Hello. Hope you are well! Today is a freebie post. Regrettably, I do not know how to count, so you get two extra questions because of my trouble.
Questions
Shown is the coat of arms for a royal family. While there is inevitably some imprecision and mystery involved with these calculations, it is thought that this family is the richest family in the world, with a wealth of over $300 million, exceeding even that of the Waltons - and this does not count their control over sovereign wealth funds valued over $1 trillion. Which family?
The majority of the work on Kind of Blue was a sextet. It was (of course) led by Miles Davis on trumpet, with Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Paul Chamber on double bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums. Who, playing piano, completed the sextet for most of the album’s tracks? This performer also had two co-writing credits on the album. Despite his influence, he wound up staying with the group for just seven months. The correct answer’s name rhymes with another pianist who was influential to Davis.
Oh, biscuits! “The Sign” was the recently released and well-received season finale for what non-American television program? At 28 minutes, its run time was four times as long as a typical episode.
Two answers required. The first is a performer who performed the song that holds the record the most weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 for a solo performance. The second is a performer who topped the US Country Songs chart with “Drink in My Hand” and “Springsteen.” What brings them together is a chair, which was thrown by the first answer off the sixth floor of Chief's, a music venue and bar owned by the second answer. Name the two musicians.
Fill in the redacted. It may be an indirect reference to a WhatsApp chat between Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, and Joe Alwyn.
Roger Fenton is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, war photographers, and was dispatched in 1854 to take photos of the Crimean War. His most famous photo from that conflict is shown below. Its title six-word phrase is a Biblical reference. Give that phrase.
At this year’s World Figure Skating Championships, Kaori Sakamoto won the women's gold for the third consecutive year. While three consecutive titles is fairly common among the male skaters, it is far more rare, especially in recent years, for the female competitors. Who was the last female skater to win three consecutive titles? To narrow it down some, she also won the Olympic gold medal in figure skating.
There are two major ways of calculating it currently: using fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation and the “local distance ladder” method. The former method gives you a value of around 67. According to recent research making use of analysis from the James Webb Space Telescope regarding carbon stars and “tip of the red giant branch” stars, the local distance ladder method gets a result of around 69 (nice). What are we trying to calculate?
Shown is the self-portrait in stone of what man? This visage can be found in St. Vitus Cathedral, which he constructed, along with another well known Prague landmark, the Charles Bridge. His first and last name combined differ by a single letter from the name of the person whose first appearance occurred in Amazing Fantasy #15, in August 1962.
A rival of the Mataram, Champa, and Khom empires, it is thought to have existed from about AD 671 to 1025. What empire, whose name in Sanskrit can roughly be translated as “shining victory,” is this?
Shown is what person, completing a race in 1966? A statue of hers (doubly so - it depicts her, and she designed it) is to be installed, eventually, on the corner of Main Street and Hayden Rowe, in Hopkinton.
The first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music was George T. Walker Jr., for what piece, usually known by a one word name? It sets a well-known poem to music. A visual clue is provided.
What is the name of Sergio Garcia’s only daughter? He named her after Augusta National Golf Club’s 13th hole, where a well-placed shot helped him to secure the 2017 Masters. A visual clue is provided.
What is the title of the Black Keys most recent album, released April 5, 2024? The album has the same name as a musical group from Dayton, whose heyday was around fifty years earlier.
A drought-plagued sertão in the 1940s is the setting of what film of 1964? The English translation of its title makes reference to a self-proclaimed saint named Sebastião and a cangaceiro named Corisco.
Who is this actor, portraying one of the many people about to be killed by John Wick? Earlier this week, he was responsible for Clippers fans getting free chicken.
We have Napoleon's Continental System to thank for what chocolate concoction? Since cocoa was in short supply because of the ban on British imports, a chocolatier in Turin stretched the chocolate he did have by adding hazelnut paste.
E.L. Doctorow readily admitted that the main character of his novel Ragtime was a “quite deliberate hommage” to the main character of what novella?
While at the bookstore, I was prompted to take a photo from what novel? As always, I’ve redacted the most helpful stuff.
Shown is a portrait, originally made for the cover of Time. From 1970, it features someone who had written a notable work of nonfiction that same year. What person? As a bonus, who is the artist who painted this? The portrait conveys the painter’s feminist themes in a manner different from other works by her.
