Something/Someone Old

I seem to be on a plant kick lately.

Know what the world's oldest plant is?

This is the cinnamon fern, Osmundastrum cinnamomeum, named for the color of its fertile fronds.

Fossils of Osmunda cinnamomea, cinnamon fern, were found in 70 million year old rocks! This discovery was published about 10 years ago, and no differences could be found between the fossil and the fern as it is today. So cinnamon fern was alive and well in the Late Cretaceous where it undoubtedly got stepped on and eaten by dinosaurs. Think about how many changes this fern has endured, the rise and diversification of both mammals and flowering plants. The cinnamon fern family is even older with a fossil record going back into the Carboniferous documenting a 300 million year history for this group of ferns.

http://phytophactor.fieldofscience.com/2009/05/oldest-species-on-earth-i...

It's pretty amazing to have a species that's 70 million years old.

Scientists have discovered a 180-million-year-old fossil fern that is so pristinely preserved, its chromosomes are still clearly recognizable. Not only that, but its various microscopic parts closely match that of today’s ferns, suggesting that their DNA content or genome size hasn’t changed for hundreds of millions of years.

Discovered in Early Jurassic lahar deposits at Korsaröd in southern Sweden, the fossil fern strengthens the reputation of royal ferns -- those belonging to the Osmundaceae family -- as “living fossils,” or the close, modern relative to something we only know about from the fossil record. In particular, the ancient fern closely resembles the cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum), which can be found throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada today.

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/royal-ferns-are-living-foss...

Something New

Hot damn. I found Something New that's good. It's a new musician. I had to go through a few before I found a really good one, but check out Louis Berry:

I can't understand how this could be at #3 when the Aces' song "Physical," which the reviewer says has a summery 70s feeling, but which sounds to me like every bland pop song I heard on the radio from about 1983-1988, is #1, but perhaps the list isn't organized according to merit.

Something Borrowed

How weird is this? Both the word "kidnap" and the word "ombudsman" come into English from the Danish. Kidnap comes from the same origin as "nab," as in "to nab the goods and get away from the cops," or "the cops nabbed the guy who was trying to get away with the goods." "Nab" means

"to catch (someone)," 1680s, probably a variant of dialectal nap "to seize, catch, lay hold of" (1670s, now surviving only in kidnap), which possibly is from Scandinavian (compare Norwegian nappe, Swedish nappa "to catch, snatch;" Danish nappe "to pinch, pull"); reinforced by Middle English napand "grasping, greedy." Related: Nabbed; nabbing. Nabbing-cull was old slang for "constable," and Farmer & Henley has "TO NAB THE STIFLES = to be hanged."

I get "kidnap," given that a lot of the Danes were doing just that along Britain's shores in ancient times, but ombudsman--well, it does come from much later, 1959 to be precise:

ombudsman (n.)
1959, from Swedish ombudsman, literally "commission man" (specifically in reference to the office of justitieombudsmannen, which hears and investigates complaints by individuals against abuses of the state);

but it has an old origin:

cognate with Old Norse umboðsmaðr, from umboð "commission" (from um- "around," from Proto-Germanic umbi, from PIE root *ambhi- "around," + boð "command," from PIE root *bheudh- "be aware, make aware") + maðr "man" (from PIE root *man- (1) "man").

So an ombudsman is a guy who gets a commission to be aware or make someone aware of something.

It's not clear to me whether the word actually had its modern meaning in ancient times. It seems that in old Denmark and other Scandinavian countries, it had a more general meaning of civil servant or representative. At least that's what Wikipedia says:

An indigenous Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish term, ombudsman is etymologically rooted in the Old Norse word umboðsmaðr, essentially meaning "representative" (with the word umbud/ombud meaning proxy, attorney, that is someone who is authorized to act for someone else, a meaning it still has in the Scandinavian languages). In the Danish Law of Jutland from 1241, the term is umbozman and means a royal civil servant in a hundred.

A "hundred" is an administrative geographical division of land that resides within a larger geographical division of land, like a county in a state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman

Something Blue

Today's Something Blue is Picasso's blue period.

I didn't know this started because his friend Carlos Casagemas shot himself. Apparently, Picasso expressed his depression over his friend's death by painting monochromatic works in blue. This depression lasted for years, during which Picasso not only painted in blue but began focusing on subjects among the poor and unfortunate:

It's odd to think that this painting, which is now one of Picasso's most famous, was part of a period which at the time was seriously unpopular. Rather like Dylan going electric, Picasso pissed off a fair number of his fans and buyers when he persisted in painting such depressing material.

I'm kind of irritated that I can't find the title of the first painting I embedded here. My search engine fu must be even worse than I thought. Apparently everybody on Photobucket and Pinterest has no interest whatsoever in what the names of their images are. I just knew that the second one was "Old Guitarist" because it's that famous. I've never been a Picasso fan, so I don't really know much about him.

If somebody, perhaps danceyoumonster, could let me know what the other painting's title is, I will add it to my tags.

So how are y'all today?