Celtibeŕ

Unrelated to waffles™, I should have another break from Bluesky to get some perspective about this and other stuff. I’m sure I’ll be back before my first Blueskyversary – a month and a half from now – bc I’m addicted to the good shit y’all post.

A paraŕ fóŕte!

#RuinoftheDay : les vestiges du Largo di Torre Argentina à Rome et sa fameuse colonie féline.

A gardener stands holding electric shears on a huge red cherrypicker, trimming a gigantic, cloud-shaped, dark green hedge. The rolling green hills of the countryside stretch out in the background under a blue sky.

A view up at the 55-foot-tall, cloud-shaped hedges at Powis Castle. A brick wall partitions the garden. In the top left-hand corner, a red cherrypicker holds a gardener over the hedges.

This is extreme gardening.

At 55 feet high and 300 years old, it takes one gardener 10 weeks on a hydraulic cherry-picker to trim the hedges at Powis Castle, returning the yew hedges to their famous, cloud-like shapes.

A plate of khabeesa

Back to wondering whether Sumerian zid-lal3 was something like خبيص (khabeeṣa), which was served in cups to gods and mentioned with morning meals:

[ZID3] Flour, often emmer or semolina
[LAL3] Honey, syrup

I personally, am not a fan of Bluesky's view on free speech and would happily move to an instance with more aggressive moderation. But there aren't any, because everyone would rather just yell at the company CEO. It doesn't take much effort for people to get together and spin up new servers. 8/?

Everyone is yelling at Jay thinking it will change things, but the organization was deliberately structured in a way which limits her power. On top of that, since the platform's original vision was "free speech", there are some, what I'd call 'free speech extremists', on Bluesky's board. 5/?

But Bluesky was also designed to mitigate other Twitter issues such as hostile takeovers, or the CEO going nuts and unilaterally making bad decisions (which kind of protected us from Jack's terrible ideas). Both were facilitated by decentralization. 3/?

I think the important historic context about Bluesky is while it's seen as a safe space for people who fled Elon-Twitter, it was not designed to be that. It was a misguided side-project created by the previous Twitter CEO (Jack Dorsey) after he learned zero lessons from what happened to Twitter. 1/?

Theres a wow factor....nit to mention a hmmm considering the aceramic nature of the Iron Age in many places...

The word ‘male’ is etymologically related to ‘macho’, but it’s unrelated to ‘female’.

‘Male’ comes from the French descendant of Latin ‘masculus’ (male), while ‘macho’ arrived in English via Spanish.

These are also related to ‘masculine’ – and perhaps even to ‘mastʋrbate’.

Click to read more:

[CONTEXT] Some demonstrators yesterday calling for a certain country in the Middle East to be ‘suntsitu’-ed, and my brain intrusively replying: “after almost 80 years in a baking hot place, it’s already ‘sunsido’”.

un dictionnaire marque la précision de la langue. La profusion des mots qui y demeurent est là pour rappeler ses nuances. Quand les jeunes disent « grave bon », cette locution recouvre au moins cinquante mots de la langue française! En l'utilisant, on se coupe de la grande précision du français et on l'appauvrit.

Car non, bande d'ignorant·es, le rôle du dictionnaire n'est pas de recenser de nouveaux mots : c'est de cimenter la nation, car « le propre d'une nation est de permettre à tous les citoyens de pouvoir échanger » !
Et quel est l'ennemi n°1 de la nation ? Les JEUNES, avec leur vocabulaire riquiqui :

Dans ce combat permanent contre l'hégémonie anglophone - qui ne fait que prendre la suite d'une ancienne hégémonie francophone, ce qui n'excuse aucunement tel ou tel comportement munichois, voire collabo -

J'oubliais la lutte contre l'ennemi absolu, l'anglais… Point Godwin allègrement franchi page 51 : emprunter des mots à l'anglais c'est apparemment du même niveau que sacrifier la Tchécoslovaquie ou livrer des juifs à l'occupant nazi. Par les mêmes qui nous serinent que « les mots ont un sens ».

Leiden's greatest happening today. In remembrance of the lifting of the Spanish siege, all inhabitants can have free herring and white bread.
This was the waiting line around 8:30

Someone around 1350 to 1380 walked in this shoe in nowadays Spain. By the time, the first paper sheets appeared in Europe, and the Americas were yet unknown, and the Black Death started his debut album in Europe … What a time to lose a shoe! #skystorians

www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

Entry for ‘suntsitu’ in the ‘Orotariko Euskal Hiztegia’ of Euskaltzaindia.

Entry for ‘sulsir, sunsir’ in the ‘Diccionario aragonés-castellano-catalán’ of the Estudio de Filología Aragonesa.

Entry for ‘solsir’ in the ‘Diccionari català-valencià-balear’ of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans.

TIL that only the ‘euskalkiak’ of the French Basque Country had ‘suntsitu’ [s̺ũnt͡s̺it̪u] – “(be) destroy(ed), vanish”–, a cognate of my dialect’s ‘sunsiŕ’ [s̺ũns̺iːɺ] – “diminish by the action of heat or time” –(Pyrenees) Aragonese ‘sulsir’ [sulˈsiɾ] or Valencian ‘solsir’ [soɫˈsiɾ].

cover of Arabic book أسماء الأسد

Arabic has 348 words for "lion". Here is the cover of Ibn Khālawayh's (d. 980, Baghdad) book on the subject.

Östra Mårtensgatan, a cobblestone street in Lund, under blue skies.

Ugaritic word of the day:
ntbt ("path, way, road").

It's a map of Boston and Cambridge with the red part showing the 1630 shoreline, and the 1999 shoreline in grey. Logan airport is almost all reclaimed zone.

Because of landfill / land reclamation, Boston has considerably more land area than it did in 1630.

Reclamation efforts between 1800-1900 on the 'Shawmut Peninsula' more than doubled the size of central Boston, mostly through elimination of wetlands & tidal flats.

#TimeTravelersTakeNote

Bord du y'n Tavern Koth yn Eglosvelyan - pur dha

A map of Sweden in 10 different panels, each showing the proportional frequency of different place name endings in various shades of blue

Distributions of endings in Swedish place names

#RStats #DataViz

The city states of the Yoruba: a history of pre-colonial West African urbanism (1000-1900 CE) At the close of the 19th century, the Yorùbá region of South-west Nigeria was one of the most urbanized places in Africa.

The city states of the Yoruba: a history of pre-colonial West African urbanism (1000-1900 CE)

www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-city-s...

The paved streets of medieval Ife during the classical period (1000-1500CE)

www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-city-s...

Bottom LH corner of broadside featuring: woodcut border decoration featuring flowers and branches, a woodcut vase with flowers, some typographical decoration, and in letterpress the first words from the imprint: “En Barcelona:”.

Decoration on a broadside from Barcelona 1682.

'Cementing over our own future': Europe's nature loss is 600 football pitches daily Every year, Europe loses 1,500km² to construction. Green spaces that once sheltered wildlife, supplied food and removed carbon from the atmosphere at an alarming rate, a new investigation reveals.

Every year, Europe loses 1,500km² to construction. Green spaces that once sheltered wildlife, supplied food and removed carbon from the atmosphere at an alarming rate, a new investigation reveals.

Map of the range of the Moroccan Locust. Source: A. V. Latchininsky (1998), "Moroccan locust Dociostaurus maroccanus (Thunberg, 1815): a faunistic rarity or an important economic pest?"

Locust in Moroccan Tamazight = tamurġi
Darija = žžṛad

A locust ranging from the Canary Islands to South Kazakhstan was named Dociostaurus maroccanus (thanks to Thunberg 1815). Attempts to rename it Mediterranean didn't stick:

Ar. al-jarād al-murrākušī
Pers. malaḵ-e marākeši
Tur. Fas çekirgesi
etc

Haha, so I’ve heard! …and that makes me think that I made the right call.

But I’m glad that people with your perspective endure, so keep at it.

Only if I ever (and finally) have anything that I find really really important to say – from all the years I’ve spent researching on my own –, I might consider to get back.

I struggled with that so much that I quit before getting anything done: I only tasted it what that would be – working in a college department, a research lab… – and it wasn’t for me. I lack the mental energy to remain in that framework while not fitting in.

And when I saw this last post of yours, I immediately thought that you and The English Oak Project should check each other’s accounts. He usually posts oaks from the Weald, but also from other parts of Britain, Spain, the US…