Something Screwed (Up)

I don't know what I did, but apparently this OT published. Perhaps it wasn't as an OT; there wasn't a single comment or rec, which is not usual.

I didn't think it had published at all; it was supposed to publish today.

The reason this matters is that this is Part 1 of a rare two-parter. Next week won't make any sense if I don't get this out. So I'm unpublishing it and republishing it, making sure it's got the OT tag, which is how I usually screw up, when I do.

If this is a repeat, my apologies.

Something/Someone Old

My Something Old Today is Ollantaytambo, Peru.
There is so much cool to say about Ollantaytambo that this will be a rare two-part Something Old. Today I'll give you some basic history, information on the town layout, and agriculture. Next week I'll talk about their temples and the role Ollantaytambo played in the war against the Spanish conquest.

Ollantaytambo is a village AND an archaelogical ruin. It is located 45 miles northwest of the city of Cuzco, in the Andes, near the juncture of the Patakancha and Willkanuta rivers. Most of the settlement is built on the left bank of the Patakancha. It contains some of the oldest continuously inhabited buildings in South America, with people having lived in the current structures back into the mid-fifteenth century:

This is an Incan doorway still in use today:

There was a village on this site earlier than the mid-fifteenth century, but Pacachuti, the Emperor of the Incans, conquered it and had the village razed to become his private estate. A silver lining to this rather awful deed is that Ollantaytambo provides us an example of 15th-century Incan city planning:

The main settlement at Ollantaytambo has an orthogonal layout with four longitudinal streets crossed by seven parallel streets.[12] At the center of this grid, the Incas built a large plaza that may have been up to four blocks large; it was open to the east and surrounded by halls and other town blocks on its other three sides.[13][14] All blocks on the southern half of the town were built to the same design; each comprised two kancha, walled compounds with four one-room buildings around a central courtyard.[15] Buildings in the northern half are more varied in design; however, most are in such a bad condition that their original plan is hard to establish.

Algebra was never my strong suit, so I struggle to understand what "orthogonal" means, but as far as I can tell, it means that there is essentially a grid of streets with one set of streets perpendicular to the others; the intersections would form right angles.

I would have been happy during my time in Washington DC if the builders of that city had followed those precepts.

I find the kancha interesting: ordinarily I'd think a walled compound with a central plaza would be an aristocratic dwelling, yet the buildings surrounding the plaza are one-room structures--not very lavish.

It sounds like the town as a whole is a bit like a kancha writ large, as it's organized around a central town plaza. This plaza is one of the things that disappeared during colonial times:

[Ollantaytambo's] layout and buildings have been altered to different degrees by later constructions; for instance, on the southern edge of the town, an Inca esplanade with the original entrance to the town was rebuilt as a Plaza de Armas surrounded by colonial and republican buildings. The plaza at the center of the town also disappeared, as several buildings were built over it in colonial times.

That Plaza de Armas does not surprise me. The Spaniards no doubt wanted to write their conquest in stone and made over the town entrance very very Spanish.

I'm fascinated by their agriculture. I will try not to let my enthusiasm run away with me and bore you all to tears with how cool I think their terraces are. Emperor Pacachuti first built these terraces, and an irrigation system for them, so his people could farm that high up in the Andes. Known in Spanish as andenes, they not only allowed people to farm on the side of a steep mountain, but also enabled them to grow a greater variety of plants:

The valleys of the Urubamba and Patakancha Rivers along Ollantaytambo are covered by an extensive set of agricultural terraces or andenes which start at the bottom of the valleys and climb up the surrounding hills. The andenes permitted farming on otherwise unusable terrain; they also allowed the Incas to take advantage of the different ecological zones created by variations in altitude...

The terraces are much narrower than I expected. I think I was expecting something more like what the Chinese have.

Apparently, the Incans expanded on this notion of terraces by creating sunken terraces, so they could make microclimates which allowed the growth of plants from far lower altitudes:

A set of sunken terraces starts south of Ollantaytambo's Plaza de Armas, stretching all the way to the Urubamba River. They are about 700 m long, 60 m wide, and up to 15 m below the level of surrounding terraces; due to their shape, they are called Callejón, the Spanish word for alley. Land inside Callejón is protected from the wind by lateral walls which also absorb solar radiation during the day and release it during the night; this creates a microclimate zone 2 to 3°C warmer than the ground above it. These conditions allowed the Incas to grow species of plants native to lower altitudes that otherwise could not have flourished at this site.

I wish I had a picture of the sunken terraces.

More on Ollantaytambo next week!

