Hairy Legs Research Articles

Calf Cutaneous Stimulation Generates Reflexes in the Thigh that Can be Modified by Subthreshold Noisy Vibration.

Imperceptible tactile noise applied to the skin of the feet enhances posture-correcting cutaneous reflexes. This sensory augmentation technique, stochastic resonance (SR), has not been tested in the less-sensitive hairy skin of the leg for its reflex-enhancement ability. The objectives of this study were to determine whether calf skin stimulation produces cutaneous reflexes and if noise can modify the reflex. In 20 participants, electrotactile pulse trains were applied at the calf while participants performed submaximal isometric knee extension. To test SR, five different levels of vibrotactile noise were applied simultaneous to the test input. Muscle activity from the vastus lateralis (VL) was analyzed 60-110 ms after stimulation. Reflex ratios were calculated by dividing the reflex peak activity by the pre-stimulation background muscle activity. A significant reflex response was evoked in 16/20 participants (5.41 2.6% of background muscle activity); these responses varied between individuals with 8 being facilitatory and 8 being inhibitory. In half of the participants, a new reflex appeared at some level of added noise (N=10). The average reflex ratio of the study population was significantly higher at the "optimal" noise level (8.61 ± 4.5) compared to "baseline" (4.70 ± 5.6) (p = 0.002); the optimal level varied across participants. These results suggest that cutaneous reflexes exist at the VL in response to calf skin stimulation and that SR can change cutaneous reflexes at the leg. This study provides an important first step towards SR application in clinical populations with sensory loss such as individuals with lower extremity amputation.

Evidence for entomophily in “Knothole Moss” (Anacamptodon splachnoides)

Anacamptodon splachnoides is an uncommon moss almost entirely restricted to water-filled treeholes in deciduous trees in eastern North America and Europe. There has been uncertainty regarding taxonomic placement of the genus because of conflicts between gametophytic characters, in which it resembles Amblystegiaceae, and sporophytic characters, which seem to ally it with Fabroniaceae, Campyliaceae, or other families. Recent evidence from DNA sequencing clearly places Anacamptodon in Amblystegiaceae despite features of the sporophyte such as an erect capsule, rostrate lid, reflexed peristome teeth, and low endostome membrane. All these unusual features, including sticky spores (which seem to have been overlooked), are characteristic of species of Splachnaceae, until now the only group of mosses whose spores are known to be dispersed by flies. Field observations of A. splachnoides over a period of 16 months revealed that the moss mat and sporophytes are regularly visited by many species of flies that are also treehole specialists. Of 12 species of flies captured, nine carried spores of the moss. Many of these are strong fliers with hairy legs and bodies that inadvertently pick up the sticky spores, dispersing them in a directed fashion to other treeholes, where the females lay eggs that develop into aquatic larvae that later emerge as adults. Though differing in some respects from the adaptations seen in Splachnaceae, the parallel evolution of sporophytic characters related to entomophily is remarkable. In addition, we consider other aspects of the ecology of this moss that may help explain its rarity, such as treehole location, pH of rainfall versus stemflow and treehole water, and a possible beneficial relationship with certain wood-rotting fungi.

Remote Subthreshold Stimulation Enhances Skin Sensitivity in the Lower Extremity.

Foot sole skin interfaces with the ground and contributes to successful balance. In situations with reduced sensitivity in the glabrous foot skin, stochastic resonance (SR) improves skin sensitivity by adding tactile noise. Some situations, however, involve an interface comprised of hairy skin, which has higher thresholds for sensitivity. For example, in lower extremity amputation the residual limb is comprised of hairy leg skin. The main objective of this study was to determine if SR improves skin sensitivity in hairy skin, and whether a specific intensity of noise is most effective. Secondary objectives were to compare the effect between locations, ages and modalities. In 60 healthy participants a vibrotactile (test) input was delivered at the lower extremity concurrently with a second, noisy stimulus applied more proximally. The presence of a remote SR effect was tested in 15 young participants using electrotactile noise at the calf. Secondary objectives were tested in separate groups of 15 subjects and differed by substituting for one of the three variables: vibrotactile noise, heel site, and with older participants. A forced-choice protocol was used to determine detection ability of the subthreshold vibration test input with varying noise levels applied simultaneously (0, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100% of perceptual threshold). An SR effect was identified when increased detection of the input was obtained at any level of noise versus no noise. It was found that all four test groups demonstrated evidence of SR: 33–47% of individuals showed better detection of the input with added noise. The SR effect did not appear consistently at any specific noise level for any of the groups, and none of the variables showed a superior ability to evoke SR. Interestingly, in approximately 33% of cases, threshold values fluctuated throughout testing. While this work has provided evidence that SR can enhance the perception of a vibrotactile input in hairy skin, these data suggest that the ability to repeatably show an SR effect relies on maintaining a consistent threshold.

