1: A photographic reconstruction of various stages in a complex medieval spell to preserve the chastity of a high-born maiden while her betrothed is away at the wars.

2: A meeting of a coven of white witches in Hertfordshire, England, in June 1964.

As you can see the simple answer is- Because its fun! I mean come on! In what other context do sad old dudes get to prance about waving wands over nubile flower-carrying virgins, flanked with skulls and incense and sheer fabrics? At what other point in their lives do most older women get to heft daggers and dance around naked together and point longswords at blindfolded initiates? The occult is just too damned fun to disapear. Not so much for the goats and chickens, granted, but for humans? A really swell time.

Seriously, you just try taking it away from desperate middle-aged naked people with swords, I dare you.

-

All images and accompanying text from the book The Supernatural by Douglas Hill and Pat Williams, published in 1965.

Hope you enjoyed.

First let me get you up to speed on what exactly Klein’s invention is all about in case you missed the story-

NPR’s site explains it as follows:

Quote: “Klein says this all started when he used a modified version of Skinnerian training to teach his cat to use the toilet, and it worked really well. That made him think that he might be able to use the method with crows. The first inklings that he would work with crows came about 10 years ago, at a cocktail party, when he argued that harnessing the birds to do something useful would be a much better plan for his native Seattle, plagued by crows, than mass slaughter.

In the first two steps of his four-step experiment, Klein says he provides crows with coins, peanuts and the vending machine, in order to get them used to the materials. Then he provides the birds only with coins, and in frustration they bang around until the coin gets in the machine’s slot. That introduces the next step, when the machine dispenses a peanut as a reward for each coin. In the fourth step, he gives the birds nothing. But the crows see that coins have been spread on the ground near the machine. This reveals what’s special about crows. Squirrels, for example, look at the box a half-dozen times, then disappear to play in traffic. Crows make the connection: Pick up the coin, put it in the box and receive a reward.”

Because the crows “make the connection” the vending machine idea works, as might more complex ones some day.

Crows have demonstrated their intelligence time and again. They have a penchant for trickery (a.k.a. tactical deception), seem to create their own “dialects” as a means of differentiating family groups, and have exhibited the ability to solve a problem spontaneously by crafting a tool, a feat not even our cousins the chimps have managed. All of this seems to points to sophisticated cognition skills, a trait which itself suggests crows share some abstract thinking skills with us humans.

So… the point is crows are smart.

Which got me thinking.

If we start stimulating their abstract thinking, with that most stimulating of abstractions– cash, what associated experiences might we be opening them up to? I mean, what else might our cognitive brethren learn, that we ourselves have learned, by being placed on this fast track of abstract thought? What epiphanies and what unpleasant shocks lay between them and their eventual empire of the birds?

These are questions responsibly-all-powerful and world-shaping beings must consider. For instance…

Will they learn the gut-twist and discomfort of the “awkward encounter” as multiple crows arrive simultaneously at the vending machine? Will they stare at their claws after a polite, but not overly welcoming, caw? Will they learn to feign interest in some banal object in the safe haven of the middle-distance? Will they pretend the machine is out of the particular peanuts they like and walk away, preferring to sneak back later when that super-annoying crow from accounting is gone?

Will the crows learn the infuriation of trekking all the way from their nest, with exact change, only to have their quarter clank through the innards of the machine and spat out again, and again, and again, until they, feathers beginning to rustle, inspect the coin and find it’s… Canadian!? Will they caw a beak-clenched epithet at Canada? Or at the deli clerk who passed the thing off? Will they throw the coin in disgust before flying away or, irrationally, and with no good reason whatsoever, keep it?




And what if after a few generations of commerce their abstract thinking improves to the degree that they notice the variances in iconography which help to differentiate one coin from another? And what if their jump-started cognition actually produces some sparks of recognition?

What if, in the lazy hours of the afternoon while distractedly fondling a smooth coin with their wings, they begin to look more closely?

I would assume that the fierce eagle, so beloved as symbol in these United States of America, might have somewhat different associations for the moneyed crows about town.

And the feathers in some American Indian’s headdress? Surely a celebration of the proud splendor and noble traditions of indigenous cultures would not be the very first thought to pop into their minds?