In a 1960 article in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, the following is stated:
We are in a position similar to that of a man who was provided with a bunch of keys and who, having to open several doors in succession, always hit on the right key on the first or second trial. He became skeptical concerning the uniqueness of the coordination between keys and doors.
The author then goes on to describe how mathematics has remarkable, predictable usefulness, offering multiple examples of such from the history of physics, to demonstrate that point. Which author? He would go on to the win the Nobel Prize three years later.
A well in the Upper Zakum in the Persian Gulf recently set the record for the longest oil well in the world, factoring in both vertical and horizontal distance traversed, at over 50,000 feet. Prior to that, almost all the super-long oil wells had been drilled to access the oil of the Chayvo field. Off what island is the Chayvo oil field? Originally a project of ExxonMobil, they withdrew their support for the project in March 2022.
Under President Macías Nguema, Fang was the official language of what country until 1982? The answer is not Transylvania. As an additional unscored thought exercise, why did writing this question make my scattered mind think of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
What boating company, dating back to 1874, has the Catalina and Calypso series among its models, and today is a subsidiary of Winnebago Industries? Pictured is an engineer and administrator not actually affiliated with the company.
Shown are some of the album covers designed by what group?
Shown is a map of what former country? Since 1864, it has existed only as a diaspora.
Which Shakespearean character’s name is a play on words for the architectural detail shown below? A carpenter by trade, his name in Elizabethan English would have been pronounced very similarly to the highlighted feature.
Answers
The Emirate of Abu Dhabi, one of the constituent emirates of the United Arab Emirates, is particularly oil rich, which has proven beneficial to its ruling family, the Al Nahyan clan. The first to rule the area that would become modern Abu Dhabi was Dhiyab bin Isa Al Nahyan, whose reign began in 1761. The current head of the family is Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, aka MBZ. He is shown below.
One night at the Village Vanguard in 1958, Bill Evans had just finished a piece when he looked up and saw Miles Davis looking at him from the other end of the piano. Having developed an interest in modal jazz (as seen in Milestones), Davis had been searching for a pianist that could improvise based on scales, and Evans had been recommended to him. His sextet was also in transition; Jimmy Cobb had replaced increasingly heroin-addled Philly Joe Jones on drums and pianist Red Garland was also about to be fired. The collaboration was to be short lived. One reason might be surmised from this photo of the sextet (with Jimmy Cobb not shown), as Davis’s primarily African-American fandom took poorly to Evans, and regularly let Evans know about it. Not coping well with the racial tensions, Evans left for a time, but returned long enough to take part in Kind of Blue. His contribution was not initially appreciated, as Davis initially received all the songwriting credits exclusively. “Blue in Green,” in particular, was largely written by Evans, after Davis suggested that Evans conceive of something using G-minor and A-augmented, so Evans went home to his apartment that night and did just that. As an aside, Bill Evans is no relation to Gil Evans, a pianist and arranger who had been a long time influence of Davis and contributed to the intro of “So What,” which opens the classic album.
A resident of what we assume is Brisbane, Bluey Christine Heeler is seven-years-old. Her sister is Bingo and her parents are Bandit and Chili. Oh, and they’re dogs. Her show, named for her, was created by Australian Joe Brumm, and it has been praised for its humor, but also how it deals with real-life situations while avoiding a preachy tone. The finale to the third season, called “The Sign,” dealt with a potential move, as Bandit is looking for better work. No spoilers, but the episodes has fans - including adults - concerned that Brumm may just not bring the show back for a fourth season, since burnout is one of the many themes with which the episode deals. Which would be too bad for Brumm, as he has won Logie Awards for his work, but also for Disney+, since the show is the second-most streamed program of 2023, after Suits on Netflix.
Chair-thrower Morgan Wallen’s album One Thing at a Time produced the hit “Last Night,” which was the most popular single of 2023 in the United States, and spent 16 non-consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. (“Old Town Road,” “Despacito,” and “One Sweet Day” are all considered collaborations.) It was the first country song by a male to reach the top of the chart since Eddie Rabbit’s “I Love a Rainy Night” in 1981. Prior to the chair, Wallen (shown first, mullet’d) had become notorious for an SNL performance cancelled due to his violation of COVID-19 protocols, followed by a brief absence from radio because of his casual use of a racial slur. The restaurant, located in Nashville and newly opened, is owned by Eric Church (second). His most recent album is the 2021 triple album Heart & Soul. He is notorious for cancelling a concert appearance so he could watch the University of North Carolina play basketball in person.
