Art by Nicholas Roerich

"My heartiest thanks for the magnificent work which you sent to me. I admire those creations so much that I can say without exaggeration that never have landscapes made such a great impression on me."

--Albert Einstein, letter to Roerich Museum, 1931

RoerichTrust.org

The Black Gobi

1928

And We Do Not Fear

1922

Book of Life

1938

Changthang, Northern Tibet

1939

Song of Shambhala

Idols (Pagan Russia)

1910

Issa and the Skull of the Giant

Message to Tiron

1940

Abode of Gesar

1947

Mongolia

Mongolia I

1938

Monhegan, Maine

1922

Mother of Genghis Khan

1933

Most Sacred Treasure of the Mountain

1933

On the Heights, Tumo

1936

Stronghold of Tibet

1932

Descent into Hell

1933

Star of the Hero

1936

Guests from Overseas

1901

USSR postage stamp

1974

Nicholas Roerich

1874-1947 Russian

The Sedlec Ossuary

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The Sedlec Ossuary is a small Roman Catholic chapel located in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people.

"Henry, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Sedlec, was sent to Palestine by King Otakar II of Bohemia in 1278. When he returned, he brought with him a small amount of earth that he had removed from Golgotha and sprinkled it over the abbey cemetery. The word of this pious act soon spread and the cemetery in Sedlec became a desirable burial site throughout Central Europe. During the Black Death in the mid 14th century, and after the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century, many thousands of people were buried there and the cemetery had to be greatly enlarged.

"In 1870, František Rint, a woodcarver, was employed by the Schwarzenberg family to put the bone heaps into order. The macabre result of his effort speaks for itself. Four enormous bell-shaped mounds occupy the corners of the chapel. An enormous chandelier of bones, which contains at least one of every bone in the human body, hangs from the center of the nave with garlands of skulls draping the vault. Other works include piers and monstrances flanking the altar, a large Schwarzenberg coat-of-arms, and the signature of Rint, also executed in bone, on the wall near the entrance."

The Great Wave

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji

Katsushika Hokusai

1760-1849 Japanese

Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes

As requested, here are photos of the remarkable but desperately rare Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes.

A total of 57 Calvin and Hobbes comic strips (56 daily strips and 1 Sunday strip) appear in Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes, organized into five lesson units. Each strip is numbered and each panel in each strip is lettered for reference in the unit questions.

Number of comic strips per lesson unit:

1. The Binoculars - 10 strips
2. The Find - 10 strips
3. The Christmas Story - 1 Sunday strip + 9 daily strips = 10 strips
4. The Bug Collection - 17 strips
5. The Report - 10 strips

#25 of 25 Runes

“25. The Unknowable

“THE BLANK RUNE

“Total trust,
surrender,
relinquishing control--
all this is only words.
Look into the night sky.
Tell me what you see.

“Blank is the end, blank is the beginning....

“The Blank Rune often calls for no less an act of courage than the empty-handed leap into the void.”


--Ralph Blum, The Book of RuneCards, 1989

www.TheSteppe.com

into myth

“He had never seen the sea. The real sea, the thunder sea that went black at night like a pane of glass. The sea that could summon and the sea that could kill, that could swallow whole cities and turn them into myth. He wanted to go to California.”

--Harlan Ellison, “At the Mouse Circus,” 1971

Close At Hand

I keep a bust of Death on my desk: literally keeping Death close at hand always, to remind me that death is close at hand always.

Shine Jiliin Mend - Happy New Year

www.xtreme.mn

Christmas in Mongolia

photo courtesy of Bayarmaa

Best Flag Designs

"NAVA, the North American Vexillological Association, conducted a poll on its website, asking its members and the public their opinions of flag designs in the U.S. and Canada....

"Participants rated 72 flags on their design qualities (rather than on political, historical, or geographic considerations)...

"The public’s overall responses paralleled those of NAVA members quite closely... Their insightful comments showed a strong intuitive grasp of flag design and confirmed NAVA’s expert opinions on design principles. One doesn’t need to be a flag expert to know a good flag design....

"The highest-scoring flags all embody the five basic principles listed in NAVA’s publication on flag design, Good Flag, Bad Flag:

"1. Keep It Simple (The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory...)

"2. Use Meaningful Symbolism (The flag’s images, colors, or patterns should relate to what it symbolizes...)

"3. Use 2–3 Basic Colors (Limit the number of colors on the flag to three, which contrast well and come from the standard color set...)

"4. No Lettering or Seals (Never use writing of any kind or an organization’s seal...)

"5. Be Distinctive or Be Related (Avoid duplicating other flags, but use similarities to show connections...)

"Good Flag, Bad Flag: How to Design a Great Flag is downloadable free from the NAVA website. It can help any organization, tribe, company, family, neighborhood, city, county, state, or even country design a great flag."

--North American Vexillological Association, 2001 June 10


1. New Mexico

3. Quebec

4. Maryland

5. Alaska

6. Arizona

9. Republic of the Marshall Islands

10. South Carolina

The flag of Maryland is one of my favorite flags. I hate the flag of Arizona; it looks like a nondescript mall decoration.

up over yawning emptiness

"Beneath me, there is the crust of the earth. Beneath that, magma. Go far enough, through the core, eventually there will be crust again, and the bottom of the ocean. Then sea water. Then air. Then the edge of the atmosphere. Then infinite nothingness, directly beneath my feet. The entire earth is a little trapeze, holding me up over yawning emptiness. And space extends to either side of me, in front of me, behind me, and above me as well, forever."

--Michael Cisco, "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" in Lovecraft Unbound: Twenty Stories, 2009

Nodak Fashion

--http://getcarhartt.com/stories

faff : doing exactly that ; divided by a common language ; blogging in general

Etymology
Dialect, 'blow in gusts'.

Verb
to faff (third-person singular simple present faffs, present participle faffing, simple past and past participle faffed)
(UK, slang) To waste time on an unproductive activity.
I decided to stop faffing about and get some work done.

Usage notes
Particularly used as faff about.

Synonyms
dick around (American)

--Wiktionary

The Book of Ratings on Superman's Powers

"Super Breath

"Yes, Superman has super breath. He can inhale and exhale large amounts of air without swelling up like Daffy Duck connected to a bicycle pump. We're dealing here with a man who can travel between the stars, who can change the course of mighty rivers, who can, in certain incarnations, reverse the flow of time itself. When does this guy encounter a problem that leaves him with no recourse but to breathe on it? At any rate, any potential uses are automatically offset by the fact that it's called 'super breath.' D"

--The Book of Ratings

Everything's Better With Platypi

"He's a semi-aquatic, egg-laying mammal of ACTION!"
--Perry the Platypus theme song

"Some believe that the platypus proves that evolution is 100% real, because not even God could make that shit up. This is an animal that, upon being sent to a British natural history museum to catalog, was believed to be a taxidermist's prank. It looks like a beaver crossed with a mole with a duck's bill added for laughs. They belong to a group of mammals known as Monotremes, a group consisting of it and the echidna, which means they lay eggs. Additionally, they're an offshoot of mammals that evolved before teats/nipples evolved, so while they produce milk, they simply... sweat it out for their young to lap up. They also have ten sex chromosomes, where in most mammals there're simply two (X and Y). And their duck-bill? It's actually quite soft, and it acts as an electrical receptor. See, platypus eyes aren't too useful, especially underwater, so they use an electrolocation system in their bills to hunt shrimp and other aquatic invertebrates. (Sharks have a similar sense, in case they weren't scary enough.)

"And to top it off, they're poisonous. Yup, male platypi have poisonous spurs on their feet, and while the poison isn't lethal to humans, the cocktail of venom will usually incapacitate people, and can cause you to be in excruciating, incapacitating pain for months. And to top it off, morphine has no effect on said pain. So it won't kill you, it'll just make you wish it did.

"So, in short, it's easy to see how humans can become so interested in this goofy-looking creature. Odd appearance, cool features, and the ability to cripple you if you get stupid. What better metaphor for Australia? And it's an Inherently Funny Word. Also, baby playtpi are called 'puggles,' which is quite possibly the cutest word ever invented, and have been called so since before pugs were crossed with beagles to make the dog breed of the same name.