As for our mythologies, our winged women and our Mercury’s and Pegasi and Griffons and Sphinx’s… well, I can’t even begin to imagine the crows’ consternation at the thought of these, most likely hungry, abominations.




Lastly, I wonder what, a hundred successfully-vended and belly-filled years from now, when the crows have learned well and their dependance on the coin has increased… when the first few murders of young have already been born with enhanced coin-detecting vision that sees straight through pants pockets and purse leather… when a crude “pawnshop dialect” has been invented approximating human-sounding phrases like “oh hell naw!” and “c’mon mister, that’s a family heirloom!”... I wonder what those unfortunate crows not fortunate enough to be hatched with a silver dollar in their beak might be reduced to?

Not so funny is it?

Anyhow, it’s a fascinating invention, so kudos to Mr. Klein… my low-browed, yuk-yuk, ah-cha-cha-cha! sullying of it notwithstanding. You can read more about the vending machine, Klein’s ultimate aims, and see a short video as well, at the official site.

Hope you enjoyed.

What makes this particular document so fantastic is that in issuing these “Special Instructions To Players,” warning against foul language on the field, Major League baseball decided to reprint some of the offensive language verbatim. Hilarious.

See below and read for yourself.

Ha. God I love that.

It shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise though, considering in the 1890’s baseball players weren’t yet the over-groomed, under-motivated, millionaires we’re stuck watching today. Back then, if these guys hadn’t been playing ball they’d probably be exactly what they sounded like, longshoremen, or coal miners, or infantry grunts, or vice presidents.

A grateful hat tip to seldivider for bringing this to my attention, and giving me an excuse to coin the hyphenated term “shit-pickling.”

Well, as you might expect, it turns out that the “perfect alphabet” of the title, which the book sets forth as remedy to the “absurdities” of English, also mentioned in the title, is a phonetic alphabet created by Comstock himself.

Quote: “It is generally admitted that our orthography is more complicated than that of any other language. Various attempts have been made by different individuals to simplify it. The author of this treatise, however, proposes not only to simplify it, but to perfect it.”

Before you go off half-cocked mocking and scoffing Dr. Comstock for pomposity, first remind yourself that he invented his more-perfect-than-English alphabet at a time when religious and philosophical outlooks on causality were giving way to scientific ones, which is to say that the prevailing feeling among the educated was that with some properly focussed brain-power any “problem” could be “solved” by scientific means, that this was the age of the elocution movement, and that there had already been, before he ever set overconfident pen to paper, at least a century’s worth of individual efforts to overhaul English. Benjamin Franklin had made his own attempt as early as the 1760’s after all, and you wouldn’t mock old Ben now would you?

Then there is the little matter which, being so far removed from grammar school, you have likely forgotten- English is a weird and knotty frankensteinian creature.

(After many paragraphs to back up the statement) Comstock puts it this way: “Our language is hedged about with difficulties which can hardly be overcome even by years of laborious study. The young student is obliged to waste much precious time in learning to spell and read our crooked words, and the adult foreigner is appalled by obstacles which seem to be insurmountable. Now, all these difficulties would be entirely removed by the adoption of a perfect alphabet — an alphabet which should represent language phonetically.”

Of course, now that you’ve reminded yourself of these things, you can go ahead and laugh anyway.

I personally find myself amused, not so much by the seemingly quixotic quest to just put on the brakes and change the course of a living language, but by the obvious galled irritation Dr. Comstock felt.

Quote: “...the 38 elementary sounds of the English language are represented in 336 different ways, which may be considered equivalent to three hundred and thirty-six different letters! Is it possible to conceive of a more complicated, absurd, unphilosophical, and barbarous system of orthography?”

Barbarous?! Hahaha.

We, all of us, find aspects of our own vocations thorny and annoying. The convolutions and abstruseness and wrong-mindedness which seem to permeate every human endeavor formulated or informed by any consciousness other than our own can exasperate; but imagine if your vocation was language! Imagine if it were English itself that stuck in your craw. Talk about fighting windmills. 

