Category: Culture

Understanding Name Conventions in Southern India: The Case of LinkedIn Profiles | September 29 2026, 15:06

It seems that the names of Indian colleagues on LinkedIn like Sakthi S are almost always not from a desire to hide their full name, but because in South India it is approximately like that. Traditionally, there are no surnames in the European sense there. Instead, a father’s name initial is added to the personal name. So, “Sakthi S” most likely means Sakthi, son of someone like Selvam, Subramanian, or Sentil. In India itself, it is often written the other way around, with the initial first: “S. Sakthi”. Accordingly, D at the end would be a father’s name starting with D (Durai, Dinesh), A – for A (Arumugam, Anandan), etc. A daughter would have the same initial, and sometimes it changes to her husband’s initial after marriage.

A classic example is mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan: “Srinivasa” is his father’s name, not a surname, and at home he was simply called Ramanujan.

In Tamil Nadu, it’s also a deliberate stance— the Dravidian movement (Periyar) actively encouraged abandoning caste surnames because they immediately reveal caste affiliation. A father’s initial doesn’t reveal anything like that.

Interestingly, when you ask Gemini about this, it says its program isn’t designed for such tasks, that it doesn’t understand me and can’t respond, that it’s just a language model and doesn’t have such capabilities. Claude, on the other hand, responds alright.

The screenshot is just a random manager from LinkedIn.

Free Admission for Isabelles at the ISG Museum: A Legacy of Eccentricity and Art | September 18 2026, 17:33

Hey, if your name is Isabella, you get free admission to the ISG Art Museum in Boston (otherwise $25). Or a discount if you show up in an “Oh, you Red Sox” T-shirt. I’m at the museum right now. You won’t find this information at the ticket counter. It’s not a promotion, but a clause in the will of the founder—Isabella Stewart Gardner, who built herself a Venetian palazzo in the middle of Boston in 1903, stuffed it with Titian, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. She also walked a lion on a leash and came to the conservatory with an “Oh, you Red Sox” band around her forehead—for this very reason, fans in gear still get a discount here.

The scariest place here is the Dutch Room, where empty frames hang on the walls, but right now it’s under renovation, and instead of empty frames, there are empty rectangles made of painter’s tape. In March 1990, two people in police uniforms entered at night, tied up the guard, and in 81 minutes took out 13 works worth about 500 million dollars, including Rembrandt’s only seascape and Vermeer’s “The Concert”—the most expensive stolen painting in the world. The case is still unsolved, and the reward for information is $10 million. The frames hang empty because the will forbids changing anything in the museum: if you move one thing, the entire collection goes to Harvard for sale 😉

If you know an Isabella—tag her, she gets in free for life 😉

P.S. I requested the museum’s will, they sent me a scan, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff https://www.facebook.com/share/1DJAbebsEH/

Discovering New Details in “Hedgehog in the Fog” | September 14 2026, 23:50

While walking with Yuki, I watched “Hedgehog in the Fog” again. Listen, pure discoveries. I always thought he walked with a little bundle tied to a stick. Turns out, he was just carrying the bundle in his paws, and the stick was there to poke into the fog. Did you also imagine him carrying a bundle on a stick, or was it just me?

Then I thought he was wandering around shouting “horsey!” But it turns out, he only said horse sadly once, and that’s it. And actually, the horse was off to the side, and his friend, a bear cub, was calling him off-screen throughout the cartoon.

It also turned out that the hedgehog speaks with the voice of Uncle Fyodor from “Prostokvashino”.

I read also that they made the animation simply by moving cut-out characters at different distances from ordinary tracing paper.

After that, Norstein has been shooting “The Overcoat” based on Gogol since 1981. Still not finished.

Turnspit Dogs: The Forgotten Kitchen Helpers of Britain | August 24 2026, 01:18

It turns out that for several centuries in Britain, they kept a breed of dog with exactly one job — to serve as the drive for a kitchen mechanism. Turnspit dog, a cooking-jack dog. Short-legged, long-bodied, bandy-legged, yet surprisingly powerful. On the kitchen wall, a few meters away from the hearth, hung a wooden wheel nearly a meter in diameter—like a squirrel cage, only larger. A dog was put inside, the wheel connected to the spit by a shaft and chain, and the dog would tirelessly move its legs for hours to rotate the roast over the fire. The first recorded mention dates back to 1576: in John Caius’s treatise on English dogs, they are classified as a separate type, Turnespete. In the 18th century, Linnaeus even gave them a taxonomic name — Canis vertigus, “spinning dog.”

