The GardenDespatches from The Satyrs’ Forest

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XLVII

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One hundred and thirty-seven

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137

My favourite number is 137. It’s an odd choice: when surveyed, the vast majority of those who have a favourite number say theirs is under twenty, let alone a hundred.1 But i have my reasons, starting with the fact that each digit alone is fascinating in its own right.

One needs no introduction, and can barely even be called a number in the traditional sense. It is both the building block from which every other number is built and the unmoving rock, the sole multiplicand that leaves any factor it touches unchanged. It is so fundamental that we barely think of it: if there is an apple in front of us on the table, we call it an apple, only invoking the numeral one if we might have been expecting two. More than that, it is τὸ Ἑν, the Monad, that from which all else flows forth; so sublime it is barely a thing, just as it is barely a number.

Three, on the other hand, is the magic number2, and it has a way of getting in our heads. The technical term is hendiatris — things just sound better in threes. Think véní, vídí, vící; wine, women, and song; or liberté, égalité, fraternité. And how many cultures around the world have some sort of threefold God, be it the Holy Trinity, the Hindu Trimurti, or Julian’s “Zeus, Haides, and Helios in one”?

Seven is where things get interesting. For once i’ll dispense with the cultural and metaphysical aspects — it’s been done — and note a curious thing about our human number sense. If there are, say, four cows in a field, we can look and instinctually know that there are four cows, without needing to consciously count. Five and six are doable, but difficult, and vary based on age and person.3 But seven is where this sense breaks down. Beyond that barrier, we lose our intuitive animal sense, and we have to actually count. Seven is the number that sets us apart from the animals; if one and three are the numbers of the Gods, then seven belongs to humanity.

So, what do you get if you smush those three digits together? By some sheer coincidence, the most famous number in physics. The number 137 is, give or take a few hundredths4, the value of the fine-structure constant, one of the universe’s fundamental, unchanging values as etched into the standard model of particles. Nobody really knows why it has the value it has; as Richard Feynman once said, “It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than [a hundred] years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.” (Worry they did: Wolfgang Pauli, the first man to theorise the neutrino, spent much time deliberating with Carl Jung on how this godforsaken 137 had wormed its way into the universe’s code, and why it might have done so.)

So, that’s why 137 is my favourite number. A remarkable figure, you might say.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XLVI

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Death of a Unicorn is okay, but i wish it were better

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A mediĂŚval tapestry of a unicorn in captivity
Pictured: what the main characters would have done if they were not pro-cancer

Yesterday i went to the cinema to go watch Death of a Unicorn, A24’s new one-horned horror-comedy-thing. I could have reviewed it in prose, but i’ve elected to leave my thoughts in bullet-point form, as there’s a lot good, a lot bad, and not much conjoining the two in my mind.

The good

  • I appreciate that this movie is wholly unapologetic about being about a unicorn. No tongue in cheek, just, yep, that’s a mythical unicorn, we’re fucking rolling with it.
  • The design of the titular beast is also great, majestic but capable of being a horror monster when it needs to be. The decision to keep the legendary unicorn’s beard rather than shave it off (as has become common under the influence of My Little Pony) is commendable.
  • Richard E. Grant and Will Poulter are great in it, and are the only ones who seem to have understood the assignment in terms of going buck-wild with their performances.

The bad

  • The well of “films that are satires about the faux-progressive 2020s nouveau riche and how they’re all stupid dum-dums” has run well and truly dry — that this is a film literally about beating a dead horse doesn’t help. It could have at least had the dignity to come out before Glass Onion dealt the finishing blow.
  • For a film that was marketed as a ridiculous, bonkers horror-comedy in the vein of Evil Dead II, it’s not actually that funny. I chuckled a few times but… that’s it, really; it never veers off that cliff into complete insanity like i was hoping it would.
  • The portrayal of the visions given by the unicorn was boring as shit. Infinite ways you could show the sight of the transcendental, and you pick CGI nebulĂŚ and stars? What is this, Guardians of the Galaxy?
  • [peter_griffin_godfather.webm] I did not care for Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega. Their performances are nothing. Their characters are nothing. They insist upon themselves.

