I Monogram I

I'm a big fan of a certain sort of interwoven monogram, what I assume to be a late-19th century graphic fashion that crops up these days (in my world) most often in the logos of Brazilian soccer teams. Here's the crest of Internacional (aka Sport Club Internacional), from the southern metropolis of Porto Alegre:

And here's the shield of Fluminense (Futebol Club?), from Rio de Janeiro:

... and of their Rio rivals Flamengo (Clube de Regatas—they began as a rowing club!):

... and of the Vitória Futebol Club (which started out as a cricket club, though the second C didn't make the current monogram):

The Brazilians aren't the only ones with cool monograms, of course. My favorite Aussie Rules team (picked largely on uniform design—how un-Aussie-Rules is that?!) is the Carlton Football Club, from Melbourne (as are most of the clubs in the AFL). The current one's lost the laurels (perhaps due to a pretty dismal performance in the last couple of seasons I was able to watch from the USA):

... and finally (most famously) here's the badge of European soccer giants Inter Milan (F.C. Internazionale Milano):

But the real reason for all this is a lead-up to the following, an artwork I scanned from a very odd design book, The Art of Looking Sideways, by the late British designer Alan Fletcher. It's a monogram of every letter, A-Z. Making it the mongram that contains all monograms, perhaps. Definitely amazing, full of the antler-esque, victorian madness that can only be called, as the 17th century Dutch did, "pronk".

Retiring on One String

I'm fascinated by this bank ad that ran on the front page of DNA India:
First, the suggestion that comfy retirement offers the chance to finally play the violin—a worthy goal, though I wonder how often arthritis might get in the way. But what really struck me was the non-Stradivarius-copy features of the fiddle: the slightly larger f-holes, and, above all, the fact that there's only one string! Was this just an error on the part of the props department, or a subcontinental adaption? A few quick searches turned up references to a one-stringed Indian viol called a riti, so perhaps it's that. Though I think in India classical music, the violin tends to be held in a pretty different posture. So who knows? Maybe you!

In any case, I was reminded of the 19th-century Italian virtuoso Niccolò Paganini:

In performance Paganini enjoyed playing tricks, like tuning one of his strings a semitone high, or playing the majority of a piece on one string after breaking the other three.