Something New

I'm very fond of the band Walk Off The Earth.

They have a relatively new single out, "Nomad." One strange thing about watching it is that I started watching Walk Off the Earth when their lead female singer was pregnant. I got so used to seeing her pregnant that it was actually startling to see her not!

Here's the song:

I note that the conservative All Sex Must Be in Context of Forever Love appears to be showing some fractures.

I'll never forget how shocked my advisor was when all the students in my class insisted that what the protagonist of "The Love-Song of J Alfred Prufrock" wanted was "to marry her." There's nothing remotely about marriage in the poem, and to call it romantic would be a stretch. My advisor walked up to me after the class (she was observing my teaching) and said "They're so CONSERVATIVE!" And it's not like she was a Marxist Free Love Bohemian.

Something Borrowed

This one is an etymological hoot.

Apparently, we Americans borrowed the terms "buttload" and "assload" from the British without really understanding what they meant.

Assload meant, originally, the amount a donkey could carry. It's used this way in the Bible. Supposedly the amount is around 8 bushels:

Once upon a time, an ass’s load was, well, how much a donkey could carry. The term was used in the Bible (according to this annotated Bible from 1832, an ass’s load was almost equivalent to 8 bushels) and it also appeared in one of Aesop’s fables and in arithmetic books through the 1800s.

https://thiswonderfulword.com/2013/11/25/the-origins-of-assload/

That one didn't surprise me so much. Not so with "buttload." Apparently a "butt" used to be a large cask or keg that stored liquid (often alcohol). I should have remembered this from my study of English literature, because supposedly Richard III's brother George, the Duke of Clarence, drowned in a butt of malmsey.

As I started digging into the word buttload, I was surprised to find that a “butt” is an actual unit of measurement. It’s an outdated term referring to a large cask used for liquids (esp. beer, wine, or water) or a specific unit of liquid measurement equivalent to 108 imperial gallons, or 491 liters.
https://thiswonderfulword.com/2013/11/25/the-origins-of-assload/

491 liters is a lot of liquid.

Fast forward a century and a half or so and cross the Atlantic. Nobody stores alcohol in "butts" anymore (if they did, frat boys would hold "butters," which would be very confusing) and few people transport goods on donkeys. Americans see the terms "buttload" and "assload" and conclude, logically, that those terms refer to somebody's posterior. Whose, nobody seems to know. Perhaps there is a Platonic butt, or an average ass.

Things became hilarious when Americans began to expand on the notion of storing large amounts of something in one's posterior:

From words like assload and buttload, it seems we applied our trademark American creativity and fashioned words like shitload, crapton, and all the other fabulously filthy words that end with -load or -ton to express our awe at having a whole lot of stuff.
https://thiswonderfulword.com/2013/11/25/the-origins-of-assload/

Something Blue

I feel I am being a bit repetitive in my Something Blue section, but western Canada has a truly amazing number of gorgeous (and actually blue) lakes, rivers, and waterfalls.

Today's Something Blue is Lake Louise:

Beautiful, isn't it? Those snow-topped mountains lead me to believe that I wouldn't be taking a dip in Lake Louise, but simply being near such beauty would nourish the soul, wouldn't it?

Lake Louise was named the Lake of Little Fishes by the Stoney Nakoda First Nations people. It was re-named Lake Louise after Queen Victoria's fourth daughter, Princess Louise Caroline Alberta (1848-1939), who married the Governor of Canada.

Of course, they had to put a big hotel on it:

The railway moguls built this hotel in the early twentieth century. Apparently they built railway hotels in grand style across Canada. This is not entirely a bad thing, since it replaced much more brutal forms of exploitation of the land:

The railways' development role in the construction and operation of large hotels was inaugurated with Canadian Pacific Railway's opening of the Hotel Vancouver on May 16, 1888. This was the first of three railway-owned hotels by that name in Vancouver. Two weeks later, the Canadian Pacific Railway officially opened the Banff Springs Hotel on June 1, 1888. CPR president William Cornelius Van Horne had personally chosen the site in the Rocky Mountains for the new hotel. He envisioned a string of grand hotels across Canada that would draw visitors from abroad to his railway. Van Horne famously remarked: “If we can’t export the scenery, we’ll import the tourists.”[1] The original Banff Springs Hotel, of wooden construction, was destroyed by fire in 1926 and replaced by the present structure.[2]

It was a case where the capitalist profit motive found a somewhat less horrendous expression than it might have.

But I feel Lake Louise would have been better served by some more modest rustic hunting lodges or cabins.

Still, it's a beautiful place, isn't it?

How are you all today?