ADAMANT

Son of A Kitsch

All that glitters is not kitsch.

Though easily mistaken for  a Victorian  monstrosity--which pretty well describes its silver gilt mounts-- this  rock crystal object of virtue might have graced Saladin's table when Richard The Lionheart dropped in for a drink.

Put up for a reserve estimate  of  £200 after a provincial auction house cataloged it as

"a 19th-century claret jug adorned by mythological animals, birds, and vegetal motifs, and set with European silver gilt and enamel mounts, possibly of Austro-Hungarian origin",

the 11th-century  Fatamid rock crystal intaglio ewer sold in Somerset for 220,000 pounds-  likely  one of the biggest bargains in auction history.

The delicate body of the ewer is not a monument to the 19th century's bad taste revival , but one of the rarest treasures of medieval Egypt with a market value  close to ten million dollars.

Large gem quality crystals of quartz found in 'alpine vein' deposits have been  worked by lapidaries since neolithic times, but the hard stone is at once brittle and unforgiving.  Hollowing out a mass of this size  by slow drilling using  using  sand or emery ( Alexandria is a week's sail from the corundum deposits of Naxos ) may have taken  months, and figuring it with animals using a bow drill  may have taken as long as it took to abrade the softer glass of the Portland Vase.

Only five other examples of Fatamid engraved crystal exists, and one scarcely two inches long, a scent vial, sold at auction a few years ago for upwards of a half million dollars.  One specialist dealer has described the Somerset find as the "Holy Grail" of Islamic art.  Its extraordinary story reported in The Art Newspaper today, began when the 11th-century ewer was put up for sale by Lawrences auctioneers of Crewkerne, whose valuers failed to realise that it was among a handful of  rock crystal ewers surviving , placing it  among the rarest and most valuable objects in the Islamic art world.

The discovery recalls  the Yuan dynasty porcelain vase that withstood service as an umbrella standin a South London vestibule for two generations before being brought to Southeby's and sold for several million pounds in the '80s.

The last one to surface was bought by the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1862.in 1998, one of the five  extant shattered when dropped by a Florentine museum employee.

Shootin with Scruton

Roger Scruton fires off a New Statesman wine review :                                      Domaine Trapet, Gewürztraminer 2003

“We decided that the best use for this wine was as an aperitif, and we sipped it on the lawn, guns on our knees, as the magpies came in for the night. It is not easy to hit a magpie, and it took three glasses of Gewürztraminer before I managed it.

But the wine was a perfect accompaniment, and the sweet note of birdsong in its flavour reminded me of the benefit that I conferred on the songbirds, in killing this ruthless enemy. Only one enemy is worse, and that - the domestic cat - will require a bottle of something stronger.”

Always glad to oblige  Roger, though  I'm not sure about taking the peg next to him in case his loader's loaded too ; but with the next cat he bags , he might try

2003 Dry Creek Meritage incorporating Malbec into the blend adds additional layers to a  ripe black cherry start  on the nose and an oaky vanilla and  mocha finish ;bright currant and plum flavors lead to cigar box  notes. This  well-integrated wine should age beautifully for several years to come.

Nice change of pace from sloe gin .

 

The NR Counter-Evolution

The President's Classicist, Victor Davis Hanson, thinks the National Intelligence Estimate shows that Iran's inability to realize its nuclear ambitions is but one of the many fruits of our wise invasion of Mesopotamia.

As presumably is Libya's failure to send a manned mission to Mars. The scholarly world awaits Hanson's magisterial essay demonstrating that Xerxes turned tail on learning of Athens threat to weaponize Democritus' atomic theory.

Proof that intelligent prose still sprouts through the mould in National Review's in-box, comes from Charles Bork, a Yalie famed for following the Harvard salient for spring breaks in Afghanistan,  whose essay examining  the corellation of falling vemouth concentrations in Maritinis and  the decline of Western Civilization is a Must Read :
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjU2ZmNhNTU3ODdhNjA0NDk4ZDJmN2JhN2QzOWNhNmU=

It is not for the faint of heart, as it alludes to Ohio vermouth and Amish Gin, either calculated to reduce  waterboarding to the status of a Humanist sacramental. As a counterexample to this horror, out of duty to the Geneva Convention I must reveal a Swiss Secret of State--the 13th blade of the Swiss Navy Knife.