This chairman, presumably Taylor Swift, is in charge of The Tortured Poets Department, which also names her just-released album. She had offered many clues as to the album’s contents to fans, though still surprised everyone when it turned out to be a double album. Its first single, “Fortnight,” is performed with Post Malone. The album is thought to reference previous relationships Swift had with inter alia Tom Hiddleston, Matty Healy, and Joe Alwyn, whose WhatApp chat may have inspired the title. The fifth track on the album, “So Long, London,” is presumed to deal with the aftermath of her six-year relationship with Alwyn ending.
Fenton must have thought he had walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death after seeing the above seen - maybe. Fenton’s photograph has also been alleged to have been another early war photography achievement - a staged photo. This is because another version has no cannonballs on the road (shown), suggesting that someone may have deliberately moved them to create a more dramatic photo. The more charitable explanation is that soldiers had pushed the cannonballs into the road so they could be more easily collected. Either way, the name for the area was coined by British soldiers because of its intense fighting, and it was used not only use by Fenton, but also by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
There have been several near misses, with skaters such as Evgenia Medvedeva, Michelle Kwan, Kristi Yamaguchi, Katarina Witt, Beatrix Schuba, and Gabriele Seyfert winning back-to-back titles, but you have to go all the way back to Peggy Fleming for the answer. She won from 1966 to 1968, also winning the gold in Grenoble that year. Just before her, Sjoukje Djikstra won three consecutive titles and Carol Heiss won five in a row. As mentioned, among the male competitors such an accomplishment is more frequent. In the same window of time that has passed since Fleming did it, Nathan Chen, Patrick Chan, Alexei Yagudin, Kurt Browning, Scott Hamilton, and Ondrej Nepela have all achieved the same.
The Hubble constant (H0) is the constant of proportionality for the equation relating the velocities of remote galaxies and their distances. In other words, it is the rate at the which the universe is expanding, and it is in units of kilometer per second per megaparsec. The relationship is a “law” named for Edwin Hubble, who inferred the velocity of interstellar objects based on their redshifts, based on his own observations and the work of fellow American astronomers Vesto Slipher and Henrietta Swan Leavitt, though others like Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaître flirted with the same ideas. Now, calculating what the constant would be is an entirely different matter. Recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have been used by Professor Wendy Freedman at the University of Chicago to suggest the number of 69 km/s/Mpc - which is lower than previous numbers that made use of standard candles (like Cepheid variables) and closer to the number derived from the anisotropy (non-uniformity) seen in the cosmic microwave background radiation.
It is unclear, though unlikely, that Peter Parler (1333-1399) had any superpowers, unless building enduring works of architecture is something Kevin Feig needs to hear about. Parler was from Schwäbisch Gmünd, modern Baden-Württemberg, but moved to Prague to work for Charles IV, King of Bohemia. He was given the commission to St. Vitus at age 24 and the Charles Bridge the next year. St. Vitus is notable for its use of crossing rib vaults (shown) that create a net-like effect in the ceiling above, which provide additional strength as well as a lovely aesthetic effect. If you visit his Charles Bridge, you may note the number 135797531 carved into its tower. That is not a phone number - sorry, Jenny - but the exact time its foundation stone was laid: July 9, 1357 at 5:31 a.m.
Careful readers will recall that I mentioned that blog alum Vijayanagara Empire of south India had a name meaning “City of Victory.” The Srivijaya Empire, located initially in Sumatra but expanding into the Malay Peninsula and to western Java, had a name that means “shining victory.” Its surrounding competitors were the Mataram (from Java), Khom (a Khmer people), and the Champa (from Vietnam). The empire was mostly lost to history until research by Frenchman George Cœdès in the early 20th century, and even he had to use Chinese sources to fill in some of the gaps left by a civilization that left behind little by way of long-lasting records. The empire was thought to be Buddhist, thalassocratic, and centered around modern-day Palembang. Its decline is thought to date from around 1025, when the Chola Empire of modern Tamil Nadu began a series of incursions, establishing a series of posts it would maintain on Sumatra for the next century.