A Brief History of Beauty

A Brief History of Beauty Nina Sharma (bio) "Don't tell anyone, but the boys in school tease me for my mustache," said my nine-year-old niece. "I'm sorry. You know that just means they are insecure." "Oh. Well then I feel bad for them." "Did you tell your parents?" "If I tell them, they will say wax it. I don't want to. Did it ever happen to you?" "Yes, boys and girls. And you know what, those same boys would ask me out on dates years later." "Did you go?" "No." "That's good." I lied. Those boys didn't ask me out. Long after the blond girl stopped taunting "Amazon woman" at my eleven-year-old hairy legs, thick pubic, armpit, and upper-lip hair in the shower after gym, long after I started going to the waxing lady working out of the back of a sari shop and then to the many others waxers and waxing parlors that cropped up in my town afterwards, the boys didn't ask me out. I lived the kind of life I imagined I was supposed to live. Not the life of the ugly, but of the not-as-beautiful. I was the funny one. The thinker. The one generous with money, time, and patience, infinite patience for white suburban teens especially. At home, my father would twist his face so it lost all symmetry. The lips a disheveled pout, one eyebrow slanting up and the other down, head cocked to the side. He put on a gruff voice. This was my mother. This was how he saw his wife. [End Page 221] Sometimes there was no twisted face. There was just him watching some movie with a pretty woman saying, "I should have married a woman like that, not you." I would let out a laugh—a full-throated "Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman" type of cackle, an unabashed laugh, a sexy laugh, a laugh like my life depended on it. ________ When I was a toddler, my older sisters lined me up with stuffed animals, placing me in the center. "We'd pretend you were our doll." ________ At twelve I began to go to a child psychiatrist, I was worried about what was real and what was a picture—scared of movie monsters in particular. I just wanted to cry. My father drove me home. "You are like the story of the ugly duckling," he said to comfort me. ________ For my thirteenth birthday, the blond girl who called me "Amazon woman" bought me lingerie, a see-through maroon Calvin Klein bra-and-panty set. She demanded to know which boy I liked. I was reluctant to tell her about the boy. It was not a secret as much as it was an issue of permission. Am I allowed to be that kind of girl? The one with a romance life, with a body? That blond girl would grow all of her hair out, dye her hair blue, and begin to ardently follow white-boy-hippie-bands like Phish. ________ I wore a low-cut dress from a vintage shop to junior prom. I loved myself in it. Next year, the white girls would take me shopping at Macy's, where they'd find me a "proper gown," as they put it. A white boy reluctantly took me to senior prom. I was going to go alone; our friends suggested we pair up. We dated through my first year of college. ________ "Who do you love more, him or me?" my father demanded once over the phone. I burst into tears; he just yelled the question louder. "Who do you love more, him or me?" ________ At the start of my sophomore year, I had a manic break. I walked around campus for twenty-four hours straight asking questions and expressing worries to any passing stranger. My mom drove me back to New Jersey [End Page 222] from Rhode Island. "Where are we going?" I asked when I saw her turning off of the expected route. We were going to the salon. I had not slept in days and the last shower I took was...

Development of water surface mobile robot inspired by water striders

This work describes a water surface mobile robot utilising surface tension forces. Recent biological studies on water striders revealed how they stay afloat and move on the surface of water. By using their hairy legs coated with hydrophobic substance produced, they increase the water repellency and float by the surface tension. This work focuses on understanding the static and dynamic interactions between supporting legs and the surface of water. First, microstructured wire legs were fabricated by using femtosecond laser machining to enhance the water repellency. Then the supporting force, the pull-off force and the drag force were measured to find the suitable legs for water strider robot. Finally, by assembling the legs optimised for supporting load and propulsion, a water strider robot weighing 4.39 g was developed. The robot successfully moved on the surface of water at a speed of 59.2 mm/s.

Du Kebra Nagast

Starting from the reflexion on the legend of the Queen of Sheba’s hairy leg, the author tries to disentangle the inextricable network of traditions – Egyptian, Jewish, Byzantine and Arab – and to find an historical thread which may explain the many syncretic rehandlings that lead to the original redaction of Kebra Nagast, the «Glory of the Kings», the Ethiopian dynasty’s founding text. All this network of traditions seems to converge towards the gulf of Akaba and the Nubian border of the Red Sea.

