Here to recommend THE DRAGON HAS SOME COMPLAINTS by @wiswell.bsky.social which I can best describe with the term “leaping scale.” This describes a Chinese landscape painting whose scale changes from foreground to middle to background, leaping orders of magnitude rather than in a steady gradient:

30,000 hours of footage, equivalent to 3 years and 7 months, were filmed to capture the blooming of 77 types of flowers, and the result is spectacular. Original post

Spotted near our place 🤔

I don’t really understand why this post got 200+ likes but since it has, I feel I should acknowledge the designer of the pattern, Louise Zass-Bangham, who is not on Bsky afaict. Anyway it is an extremely elegant design and was very zen to knit up.

Kate Lingley 龍梅若@klingley.bsky.social · last wk.

I finished this a week or two ago, but had to wait to give it to its recipient before posting it. The pattern is called Siren Song and the yarn colorway is called Whale’s Road 😊

I finished this a week or two ago, but had to wait to give it to its recipient before posting it. The pattern is called Siren Song and the yarn colorway is called Whale’s Road 😊

That’s somewhat later than I would have guessed.

Merriam-Webster@merriam-webster.com · 3w ago

‘Odyssey’ comes from the name Odysseus. The first known use of ‘odyssey’ as a generic term for “journey” was in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” in 1886.

My brother is a master electrician. I think I could probably avoid actually electrocuting myself, but no actual work would get done.

Bethany Albertson@albertsonb2.bsky.social · 3w ago

Thought experiment- if you were suddenly appointed to do your sibling’s job, how badly would you suck at it?

Calligraphy I commissioned for our 20th anniversary: from an inscription I once wrote about. In it, a woman explains why she sponsored a monument in her husband’s honor: “Being sensible of the honor between husband and wife, and the weight of our mutual regard…” The inscription is from the year 573.

Trying to capture the startling brightness of the moon shining in through the bedroom window. I think the extreme contrast of the picture is mostly camera effects but no joke, from where I’m lying (in bed) it’s bright enough to read by 😯

Vale Victor Mair. I didn't know him as well as some of you did, but I was always glad to encounter his maverick spirit and tremendous enjoyment of his subject. I think that's what gave me permission to approach my own work with joy.

In my professional life: I have a Shang dynasty grayware rim sherd from Zhengzhou that dates to about 1200 BCE. Everyday life: my cast iron frying pan, in which I bake my cornbread, was made around 1854.

Pookleblinky@pookleblinky.bsky.social · last mo.

I always like thinking about: what is the oldest object you regularly use, the oldest thing you're using in your normal everyday life

Reading through 冥祥記 ("Signs from the Unseen Realm," a collection of Buddhist miracle tales from the last decade or so of the fifth century) in search of miraculous images, I notice there are a lot of "trip to the underworld" narratives, which reiterate the fundamental bureaucracy of the afterlife:

SJÄMSÅRA

Haha @coreopsismajor.bsky.social I have gotten to the episode in the Nanyang Mystery where we encounter the European archaeologist, and his name is Warner 😆 Can I tell you how many times I have heard this guy reviled to me while I was working with Dunhuang and related materials?

Langdon Warner - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Not sure this is a MBOTD because the donors are unknown, but let's give them credit nonetheless for sponsoring one of the most beautiful sculptures of (I'm guessing) the 530s. I'm writing about it because the Buddha, carved nearly in the round, is accompanied by two bodhisattvas in intaglio:

It's been a while, but today's Medieval Buddhists of the Day are the 90(-ish) lay and monastic patrons of an Eastern Wei stele in the collection of the Henan provincial museum, dated 543, for their forthrightness in talking about how material objects can help us understand the ineffable:

The big shade trees on campus are mostly either leguminous trees like the monkeypod, which drop big sticky beans, or some kind of ficus like this one, which periodically sheds tens of thousands of small round berrylike fruits, so the groundskeepers have to break out the Fruit Zamboni.

Waiting in an ordinary, lovely spot to pick up two muddy post-hike teenagers.

Further pep talk

Kate Lingley 龍梅若@klingley.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Pep talk from the city

Pep talk from the city

True heroism (adapting Hucker for the Pleco interface, hooray)

Brendan O’Kane@bokane.org · 2mo ago

Friday night, time to go wild.

Thinking about the extraterritoriality of Buddhist (and other) images. This is Dunhuang cave 275, dated to the Northern Liang c. 421-439 CE. A (mildly) colossal Maitreya Bodhisattva sits on his lion throne in Tusita heaven, accompanied by bodhisattvas and so on. It's like an embassy or consulate:

I don't have much truck with the eight-legged essay 八股文, the bane of Ming and Qing scholars, because it arrived on the scene much later than the stuff I work on. But today I had reason to look up the basics, and it was kind of interesting for a person who teaches argumentative writing:

Eight-legged essay - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The weather’s warming up so I got out my favorite beach wear: Huaisu’s “Autobiography” … in the form of a rayon pareo … from Costco. No, I can’t explain it either 🤷🏻‍♀️

Dressed in our official plumage and getting ready to march in. The whole business is awkward and sweaty but extremely life-affirming.

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

OK, so here's the poem by Gaoping local poet, Miao Lingcong (苗令琮). Miao was from Fengtai in Shanxi 山西鳳台 and was named juren 舉人 (not jinshi 進士, oops) in 1771, so this is probably a late c18 poem, but is found in the 1880 gazetteer 續高平縣志 (and not in earlier Gaoping gazetteers, fwiw).

Kate Lingley 龍梅若@klingley.bsky.social · 3mo ago

LOCAL POET: In 2002, doing research for a dissertation chapter about the small cave temple site of Gaomiaoshan near Gaoping, I spent some time poking through the county gazetteers (縣誌) for Gaoping county. Gazetteers are local histories usually compiled by local officials in the Ming and Qing...

I know that every year has 365 days and every day has 24 hours and so on, but even so, how is it possible that my children are SIXTEEN today? (Happy birthday guys!)

I designed a winter hat that I meant as a reference to medieval Iranian textile patterns with their pearl borders and birds wearing fluttering scarves. But the recipient pointed out that the birds also look a bit like Hawaiian nēnē, so that’s also appropriate.

As a Mother’s Day gift my kid shared a picture of me that he took at a protest a couple of weeks ago, in which he made me look kind of cool and not like the screaming nerd I actually am. Cover of my next solo album? It’s a gift to see yourself through your child’s eyes.