Anyhow, if you are interested, Comstock’s phonetic alphabet broke down essentially as follows- 

Quote: “This Alphabet comprises all the letters of the Phonetio Alphabet for the English Language, with additional ones to represent sounds peculiar to foreign languages. Comstock’s Phonetic Alphabet is the common, or Boman alphabet, not only so extended, by the addition of new letters, that there is a character for every articulate sound, but so improved by the introduction of signs for the various modifications of the voice in speech, that there is a character for every accent, inflection, intonation, etc. Hence it must be considered a perfect alphabet.”

Including all 44 characters and 16 tone marks Comstock’s perfect alphabet looked like this-

If you were enthusiastic about the alphabet and wanted to set about immediately hand-writing a letter to your dear old mother, or your betrothed in Niagara Falls, you could refer to this chart as a guide-

Meanwhile if you wanted to set about teaching the gents down at the club or the fellows at the beer garden this new method, some charts depicting mouth articulations, grouped by phoneme, would be helpful. Luckily Comstock furnished these, saying- 

Quote: “An accurate knowledge of the positions which the organs of articulation should assume in the formation of the several elements of vocal language, is very important to those who would speak with ease and elegance. To aid the reader still further in the acquisition of this knowledge, he is furnished with the various postures of the mouth, required in uttering the elements energetically, and singly.”

“The pupil should exercise his organs of speech, in the most forcible manner, every day, on all the elements. The vowels should be exploded from the throat, both interrogatively and affirmatively, in every range of pitch.”

Certainly, even armed with logic and charts and enthusiasm, there would be some doubters. To them, leaving aside stability and ease of use, you could quote a few of the many benefits Comstock himself lists, like, say-

3. It would enable one to spell and read in one-twentieth the time required by the present absurd and barbarous orthography.

4. It would render the teaching and the learning of the English language, which, by the old theory, are extremely irksome, highly interesting.

7. It would interdict provincialisms; because, according to this theory, all words are spelled as they are pronounced, and, consequently, pronounced as they are spelled, every graphic word being a perfect Daguerreotype of the vocal word which it represents.

10. As, in phonetic spelling, most of the words have fewer letters than are employed in our present orthography, this alphabet would enable a writer to put more matter upon the same page.

13. The adoption of this alphabet would not only be the means of greatly advancing the cause of science and literature, but would be invaluable to the missionary in disseminating a knowledge of the gospel among the heathen.

How can you argue with that? Comstock certainly couldn’t see any way.

Quote: “The Author feels confident that no one who peruses this treatise understandingly, will desire to cling any longer to the old system of orthography, unless he prefers chaos to order, —discord to harmony, —darkness to light. Hence, he sends forth his Alphabet to the world with the most sanguine expectation that it will meet the entire approbation of the public, and be speedily adopted.”

I might wonder weather, having seen his countrymen choose chaos, discord, and darkness over his perfect alternative, he died sanguine as well… were it not for the obvious linguistic contradiction of it.

Anyhow, hindsight being smug and sadistic as it is, we know his grandiloquent claims and aims came to naught. We know also that the scores of other contrived alphabets which came before and after his met similar fates. I don’t believe there has ever been a constructed script, in the history of the world, which has supplanted a “naturally” evolved predecessor by dint of logic and force of will. 

Perhaps it’s the fact that, as in Comstock’s case, a switch might benefit 3rd graders and immigrants but would effectively render the entire adult population of the country illiterate in the bargain?

Perhaps it’s because, ever since learning as ankle-biters what the characters MOMMY added up to, our alphabet is so intertwined with our language, and hence, our thoughts, our minds, our being, that we would never and could never willingly replace it?

Perhaps it’s because language is a vibrant and living and evolving thing which has never, not even in or present “barbarous” orthography, been truly tamed and finally codified?

Or perhaps it’s just that the overwhelming majority of us are not elocution teachers, or linguists, or grammarians, and so the quirks of English just simply do not stick in our craws enough to warrant, in any of our minds, a “solution?”

Hell, I don’t know.

Though his perfect alphabet is all but forgotten, I would like to thank Dr. Comstock, none the less, for not only affording me a chuckle (which I suppose I ought to be offering apologies for rather than thanks) but more importantly for occasioning circumstances in which the letters “Phonemenon” could be put together, in that exact order, and be something other than a misspelling.