On April 19, 1966, Bobbi Gibb hid in some bushes near the start of the Boston Marathon. When the gun sounded, she snuck into the field of (only) men to join the race, wearing a hoodie initially to conceal her identity. Prior to that, she had been running up to forty miles a day with the expectation of competing - only to learn from the director of the Boston Marathon that the furthest women were allowed to compete in a sanctioned race was 1.5 miles, and that he had no interest in being liable from any harm he thought would happen to her from her running a marathon’s length. Not one to take no for an answer, she completed the race in 3:21, a little slower than her usual time, but she ran the first half wearing the hoodie, which she said later certainly slowed her down. She continued to compete; today, she is listed as the unofficial women’s winner of the 1966, ‘67, and ‘68 marathons. The first officially sanctioned winner of the women's open division of the Boston Marathon was Nina Kuscsik in 1972.
Lilacs for voice and orchestra, usually called Lilacs, won the Pulitzer for Walker, and is based on the Walt Whitman poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” which Whitman wrote as an elegy for Abraham Lincoln. The lilac is also a flowering woody plant from genus Syringa.
The holes at Augusta National are named for plants - mainly trees, but even a kind of grass and several bushes are so used. The par-5 13th hole is named Azalea. An azalea is a flowering shrub belonging to genus Rhododendron. Rhododendron atlanticum is the species most prominent at Augusta National, but over thirty different subspecies can be found on the course’s immaculate grounds.
The Black Keys, originally from Akron, are Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney. Their best known album is probably Brothers, which has the popular single “Tighten Up.” Their most recent album is Ohio Players, which recalls the Dayton-based funk group who is probably best known for their songs “Fire,” “Love Rollercoaster,” and “Funky Worm.” “Love Rollercoaster” is from the album Honey, which is arguably just as famous for its provocative cover, shown.
Glauber Rocha is considered to be one of Brazil’s greatest directors. A part of Cinema Novo, he’s best known for Entranced Earth (Terra em Transe) and Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol), the correct answer here. In Black God, the illiterate cowhand Manuel and his wife Rosa go on a series of pilgrimages, triggered when he accidentally kills the landlord who has been cheating him. Pursued by the assassin Antonio, they join the company of the black mystic Sebastião, where they live a literally Sysphean existence - including rolling a rock up a hill - before tragedy occurs and they must flee again, this time joining bandits lead by Captain Corisco. That, time, too, ends in tragedy because of the intervention of Antonio, and the film ends with them once again fleeing, presumably with an another encounter of violence and want in their futures.
A chocolatier named Michele Prochet came up with gianduja, the hazelnut-chocolate confection still associated with Turin in particular today. The hazelnut paste makes it softer than normal chocolate, so it is almost always tempered to preserve its form. Its name comes from Gianduja, a stock character of the commedia dell'arte hailing from Piedmont. The hazelnut-based Nutella was originally called Pasta Gianduja, and a well-known Piedmontese dessert is the Cremino, a layered confection made of gianduja sandwiching a flavor like coffee or lemon.
Serbian basketball player Boban Marjanović currently plays for the Houston Rockets, his fifth NBA squad. A role player in the NBA at this point, he has smartly attempted to pivot into broader entertainment, making an appearance in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, where he plays an assassin. Risking becoming typecast, he also plays an asassin in the 2023 film Self Reliance. Earlier this week, Chick-Fil-A had a promotion at the Clippers-Rockets game where, if any player missed both ends of his free throws, the audience would get free chicken sandwiches. Boban - “a man of the people!” according to the game announcers, complied by clanking both shots with about five minutes left to go and the Rockets comfortably ahead.
While E.L. Doctorow's best known novel, Ragtime, is known for its use of real historical people as characters, like Harry Houdin, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, and Booker T. Washington, it centers mainly around three fictional families - one Anglo-Saxon, one African-American, and one Jewish - with the story of one of the black characters, Coalhouse Walker, Jr., driving the novel’s most interesting action. A ragtime piano player, he uses the financial success from that to purchase a new Model T Ford, which he proudly drives around New Rochelle, New York, until a racist fireman vandalizes and destroys it. Seeking restitution, he is rebuffed again and again by authorities. His girlfriend pleading his case is then killed by the Secret Service. This triggers a campaign of terrorism by him and the group of followers that he recruits - when all he wanted was his car back. All this recalls the 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist, based on actual events of the 1530s. The parallels can be seen in its compelling opening paragraph:
In the middle of the 16th century there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas, son of a schoolmaster, at once one of the most righteous and appalling individuals of his time. Until his thirtieth year, this unusual man would have been accounted the very model of a good citizen. In the village that still bears his name, he owned a farm that provided him with a comfortable living; the children his wife gave him he brought up in the fear of God, to be hardworking and loyal; there was not one among his neighbors who hadn’t benefited from his charity and his fair dealing; in sum, the world would have blessed his memory, if he hadn’t followed one of his virtues to excess. His sense of justice led him to robbery and murder.
Kohlhaas, angered over the seizure of two of his horses, engages in a campaign of terrorism and private warfare throughout Saxony. In Ragtime, Booker T. Washington appeals to Coalhouse, to no avail. In Michael Kohlhaas, Martin Luther serves a similar role, mirroring actions taken by the real person during the actual events of the 16th century.
Just after Chapter 41 of The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) ends, there is blank page, only labeled Kumogakure (“Vanished into the Clouds”). In the previous chapter, Hikaru Genji, the protagonist, had been contemplating how transient life was. The following chapter, Niō Miya, as well as the remainder of the book, refers to Genji in the past tense, suggesting that the novel’s author, Murasaki Shikibu, meant to convey the death of the work’s title character by saying as little as possible. Genji is nominally the story of a son of the Emperor and one of his consorts, who first is demoted to being a commoner before working his way back into court life. But it also has something like 400 characters and offers unique insight into the life of the Fujiwara-controlled Heian era of Japanese history. There is a very good, though not absolute, claim that Genji is the first novel - but like how that book ends, I will leave that matter somewhat unresolved.
The painting is of Kate Millett, who in 1970 wrote Sexual Politics, based on her PhD dissertation at Columbia. The book is nominally an analysis of certain authors from Western literature, like Henry James, Norman Mailer, and D.H. Lawrence, before more broadly discussing the concept of patriarchy and asserting that the only ways to undo it would be to give women more economic power and to radically change the nature of the family. It was a media sensation, not just because of its claims, but because it was one of the first works of feminist criticism towards society that made use of academic analysis, so it was felt to be a more substantial work for that reason also. When Time wanted to do a cover story on Millett, she refused to cooperate, even declining to sit for a photo or portrait. So Time asked noted portraitist and longstanding feminist Alice Neel (1900-1984) to make a portrait of Millett using photographs, which she gladly agreed to do. Neel, like recent blog alum Paula Modersohn-Becker, is probably most noted for her nude portraits, including portraits of pregnant women, but she painted people from many ranges of life. Her most famous portrait, however, is probably that of a vulnerable Andy Warhol, exposing the scars to his chest that resulted from him being shot by Valeria Solanas two years earlier. I have include a detail from that, as way as a more modest (doubly so) detail from Neel’s 1980 Self-Portrait, below. Look for the full works, and more, online, at places like the Met and the Smithsonian, since her estate is apparently quite protective of her copyrighted work.
I quoted “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” an essay written by the physicist Eugene Wigner, who would go on to win the Nobel for his work developing the mathematical formulations underpinning quantum physics, so he would be the one to write such an article. In the essay, he discusses how mathematic principles derived from one physical phenomenon can be surprisingly - yet somehow, predictably - be applied to other physical phenomena. As an example, he discusses how Newton, by observing falling objects, was able to derive the motion of the planets mathematically - not entirely an intuitive leap to make. He gives similar examples, such as how Wolfgang Pauli was able to build on the work of Heisenberg, Born, and others. Another example of this idea, not cited in the article, is how Maxwell’s Equations were found to apply to radio waves. Critics have suggested that Wigner really only meant to discuss physics; I.M. Gelfand retorted that, “there is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology.” In response, other have said that our increasing knowledge of molecular biology might suggest that we simply do not know enough yet to find the math that would apply to biology.
Given the existence of the Kola superdeep borehole, it is little surprise that the Russians were responsible for another subterranean superlative. Off the coast of Sakhalin are multiple wells that go great distances, mainly horizontally through use of directional drilling, to reach oil reserves. This is felt to be worth it, as the Chayvo oil field is thought to hold 2.3 billion barrels of oil. If you are looking to visit the oil well that goes the deepest based purely on vertical distance traveled, one could visit the Bertha Rogers No. 1 in the Andarko Basin of Oklahoma. It goes about 31,400 feet deep, but has been plugged up since 1997, when it struck sulfur. Another candidate would have been in the Tiber oil field, in the Gulf of Mexico. Its well went some 35,000 feet deep, not including the 4,100 feet of water above that. Unfortunately for that well, it was attached to the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, and was destroyed with the rig in a blowout explosion in April 2010. That explosion killed 11 workers and has placed future development of most of that oil field on indefinite hold.