Same Sun Here (review)

Reviewed by: Same Sun Here Hope Morrison House, Silas . Same Sun Here; written by Silas House and Neela Vaswani; illus. by Hilary Schenker. Candlewick, 2012. 297p. ISBN 978-0-7636-5684-3 $15.99 R Gr. 5-8. This epistolary novel documents the correspondence between two pen pals: Meena, an Indian-born twelve-year-old girl living in New York City's Chinatown, and River, a twelve-year-old rural Kentucky boy, brought together by a school project. The letters reveal not only their developing friendship but some of the bigger issues faced by each of their families, namely River's community's struggle with the environmental devastation caused by mountaintop-removal mining and Meena's [End Page 402] family's illegal status in their apartment and quest for American citizenship. Meena and River communicate with the candor that distance and anonymity often bring; as they grow closer, they feel they can ask each other anything (such as when River asks if Indian women draw their bindis on with Magic Marker) and tell each other anything (such as when Meena describes the embarrassment of being made fun of for her hairy legs at her new school). House penned River's letters and Vaswani Meena's, resulting in appropriately different voices for each kid. While at its heart a friendship story, this is also a celebration of writing, both as a means of processing emotions and as a vehicle for making the writer more observant of people and places, and both Meena and River come to appreciate and value the role the letter writing plays in their own lives over the course of their relationship. Readers who enjoy differing points of view will particularly enjoy this old-fashioned yet contemporary letter-writing exchange. Occasional spot art and black-and-white photos of the kids' surroundings are included. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

From Russia with lobe: genetic differentiation in trilobed uncus Ostrinia spp. follows food plant, not hairy legs

Trilobed uncus taxa of the genus Ostrinia (Lepidoptera, Crambidae) illustrate the complex relationship, at early stages of speciation, between reproductive isolation and differentiation in morphology, resource use and genetic variation. On the basis of behaviour and ecology, we recently hypothesized that individuals with small mid-tibiae belong to two distinct species depending on host plant--O. nubilalis and O. scapulalis sensu Frolov et al. (2007) feeding on maize and on a number of dicotyledons, respectively. Individuals with small, medium or massive mid-tibiae would all belong to O. scapulalis as long as they feed on these dicotyledons. This contrasts with previous taxonomy, which distinguished three species by male mid-tibia morphology, regardless of host plant. Here, we test our hypothesis by examining the genetic structure of Ostrinia populations from regions with mid-tibia polymorphism--Western Russia and Kazakhstan--and comparing it with that of French populations where only small mid-tibiae occur. Results support two predictions: (1) maize- and dicotyledon-collected populations are genetically differentiated from each other like in France, and (2) dicotyledon-collected populations show no genetic evidence of consisting of more than one species. Between-species differentiation was unrelated to geographic distance, despite significant isolation by distance within species. The distinction between two and only two species differing by host plant thus holds at continental scale. Interestingly, one microsatellite locus contributed ∼10 times more than the others to differentiation between both taxa. This deserves further investigation, as it might reveal a linkage between this outlier and loci involved in host-plant adaptation and/or reproductive isolation.

A comparative study of the morphology and distribution of setae and hairs on the larval legs of two families (Perlodidae, Perlidae) of Japanese Plecoptera

A scanning electron microscope (SEM) was used to investigate the morphology and distribution of setae and hairs on the larval mid leg femur, tibia, and third tarsomere in representatives of six genera of Perlodidae and Perlidae. On the ventral surfaces of these leg segments we observed previously described clothing hairs, spine-like setae, and pinnate setae. We describe for the first time a new type of seta that we refer to as candle-like seta. Distinct differences in the distribution of hairs and setae are exhibited between the two families. Perlidae have hairy legs and on the femur the percentage of setae as compared to that of the clothing hairs is very high. Perlodidae are less hairy and on the femur the percentage of setae as compared to clothing hairs is much lower. The distribution of setae and hairs is similar among genera in the Perlidae, but not between genera of the Perlodidae. Pinnate setae are observed only in Neoperla geniculata. We discuss the types of setae and their distribution on the larval legs that characterise the families in relation to their habitats as well as to their behaviours observed in an aquarium using a video camera.

Run, Dad!