So in his honor, finally, let me offer the following, may it live on in the minds and mouths of we who have choosen chaos, discord, and darkness:

Pho·nem·e·non [fo-neem-uh-non]
noun. plural: phonemena.
1. A vocalization, or sound made with the mouth, that is perceptible by the senses.
2. A remarkable or outstanding utterance.

Hope you enjoyed.

A Chinese legend traces shadow play to 121 BCE.

“Emperor Wu of the Han-dynasty placed his affections on the lady Li; she departed this life and his thoughts were with her incessantly. Then a native of Ts’i, versed in occult arts, named Li Shao-weng, told him he could make her shen (ghost) appear. That night he stretched a curtain across the room, lighted lamps and torches, and told the Emperor to sit down by another curtain, and look from some distance. Then within the curtain a beauty appeared, whose form was that of the lady Li.” - As reported by the sinologist Gustave Schlegel. 

To cite the legend of Emperor Wu as the actual origin of shadow theater would be a stretch, however, in that it would be a century yet before the practice really took hold.
 
Quote: “Shadow shows did not appear until about 1,000 years later, during China’s Sung Dynasty (960-1279 AD). Popular across all social classes, these shows were performed at court, in homes, along roadsides, and between military battles.

The popularity of shadow play spread across cultures and continents. By the 18th century, shadow shows could be seen in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and Western Europe, each with a distinct style, look, and function.

Traditionally, puppets were made from animal skins such as buffalo, donkey, and fish that were stretched, dried, colored, and treated until translucent. Now they are made with just about anything from strong card to thin plywood to plastic, wire, and zinc.” - ARTSLEDGE: Playing With Shadows.

On that note (having offered you only the barest bit of background information possible to introduce an art form thousands of years old, in a transparent attempt to elevate this post out of the realm of pure gawk-fest) I offer you a slew of poorly notated but exceptionally handsome examples.

“Step right up! Step right up! See the pretty puppets!”

Pretty nifty. Though most of us now watch our culture’s grotesque figures on television screens rather than screens made of fabric, shadow play remains a vital form in many parts of the world. Most of the examples above are actually comparatively modern examples. 

For anyone interested in learning more about the various incarnations of shadow play I offer the following key to more pointed searches:

China - “Pi Ying”  (shadows of hides)
India - “Chhaya Natak”
Indonesian - “Wayang Kulit” (leather shadows)
Thailand - “Nang Yai”
Egypt - “Khayal al-zill” (shadows of fancy)
Turkey - “Karagoz” (Named for the protagonist of all Turkish shadow theater)
Greece - “Karagiozis” (see Turkey)
France - “Ombres Chinoises” (Chinese shadows) and later “Ombres Francaises”

Meanwhile here are some related links:

Playing with shadows
Shadow play at wikipedia
Chinese shadow puppetry
Chinese shadow theater
Scenic shades
Puppet India
Thai shadow puppets
Wayang Kulit of Indonesia
Javanese traditions in Suriname
Wayang resources
Wayang Kulit
Wayang at discover-indo
Wayang at wikipedia
Wayang at YouTube
Shadows of fancy
Kargoz, Turkish shadow theater
Kargoz video
Shadow puppets at Flickr
Shadow plat at YouTube

And let’s not forget The Allegory of the Cave.

Lastly I wanted to offer this tidbit which I found interesting–

Quote: “The expression ‘Silhouette’ is comparatively new. It was coined in France in 1759 for cheap and easily produced articles after the name of the French minister of finance of that time, Etienne de Silhouette. The term was used in mockery of his stern and unpopular economic laws.” - Alphabets & Ornaments by Ernst Lehner.

Take that Kara Walker! Haha. Just Kidding.

Hope you enjoyed.

I don’t mean to be mysterious or coy, really I don’t. It’s just that if I, you know, put the link right here you’d click it, and having succumb to exactly the same sort of noncommittal “oh, I’ll just poke around in the dark corners of the internet with nary a care” temptation that I did, without even a smidgeon of wariness, all sense of self-preservation lulled to sleep by the comfy familiarity of the action, you might, well… lets just say I feel I ought to do you the favor of warning against it. 

It’s for your own good. Really. Because you know what would happen? You’d see things, and your valuable minutes would just start slipping away like so many slapstick banana peels.