The wheel was hung higher and further from the hearth, so the dog wouldn’t overheat. Not out of sentimentality: in early designs, where it stood right by the fire, dogs hated this job so much that they would run away as soon as they saw the kitchen boy with a piece of meat. A reduction gear — the dog runs fast, the spit turns slowly, perfect for an even crust. In large kitchens, they kept two dogs and rotated them: one spins, the other rests. Hence, according to a persistent legend, the English saying every dog has his day—though etymologists, admittedly, debate this. There was also stimulation, unpleasant to read about: a hot coal could be thrown into the wheel to make the paws move faster.

The breed was doomed by the smokejack—a chimney turbine that spun the spit with the free flow of hot air. Cheap factory mechanisms (clock jacks, a spring with weights, like in floor clocks) and the Victorian cast-iron stove, after which the open hearth completely disappeared from kitchens, delivered the final blows. By the mid-19th century, turnspit dogs became a rarity; by the end of the century, they were gone entirely: no one kept this dog as a companion, they weren’t valued for their temperament to begin with. From Canis vertigus today — only a stuffed specimen named Whiskey in the Abergavenny Museum in Wales and a few rare prints remain. It is written that their bloodlines can be found in Welsh Corgis and Glen of Imaal Terriers, but, as far as I know, this has not been seriously genetically tested.

The Evolution of Mermaids in Russian Folklore: From Legged Creatures to Aquatic Tails | August 08 2026, 02:15

WOW, it turns out that mermaids in Russia actually had legs, and if you asked about the tail, they would tickle you to death or drown the curious in the nearest pond. A specific feature — tousled blonde hair, hence the phrase from Dal “walks like a mermaid.” The name itself, however, is not from the type of blonde hair, but from “rusalki” — a spring commemorative festival.

And the tail actually came from sea maidens (mermaids). Mermaids are an invention of peoples living by the sea. In general, how mermaids merged with them in our perception is unclear, but it happened relatively recently.

Although there is one assumption. In Andersen’s tale, the little mermaid — literally a sea maiden (Den Lille Havfrue). But in Russian translation, it was called “Rusalka.” Lermontov has a poem “The Mermaid” from 1831, where she swims in a river. Surely the modern reader imagines a tail. There’s also a tale by Orest Somov, where the mermaid runs away from her mother, and her unfaithful lover—the Pole, was tickled to death by mermaids.

I illustrate with an 1871 painting by Ivan Kramskoy. With legs and Makovsky’s “Mermaids” (1879) – Makovsky painted it on an estate on the border of Chernigov and Poltava provinces, near Dikanka — that very Gogolian Ukrainian night, i.e., the same literary source as Kramskoy. They would have been very surprised by a tail. Also adding Prushkovsky’s Mermaids” (water nymphs) from 1877. Also attaching a drawing by Ivan Bilibin (1934).

By the way, those who depict mermaids with tails on trees – think about how she climbed up there.

The Invisible Merchants of Spain: The Manteros of Top Manta | July 31 2026, 18:59

Here in Spain, they are called manteros (mantas sellers)—from the Spanish word manta (blanket or cover). And the process of such illegal street vending is called top manta.

Since their activity is illegal, they have developed a rigorous system of alerts. As soon as one of the vendors spots the police, they signal (often yelling the code word “Agua!”—water). After this, all the manteros on the street in a split second gather their blankets into bags and melt into the crowd. If someone had managed to give them money – apparently, they will run together with them.

The vast majority of manteros are migrants from sub-Saharan African countries (most often from Senegal, Gambia, and Mali). They are not doing this for an easy profit: most of them are status sin papeles (without documents), making legal employment in Spain impossible.

In Spain, the police fight not only the supply but also the demand. By law, if the police catch you in the act of buying a bag or sunglasses from such a blanket, you, as a buyer, can be fined up to several hundred euros.

