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Showing posts from May, 2010

Hearts on Fire

Before I return to the snail fallacies, let me show a line drawing of the Red Queen from  Alice in Wonderland  for a quilt design. Cuddly, no?  I didn't ape any one popular rendering of the queen, though costumes are influenced by engravings of Queen Elizabeth I. Of course, I ran a background check on the Red Queen before starting. Behold: two red queens populate Lewis Carrol's/Charles Dodgson's literature. The Queen of Hearts of  Alice in Wonderland  is more obviously ill-tempered, given as she is to bellowing "off with their heads" and cheating at croquet. Of course, she's a dominant playing card, and an allegory to Queen Victoria of England. The Red queen in  Through the Looking Glass  is a chess piece who presents an exaggerated evolutionary hypothesis: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place," or that it takes a constant effort and adaptation to maintain a competitive position. Similarly, "Red Queen" marketi...