Lavender Files 10.

Note: Rea Michaels, writer of novels including Cloak of Evil and Duet in Darkness, stands out as one of the only pulp authors to include people of color and interracial relationships in her books and to have representations of lesbians of color on the covers of her novels. The majority of Queer pulp was overwhelmingly white.

Challenging Oxford: World’s Oldest Zero.

Bakhshali manuscript – image courtesy Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; Science Museum.

An international group of historians of Indian mathematics challenges Oxford’s findings around the age and importance of a manuscript thought to contain the oldest known zero.

Last month, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University announced that a Sanskrit manuscript housed in the library for the last century had been dated using radiocarbon techniques. Oxford’s radiocarbon dating laboratory announced that the three of the birch-bark folios of the Bakhshali Manuscript could be dated to roughly 300 CE, 700 CE and 900 CE.

[…]

An international group of historians of Indian mathematics has now challenged Oxford’s findings.

The team, which includes scholars from universities in the USA, France, Japan, New Zealand and the University of Alberta in Canada, has published a peer-reviewed article that refutes several of the Library’s key assertions.

[…]

The international team ends its article with a plea to Oxford University’s Library that important and complex scholarly topics should be published through established academic channels involving peer-review, and not through sensationalizing press releases to the media.

Medievalists has the full story. Also see The First Zero. The article in the journal History of Science in South Asia.

Revisiting Club 57.

Kenny Scharf, Untitled #6 (Speed), 1979. Mixed media on board. Courtesy the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles.

Lady Wrestling at Club 57. Pictured: Tom Scully, Tish and Snooky Bellomo. 1980. Photograph by and courtesy Harvey Wang.

MOMA is revisiting Club 57, in all its various glories. Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983 is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through April 1, 2018.

You can read about this at Garage.*

*This seems to be where the never updated Creators Project went. The writing has become extremely pretentious.

So much for those latches…

Rats, so clever. They figured out how to open the latch, and had a party. Rat Art Installation 7,352. Can you tell I’m cleaning my studio? Takes a while to find these things, the girls drag them off and hide them, even stuff that is 9.5″ x 7.5″. As to why this is in my studio, every now and then I like to paint with cosmetics. Click for full size.

© C. Ford.

Vaccinations Are…Population Control!!1!1

The Inner Rodney Howard-Browne, aka Belphegor.

Rodney Howard-Browne, that Master of Conspiratorial Idiocy, has actually dialed down the rhetoric a bit for this latest round of “look what shit I can make people swallow!”

“The dogs want war,” Howard-Browne said. “Our American men and women are being used as cannon fodder for the globalist agenda. We’re not in Afghanistan because we’re killing terrorists. The ISIS bases are in 49 states in America that the CIA brings them and trains them here and then ships them out to the areas of the world where they want there to be conflict. They are all trained here. Osama bin Laden worked for the CIA, so does Anderson Cooper. Work that one out.”

Pretty sure most dogs don’t want war at all. Attention, playtime, food, bones to chew, a nice place to sleep, that’s dogs all over. If you want to talk people, well, it’s people like the Tiny Tyrant who are slavering for yet more war. Donny and his puppet Pence can’t talk about those wonderful nukes enough. They are the morons who think you can settle all things with more war, and hey, why have a military if you aren’t going to use it?

Of course Afghanistan is fucking sham, the whole damn thing is, most people are well aware of that one, Rodney. 49 states? Oh, guess that awful island of evil isn’t included anymore, what with the issuing of birth certificates and stuff. Bin Laden is dead, and when he was alive, it could not be said that he had any regard for uStates. Pretty sure he wouldn’t want to be stuck in a secret CIA den somewhere. Damn, that Anderson Cooper must be one busy person! I can’t imagine how he fits all that into his schedule. Really, since you’re pushing the idea that the CIA does everyone’s thinking for them (there’s an insult and a half), I’d think everyone ought to be giving you a healthy side-eye, Rodney. “Hey, what better way to get people to not believe we’re behind everything – hey, Rodney, get on that right away!” Ooooh, conspiracy. It’s really easy, cooking this shit up, but it can’t be healthy, being so obsessed with it.

Howard-Browne claimed that vaccines are really just an eugenicist effort to impose population control on the world by sterilizing people and giving them diseases, vowing that he’ll “go Old Testament” if anyone ever tries to forcibly vaccinate him.

If vaccines sterilised people, we wouldn’t have the current massive population. If vaccines sterilised people, I would not have had such a difficult time when I started seeking sterilisation.

“There was talk about five years ago, they were going to stop people by the side of the road and give them forced vaccinations,” he said. “Let them try. I have a couple of injections for them and it’s going to be the size of a .45, I can promise you right now. Somebody said, ‘But you’re a Christian.’ Yeah, I am, but I’ll go Old Testament for a half an hour, it’s not a problem.”

:Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha: :hahahahahee: :Thud: No, there was never talk of vaccination stops, let alone forced ones. Going by your age, Rodney, you were duly vaccinated as a child, like I was. Yep, you’re 56, I’m 59, so that was all taken care of long days ago. You should be grateful, polio is nasty. Yes, yes, you’re a christian alright, declaring your intent to murder over a vapourous fantasy.

RWW has the story, and two videos.

Faust 1.

Title page and opening pages of Faust, by Harry Clarke. Note the beautiful self-portrait in the last image (Clarke as Faust, figure on the right). One thing that’s fun to do with all of the illustrations is to count all the eyes. Many, lots! :D There are some noted phalluses, too, but those are a bit later on.