Tuesday: Hili dialogue

35 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

1. The thagomizer is a bit puny.

2. There are loads of those BRONZE STAMPS knocking about – making a few thousand quid/dollars each at auction. Wouldn’t be hard for a dealer to make these from pre-industrial bronze & get an underpaid museum geek to authenticate. A right old racket – antiquities.

   Re Twitter:

   #Byzantine bronze stamps, both inscribed in Greek. The first reads “Christ, protect” and the second, “Joy life”

   The tweet doesn’t give a source. Google image search does the usual & digs up dozens of copies all on Pinterest! [what’s the point of that? Most Pinterest accounts are useless without attributions for the images.]

   Some Pinterest accounts say the source is British Museum twitter, but no link of course. British Museum site is very poor at internal search so no results there.

   The only thing I’m sure of is the reverse bronze stamp is for imprinting onto bread before baking. I don’t know what use the other stamp is – perhaps that photo is reversed? Bread stamps were a requirement for bakers in Rome at some point because bread was regulated & it carried on into the Byzantine era – perhaps just decoration at later dates? Or to sell at inflated price to Christians “Oi, this bread is blessed & stuff – gimme your money”

   1. Most Pinterest accounts are useless without attributions for the images.

      This irritates me to no end when I’m trying to find something – it is worse than useless.

      1. It grinds my teef! Pinterest people “follow” each other & copy images off each other so a mistake, unjustified assumption or deliberate falsification grows like Pinnochio’s nose.

   2. Thanks for doing the leg work. Saved me a ton of grief. 😎

   3. here’s the joy life

      http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=60780&partId=1

      1. @jahigginbotham Thank you! When I searched the British Museum site the returns were nine pages of items – the first pages were items for sale in the museum shop. I suppose the “XAPA SOH” “Joy life” was further in than I looked.

         “Bread-stamp; bronze; S-shaped with a ring at the back; on the front in relief an inscription” Thinking about it… this 2nd image is also the wrong way round for a bread stamp…

   4. [skipping moderation]

      The first one is not reversed (or has been reversed, depending on your viewpoint).
      XE abreviation was often used for Christ – https://timelineauctions.com/lot/ring-inscribed-christ-protect-sauras/113965/

      1. @jahigginbotham The first stamp: XPICTE
         BOHBL is reversed in the sense that the result of stamping with it would be reversed letters – not a useful stamp! Therefore I suppose it’s not meant to be used as a stamp or the photograph of the stamp is flipped.

         I don’t know why you mention XE as abbreviation for Christ with respect to this ‘wrong-way-round-stamp’, but thank you for the link. Most interesting.

   5. Here’s another showing abbreviation https://books.google.com/books?id=1DsABAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA109&ots=k0lfVEMA9Q&dq=XPICTE%20BOHEI&pg=PA109#v=onepage&q&f=false
      and

      https://www.doaks.org/resources/seals/byzantine-seals/BZS.1947.2.337

      1. A Jack Finegan archaeology book – an interesting read that page, I don’t know how a Christian can fairly ‘do’ Christian archaeology & the page doesn’t read as impartial. I remember some evangelical nutter years ago telling me Christ was real because ‘they’d’ [no reference to the identity of they of course] discovered the House of Peter “therefore God/Christ is real.” I suppose my nutter was referring to Finegan’s work.

         Why are you showing me ancient Greek abbreviations? As an ex-Catholic hater of Catholicism & all other Christianity [& religion in general] I’m aware of the various abbrevs for Christ etc – it was all over our Latin bibles & other items used for magical, symbology [“buy at the church shop, fresh stocks in, pre-blessed by Father Dermot”]

3. Those Hungarian suba coats would surely be a fashionable item on crowded subways.

   1. Yeah, I bet they smell great.

   2. I’d think that would be quite confusing to sheep dogs.

      1. It is not, because it takes at least partially the body odor of the shepherd. :/
         Also dogs can differentiate between a sheep and the removed skin of a dead sheep.
         As for the visuals, shepherd dogs are smarter than that.

         Those shepherds worked together with sheep dogs (like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puli + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komondor ), so it would be really weird if the dogs could be confused by something like this.

         1. Looking at the Pulis and the Komondors, I see that even the dogs go for the sheep-in-need-of-shearing look.

            Here are some sheep herding a dog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-9-3DtUzug.

      2. As long as amorous rams aren’t confused…!

4. It is always so heartening to see the two species,
   Ms Hili and Mr Cyrus, in such togetherness.

   Initial divisiveness .can. melt away. These two prove it.

   Blue

5. I thought that said “ISIS flying across the moon” and thought, “oh no. The age of Moon ISIS has begun, just as my local psychic foretold. May God have mercy on us all.”

   Maajid’s rant is pretty epic, indeed. I was reading SYP’s tweets and noticed that they’re in the middle of a recruitment campaign. Guess what they call their officers…

   They call them “PCs” 😀 (no, I am not joking)

   1. Police Constables.

      1. As in the chant ‘All coppers are constables.’ The emphasis is put on the first syllable.

   2. Send ISIS to the Moon. Let them starve to death during the two-week long daylight hours of Ramadan.

6. I’ve seen Harry Connick, Jr. in two movies, one in which he played a fairly dark serial killer (“Copycat” 1995) and one as a romantic lead, playing Joe Cable in the HBO remake of “South Pacific” (2001) in which I thought he was remarkably good.

   =-=-=

   The Beatles did three takes of their first single “Love Me Do” and finally used the 2nd of three, indeed recorded today. It would get released in England on the 5th of October, 1962, the same day as the release of the first James Bond film, “Dr. No”

   1. When I was a kid, Copycat was on HBO all the damn time. That scene where Weaver’s character opened the email and it played the gif of a woman in a bathtub turning into a skeleton gave me nightmares. It’s one of those weird, largely innocuous (in comparison to other things I saw) images that got stuck in my brain for some reason. I mean, I saw Robocop for the first time that same year, and Toxic Waste Emil didn’t frighten me quite as much.

      1. A horror scene that stuck in my craw as a youth and gave me nightmares was from The Shining. The scene where a beautiful woman comes out of the bathtub and seduces Jack Torrance and while he’s hugging her, he looks in the mirror and sees she’s a rotting corpse. Then that cackle as she shuffles after him. Damn that was terrifying…still is!

         1. If you are a Shining fan you shouldn’t overlook Speilberg’s Ready Player One.

            1. Thanks for the tip, I’ll check it out.

            2. If you do you’ll spot my pun.

            3. Wish I hadn’t misspelled Spielberg though.

         2. Oh, boy! I would have lost a hell of a lot more sleep if I had seen that film as a kid. The biggest cause of sleep loss when I was young was Nightmare on Elm Street. What a brilliant concept: stay awake or you die!

            1. Great concept indeed; that is one helluva great horror movie. I was a high school freshman when that came out, but still freaked me out (and all my friends). I’ll never forget the Shakespeare reading scene…or the very end.

               Now that we’re on the topic of good horror films, ever seen Session Nine? Ooh that’s one of my faves.

         3. I recently stayed at the hotel in Colorado which inspired Stephen King to write “The Shining” (The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park).

            I texted two friends of mine that I was tired and sweaty and it was time for a nice warm that and of course I included a YouTube video of that scene.

7. While Connick was already an established jazz pianist …

   Harry Connick, Jr.’s piano teacher growing up in New Orleans was Ellis Marsalis, paterfamilias of the famous Marsalis musical clan.

8. The thylacine tweet is prime “just-so” material. Still, there may well be naturally selectable reason why the stripes are the way they are, but the word “spandrel” comes to mind.

   1. On the other hand, knowing in a given individual what biochemical pathways form the striping would be interesting.

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