Images: Historic Florida Maps

Six Centuries of our Glorious Peninsula
After the last post featuring a small depiction of our region, I couldn't help but add more. I almost feel hometown pride... or the voyeuristic detachment of seeing an omniscient and long-past view of the land currently under our feet.

Judging our position with historical relativism:


South tip of Gulf de Juan Ponce, west of the mountain ridge, past the view of the conquistadors.


West from Fort Crawford. Now we have a river, though the house is divided and father Abraham not long for the world.


Computer-aided accuracy, nature-aided maelstrom. We didn't get the worst of it.
Still we stand and add sand to the beaches, water to the seas (from the poles), and people to the shore. May God bless the chartmakers for falling in love with the world.

Image: Demographic Maps of the United States

American Ethnic Geography Site at Valparaiso

This site is a compilation of demographic maps that are handy if you want to generalize social trends across regions. The colors are especially evocative.
The maps include categories such as religion and politics along with others useful for pursuits besides flame wars.


This selection of the editors' region comes from a map of average median income. We live in the slate-blue section between the two darker regions on the western coast. Our households have more in common with yellow and green - hopefully, in this case, the colors of spring-like growth.

Image: Neo-Catholics

Article on the sexing-up of the priesthood

Father Meyer said the poster, on which he is featured as the "Matrix"-style priest, had its origins in a skit that he saw during his first year at the North American College, the U.S. seminary in Rome. The skit, put on by a group of older seminarians, was based on the film. In it, a group of priests fought Satan in a series of mock martial-arts confrontations.

So the church is the resistance, OK. And Satan is Agent Smith, perhaps? And Jesus is Neo... and Trinity is Mary (Magdalene?) and the Merovingian is.. and .. Does the church have some sort of censor that stops an already-convoluted mythology from being spun farther into incoherence? Or perhaps they understand that this will sell well, and only works by appropriating a harmless image from popular culture, without all the philosophical baggage.

Well, while we're buying - Get your John Paul II rookie card!

Image: Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross

[click image for larger version]
An image I came across, different from most of the allegorically-populated supernatural landscapes that Bosch's name generally evokes. Christ carrying his cross through the unheeding boors of the crowd could be an indictment of the world, or it could be a realism (especially compared with a gold-embossed, haloed christ with supplicants looking to him for salvation, all the while dragging a heavy wooden T on the road to Golgotha).
Another interesting detail - the woman in the bottom left looking pleased with her Turin-like shroud.

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Braineel annotation:
Various misled and mismanaged talents ran rampant in the sloth-eyed dawn. Slack-jawed with upturned eyes and downcast bearings, they trudged sadly up a mountain of shit. Gut-wrenched and hunger-wracked, a poorer band the land had never seen. Raucous and toothless, they meandered, head-hobbled and gnarled-legged, straggling men and women; splotches of hair sprouting oddly from patchwork bodies. All pursued no clear end but one; and he, beautiful as a harvest feast, bore a tree towards the joyous hill at Golgotha. Somehow more understanding then the mass of human wreckage, he walked among-above. One woman within the awkward throng saw his image, and was made beautiful.
Thou shalt worship no graven images, she is a witch.

Images: Artistic Interpretations of Literary Figures

Dostoevsky crosses his legs
credit to Farel Dalrymple, artist


This site has an archive of literary figures as portrayed by comic book artists. It includes characters and scenes from literature, as well as the authors themselves. Interesting insight into the reimagination of the past, especially going from a textual medium to a graphic one. One last picture, to compare against the earlier daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson:

credit to Andy Bennett, artist
[via metafilter]

Text: Emily Dickinson #324

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church-
I keep it, staying at Home-
With a Bobolink for a Chorister-
And an Orchard, for a Dome-

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice-
I just wear my wings-
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman-
And the sermon is never long
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last-
I'm going, all along.


Braineel: So spare, so lean. Why have we regressed so?

I: Regressed from the spare forms of the dome? Nowadays there would be a stanza as follows to mimic our default method of information intake-
Clorox bleaches, a noted Detergent -
And the Stains do fall away-
But what is left for Our dear Purpose
When I am unable to pay?

Braineel:
Spare? Not the dome -
But the rock it built upon;
Not the lot who make it home-
Nor the charge the hat will ask
To loose the filthy ward -
First there was the word
And then the word became dirty.

I:And we can clean it with so many miracles of science that I feel faint.

Animation/Commercial: Hard Drive is the new bling

Hitachi's advert
Kind of a self-evident title, but strange when considering what demographic this ad campaign pursues.
Is storage space the next status symbol? And if so who will be the Flava Flav equivalent, wearing a 5.25" drive around his neck, tied with old SCSI cables? I call dibs...

via the best-of-the-edited-web memepool

Text: "The die is cast, you will cut the mustard or face the music!"

This piece of Everything2 prose is interesting conceptually, but made even more interesting by its placement in an overdatabase consisting of as close to everything as a multiuser textdump has produced so far. Enjoy.

It also plays to my weakness for random strings of words (see an example prose-mash here).

On an unrelated note, does anyone want to start the Church of Arbitrary Worship? Today's ikons are empty water bottles.

I believe we have liftoff?

-he said as the sheets of ice cracked the hull and doomed the whole.