Scarabs battle for possession of a ball of dung
Photographer Cornelia Clarke was in the right place at the right time, capturing this grim struggle between two beetles, each intent on gaining sole ownership of a dung ball. (Via Goof Button)
Photographer Cornelia Clarke was in the right place at the right time, capturing this grim struggle between two beetles, each intent on gaining sole ownership of a dung ball. (Via Goof Button)
the latest
latest episodes
Allegory for the Gaza strip?
Ah, finally: an appropriate metaphor for the troubles in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
I always thought of it as two madman in a burning house clubbing each other with babies.
That's some important shit.
This is pretty much how any advanced alien civilization we encounter is going to view us. Just keep that in mind.
mmmmmmmmm. delicious dung.
I saw a lot of images of this struggle last year...
http://tinyurl.com/9dqfub
Looks as though it might have been posed using dead insects.
More recent study of scarabs indicates that while this pose is typical of what is observed in the wild that it represents two-parent collaboration (bringin food fer the youngsters)rather than a struggle.
also about scarabs
http://www.empiresnafu.org/character/charpic/scarabs3.html
how could they have seen the sun in a ball of dung?
These beetles are doing my job!
Tak: new scarab life emerges from the ball of shit buried by the beetle: the sun is a symbol of resurrection, reborn after being buried each night.
but it's not shiny!
Not only that, but because the dung beetle in Middle Egyptian is called "k-f-r" (we don't know the vowels), and the word for the verb 'evolve' is also "k-f-r" (presumably with different vowels),the dung beetle (or scarab) is an Egyptian symbol of evolution (in the sense of spiritual growth), which is why it's a common pendant, whether made of faience or solid gold.
Given the sacredness of the scarab as a symbol, I prefer Takuan's metaphor for Gaza. Brilliantly evokes the despair with which I and most people I know view that conflict.
Noen 4: This is pretty much how any advanced alien civilization we encounter is going to view us. Just keep that in mind.
I agree, except that I think any advanced alien civilization would avoid us like the plague we are, and we never will encounter them. We're more likely (though still pretty unlikely) to encounter an extremely primitive civilization (much like our own) with advanced technology, and they will simply wipe us out as we would poison ants.
Re: #12 Xopher,
Wow.
Those Egyptian moderators must of gone crazy on the devoweling.
oh no, they hadn't invented vowels yet. No, the moderators back them just threw your soul to the crocodiles of the Underworld, there to be rended and befouled for all eternity.
Well tak IIRC the Egyptians did not think of light as rays entering the eyes; they thought that the eyes sent out projections , or emanations, to see the world. So while 'shininess' for us is an attribute purely of the object perceived, for the Egyptians, in some sense, the eye participated in creating that "shininess"; that is, the attribute was at least partially created by the seeing eye itself.
It is difficult to appreciate the world as it appeared pre-science, in our scientific age.
MIDDLE EGYPTIAN COMMENTER: Yeah, so count yer blessins, you gang of complainers! In my day the mods didn't let us write ANY vowels, no matter how civil we were! Why, even if we were civil ENGINEERS we still couldn't write vowels!
ANCIENT SUMERIAN COMMENTER: No vowels? That's nothing! At least you had different symbols! What'd we have, you ask? Wedges. Nothin' but bloody damn wedges. You know how hard it is to write "Fill my holy churn with honey cheese" with nothing but WEDGES?!?!?
ÇATAL HÜYÜKIAN COMMENTER:
MIDDLE EGYPTIAN COMMENTER: What's that you say? Couldn't quite read it.
ANCIENT SUMERIAN COMMENTER: Neither could he!
exeunt MEC and ASC laughing
ÇATAL HÜYÜKIAN COMMENTER (smugly):
exit
#7 - Yeah, I've seen this before and your explanation is what I was thinking, too.
LOL, Xopher! Got me.
(LOL also means Lots Of Luck for what's coming up.)
@takuan: a spoonful of dung weighs a ton?
Aton?
Xopher @ 17, classic :)
Xopher, you're the shit!
Buddy66, Arkizzle, FoetusNail, thank you.
Now I must beetle off home.
flees
Humanity has no hope.
It's a good allegory for pretty much every argument ever played-out online. Every war. Every petty, bickering situation. Most of life, really.
Very dead, very beat up. Their little tibias and tarsi gone, broken off who knows where. They are hardly posed, more like propped up on their little stumps.
You can post insects when they are freshly dead, but not when they are dried out. You can freeze them and pose them when you thaw them out.
Hoo boy, now the sea kitten people are going to come after me. They probably want to give scarab beetles a PR makeover too and call them.....
..... turd bunnies.
belatedly: OW!
I like turd bunnies. Wanna come over tonight and gut,behead and broil some sea kittens?
"Photographer Cornelia Clarke was in the right place at the right time..."
Others have pointed out that the beetles look pretty dead, but my first thought was "Right place at the right time? In front of a white infinity wall? What are the odds of that happening in nature?"
Sea kittens, wow. Just looked that up.
Hey, if they do, Pipenta...well, let's just say there's lots of candy in those people, and none of us is blindfolded.
Kafkaesque and Sisyphean
we got 'em in our front yard. they look like they are made of green chrome with little diamonds on the carapace. just rollin the dog poop across the lawn. truly surreal.
Well, considering that this dungball is what will nurture their respective children, I don't quite see how this holds up as a metaphor for the troubles in Gaza. Any parent would, I presume, fight furiously if the stake was their children starving to death.
Also, related to the Egyptian vowel-thing. In Semittic languages, the roots of words concists in principle of three consonants, for instance k-t-b, which are in any word having to do with writing.
Inflection and derivation is done by subtituting the vowels - katab (writing), kataba (he has written), mektu:b (it is written), ka:tab (write to), kita:b (book), kutub (books), etc.
Very interesting :)
what's brown and sounds like a bell?
dung.
Kari
" I don't quite see how this holds up as a metaphor for the troubles in Gaza."
"Any parent would, I presume, fight furiously if the stake was their children starving to death."
No, I think you've got it exactly.
Kari, yes, and just as verbs in English have suffixes (walked) and occasionally preemptive infixes (sang) for tense and person etc., Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic) have these interfixes (discontinuous affixes*) for various word-forms.
(One of my friends in college did his Masters thesis on "A Stratificational Analysis of Interfixation in Amharic," which is why I know these arcanities.) Which Semitic language are your examples drawn from, btw? I know some things about them but don't actually speak any.
I think ME is in the Semitic language family, but I'm not sure. I'll have to look it up when I get home. It's interesting to me that the German word for 'beetle' is 'Käfer' - looks like a borrowing to me, but the history seems dubious.
Arkizzle, the problem with that metaphor is that these two kfrs are cooperating to get the children fed. If instead they killed each other and destroyed all the food, that would be a little more apt.
___
*general case of 'prefix', 'infix', 'suffix', as 'sibling' is of 'brother' and 'sister'
Xopher, actually because it's in black & white you can't see their opposing gang colours.
Or their miniature carapace-mounted lasers.
(IOW: touché)
A Metaphor for consumerism was my first reaction.
Hmm, Kari, on second thought it's different from the Semitic model, because the relationship in consonants doesn't mean things are related in meaning at all. I'd expect such a relationship if the consonants were verb stems as in Semitic languages.
For example, the three-group 'j-n-kh' (where j just means "this syllable starts with a vowel") is spelled with a stylized drawing of a sandal strap; the word for 'sandal strap' has the same consonants as the word for 'life', so the picture of a sandal strap is also the way you write 'life'; people wear this and call it an "ankh." There's no special relationship between life and a sandal strap; the words just happen to have the same consonants. If it were a verb stem, it would have to be a verb meaning "to live and/or be a sandal strap" or something!
Tak,
Sounds great! I'll bring over some dirt kittens so we can french fry them and have sea kittens and chips.
What's ÇATAL HÜYÜKIAN it doesn't Google* and I've no idea how to search around it.
*Well it does, but it comes back here.
Belonging to Çatal Hüyük. It's variously spelled. Here's the Wikipedia page. A neolithic site where the people apparently had a sophisticated culture with religion and art, but hadn't (as far as I know) invented writing. It dates from c. 7500 BCE, which puts it right around when humans were starting to do agriculture on a scale bigger than gardening.
The most interesting thing about it is that social status does not appear to have been dependent on gender, in either direction.
Thanks Xopher, now the other thickies like me can laugh and pretend they knew what they were laughing at all along :)
I did guess it was a pre/none literate Culture though.
(Plus I get to feel smug as I already knew about the Se Kitten thing :p )
hey some news about Scarabs! Link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7840404.stm
Something new under the sun?
it'd soon be another crummy horror flick except Scorpion King covered it already.