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Dr. Lynette Davidson writes a great article, What do Templars, the Jesus Family and DaVinci have to do with Nazis?, about how bad history, even fictionalized, has real consequences.

But do Knight’s Templar, as seen in their heyday and in the 1930’s, suffer?

Does DaVinci’s Last Supper suffer from being repainted, or from modern interpretations?  The artwork at the top is

“A life sized rendering of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper constructed from 20,736 spools of thread strung onto aluminum ball chain. When seen with the aid of optical devices, the spools of thread coalesce into realistic images of Christ and his disciples.”

Below is the repaired version along with a detail showing before and after of JohnMary.  The third picture is an ad showing a sacred feminine version that was banned in Milan.

As for albinos, Karen Jordan, Lexi’s mom, says this about the stereotypical depiction of albinos in books and movies:

One more evil albino makes things just a little harder for my daughter and many others.

Incidentally, athough albinos usually do have some vision impairment, their eyes are only red, like everyone else’s, in flash pictures.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is the fear that 666 is the number of the Devil.  Aside Revelations 13, there are some peculiar theories as to the origin of the number.  June 6, 1666 was a good day for that old time blogger, Samuel Pepys, because of English victories at sea over the Dutch.  In part he wrote:

Up betimes, and vexed with my people for having a key taken out of the chamber doors and nobody knew where it was, as also with my boy for not being ready as soon as I, though I called him, whereupon I boxed him soundly, and  then to my business at the office and on the Victualling Office, and thence by water to St. James’s, whither he [the Duke of York] is now gone, it being a monthly fast-day for the plague. … Mightily pleased with this happy day’s newes, and the more, because confirmed by Sir Daniel Harvy,  who was in the whole fight with the Generall, and tells me that there appear but thirty-six in all of the Dutch fleete left at the end of the voyage when they run home.  The joy of the City was this night exceeding great.

September 2 that year was a bad day, as the Great Fire of 1666 burned down medieval London.  Pepys wrote:

Spirals of great fire and flame lept forth from every chimney and London was left but a ruin.

The fire smoldered until March of 1667.  On the bright side, the Great Fire did end the previous year’s plague and made way for the great architectural works of Christopher Wren.

Speaking of fire and history, today is the aniversary of D-Day, “The End of the Beginning” of Hitler’s Nazis, in 1944, and the shooting of James Meredith, the first black man to attend the University of Mississippi, in 1966.

Guess which book I’m reading!  There is a lot of mumbo jumbo about the golden ratio (Φ) in the book, so I think it is interesting that the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre is ~4% too wide in aspect – compare first Mona above to “Φ ratio-ed” second.  The third Mona is a contempory’s copy of the original, showing the original original may have been wider yet – note columns on sides - a full ~31% too wide for Φ.

The three Mona Lisa variations to the right of the pentagram are: Dali’s self-portrait, my favorite – check out the 30(?) pieces of silver he/she is holding in his/her hand;  MAD Magazine cover art;  and an eye test.  Can you see what’s wrong with the last Mona, aside from the obvious?

On April 6, 1906, 12 days before the San Francisco earthquake, cartoonist James Stuart Blackton and Thomas Edison released the first animation – a film of a man puffing cigar smoke while his sweetheart rolled her eyes in disapproval, a dog jumping through a hoop, and a juggler. They used Edison’s newly invented Kinestoscope (which Edison had patented the same year, 1897, as the phonograph ), and called the film The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. Blackton had studied Edweard Muybridge’s pioneering sequential photographs for inspiration.

You can study the book, Animation, The Whole Story by Howard Beckerman , animation professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Or you can read all kinds of stuff , the blog of Ren Hoek and Stimpson J. Cat creator and animator extraordinare John Kricfalusi (pronounced like my name, ‘JohnK’ :-O, he also happens to be of Hungarian origin, though he was born in Canada – ‘falusi’ means ‘from the town of’ and ’s’ is pronounced ’sh’ in Hungarian).

Ren was fashioned after Hungarian actor Peter Lorre , an inspiration for many cartoons (see Tex Avery’s wonderful rendition). During the Hayes Commission investigation of the late 40s, Lorre was asked to name anyone suspicious he had met since coming to the United States. Lorre responded with a list of everyone he knew. As a young man in Vienna, Lorre was a student of Sigmund Freud. Alice was a student of Sophie Freud, Sigmund’s granddaughter.

Best known for his books popularizing science, including the fun “Mr. Tompkins” series and the terrific One, Two, Three…Infinity (I have them all – I am a Gamow book collector!), George Gamow, in 1928 explained radioactive decay, in the 30s, after defecting from the Soviet Union (successfully after 2 failed attempts by kayak!), created what became known as the  “Gamow factor” which explains how fusion is possible, in 1948 published the famous science joke (its history can be found here) quantifying the processes that formed the Big Bang, and later predicting the Cosmological Background Radiation 17 years before it was discovered, and, for grins, in 1954 formed the RNA Tie Club and proposed how to crack the genetic code by using triplets of nucleotides.  Obviously an overachiever.

His son, Igor, an iconoclastic inventor, was fired from a University position  under strange circumstances, and has a movie about it on his website.

Born on this day in 1564, Galileo Galilei (more) published his Starry Messenger in 1610, in which he used his newly perfected telescope to discover, among other things, the ‘Medicean stars‘ (new revisionist book on Galileo’s rise and fall), or, as we know them, the Galilean Moons.  

In the history of science, the Starry Messenger:

• provided the first direct evidence that not everything orbited the Earth (geocentricity),
• provided an explanation for the retrograde motion of the planets, and
• indicted that a theory of Copernicus might be correct. 

It took only 346 years for the Catholic Church to apologize for persecuting him (‘The Galileo Affair‘) – I guess science and religion can coexist in the long run. 

Speculation & Spoiler Alert - don’t go here if you haven’t read HBP.