For instance, you’d see headlines, preceeded by numbers, in bold blue type, which said strange things, in clipped English translation, like–


#1. Who are these “changelings”


#19. Male UFOnauts love to impersonate saints or Jesus


#I2. How the evolution of God looked like


#8. Why I believe that I have a moral obligation, and a moral right, to declare the “telekinesis free zone”?


#B3. How “Teecee”, means my four-legged friend, companion, and teacher, was murdered with the “machine of UFOnauts for inducing cancers”, and what knowledge emerges for all of us from his painful death


#22. Bitter truth is better than sweet lie


Reading them here in the relative safety of The Nonist’s soft and uncluttered monochrome is one thing. No sweat. You can see them for what they are and chuckle a bit perhaps. But if these headlines were surrounded on all sides by dense blocks of seemingly endless text, in randomly shifting point-sizes and thicknesses, rendered throughout in black and red and blue and green? What then?

More importantly what would happen when it dawned on you that the behind a large portion of the links which pocked each page were images? Images I say! (Oh yes, I know you, with your ravenous eyes.) Would you, curious and careless internaut that you are, have the strength of will to just turn away from it all? More to the point could you resist clicking on links with descriptions like, oh, I don’t know…

The operation of the Johnson telekinetic motor.

Cross-section through the smallest Magnocraft type K3 that shows the design and main features of this starship

Personal propulsion with propulsors in epolettes.

An arrangement of oscillatory chambers called “spider configuration”.

One of Tables that combine different shapes of UFOs.

Magnetic circuits and magnetic whirl.

The design of the telepathic pyramid.

An ancient plan for a cubical Oscillatory Chamber of the first generation, recorded in the form of so-called “tanka” drawing of Tibetan Buddhists.

Path of light in a magnetic lens.

A technique for NO/NO answers in a pendulum.

I didn’t think so.

Of course clicking the links I’ve offered you was painless because I am gentle with you. I love you and don’t want to see you hurt. I don’t want your eyes to bleed and I don’t want to pierce your skull with a headache so loathsome that it went unnamed and uncataloged at the Creation.

But imagine if, instead of the neatly lined-up and underlined links above, there were hundreds, some in bold green, some in blue, some in tiny underlined black, and each one opened a new browser window, and every page was slow to load, and half the pages opened in Polish, and everywhere you clicked you found yourself more disoriented and confused, and every caption you read was full of strangeness, and every paragraph you waded into just turned you in circles and created more exasperating questions than they answered, and everywhere your eye landed there was some sort of frustrating lunacy– angels and telekinesis and UFOnauts and magnocraft and levitating tables and dipolar gravity and bandits and devils and free energy and cover-ups and changelings…

And all you wanted to know was “How M. Ivorde’s little man climbed the back wall.”

Do you see what I’m trying to tell you here?

Allow me to parallel a couple of popular quotations by way of artful clarification-

• The truth is out there.

• You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!

And you know what else? You really don’t even want to.

So please, for the miserly love of a fictitious God, please do not visit this page.

Royalty, loving their amusements and clever gadgets of exotic origin, had to have carousels of their own and contrived to have some small versions built for them in their private gardens. Here contests centered around the carousels were held among the court and those Chatty Cathies were so delighted this “secret training device” soon became a popular entertainment.

Quote: The contests were tests of dexterity and equestrian skill involving the tossing of fragile perfumed clay balls from one rider to another. The object of the game was to deftly catch the delicate balls to avoid the unmanly mark of the loser — a bath of sweetly scented fragrance (which reportedly lasted for days).

The popular games spread to France; and, by the sixteenth century, they had expanded into lavish tournaments of pageantry and drama called Carrousels. Designers, wigmakers, seamstresses and artisans of the court spent months preparing elaborate costumes and decorations for these spectacles. Le Grande Carrousel, the most celebrated of all Carrousels, was planned by Louis XIV in 1662, to impress his young mistress, Louise de la Valliere. Cheered by thousands and heralded by choirs and trumpet fanfares, quadrilles of cavaliers demonstrated their equestrian talents as allegorical dances and scenic displays were performed.