In Barcelona, the vendors have united into the “Union of Street Vendors” (Sindicato Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes) and made a brilliant marketing move. They registered their own legal brand of clothing and footwear, calling it Top Manta. Now they produce quality sneakers and T-shirts, giving migrants the opportunity to leave the streets and work legally.

The Art of Beauty Marks in Historical European Portraiture | July 28 2026, 06:34

It is interesting that the artist did not hesitate to place a black beauty spot on the temple of the hawthorn seller in this painting. At that time, it was a very typical accessory. They were applied to cover skin defects and quickly became an essential element of makeup. The black color of the beauty spot fabric created a strong contrast, visually emphasizing the aristocratic paleness and whiteness of the face, and also drawing attention to the eyes. In Europe (including Spain, where Lorenzo Tiepolo worked), there was a complex “language of beauty spots”. Depending on where the piece of fabric was attached, it conveyed a specific message to suitors.

But they probably would not have understood piercings and tattoos 🙂

The CIA’s Secret Role in Promoting American Avant-Garde Art | July 28 2026, 05:15

Today I learned that the popularity of American avant-garde worldwide turns out to be the result of a CIA program—at least in part. During the height of the Cold War, starting in 1950, the CIA secretly funded magazines, concerts, and exhibitions throughout Europe through the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” and front organizations (the most famous being the Fairfield Foundation). The idea was simple: to demonstrate that the free West produces bold experimental art, while the USSR produced only state-controlled socialist realism. For example, when London’s Tate Gallery couldn’t afford the “New American Painting” exhibition in 1959, a “generous patron” Julius Fleischman suddenly appeared—though the funds actually came from the intelligence budget.

The most astonishing fact is that the artists themselves had no clue. Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, who came from the left-wing bohemia of the 1930s, despised the government and the era of McCarthyism, and would have considered it insulting to work for the intelligence. The CIA didn’t propose: they didn’t pay the artists or dictate anything, they simply “promoted them in the dark,” paying for the infrastructure of fame through two or three layers of intermediaries. It reached the point of absurdity. While one hand of the government secretly transported their canvases across Europe as a symbol of American freedom, the other—the FBI and conservative congressmen—kept files on the modernists and branded their art as “communist smears.”

Exploring the Missing Trojans: Homer’s Illusive Episodes | July 21 2026, 18:14

Tomorrow I will go to the Odyssey. Remember the Trojan Horse, the snakes, Laocoön, and “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”? So, it turns out that the most famous episode of the Trojan War isn’t in the “Iliad”—the main poem about this very war, and things with the Odyssey are also tricky. In the Iliad, Homer ends the story earlier: the “Iliad” covers only fifty days of the last year of the siege and ends with the funeral of Hector—there’s no horse, no death of Achilles, nor fall of the city in it. In the “Odyssey,” the horse appears a couple of times but only in passing: the bard Demodocus sings about it at a feast, Menelaus recalls how Helen walked around the horse and mocked the voices of the Greeks hidden inside. That’s it. There is no elaborate scene of assault and fire in Homer’s works at all. And that canonical story—with the spy Sinon, Laocoön strangled by the snakes, and burning Troy—is from the Roman Virgil, the second book of the “Aeneid,” written in the 20s of the 1st century BC, almost seven hundred years after Homer. It is precisely from there that the plot leaked into pop culture.

But Virgil did not invent the horse out of nowhere. Between him and Homer, there was an entire “epic cycle”—a series of poems that covered the entire war from beginning to end: “Cypria” (prehistory: the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen), then “Iliad”, then “Aethiopis” (the death of Achilles), then “Little Iliad”—here’s where they finally build the horse,—then “The Sack of Ilium”, where they roll it into the city and the massacre begins, and then “The Returns”, “Odyssey”, and a somewhat odd “Telegony” for dessert. Out of the eight poems of the cycle, only two Homeric ones fully survived. The other six—including both with all the salt about the horse—have disappeared and are known only from a later synopsis-summary and scattered quotations, totaling about a hundred lines. That means we have the middle and epilogue of the story at hand, while the beginning and the climax in the original are lost.

Turns out, we’ve been retelling a scene for centuries, the authentic text of which we don’t have.

P.S. A separate story about whether Homer was blind. And whether there was a Homer. It’s all very complicated 🙂 But that’s a story for another time.