Spartacus Redux

Bloggers, the Neo Nazi Right Wingers are after Shakes again. Were we on the streets, they would not likely find the courage to attack a woman. One guesses they feel safe when they can't be seen.

I'm with you, Melissa.

Tuesday's Word: Pantomime

Pantomime (informally, panto) refers to a theatrical genre, traditionally found in Great Britain, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Ireland.

History
The performance of pantomime originates at its earliest in ancient Greece, but exploded in popularity during the reign of Augustus in ancient Rome. The name is taken from a single masked dancer called Pantomimus. The style and content of modern pantomime has very clear and strong links with the Commedia dell'arte, a form of popular theatre that arose in Italy in the early middle ages, and which reached England by the 16th century. A "comedy of professional artists" traveling from province to province in Italy and then France, they improvised and told stories which told lessons to the crowd and changed the main character depending on where they were performing. The great clown Grimaldi transformed the format. Each story had the same fixed characters: the lovers, father, servants (one being crafty and the other stupid), etc. These roles/characters can be found in today's pantomimes.
The gender role reversal resembles the old festival of Twelfth Night, a combination of Epiphany and midwinter feast, when it was customary for the natural order of things to be reversed. This tradition can be traced back to pre-Christian European festivals such as Samhain and Saturnalia.
In Restoration England, a pantomime was considered a low form of opera, rather like the Commedia dell'arte but without Harlequin (rather like the French Vaudeville). In 1717, actor and manager John Rich introduced Harlequin to the British stage under the name of "Lun" (for "lunatic") and began performing wildly popular pantomimes. These pantomimes gradually became more topical and comic, often involving as many special theatrical effects as possible. Colley Cibber and his colleagues competed with Rich and produced their own pantomimes, and pantomime was a substantial (if decried) subgenre in Augustan drama. This form had virtually died out by the end of the 19th century.

Pantomime in the United States of America
Pantomime, as described in this article is not commonly performed in the United States of America, as a consequence, the word "pantomime" is more commonly understood to refer to the art of mime, as practised by Marcel Marceau or Mummenschanz and is often assumed to be a solo performance seen as often on street corners as on stage.

Bloggers, I've seen Marcel Marceau and can attest that his was an outstanding performance. The young woman who mimed in New Orleans was also quite talented when she mimed the way I needed to go to find my way about the French Quarter. Merci beaucoup!

Friday Science Blogging: Peltier effect

(Elec.) The production or absorption of heat at the junction of two metals on the passage of a current. Heat generated by the passage of the current in one direction will be absorbed if the current is reversed.

the free dictionary

Readers, I checked science sources. It's so complicated that you don't want to know!

The Peltier effect is the reverse of the Seebeck effect; a creation of a heat difference from an electric voltage.
It occurs when a current is passed through two dissimilar metals or semiconductors (n-type and p-type) that are connected to each other at two junctions (Peltier junctions). The current drives a transfer of heat from one junction to the other: one junction cools off while the other heats up; as a result, the effect is often used for thermoelectric cooling. This effect was observed in 1834 by Jean Peltier, 13 years after Seebeck's initial discovery.

Wiki

See!?!

Thursday's Quote: Katherine Ottaway

Quota by Dr. Katherine Ottaway

honestly
I feel despair
when I try
to think about the new schedule

Twenty four slots
Of 20 minutes
See three people
For 40 minutes
Twenty on the schedule
Pray for two no shows

Unanswered questions
Wake me Sunday morning
If I am called to a labor patient
Must I make up that clinic face time?
What of holidays?
The clinic is closed.
Night call is nowhere addressed
Will they hire more and more
Who don't take call
Until I am the last woman standing
Red rimmed eyes staring
Numb with fatigue

What of my nearly deaf patient
Who reads lips
May we take forty minutes?
All the fairly deaf elderly?
New parents, anxious
Questions pour out like
Coins from a jackpot win
What of the tearful brokenhearted
And anxious?
I shrink at the thought
Of crushing their hearts
Into twenty minutes

And what if I am sick?
(no paid leave)
If I cancel clinic
For illness
Do I make up those days
A quota of patient face days

I am in the factory
The mines
People are the shirts I must sew
The tons of coal I must load
I must meet a quota

Doctors die younger
Our life is measured out
In patients

I won't let the quota
Kill my love

6/17/07
Katherine Ottaway

Bloggers, this poem from Katherine Ottaway, MD, is one woman's perspective on managed care. She practices in the Pacific Northwest. Some would say she slaves.

Love to Blue Gal!

Happy 200!

Happy two hundredth post to Yoga Korunta!

Goodbye

We could have been so good together!

