Cultrface – a blog dedicated to culture and how it enriches our lives.

Special Drawing Rights (SDR): worth its weight in gold

Something I learnt about the other day was the Special Drawing Rights, or SDR. It’s an international reserve asset that countries can exchange for currency and its value is a combination of five other currencies:

  • the US dollar (USD)
  • the euro (EUR)
  • the Chinese yuan or renminbi (CN¥)
  • the Japanese yen (JP¥)
  • the British pound sterling (GBP)

The IMF created the SDR in 1969 and set its value as the fractional amount of gold equivalent to one US dollar. In 1973, this changed to the equivalent of the pooled world currencies (as above).

For more info on the SDR and its exact value, check out the IMF’s factsheet.

For Atlas Obscura, Natalie Zarrelli wrote about the infamous ‘crying boy’ paintings from the ’80s that allegedly caused fires in the UK. This was before I was born but I remember hearing about it years later and the moral panic it caused, fuelled by The Sun (scumbags).

On September 4, 1985, British tabloid The Sun published “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy Picture!” a story about a very unlucky painting that caused fires, supported the comments of a local fire station officer. These paintings, the firefighter said, turned up mysteriously unscathed in fires across the U.K., all of which started spontaneously. It was well-known; he would never think of owning this cursed painting himself. “The couple had laughed off warnings” that their painting was cursed, wrote The Sun. Let all other heed the warning, and get rid of their own giant paintings of crying children immediately.

The article goes into who painted these crying boys, as there was a lot of misinformation about the artist’s identity, and why they survived the fires that they were in (spoiler alert: they weren’t supernaturally fire resistant).

Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

An excerpt from “Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem” by Maya Angelou

Hot toddy apple cider recipe

I found this hot toddy apple cider recipe by Brandi Crawford which sounds perfect for the Christmas period.

Ingredients

  • Liquor (whiskey, rum, tequila, brandy, or cognac)
  • Tea bags
  • Apple cider
  • Lemons
  • Cinnamon

The recipe makes enough for 5 cups, takes just 10 minutes to make, and there’s plenty of variation in terms of ingredients. Make your hot toddy your own!

I found this blog post by Zeeslag listing 5 underrated Christmas movies. The last one was Die Hard so it’s really 4 underrated Christmas movies but I’m tempted to watch them—dw I’ll be watching Die Hard on 24th December! (via wiby.org)

Tom Hanks is the film voice of Woody from Toy Story but his brother Jim does Woody’s voice in pretty much everything else. In an interview with Jace Diehl, he discussed his career and journey with the character.

Xanthippe: the "ill-tempered" wife of Socrates

I discovered a word on Futility Closet the other day: Xantippish. Looking the word up led me to Xanthippe, Socrates wife and apparently an ill-tempered one:

In Xenophon’s Symposium, she is described by Antisthenes as “the most difficult, harshest, painful, ill-tempered” wife; this characterisation of Xanthippe has influenced all subsequent portrayals of her.

Saxonhouse, Arlene (2018). “Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse”. Hypatia. 33 (4). JSTOR 45153718.

Unfortunately, because all scholars are men and they’re never questioned, that characterisation has stuck and been embellished. Seeing as Medusa had the same treatment, I’m always skeptical of depictions of women from Ancient Greek history. But it appears that I wasn’t alone as poet and critic Robert Graves suggested in an essay that the stereotype was based on the old ideology that men acted with their head and women acted with their hearts and so rationality and the patriarchy won that round:

[…] Sweet reasonableness was wanting in Socrates: ‘So long as I breathe,’ he declared, ‘I will never stop philosophizing!’ His homosexual leanings, his absent-minded behaviour, his idleness, and his love of proving everyone wrong, would have endeared him to no wife of mettle. Yet Xanthippe is still pilloried as a shrew who could not understand her husband’s spiritual greatness; and Socrates is still regarded as a saint because he patiently bore with her reproaches.

Let me break a lance for Xanthippe. Her intuitions were sound. She foresaw that his metaphysical theories would bring the family into public disgrace and endanger the equipoise of the world she knew. Whenever the rational male intellect asserts itself at the expense of simple faith, natural feeling and sweet reasonableness, there follows a decline in the status of women who then figure in statistics merely as child-bearers and sexual conveniences to men; and a decline in the status of poets who cannot be given any effective social recognition; also an immediate increase in wars, crime, mental ill-health and physical excess.

Graves, R. (1960). The Case for Xanthippe. The Kenyon Review, 22(4), 597–605. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4334072

So to Xanthippe, I saw she was perhaps long-suffering and doing her best with a possibly frustrating man who had gay affairs. I’d probably do more than pour a jug of water over his head.

Right to light

This week, I found out about a concept called “right to light”:

Right to light is a form of easement in English law that gives a long-standing owner of a building with windows a right to maintain an adequate level of illumination. The right was traditionally known as the doctrine of “ancient lights”. A right to light can also be granted expressly by deed, or granted implicitly, for example under the rule in Wheeldon v. Burrows (1879).

via Wikipedia

This sounds quintessentially British and then I discovered that it had serious ramifications for the BBC when building their HQ in London:

The site of Broadcasting House was initially to be developed as what were described as “high-class residential flats”, however the location was perfect for the BBC. It offered a central London location, close to multiple transport links, and with just enough space to construct a new building.

The owners of the site agreed to build the BBC’s new centre and offered a long lease, however the BBC purchased the site before the building opened.

The site was of some size, but was strangely shaped, with a long curved section along Portland Place. The building was limited in height as there were a couple of nearby buildings that had their right to light protected under the custom of “ancient lights”.

via A London Inheritance

TIL: Q-Tips used to be called Baby Gays

I fell down a rabbit hole yesterday looking up cotton swabs, leading me to Q-Tips—and their original name:

A Baby Gay swab was practically different from the Q-Tip we know today. For one, each swab was made by hand. Workers wrapped cotton around a wood stick (usually one side) and moved on to the next one. After that, the cotton was sanitized in a small amount of boric acid. As an ad from 1927 brags, the “boric tipped” swabs were great for babies’ ears, noses, and nostrils.

Phil Edwards

The man behind Baby Gays was a Polish-American inventor named Leo Gerstenzang. Apparently, a woman named Mrs. Hazel Tietjen Forbis owned a patent for a “cotton tipped applicator” before Gerstenzang, and sold the product under the name Baby Nose-Gay. Then, in 1937, Gerstenzang and his wife bought everything from Mrs Forbis including the patent.1 So much for competition!

  1. via Wikipedia ↩︎