LOCKE ON LIGHT & FAIRYLAND TENNIS

From today's perspective John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding beats an entire team of dead and decaying horses, regaling the reader ad nauseam about relatively simple empirical concepts. Witness my relief when I am greeted with the following:

Those who tell us that light is a great number of little globules, striking briskly on the bottom of the eye, speak more intelligibly than the Schools: but yet these words never so well understood would make the idea the word light stands for no more known to a man that understands it not before, than if one should tell him that light was nothing but a company of little tennis-balls, which fairies all day long struck with rackets against some men's foreheads, whilst they passed by others.

Locke was no Richard Feynman, but I'll take my bizarre physical metaphors where I can find them.

HALF-CRAZED FRUIT DROPS & THE POLISH EDISON

In chapter 12 of A Companion to Russian Cinema (Wiley Blackwell) essayist Phil Cavendish quotes Victor Shklovskii as characterizing color film as "half-crazed fruit drops [vzbesivshiisia landrin]."* 

The first full Soviet feature in color:
The Nightingale

Schklovskii was deriding a popular push among Soviet ideologues to develop a Soviet answer to Disney's color process. But this failed to prevent Fedor Provorov (inter alia) from developing a two-color subtractive process, which was used for the 1936 film The Nightingale (i.e. Solovei-Solovushko = Соловей-Соловушко, but it's also known by the name of its protagonist Grunia Kornakova)).

Other exciting tidbits can be gleaned from Cavendish's essay, e.g. just the existence of Polish inventor extraordinaire "Jan Szczepanik, 'the Polish Edison'", who apparently developed a color film process, among a multitude of other things. According to Wikipedia, Mark Twain met and wrote an article about him entitled The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again.

*A note explains that landrin derives from popular confectionery founder Fedor Landrin, but that the quote was repeated so extensively by Soviet writers that its provenance is uncertain.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: THOMAS ADAMS SMACKTALKS "FLING-BRAND FRATERNITY" PURITAN-STYLE

"Aristotle calls discretion virtutum normam et formam -- the eye of the soul, the soul of virtue. I would to God some amongst us had one dram of this grace mingled with their whole handfuls of zeal. it would a little cool the preternatural heat of the fling-brand fraternity, as one wittily calleth them."

The works of Thomas Adams : being the sum of his sermons, meditations, and other divine and moral discourses (1861), vol. I (p. 125).

"Fling-brand fraternity" is now my preferred term for basically everyone in or out of the news.

Mtmrphss X.520

nihil est annis velocius

le propre de l'homme

Picked up a copy of Rabelais' to read in the near future, noticed the introductory verses 'aux lecteurs' which conclude:

...
Mieulx est de ris que de larmes* escripre, [=tears]
Pour ce que rire est le propre de l'homme.

Roughly, " 'tis better to write of laughter than of tears / since laughter is the peculiar quality of man."

This should be the rallying cry/motto of all comedians.

Picked up Rabelais since it was apparently (Wikipedia-level apparent) one of Sterne's favorite works (I'm reading Tristram Shandy at the moment. Just finished Slawkenbergius's Tale.)

Estote ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbæ

This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfections