Fuel injection cutoffs and chrome plated rods

[austin_dern]

Quirky news from Singapore: the mer-lion of Merlion Park has reopened. It'd been closed after taking a lightning strike the last day of February. Now, this isn't the Sentosa Island mer-lion, the ten-storey tall statue that's out in the open and has a nest of wires poking out of its head and shoots lasers from its eyes at night. Instead it's the maybe three-storey tall statue a little west of the southern end of the Singapore River, at the end of the business district with its many skyscrapers and not quite near the Port with its containerized cargo cranes, which up until the lightning strike sprayed a jet of water out of its mouth into the straits. (It's also not the smaller still mer-lion statue which I initially thought it was, which sprays a smaller stream of water and faces opposite the primary Merlion Park mer-lion.)

As far as the Tourism Board can tell this was the first time since the statue was inaugurated in 1972 that it was damaged by lightning, and they note that it was built as a sculpture and didn't have a lightning conductor. Well, it's an understandable oversight. They're working on ways to keep this from happening again. Still, as of the 18th it's back to its important work of spraying water and being photographed so I suppose the immediate situation is under control.

Trivia: Henry Morton Stanley, finder of David Livingstone, was born John Rowland. Source: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Niall Ferguson.

Currently Reading: The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale Of Battling The Smallpox Epidemic, Jennifer Lee Carrell. This is better than David Galerntner's 1939, in that while it presents scenes complete with dialogue and even personal thoughts at least, according to the endnotes, it keeps to stuff that the people involved actually wrote about around the time. It's still aggravating, particularly to find that a dramatically great encounter to climax the book, ah, well, there's not actually any documentary evidence to say whether or not it did happen. Don't you writers realize this sort of thing beats credibility to a small, gelatinous goo and makes the remarkable stuff harder to believe happen?

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

My first exposure to the Mer-lion was when I got it as an item in the original Animal Crossing. I had to go online to find out what it was. There was a series of miniature versions of world landmarks you could get, and I ended up getting several of them. The Mer-lion was always my favorite, and I proudly displayed it in my house. It had water running out of its mouth, which somehow miraculously disappeared when it hit the floor.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, the Animal Crossing merlion, yes. I remember your talking about it and to have it spraying mysterious water is just so fitting.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

It's still aggravating, particularly to find that a dramatically great encounter to climax the book, ah, well, there's not actually any documentary evidence to say whether or not it did happen. Don't you writers realize this sort of thing beats credibility to a small, gelatinous goo and makes the remarkable stuff harder to believe happen?

I honestly believe that if you brought that up among a lay audience these days, most people wouldn't understand the objection. Truth is no longer understood in terms of objective reality. Truth is now verified by the sincerity of one's belief.

The limits of documentary history

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

And even if you do believe in objective reality, there's a problem with applying it to history. Physical principles can be repeatably demonstrated: that's the basis for science. But what constitutes documentary historical evidence? Once you've dug up the artifacts and removed them from their context, how do you maintain a "chain of evidence" (in the forensic sense) to prove they mean one thing and not another?

This occurred to me after this weekend's finale of Battlestar Galactica, and more generally re: any SF that deals with mega-long periods and the limits of human memory. After a point, as attributed to Saint Ford in Brave New World, history is bunk.

The idea that we need to have some coherent when-what-why history may derive from the all-too-coherent chronologies in fiction and simplified real-history books. For certain purposes, how is history any more useful than myth?

Re: The limits of documentary history

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, the meaning of events does tend to depend on what questions one's asking about them, what one's perspective is, and what one hopes to know about the future. People had a different understanding of what the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution meant in 1691 from what they would in 1793, when they were trying to understand the French Revolution in its context.

But artifacts are artifacts, both in things dug out of the ground or the scrolls of past years kept around. They can be faked or misrepresented or not understood (as, for example, dinosaur bones were for centuries), but the same analytical techniques still apply: does this information make sense when taken as the footprint of this storyline? If it doesn't, what might? If the story is right what other evidence might be expected to be found? If an alternate story is right what evidence might be sought for that? Can that projected evidence be found? What is instead?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, it may not be a lay audience but most of the reviews I've found for it online note that the book reads as historical fiction and is best appreciated that way: understanding that things like this may have happened --- and much of the book and dialogue is taken from court records, or the records of determined diarists or letter-writers or doctors who knew that the smallpox epidemics they were experiencing were very important events that needed to be carefully recorded, so it's not like it was wholly imagined; for the most part it was just details, and some guesses made where people insisted on writing Mister M- instead of giving a proper name --- but that the fine print isn't there. Other people reading it seem to have similar reservations, although are more willing to read it as a story rather than a reference.

[skylerbunny.livejournal.com]

You know, if you were to include another paragraph with the completely straight scoop on how Singapore picked the Merlion, as illustrated in that little film at Sentosa, this could have been posted yesterday.

(You'd think lightning would strike) the Sentosa Island mer-lion, the ten-storey tall statue that's out in the open and has a nest of wires poking out of its head and shoots lasers from its eyes at night. Instead...

This is one of those odd cases where the truth sounds as odd as fiction.

Having said so, do I know which Merlion this is? You now say there are two Merlions near Merlion park, and I only remember the one that we passed twice on the little boat tour. News footage I found looks like that one, but now I'm not sure.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, the Merlion that faces out to the sea and that's easily visible from the boat tour is the one struck by lightning. About halfway between that Merlion and the underpass beneath the bridge, however, is another, smaller Merlion facing the opposite direction. This one used to be elsewhere in the park, closer to the river and the Indian National Army monument, but it was moved to the more prominent spot back in 2003, I believe it was.

Neither's the huge statue people can go up in.