The neutral observation

  • The fatal flaw is that the evil plan made a little too much sense. Like — actually, yeah, you’re right! I think once you’ve established that (a) the unicorn’s blood cures cancer and (b) the unicorn can heal itself, you do, in fact, have a utilitarian obligation to bring this stuff to market. Maybe not with the methods the evil pharma family use, but still.

TL;DR: 5/10.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XLV

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Two large white wolf puppies
Neo-dire-wolf puppy pics Š Colossal

Stuff i watched recently, April ’25

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The posters for “Jackie Brown”, „Spoorloos”, “The Monkey”, “Quiz Show”, “The Mist”, “The Blues Brothers”, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, “Severance”, “Flow”, and „Felidæ“.

Jackie Brown

What a great flick! My beef with Tarantino is that you can often tell that, just behind the camera, he’s jacking off at the thought of how clever he is and how many obscure seventies TV shows he knows, and while that’s still true here, the electric pairing of Pam Grier and Robert Forster washes all those eye-rolling feelings down until you’re left with the aftertaste of nothing but a good-ass crime thriller. 8/10 — my Tarantino power ranking goes something like Inglourious Basterds > this > Pulp Fiction > Django Unchained >>> Reservoir Dogs.

Spoorloos (The Vanishing)

This grim Dutch crime thriller is consistently mentioned alongside Paul Verhoeven as proof that “see? Dutch cinema isn’t all bad”, which is something you could almost convince me of if it weren’t for every top-five list’s inclusion of a film about an evil lift.

Anyway, while Spoorloos does occasionally veer uncomfortably close to “TV movie of the week” territory, it’s carried by its villain, an exemplar of the banality of evil. He does what he does because he’s experienced being a hero, and he’s just curious what it feels like to be a villain — and that’s what makes him fucking terrifying. Check this out if you get the chance. 7/10.

The Monkey

Osgood Perkins returns right soon with another horror endeavour, this time a gory comedy about an evil cuddly monkey. The Monkey doesn’t reach the highs of fear and tension that Longlegs does, but neither does it completely bottle the ending, so let’s call it a draw, shall we? 6¾/10.

Quiz Show

I put this on on a lazy afternoon. I was suitably entertained. I remember nothing from it. A platonically perfect 5/10.

The Mist (rewatch)

The Twelve Angry Men of horror puts modern (well, 2000s) American society up against a mirror and examines how people would really react to a mass calamity in a way that hits different in the post-covid era, where everyone’s brain has had time to cook in the sun. Plus: the cruelest twist ending in cinematic history. 8/10.

The Blues Brothers

Dan Aykroyd is an actual crazy person and that’s why The Blues Brothers works. This is two-and-a-half hours of overindulgent insanity, the cinematic equivalent of a five-year-old playing with their toys, and i wouldn’t want it any other way. I nearly had an asthma attack laughing so hard. 10/10.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Warm. Fuzzy. Inessential. It’s weird seeing Adam Scott with a beard. 6/10.

Severance (season 2 finale)

The back half of Severance’s sophomore season fell victim to some shonky pacing decisions, placing two self-contained, slow-paced bottle episodes right before the final two, messing up the flow we were in and negating the chance for an epic Season 1-style three-episode ramp-up, but nonetheless, the double-length finale successfully sticks the landing. The camcorder conversation, where Mark’s innie and outie finally “meet”, may as well be what the whole show has been building up to, and it just keeps going from there. Every company needs a Choreography and Merriment department. 9/10.

Flow

The first part of a feline double feature, about an adorable black kitty who goes on a maritime journey after the world is inundated by a mysterious flood. The gimmick (if you can call it that) is that the film is told without a single line of dialogue — just animal noises and a backing of beautiful C418-esque music composed by the film’s director.

It’s a beautiful, serene, lovely experience — all animated in good ol’ open-source Blender, no less! It got me to really feel things for these animals — it was a good idea to dial the anthropomorphism down to, like, 10%, rather than 75%. They’re intelligent enough to steer a boat, but that’s about it. The kibby bats around a lemur’s tail and hates dogs. 9/10.