The despot mentioned in the question usually went by Macías, so perhaps you were clued into this being a country with a Spanish-speaking background and opted for Equatorial Guinea. Proportionally, he was one of the most brutal dictators in history, with most estimates suggesting that around a quarter of his country's 250,000 citizens died during his 15 year control from political violence and politically-created deprivation. But never mind that - he was of Fang background, and he made his native tongue the language of the entire country. The Fang are Bantu people from the Río Muni (mainland) area of Equatorial Guinea, with a sizable population in northern Gabon as well, where they are probably the largest single ethnic group of that country as well. But they do not have much presence on the country’s island portion (Bioko), where an English-based creole called Pichinglis, or Pichi, is spoken. Shortly after Macías was deposed, tried, and executed in 1979, Spanish, which had been the nation’s original official language, was restored to that position, as it remained a valuable lingua franca. Since the time, both French and Portuguese have been made official languages, in order to promote foreign trade, though English is used also, as well as several indigenous languages, including Fang. Regarding Pichi: it is the language of choice for the Krio people of Bioko, most of whom are descended from a creole people (hence the name) from Sierra Leone that themselves were descendants of freed slaves from America and the Caribbean. Probably the most famous Krio is The Song of Hiawatha composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - no relation to the poet of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The boating company is the Chris-Craft Corporation, founded by Christopher Columbus Smith in Michigan in 1874. Smith is not related to Chris Kraft, one of the key figures in the early days of NASA’s Space Task Group, which was put together in 1958 to design vehicles that could put humans into orbit. Starting as flight director for the Mercury Program, Kraft took on increasingly senior roles with each subsequent program, ultimately becoming the director of the Johnson Space Center. Very hands on during the Mercury program days, he took more of an oversight role during the Apollo program, deferring to his protégé Gene Kranz for NASA’s most famous missions. Kraft is widely credited for creating that culture that made NASA's Mission Control work so well, through, among other examples, installing an effective system of space-to-ground communications and go/no-go decision trees that remain a core part of the organization’s ethic.
In 1968, artists Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell formed Hipgnosis, a design group that produced the some of the most famous album covers of the British rock music scene of the late 1960’s to the end of the 1970’s. They are most associated with Pink Floyd, as they got their start when the band asked them to design the cover to their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (shown first), which was followed by the international attention they received for their subsequent design for the band, the cover to 1973's Dark Side of the Moon. Aside from their work with Pink Floyd, they made multiple album covers for Led Zeppelin, and are responsible for the font indelibly associated with the band since Houses of the Holy (its psychedelic cover also by Hipgnosis) was released in 1973.
Russia’s longest single war was fought over a century, from 1763 to 1864, against Circassia. The Circassians, also called the Cherkess or Adyghe, are a mostly Muslim people once from the north Caucasus who do not seem to have been closely related to neighboring Turkic tribes. They probably reached their height under Inal the Great, who unified the many tribes during the 15th century. They existed in an uneasy zone of land between the Ottomans, Tatars, and Russians for many decades, developing a fierce warrior ethic from that siege mentality. Such a mentality was unfortunately justified, as Russia began a slow project to conquer the entire region, starting in earnest during the reign of Catherine the Great and culminating in 1864, when an outmatched Circassian army was slaughtered by a Russian army five times its size. In the ensuing few years, a policy of deportation and genocide (the Tsitsekun) was enforced by the occupying Russian army. The Ottomans, respecting their warrior culture, took in many Circassians, and today most ethnic Circassians live in Pontic Turkey, and number about 3 to 4 million. It is thought that up to 1.5 million Circassians died during the Tsitsekun. I have shown its historical flag below, still used today by the Russian Republic of Adygea. About 95,000 people claiming to be of Circassian ancestry live in the Republic of Adygea today. One last unfortunate note: the city of Sochi, in nearby Krasnodar Krai, probably gets its name from a Circassian word meaning “coast.” Circassians allege that Sochi's Olympic Village is built atop a mass grave of slain Circassians.
The pieces highlighted are called quoins, which are masonry blocks at the corner of a structure that can offer both structural and aesthetic support. I am told - I’ve had no occasion to utter the word - that “quoins” sounds like “quince,” which gets us to Peter Quince, the carpenter by trade who is one of the Mechanicals from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and who was named such as a play on words. I’ll leave it to you to figure out why Nick Bottom or Francis Flute were so named.