"Plus, if you want to talk about them in the plural, expect to confound linguists until the end of time. (Platypodes, platypi, and platypuses are all acceptable spellings.)"


--TVTropes.org

The Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu

"In any martial arts fight, there is only a finite amount of ninjutsu available to each side in a given encounter. As a result, one ninja is a deadly threat, but an army of them are cannon fodder.

"You can have three guesses who's going to win. The first two don't count."

--TVTropes.org

www.TheSteppe.com

Hylas

Hylas and the Nymphs

John William Waterhouse

1849-1917 English

Old Russia in Color

The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated exhibition at the United States Library of Congress.

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

"These rare color photos by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii document the Russian empire between 1909 and 1915. With the support of Tsar Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorskii traveled throughout the Russian empire in a specially outfitted train car conducting a photographic survey, according to the Library of Congress, which owns the original slides.

"Using a special technique that captured three black and white photographs in succession, the pictures could then be combined using red, green and blue filters to create realistic color. The result is vivid photographs that look startlingly modern."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/20/rare-color-photos-of-the-_n_785798.html#186298

Awesome Captured on Film: Orson Welles as Father Mapple in the 1956 movie *Moby Dick*

The sermon scene ends halfway through, and the following isn't worth watching, but this is the best-quality clip of Welles' performance on YouTube.

The set was reproduced from Melville's description, including the memorial plaques of the whalers lost at sea and the pulpit like a ship's prow.

"Delight is to him who against the proud commodores and gods of this earth, stands forth his own inexorable self...

"Yet this is nothing."

uninterpenetratingly: the comprehensive cosmic horror of Moby-Dick

“How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?”

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Satire

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Satirical literature can commonly be categorized as either Horatian or Juvenalian.

"Horatian
Named for the Roman satirist, Horace, this playfully criticizes some social vice through gentle, mild, and light-hearted humour. It directs wit, exaggeration, and self-deprecating humour toward what it identifies as folly, rather than evil. Horatian satire's sympathetic tone is common in modern society. Examples of Horatian satire: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver’s Travels, Daniel Defoe's 'The True-Born Englishman', Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, The Onion, Matt Groening's The Simpsons and the Ig Nobel Prizes.

"Juvenalian
Named after the Roman satirist Juvenal, this type of satire is more contemptuous and abrasive than the Horatian. Juvenalian satire addresses social evil through scorn, outrage, and savage ridicule. This form is often pessimistic, characterized by irony, sarcasm, moral indignation and personal invective, with less emphasis on humour. Examples of Juvenalian satire: Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, Samuel Johnson's London, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Stephen Colbert's performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, anarcho-punk band Crass, and the cartoon South Park."

past and gone

“Life continues interesting though I find it hard to realize that this--breakfast, dinner, lessons, mending, writing letters, arranging flowers, with a little visiting and reading is actually my life with a capital L. One waits for it to begin and will be waiting perhaps when it is past and gone.”

--Emily B. Trevett, journal, 1894 August 6

collected in Talking on Paper: An Anthology of Oregon Letters and Diaries, 1994

ARMISTICE DAY WAR POETRY READING

Australian soldiers in Ypres, Belgium, 1917

photo by Frank Hurley

At 11:00 on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, “The War to End All Wars” came to an end.

Designated Armistice Day, it is still commemorated as such in France and Belgium, as Remembrance Day in the UK and Commonwealth countries, as Volkstrauertag in Germany, and as Veterans Day in the United States.

In World War I, on the Western Front, a years-long stalemate between the German, French, and British armies would see millions of men die pointlessly in the living horror of trench warfare.

Out of this colossal tragedy arose poetry that is among the most beautiful, disturbing, and compelling poetry ever written.

“These men are worth your tears.”
--Wilfred Owen

Classic World War I Poetry

read by Radigan Neuhalfen

Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, Cafe Amsterdam

2010 November 10, Wednesday

20:00 (8:00 PM)