses that term) depicting Jonah in the Whale.

On heads there's all the usual stuff, date, country, denomination as well as the text "Jonah in the belly of the fish (Jonah 2:1)" in Hebrew, Arabic and English. At the bottom is a small figure of Jonah in prayer. On the back Jonah is shown insconced in the, he is a negative space in the large frosted plateau of the fish.

(source)

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The first Viking ship burial on mainland Britian has been found on the Ardnamurchan peninsula on Scotland's west coast. The bulk of the boat has rotted away, but the body was found with a spear, ax, sword and remains of a shield. Archaeologists estimate that the original ship would have been approximately 5 meters long (see reconstruction below)

(see more details at the source)

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In the late 18th and early 19th century the wealthy aristocrats of Europe often collected small automatons. These were clockwork robots, decedents of the hour-striker clocks of Renaissance Europe. One of the most popular styles consisted of birds who flapped their wings and sung. They were originally mounted in cages as an attempt at realism. Styles changed and the little birds popped up everywhere, including the barrel of bejeweled gold pistols and the only matching pair by Freres Rochat recently were auctioned at Christie's

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(This is something new, for me at least, a review of a museum exhibit.)

While in New York this past weekend, I went to the oft-extended Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met, Savage Beauty.  I was impressed by the clothing and related accessories on display, having known almost nothing about the man before except the few "shocking" pieces that rose above the background noise of "who are you wearing" that surrounds big red-carpet affairs. The pieces spanned his post-college work through the last collection he did, which as presented posthumously in the past year, and gave a good evolutionary progression.  The early works show the clear influence of his prior work as a Saville Row tailor, not yet the insanity of the future, and the later pieces show the context of the great insanity that was commonly known.  Alongside the clothing were some of the usual accessories, hats, shoes and jewelry, and some unusual bits, such as laser-cut wood wings and a cast-aluminum corset in the form of a spine and ribs. 

  Where the exhibit really shown was in the displays and related settings.  Each of the rooms had a theme, with the interiors decorated to match, and these were done quite excellently.  Many of the pieces were shown alongside video of the original collection show, including a piece that was spray-painted by robots on stage and a series of chess themed works that played a game.  All of the manikins were masked in some way to hide the blank heads, and even the masks were customized to the exhibit room's theme.
  The only drawback to the exhibition was that there was no clear progression, each room opened onto the next from the middle of a wall, so you could not simply follow the sense of the exhibit to see all the works, which led to weird traffic issues.  There was also a wait to get in, about 30 min when we were there, but it was managed well enough not to be too annoying. 

  Overall I'd say it was much better then I'd thought it would be, highly recommended for anyone interested in fashion, and still recommended for those who just like a good show

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This is easy, sir, I'll warrant you. You have about you fools and madmen that can dance very well, and 'tis no wonder your best dancers are not the wisest men: the reason is, with often jumping they jolt their brains down into their feet, that their wits lie more in their heels than in their heads.

From The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley

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