In the late seventeenth century, young French noblemen, astride legless wooden ‘horses’, trained for spearing contests by lancing rings as they rode around a center pole. This training device appears to be the forerunner of our present day carousel and its game of ‘catching the brass ring.’ As the ride evolved into a popular form of entertainment, French peasants paid to ride crudely constructed carousels, while the aristocracy circled in elegant seats resembling fancy chariots, bicycles, or boats.

Until the late nineteenth century, rotation power was supplied by a horse, mule, or man pushing, pulling, or cranking the mechanism. The amusement flourished in England, and it was there that the invention of steam as a motive power revolutionized the development of the carousel.”

-Charlotte Dinger, from Art of the Carousel as reprinted in FMR magazine, 1991.

The carousel proved an extremely popular part of local fairs and circuses all over industrialized Europe, and eventually America (where, thanks to an influx of skilled European carvers, the form reached its pinnacle). In as much the device went by many names. Quote: From caroussels and maneges de chevaux de bois in France to the United Kingdom where they were called roundabouts, gallopers, and tilts. In the Netherlands they were called stoomcaroussels and torneos in Italy while in Germany they called them karussels. By the time they reached the United States they were being called everything from flying horses to carousels, whirligigs and steam riding galleries, carry-us-alls and flying and Spinning Jennies, not to mention hobby horses, and, of course, merry-go-rounds.”

In Europe carousel figures took on a dizzying array of shapes and styles. There were pigs, ostriches, roosters, elephants, chariots, dragons, lions, dogs, cats, warhorses, sea horses, mermaids, fish, centaurs, camels, and on and on. In America it seems the classic horse was the vastly preferred form, perhaps owing to a fondness for our own “wild west” legends or perhaps because even then our children were coddled imaginationless little twerps, and carousel owners didn’t want to scare away the customers.

One side of carousel animals was generally more elaborately carved and decorated than the other. The side facing outward, which was called the “romance side.” On American carousel animals this is the right side because our carousels always move in a counter-clockwise direction, where as English roundabout horses move clockwise.

A few more design tidbits are as follows:

Quote: “The fast-moving platform provided a forward thrust that determined the action of the animals. Figures in static poses were meant for young children, who were strapped into position. The other figures, usually on the outer rim of the platform, were designed for more daring riders, and the brass ring also attracted older children to the outside positions. In later years, the up-and-down action of the animals provided an extra thrill.

Softwoods, especially white and yellow pine, were most suitable for the carrousel animals. Pine was easily worked, and greater speed of execution meant the figures could be produced quickly in great numbers. Little sanding or polishing was necessary in the detailing of the head, mane, and tail portions. the rounded areas of the body which required sanding were turned over to assistants and apprentices. Finally, the figure was ready for painting and gilding. These carrousel animals received the same bright-colored treatment as the circus wagons. Frequent refurbishing was necessary to maintain their attractiveness, and often much of the original intention of the artist was obscured.”

-From Treasury of American Design, 1950.

And what of those largely anonymous men who actually carved these beasts? What would they think about the fact that all these years after the carousel’s golden age, owing largely to scarcity, their functional handiwork has been elevated by collectors and historians to an art form?

Quote: “Some of the artists and carvers worked alone, or ran small studios and carving shops. Others were employed in the factories and workshops of the roundabout manufacturers. The degree of creative license allowed by their customers or their employers varied, but in every case their art was strictly functional. With few exceptions these artists and carvers saw themselves as craftsmen and certainly their income largely reflected their comparatively humble status. The fact that their work is now perceived to be ‘art’ would have surprised many of their number, but no doubt would have delighted them all.”

-Geoff Weedon and Richard Ward from Fairground Art, 1981.

Though I’ve only just skimmed the historical surface here I hope you enjoyed.

The images from this post are all from the following sources:

Fairground Art by Geoff Weedon and Richard Ward.
FMR magazine 53, Vol XI. Photos by John Lei.
Treasury of American Design by Clarence P. Hornung.
American Memory Collection page for the Glen Echo Park, Dentzel Carousel.

For more on carousels see:

National Carousel Association
Carousel Magic
iFairground
The Dentzel Family Carousel Story
The Carousel Works
My Carousel
Dentzel Carousel Coloring Book.
The Tournaments of Colonial Times