3/9 Moment of Zen: Darwin Meets Dogdson in the Parlour

In the Victorian Era, cartes de visite (lit. "visiting cards" - think of them like baseball cards for tea drinking) were quite the thing. Ladies would display them, showing off all the guests they'd had at their house. Then, they started cutting up their friends' pictures and pasting them into strange contexts, onto the bodies of animals or into the middle of some kind of geometric maze, decades before surrealism and photomontage had been officially discovered. It's not entirely clear what started this fashion. Likely, it was a combination of things. One speculation is that as cartes de visite became more widely available to people outside the upper class, rich ladies felt the need to distinguish theirs further. Another deals with two books that came out within a few years of each other and which have both had a profound influence on the intellectual landscape. One was Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the other was Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Both caused quite a stir, in very different ways, but both changed the image of what creatures could look like.

Follow the link above to see a gallery of more odd and interesting visiting card collages, along with more history and interpretation to go with it.

Moment of Zen 3/8: Alice on Film, 1903

Although last night's Academy Awards ceremony probably accounts for this weekend's Big Deal in Movies, I know many of you went to see the most recent cinematic take on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, as imagined by Tim Burton, which opened on Friday. However, many others have tried to bring Alice and her adventures in Wonderland to film since the very beginnings of the medium. A cursory search turns up more than a dozen attempts, the first of which was made in 1903 - 37 years after the book's release and just 5 years after Lewis Carroll's death in 1898.

This 1903 silent film, directed in England by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, was the longest film ever made at the time, running almost 12 minutes (only 8 of which have survived). Hepworth was insistent about staying as faithful as possible to the book's original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. The cast included his wife as the White Rabbit and Red Queen, his secretary as Alice, and the family dog, Blair. The dog went on to star in 1905's Rescued by Rover.

The British Film Institute has made the surviving 8 minutes of the movie available online.

• Information on the 1903 film from the British Film Institute
• Detailed description from the silent-film focused blog Verdoux, including many more stills from the movie

Moment of Zen 3/5: World's Largest Burrito

By Request: World's Largest Burrito

The World's Largest Burrito was constructed on May 8, 1999 in Pasco, Washington. It took just under 2 hours to put together, measured 4,298 feet long (more than 3/4 of a mile) and weighed in at 3.7 tons (over 7,000 lbs!). You can see a breakdown of weight by ingredient here.

(one of my 8th graders has been requesting this as the MoZ for a while now)

Moment of Zen 3/4: Happy Pun Day!

Happy National Pun Day!

"The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability."

~Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia, 1849

Why today? Because only on March Fourth can pundits really March Forth to the beet of their own humor and see how it's taken root.

I leave the rest up to you: please comment with your best (I use the term loosely) puns, so we can all share in the punishment.

3/3 Moment of Zen: Pothole Gardens

Pothole Gardens

"If we planted one of those in every hole, it would be like a forest in the road." -Pete Dungey, British artist behind a number of tiny gardens in potholes.

Wonder if he knows the guy who makes art on snail shells, then lets the snails go.

3/2 Moment of Zen: Power vs Effect of Earthquakes: Chile and Haiti

Saturday's earthquake near the coast of Chile, which registered a magnitude of 8.8, was actually significantly stronger than the January 12 earthquake which devastated Haiti with a magnitude of 7.0. While damage, casualties and civil unrest are at catastrophic levels in Chile now, the degree to which the destruction affected Haiti more could be measured on the same kind of exponential scale used to measure the magnitude of the earthquakes themselves. It's worth asking why lesser tremors caused so much more damage. Two immediate answers present themselves: poverty and preparedness.

Chile's location on the Pacific Rim puts it in a very high risk area for seismic activity like earthquakes. In fact, the strongest earthquake on record, with a magnitude of 9.5, had its epicenter in Valdivia, Chile on May 22, 1960. Additionally, nine out of the ten largest earthquakes on record are along the Pacific Rim (Saturday's quake will take the #5 slot on this list). Because of this historical precedent for large scale seismic events in this region, engineers have focused on planning for events such as these in the way that cities are laid out and in the way buildings are constructed. The Caribbean is not the same hotbed of seismic activity, though there are several significant Caribbean earthquakes noted over the last 500 years, and so earthquake safety isn't as high on the list of building specifications as it is on the Pacific Rim.

Even if it was, however, Haiti's history of poverty and political unrest make it difficult to put together and put in action any kind of coherent plan for this. Haiti has a GDP per person (a commonly used measure of a country's financial health) of $1,300, compared with $14,300 in Chile and $46,900 in the US, making it one of the poorest countries in the world (compare it even with the GDP per person of the Dominican Republic (which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, and which was relatively unaffected by the January quake) of $8,300). While Chile has had its own share of political unrest, violent turnover has been a recurring feature in Haiti's history, compounding the economic hardship with a lack of consistent government support. When the majority of the population lives in unofficial, improvised shanty towns, even the strictest building code isn't going to protect that largest part of the people. When essential needs like food, water and medical attention are hard to come by even when things are running normally, any upset will make them near impossible.

Right now, the death toll from Saturday's earthquake in Chile stands at 723, and is not expected to rise much higher, though the region is still feeling aftershocks of 5+ magnitude. The record-setting 1960 quake claimed about 1,600 lives. Those numbers are tragic, regardless of larger context. However, it's still boggling to think that January's quake in Haiti, which released about 1/500 of the energy of Chile's quake, claimed more than 200,000 lives. Chile's death toll would have to nearly triple to represent 1% of that in Haiti. This mismatch between destructive power and destructive effect further highlights the tragedy of the situation in Haiti, because it suggests that it was the pre-existing desperation of the country's situation more than the event itself that caused the most damage and that the same event elsewhere might have done relatively little damage. In the wake of it all, it provides us with an opportunity to think of the broader reaching effects of poverty around the world, and how many of these places are a quick shake away from being Haiti all over again.

3/1 Moment of Zen: The Idiotarod

The Idiotarod

It was deep in the winter when the sickness took them: The snow piled high and no sign of a melt. The only antidote could be found by hitching a team to a sled and heading out into the icy wasteland of...New York City? It draws inspiration - or at least a horrible pun of a name - from the Iditarod, the grueling, thousand mile dogsled race held every year along the route that brought essential medicine to cure a 1925 diptheria outbreak in a snowbound Alaskan town, but instead cures the annual epidemics of winter blues and cabin fever by hitching teams of four costumed people (plus one equally decked out "musher") to a glorified shopping cart and running around the city. Idiotarods have taken place in Toronto, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Austin, and Washington, D.C., though the original race was founded in San Francisco in 1994 as the "Urban Iditarod."

Prizes are awarded not only for the first team to cross the finish line, but also for the team with the best costumes, best sabotage, best bribery and "Best in Show." Beyond that, the awards change every year at the judges discretion and have included honors for: Best Dance, Best Recruitment of New Members Along the Course, Most Surprising Completion of the Race Despite An Unwieldy Course, and Best Name Change When Pirates Became Against the Rules.

Norwegian Curling Pants Update: Norway took the silver medal in Men's Curling Saturday night, losing the medal match to Canada. See story