Tuesday's Word: kismet

Kismet (Turkish, Urdu as well as Hindi and Arabic, "fate"--derived from the Arabic term qisma; modified in Persian as qismat and then from Turkish it came to English usage) can refer to several things:
Contents
1 Locations
2 Other uses
3 Arts
3.1 Film

Locations
Kismet, Kansas
Kismet, New York, a town on Fire Island

Other uses
Kismet (program), a computer program used to analyze wireless network traffic
Kismet (robot), a robot intended to demonstrate simulated emotion
Kismet (Marvel Comics), a Marvel Comics superheroine
Kismet (DC Comics), a DC Comics character
Kismet (chocolate bar)
Kismet (dice game)

Kismet (gameplay scripting), gameplay scripting tool for the Unreal Engine from Epic Games
Kismet is a song from Born, the debut album of the string quartet bond
Kismet, a curry house in the North East of England
Akismet, short for Automattic Kismet, an effective server based spam filter.

Arts
Kismet (musical), a 1953 Broadway musical built around the music of Alexander Borodin, and adapted from a 1911 play by Edward Knoblock.
Kismet was a band formed by ethnic Macedonians in Australia (1993-1999), lead by Gorazd Chapovski from the band Mizar.
Kismet is an album from the Hungarian folk vocalist Márta Sebestyén.
Kismet Magic: The Gathering card.

Film
Kismet is the name of more than 15 films; among the best known is the lavish production of:
Kismet (1930) produced by Warner Brothers starring Loretta Young and Otis Skinner which was shot in an early widescreen process known as the Vitascope
Kismet (1943), Hindi film which stars Ashok Kumar
Kismet (1944), starring Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich), and based on Knoblock's play; sometimes shown on television as Oriental Dream.
Kismet (1955), directed by Vincente Minnelli and based on the 1953 musical

This week's Word was suggested by Barbie, from whom this blog was recently tagged!

Wiki

Friday Science Blogging

A ruminant is any hooved animal that digests its food in two steps, first by eating the raw material and regurgitating a semi-digested form known as cud, then eating the cud, a process called ruminating. Ruminants include cattle, goats, sheep, llamas, giraffes, bison, buffalo, deer, wildebeest, and antelope. The suborder Ruminantia includes all those except the camels and llamas, which are Tylopoda. Ruminants also share another anatomical feature in that they all have an even number of toes.

Explanation

Ruminants have a fore-stomach with four chambers. These are the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. In the first two chambers, the rumen and the reticulum, the food is mixed with saliva and separates into layers of solid and liquid material. Solids clump together to form the cud (or bolus). The cud is then regurgitated, chewed slowly to completely mix it with saliva and to break down the particle size. Fibre, especially cellulose and hemi-cellulose, is primarily broken down into the three volatile fatty acids, acetic acid, propionic acid and butyric acid in these chambers by bacteria and protozoa.

Even though the rumen and reticulum have different names they represent the same functional space as digesta can move back and forth between them. Together these chambers are called the rumen-reticulum. The degraded fibre, which is now in the lower liquid part of the rumen-reticulum, then passes into the next chamber, the omasum, where water and many of the inorganic mineral elements are absorbed into the blood stream. After this the digesta is moved to the last chamber, the abomasum. The abomasum is the direct equivalent of the monogastric stomach (for example that of the human or pig), and food here is digested in much the same way. Digesta is finally moved into the small intestine, where the digestion and absorption of nutrients occurs. Bacteria created in the reticulo-rumen are also digested in the small intestine.
Almost all the glucose produced by the breaking down of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin is used by bacteria in the rumen, and as such ruminants usually absorb little glucose from the small intestine. Rather, ruminants' requirement for glucose (for brain function and lactation if appropriate) is made by the liver from propionate, one of the volatile fatty acids made in the rumen.

The idea for this Friday's contribution to the understanding of science is from Katie, a lovely young lady. We were talking about cows. She said cows aren't supposed to eat grain; they should eat grass. It seems that advice has been heard before, perhaps it was a discussion of organic farming or safe beef. Not sure. In any case, I hope to see her again as there are now more questions re safe food sources.

Wiki

Tuesday's Word(s):

Blog friends, this week's Words are brought to us by the Curmudgeonly Crab!

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely. The word derives from an old Persian fairy tale and was coined by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754 in a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann (not the same man as the famed American educator) an Englishman then living in Florence. The letter read,

"I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table.

For more information about the story that inspired Horace Walpole to coin the word serendipity, see The Three Princes of Serendip.

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally inexplicable to the person or persons experiencing them. The events would also have to suggest some underlying pattern in order to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

Carl Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "'acausal connecting principle'" (i.e. a pattern of connection that cannot be explained by direct causality), "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Jung introduced the concept in his 1952 paper "Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle", though he had been considering the concept for almost thirty years.

It differs from mere coincidence in that synchronicity implies not just a happenstance, but an underlying pattern or dynamic expressed through meaningful relationships or events.
It was a principle Jung felt encompassed his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history — social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.
Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidence were due not merely to chance, but instead, suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances reflecting this governing dynamic.

One of Jung's favourite quotes on Synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards".

Events that happen which appear at first to be coincidence but are later found to be causally related are termed incoincident.

As you've read, Crabbi is way smarter that me!