FelidĂŚ

The second part of the double feature: Felidæ1, a 1994 German film about… okay. Okay. Look. Bear with me here. The idea is that it’s a film noir except everybody is a cartoon housecat. And for the first twenty minutes or so, i was thinking, okay, that’s a nice idea, but i don’t know if it has much more than that idea? And then it goes full-tilt into Crazytown. This movie contains, in no particular order:

  • Cat buttholes
  • Cat sex
  • Cat homophobia
  • Cat eugenics
  • Cats speaking Latin
  • Cats reading German
  • Cats using a computer
  • Cat murder
  • So much gory cat murder
  • An electroshock cat cult
  • Genetically engineered lab cats
  • A cat psychopomp who takes care of the cat dead in his cat catacombs
  • A dream sequence involving a giant evil Gregor Mendel commanding a literal sea of dead cats

And it’s all done in the animation style of an eighties-nineties-type Disney film (with some budgetary concessions and dodgy lip-synch, because, hey, nobody’s actually going to watch this). It reminded me, weirdly enough, of an old Garfield cartoon i watched as a kid — the one where he had nine lives, specifically that segment where he was an escaped lab cat. I have only the haziest memory of it, but damned if it (and the annoying-ass little girl in the Garf-den of Eden) didn’t stick with me…

I don’t know who the fuck the audience for this is other than furries and sicko Europeans, but i fucking love that it exists. I’m gonna be thinking about it forever, whether i want to or not. All hail Claudandus? 9/10.

I’ll elaborate properly on getting around to the bimensal stuff-i-watched-recently post, but for now, you should absolutely go and watch Flow and Felidæ right now. Two films about cats: one beautiful and serene, one weird and deranged. Go do it. They’re great.

A trip to Washington Wetland Centre

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Washington1, a town in urban County Durham long since incorporated into Sunderland, is not a place where one expects much nature. The palatinate’s chirping woods and rolling Pennine moors are not so far away, and the path i took to get to today’s attraction led not through winding country roads but broad, grey industrial arteries, designed to ferry thousands to and from Nissan’s immense factory.

But at the end of the road, down by the river Wear, there lies a wee patch of idyll: the Washington Wetland Centre.

A reedy wetland, the Penshaw Monument clearly visible on a hill in the distance.
On a hilltop in the distance: the previously covered Penshaw Monument.

I’d come on a good day for it, clearly, as the first thing i saw coming out of reception was the staff corralling all the ducks together for their annual vaccination, by means of a ramshackle assemblage of mesh fences. (Crowd control for birds!) The littlest one kept trying to escape his jab like an ornithological Bobby Kennedy.

Most fabulous of all creatures of the air on offer are the eiders, the diva-est ducks in the world, emitting a chorus of sassy coos as they revel in their status as undisputed kings of the pond. (You’ll have to take my word for it, as i neglected to take a video, erring towards the side of it being better to live in the moment than through a phone camera. I was yet to realise what good blog-fodder the visit would make.)

A grey squirrel being all cute
As apologies for the lack of Eider Content, please accept this invasive rodent instead.

On the other side of the preserve a viewing area juts out to overlook the Wear — still salty and tidal this close to the sea — and an artificial saline lagoon, built to provide a home for those creatures who prefer a more brackish milieu. The signs tell me that, rare as they historically have been, more and more European otters have made their home along the wear, and the lucky visitor might hope to see one… if only the centre were open at dawn or at dusk, when they come out.

Two otters embracing on a little wall over a pond
Sign with a drawing of an otter saying “I may bite”
The sign’s not joking — Asian small-claweds’ bite force is enough to break your bones.

Not to worry, for the centre are also very proud of their main mammal enclosure: a family of utterly2 adorable Asian small-clawed otters. They’re a lot less squeaky than the ones at Northumberland Zoo, and wondering why, two theories popped into my head.

First, that it’s the Northumbrians’ fault. Their northern sibs were greater in number, a family of four to Durham’s two, and they were, by all accounts, masters of putting on a show. They appeared in an orderly fashion when their circadian rhythms told them it was feeding time, pipped and squeaked incessantly at the keeper until they got their fish, performed some cuteness, and then went back inside when their bellies were full. They knew exactly what they were doing, methinks.

Second, that the Washingtonian otters were grieving. I said there were two, the younger Buster and the elder Musa, and you might be hard-pressed to call that a family. But until this month, there were three. Mimi, the clan’s matriarch and a scamp who bonked so much they had to give her a lutrine IUD, passed of old age at fourteen (a good innings by her species’ standards, no doubt). When she went, they had to put her corpse back in the enclosure so the others would understand.

An otter looking out from the top of his castle

They were still otters. Still playful. But something about them seemed… morose. Maybe, in between the fish and the scampering and the puzzle feeders, they were still thinking about her.

On the way out, i passed a tiny observatory, cleverly named “Cygnus” for the constellation of the swan, used by night for the Sunderland Astronomical Society. I don’t know if it’s of much use this far into the zone of light pollution, but they certainly seem to enjoy it, so perhaps my relatively sky-privileged Northumbrian self shouldn’t play the lecturer. Perhaps that fateful night that Mimi died, a star in the sky began to twinkle a little brighter.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XLIV

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I saw this Welsh-language quartet live at a teeny-tiny venue on the Ouseburn the other week. They were pretty great!

I live in mortal fear that one day i’ll mess the Roman numerals up and wipe out the last link roundup by mistake. Anyway—

Filtered for surnames

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(With apologies to Interconnected for the title format.)

I found out from a chain of comments on the venerable Language Hat that the Jewish surnames Katz, Matz, and Schatz were all originally acronyms.

Katz comes from כוהן צדק kohen tsedek “righteous priest” — you’ll of course recognise kohen as the origin of the surname Cohen, denoting Judaism’s paternal priestly lineage.1

Matz is similarly derived from מורה צדק more tsedek, meaning “teacher of righteousness”, and Schatz, the odd one out, comes from שליח ציבור shaliaẖ tsibur, referring to a cantor, though more literally translated as “emissary of the congregation”.

Meanwhile, in the Russian Empire, bastard children would often have their surnames symbolically clipped just so noĂśne went around thinking they had anything to do with their aristocratic fathers. Thus Ivan Pnin was the son of Nikolaj Repnin, and Elizabeta TĂŤmkina was the daughter of Grigorij PotĂŤmkin.

This isn’t a surname, but by all accounts it isn’t a given name either, and once you’ve noticed it, you’ll never be able to unsee it. The name Jebediah does not exist. Jedediah was a very real Biblical figure after whom many a son has been named, but there’s no variant of any real-life person being named Jebediah with a B. (I know what you’re thinking — but, nope, Jeb Bush’s name is… an acronym, again, for John Ellis Bush.)

There’s this weird inconsistency in English in how we treat the names of people from cultures where the surname comes first. Chinese and Korean people usually keep the original order: Qian Xuesen and Bong Joon-ho are indeed from the families Qian and Bong, and it would be quite the faux pas to refer to “Mr Joon-ho”.

Japanese names are less consistent — traditionally they’ve been flipped to conform to the English order, so Hayao Miyazaki was born to a Mr and Mrs Miyazaki, but the trend in recent times has been to restore them to the original order, such that the former foreign secretary officially styles himself as Kōno Tarō, born to Kōno Yōhei.

Then, at the bottom of the ladder, there sits Hungary, whose names are so European-sounding and so universally reordered that most people don’t even realise that, in his home country, the prime minister is called Orbán Viktor. (This gets even more confusing with middle names — the mayor of Budapest, known elsewhere as Gergely Szilveszter Karácsony, is natively Karácsony Gergely Szilveszter, his given name nestled squarely in the middle!)

One last onomastic oddity. In olden days, the capital letter F was written as if double struck, looking like two lowercase f’s put side-by-side. This was copied and copied and misread over and over again until it became the case that some particularly snooty English surnames were properly spelt to begin in lowercase — such as in the cases of Gonville ffrench-Beytagh and Charles ffoulkes. Truly, the irregularities of our language’s orthography know no bounds.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XLIII

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