Herodotus did get some things right, and he rightfully showed skepticism over certain claims and stories or at least said “this is what I was told…” But he reported a lot of stuff without such disclaimers. Some of the wilder claims from his Histories that are given as fact:
- Egyptians have thick, strong skulls that can’t be smashed with a boulder, and Persians have thin, weak skulls that can be shattered by a pebble. This is because Egyptians shave their heads and are exposed to the hot sun, while Persians keep their heads covered.
- Egyptians are the oldest civilized culture and are greater than Greeks, but the “backwards” flow of the Nile naturally causes them to do certain things backwards. For instance, they knead dough with their feet, and Egyptian men pee squatting while the women pee standing up.
- Cassia comes from Arabia and is guarded by flying serpents; those harvesting it have to lull them to sleep by fumigating with storax. These same flying serpents try to invade Egypt every year but are defeated by ibises.
- Arabia also has ants bigger than foxes but smaller than dogs, which dig up gold and can kill camels. People crossing the desert have to ride on female camels with a pair of (slower) male camels, and if pursued by ants, they release the males as a distraction while they make their escape.
- Camels’ back legs have four knees and four thighs.
- Lions only ever give birth to one cub because the fierce claws ruin their mothers’ wombs. (I don’t think he followed this idea to its mathematical conclusion.) Rabbits, on the other hand, can get pregnant while already pregnant at any stage, giving birth to endless streams of babies without limitation. Both of these, um, “facts” are divine miracles.
- Ethiopians are the tallest and most beautiful people on earth, and so strong that nobody else can draw their bows. Their skin is black because it’s been burned by the sun… and their semen is also black. (Please see a doctor.)
- The Enarees (transgender priests) of the Scythians are that way because they’ve inherited a curse from ancestors who sacked a temple of Aphrodite.
- It’s very unlikely that there is a sea to the west of Europe.
- When Egyptian women die, their families let the corpses rot at home for several days before sending them for embalming to discourage necrophilia.
- In India, when a parent dies, the children eat them.
- Everything in history plays out exactly like a Greek tragedy, complete with irony, hubris, misleading oracles, and wars and assassinations that are always caused by women and/or personal insults.
I know I did earlier first takes on new gear announcements, but things move fast and now more has been revealed. Thoughts:
- Bastl Kalimba is a sort of hybrid electronic/electroacoustic instrument where twanging tine-shaped PCB bits triggers resonators, I guess somewhat like Korg Wavedrum did. Physical modeling and FM, but also pressure sensing and effects and looping and glide and pads and drones and other stuff. Definitely pretty neat, and I approve. At the price, I can remind myself I said no more desktop synths and can let it pass by without anguish — if it was cheaper I might have broken. But nothing is cheap now, and they spent considerable development time on this and it’s more than the toy it appears to be at first.
- Buchla Ziggy: “not even next year” thing for me. In what I’ve heard so far, it pretty much doesn’t sound like a 208c. It has no sequencer of its own and its “cycler” can’t trigger an external sequencer either. I don’t like it when presets fight with analog pots, and don’t think a simple synth like this needs presets at all. It just can’t offer me anything, really.
- Make Noise Plexiphon: some of my guessing was wrong. To categorize it simply, it’s more in the vein of Desmodus, Valhalla Supermassive, or Phonolyth Cascade — somewhere between delay and reverb, where the “Plexus” knob affects feedback networks that determine which way it leans. Some of the mojo seems to come from short delay times and the way the feedback loops interact with diffusion. But playing with Cascade just now, I’m realizing what an underrated thing I have in that — so I’ll play with it more and have talked myself easily out of Plexiphon already.
- Expert Sleepers Forever was the one that stood the greatest chance of maybe sneaking into my rig in 2027. It’s just a nice simple smooth texture-preserving buffer freeze effect with overdub features. But like Plexiphon, it got me playing with plugins and I found happiness of different flavors with Cascade, Raum and SpecOps; with the latter I produced a drone that’s going into the next recording for sure. So again, I will nod and say “that’s cool” and happily let it pass me by.
- Xaoc Budapeszt: I’m waiting on a demo of this, and will update once I’ve heard it. I’m quite curious to hear demos — it’s a dual stereo comb filter (or “exploratory spectral lattice” as they call it) with internal LFOs and some different feedback options to get them interacting. Chorus and flanging are among more esoteric things it can do. It’s 20HP, so if it turns out to be spectacular it’ll be a difficult call to make… in some other year. But again, maybe it can inspire some fun usage of software.