Covered With Bees!

[magid]

This year at Burning Man I'll be in camp Covered With Bees!, and I decided I should paint myself a T-shirt to show camp affiliation.

I researched online and at the Cambridge library (and had the help of a nearby friend for precise brushstroke instructions for the Chinese), but didn't make it down to the Boston library. As it turned out, I started with larger fonts than I should have, so the shirt feels rather filled anyway, even without finding more (though I do wish there were more African languages represented). Since bees swarm, I wanted to put language families together (though I didn't do this perfectly), rather than distributing them as I had with the peace shirt.

The languages: Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Aragonese (which is the same as Galician), Asturian, Catalan, Cherokee, Chinese, Cree, Croatian (which is also Bosnian), Dutch, Dutch Low Saxon, Emilian-Romagnolo, English, Esperanto, Faroese (which is also Icelandic), Farsi, Fiji Hindi, Finnish, French, Gaelic (which is also Irish), Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hakka Chinese, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Kiswahili, Komi, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Macedonian, Magyar, Malaysian (which is also Bahasa Indonesian), Maltese, Mongol, Navajo, Norwegian bokmal, Norwegian nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese (which is also Occitan), Russian, Serbian, Shona, Slovenian, Southern Min, Spanish, Swedish, Tajik, Tamil, Thai, Turkish (which is also Azerbaijani), Ukranian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Winaray (a language of the Philippines), and Yiddish.




It's silver glitter paint; I'm looking forward to seeing whether it's black-light reactive or not.

Still up for debate: painting a small bee in front, with purple dashed lines to show a flight path through the words.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Nice.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Neat :) I like the swarming concept.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I wasn't sure whether the swarm idea meant I was over-thinking it... (And were I more organized, it would've been good to do a mock-up of where things would go, so they'd be clearer.)

[queue.livejournal.com]

Very nice :-)

What's the language in the bottom middle on the front? It looks mostly like Cyrillic letters (could be transliterated into English as "zanbur"), but I can't figure it out.

You know what would be cool? A little web page/app that took a single word and translated it into a bunch of different languages, possibly with groupings, possibly arranged nicely. I wonder if something like this exists already.

[magid.livejournal.com]

The one that starts with a 3? That's Tajik.

That would be a cool app; it would save me a lot of time using dictionaries and Wikipedia :-).

[queue.livejournal.com]

Ah, that would explain the Cyrillic :-)

You do know about Google Translate (http://translate.google.com/), right? (Not that it's 100% accurate, but at least for the languages I tend to use it for, single words seem to be pretty OK.)

[magid.livejournal.com]

No, I hadn't known about Google Translate; thanks for the pointer. I had had some issues with certain languages either not displaying or not being readable enough for someone not familiar with a different alphabet, which is why I ended up at the library.

[gingicat]

Very nice! I'm always impressed by the fact that you have consistency of letter shape and size throughout a word and in shape through other words... even when I'm careful, I can't do that.

[cellio]

The Hebrew word for "bee" is your name? :-)

I like the swarming, and I think a bee with a flight path would be nifty.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Cool. (Where's the Greek, BTW? I didn't spot it in the pictures.)

>> Turkish (which is also Azerbaijani)

Minor point: Azeri is the word used for language & ethnicity, while Azerbaijani is the word used for citizenship.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Actually, I see a lot where my consistency was off, where the letters got larger over the course of a word, or the alignment wasn't done as I wanted, etc. I think it's like everything else I've made: I can see all the issues, and apparently no one else can :-)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Yay, someone got that! Except that it's not my Hebrew name, actually, since I was given a Yiddish name (that bears no relation to this Hebrew cognate).

Another friend voted yes on bees with flight paths, so I might end up doing it. Pictures to come if I do :-)

[magid.livejournal.com]

The Greek is in the lower middle back, rather small (I'd realized that I'd been using too many large letters, and put some of the short ones in rather small...).

And thanks for the correction.

[twostepsfwd.livejournal.com]

wow, very nice!

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[(Anonymous)]

I like the idea of adding a bee with a purple (!) flight path, but I also like the shirt as is. The white (really silver I know but looks white in the photos) printing on the black shirt is really sharp! The peace shirt was nice, but something about this shirt really appeals to me. I like not only the grouping but also, hmm, perhaps the alignment of the groups? You know, it looks sort of like those word clouds I see on some websites. The placement of the Hebrew word where a name usually goes on a shirt is very clever.

[geekosaur]

Yeh, it's usually translated as "honeybee". Sadly, some of the more sexist parts of the G'mara had a field day with it wrt the Judge of the same name.

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

we were happy to see Thai was there. Peung! Peungpeungpeung!!

Hooray, see you on the playa!

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I like painting T-shirts, but don't feel like I'm artistic enough to draw something freehand. Language is a lot easier :-)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Glad to oblige ;-).

Looking forward to seeing you there!

[scholargipsy.livejournal.com]

This is why those of us who love you love you, just in case you were wondering.

Have you read Mark Helprin's novella "Ellis Island"? There's a marvelous set piece in which a mystically inspired rabbi delivers a derasha on the importance of bees. "God bless the bee!" has since become one of my catchphrases.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Aw. *blush*

I read "Ellis Island" far too long ago to remember anything about bees in it. Obviously, it's time to reread that, in some copious spare time that I expect to have... in October? Maybe? :-)