Devised by the death-dealing  Gnomes of Zurich, It is designed to remove pips from unpeeled beerenauslese grapes prior to their being immersed like olives in seven centiliters of supercooled Willamine Morand, or other echt birengeist .

Once the grape freezes and splits, the supernatant liquid is poured into a chilled martini glass, and served to a potential belligerent, who is thereby deterred without recourse to the fleet of  Helvetian Confederation nuclear missile submarines lurking in Lac Leman.

Finally,
National Review Online asks its assembled pundits : 

"There is rioting in Sudanese streets calling for the death of a woman over a teddy bear named Mohammed.

What can we in the West possibly do with this — nationally, individually? How do we help? What must we learn from it?"

TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT BEAR

The Vegan Wedge

Anthony Bourdain reports on the latest culinary minefield PETA has laid.

The Judgment Of Paris

In  a shoe-in for an IgNobel prize, Neuroscientists have found that a cardboard cutout of Paris Hilton has a painkilling effect on male mice. Science reports:

" the idea for the unconventional experiment arose when Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues noticed that male mice spent less time licking the site of a painful injection--indicating that they had less pain--when a scientist was present. To investigate whether it was the sight or smell of a human that caused the effect, the researchers acquired a promotional cardboard cutout of Hilton from her television show The Simple Life."

However, the ubiquity of cell phone screens nowadays makes it hard to find mice innocent of having seen a Ratatuoille trailer.

To eliminate comfort food reference cuing, the experimental design must be kicked up a notch. The Montreal study should be repeated with a cutout of the other Paris Hilton--the one with two Michellin forks, and a Ritz cracker box as controls.

Skip The Sharkfin Soup

Crave coquilles St. Jacques ?  Lovers of that baby seal of the shellfish world, the blue-eyed scallop, had better go easy on the shark fin soup, suggests a Science study by Ransom A. Myers et al of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It documents the cascading effects of top predator loss on a marine ecosystem. In this big fish-little fish story, absent  the large sharks , the smaller bottom feeding sharks, skates and rays multiply, and gobble up all the scrumptious shellfish before scallopers can..  1/30th of our friend, Argopecten Purpuratus

But Please Do Try The Calamari Special

The study focuses on one of these middle links in the food chain, the cownose ray, that growing abundant for lack of predation,  has wiped out scallop beds in North Carolina.“People are always asking me why we should care about sharks,” said Ellen Pikitch,executive director of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, who described the Science paper as a “classic,” in the search of similar effects, called trophic cascades.

Full disclosure : Having been zapped by a woefully unpredated 300 volt Torpedo ray in Vineyard Sound , I propose the Commonwealth cut Jaws a plea bargain if he'll lay off Massachusetts scallop divers and go after the Great Whitey Bulger instead.

SCARY CALAMARI

Last week New Zealand oceanographers netted the next best thing to a Sea Monster.

Though the Colossal Squid , Mesonychoteuthis is a shrimp compared to the critter in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea - the true Giant Squid , Architeuthys , the fresh-caught adult Colossal Squid  shown here  is still one very serious piece of sushi , though the wee beastie , a 10-meter-long, 1,000 pound  male , seems to have died of fright upon seeing its first human when hauled aboard a fishing boat off the New Zealand coast .

Just as well- swarms of the creatures have  been known to attack modern nuclear submarines as they cruise the abyss, using  parrot-like beaks to gouge five-inch holes in the  sonar-absorbing  tiles shrouding the stealthy subs hulls.  The Colossal Squid's  gigantic  cousin , Architeuthys, AKA  The Kraken , has been on Norway's most wanted list since 1240 , when one attacked a longship carrying the Bishop Of Oslo, whom the naughty creature apparently mistook for a smorgesbord  item.   

The creatures rediscovery may lead to a revival of a masterpiece of Carib-Eskimo fusion cuisine , jerk colossal squid en brochette , which until the advent of the pressure cooker,was prepared by Narwhals like this one  , trained to tenderize the rubbery delicacy in the superheated steam of abyssal black smokers .

Some ecologists eschew the dish , as an earlier reptile based version, the favorite of noted gourmand and explorer  Amerigo Vespucci  ,  shown below choosing his lunch , led to the Baroque dragon extinction as hungry tourists flooded the  Caribbean after The War of Jenkin's Ear.    Photo: AP /New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries