After-Orts #66
Sriracha sauce may be harder to find due to a chili pepper shortage:
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/08/sriracha-shortage-2022-chili-peppers
Helium shortage hits birthday and graduation parties:
https://www.axios.com/2022/05/26/helium-shortage-2022-balloon
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- two quotes from a fascinating review of three books which explore "the materiality of the medieval book" -
Book historians love the sloppy readers who would have pained librarians of old. Marginal notes supply priceless evidence of reader response to texts, while maniculae or pointing hands highlight key passages. If beeswax stains indicate liturgical reading, the humbler tallow wax suggests a late-night lay reader at home. Saint Boniface used a manuscript to shield himself when attacked by robbers; the slashes it suffered make it a relic of his martyrdom. Pages of many books are marred by dirty fingerprints, wine stains or, in one case, cat urine. An angry scribe in 1420 scrawled next to a smelly lacuna: ‘Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum istum in nocte’ (‘a curse on the wicked cat that pissed on this book last night’).
In a German Bible from the late 13th century, a richly decorated ‘I’ initial (for In principio) opens the book of Genesis. It features six medallions illustrating the six days of creation, but the one that represents the first day, the division of light from darkness, is a circle of bare parchment, perfectly framed. God made the world ex nihilo, theologians declared, so here is precisely that nihil, a shocking emptiness that lures the eye more surely than all the gold leaf, intricate designs and dense Gothic script.
-- both, from Peasants Wear Ultramarine, by Barbara Newman, in London Review of Books, Feb.10 2022
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n03/barbara-newman/peasants-wear-ultramarine
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Freedom ain't a state like Maine or Virginia,
Freedom ain't across some county line:
Freedom is a flame that burns within ya,
Freedom's in the state of mind.
-- a song in Shenandoah, a 1974 musical about the U.S. Civil War