Run, Dad! Kim Aeran (bio) Translated by Kevin O'Rourke (bio) I cried a lot when I was a fetus. I cried because I was scared of the tiny darkness within my seed-small womb. I was diminutive; I had miniscule wrinkles, a small, rapidly beating heart and a body that didn't know what language was. I'm talking about a time without yesterdays or tomorrows. I came like something in the mail, my arrival announced by mom, a parcel of flesh without language. Mom gave birth to me in a semi-basement room where summer sunlight rough as sandpaper shone relentlessly. She flailed around with only a shirt to cover her. And with no hand to hold onto, she simply grabbed a scissors. Outside the window she could see the feet of people walking by. Every time she felt she wanted to die, she stabbed the floor with the scissors. This went on for hours. In the end, she didn't kill herself; instead she cut my umbilical cord. Here I was, newly arrived in the world, and I couldn't hear mom's heart beating. The silence made me think I was deaf! The first light I saw as a newborn was window-sized. I knew it existed outside of me. I don't remember where my dad was. He was always someplace else, or he was late, or he didn't come at all. Mom and I held onto each other, heart against rapidly beating heart. Mom, naked, looked down at my solemn face and wiped it several times with her big hand. I liked my mom, but I didn't know how to tell her; I just frowned all [End Page 227] the time. I discovered that mom laughed a lot when my face puckered with wrinkles. I think I concluded that love was not so much two people laughing together as one looking funny to the other. Mom fell asleep and I was left on my own. The world was quiet; the sunlight lay over there on the floor like a polite "Dear John" letter, the first unpleasant note I received in this world. I had no pockets. So I clenched my fists. When I picture dad, it's always against the same background: he's running resolutely somewhere. He's wearing luminous pink shorts and has thin, hairy legs, and he's running straight-backed with a high knee action. He looks like a referee who's enforcing rules no one cares about. So he cuts a comical figure. I guess he's been running for twenty years, his posture and face always the same: a laughing red countenance sporting a row of yellow teeth like a bad painting someone stuck on him. It's not just dad, though. Everyone playing the exercise game looks funny. It embarrasses me when I see middle-aged men in the park bouncing their bellies off the trunks of pine trees, or middle-aged women clapping their hands as they walk. They're always so serious about what they're doing and so enthusiastic. As if getting healthy entails looking more and more ridiculous. I've never really seen dad running, but as far as I'm concerned he's been running all his life. I may have gotten this idea from something mom told me long ago. When she first told me this story, she had a washboard stuck in the V between her legs. She was scrubbing laundry in a welter of soapy suds and breathing so hard she looked very angry. Mom says dad never ran to her. He wasn't the kind of man to come running: not when she said they should break up, not when she said she missed him, not even when I was born. People called him a gentleman; mom thought he was a fool. If mom made up her [End Page 228] mind to wait for him on a certain day, he'd show up the next. And when he arrived late, he looked haggard. She always had a joke to greet her diffident lover—with his inevitable late-schoolboy look. He made no excuses, used no big...

Response

Response Gannit Ankori When Emily Culpepper's Period Piece was first screened in Harvard Divinity School's (HDS) Sperry lecture hall thirty-two years ago, I don't believe a single person in the audience could have foreseen that a Museum of Menstruation would be established on the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s.1 Or that by 2006, the visual art included in the museum's virtual collection—for example, Von Taylor's The Star-Tamponed Banner, a composition composed of 286 tampons—would provoke giggles rather than shock or embarrassment.2 [End Page 140] The existence of a Museum of Menstruation and additional related (and more profoundly significant) developments would not have been possible without Emily Culpepper and her peers. Their pathbreaking intellectual and creative work in the early 1970s broke the menstruation taboo and the conspiracy of silence that shrouded the sights and sounds related to so-called bleeding wombs. When I first heard about Period Piece in Ann Braude's inspirational convocation address in fall 2005, I rushed over to Andover Harvard Theological Library to look up Emily Culpepper's Master of Divinity thesis.3 As an art historian, immersed in what I term "visual epistemology," I felt compelled to verify my intuitive understanding that at a certain point in her academic studies, HDS student Emily Culpepper realized that words sometimes simply are not enough. A bold confrontation with menstrual blood required a different medium. Colors were needed, hence her thesis title, "Menstruation Mantra: Red, Crimson, Sienna, Scarlet." In order to break a taboo—you must show the forbidden sight, expose what previously had been covered up in shame. Culpepper's thesis reflected a double movement: a shift from deconstruction to reconstruction, and from the textual to the visual. She began by examining what canonical religious texts had to say about menstruation. However, as Braude cogently observed, "concluding that she could spend the rest of her life analyzing negative attitudes toward menstruation, Culpepper decided to explore the subject from a positive point of view."4 Her effort to re-vision menstruation as a positive experience entailed using visual amalgamations of body language and the language of art. Hence, she created a film, Period Piece, and a series of ten drawings based on the sensations evoked by the sight of her cervix during menstruation, which she called "Menstruation Yantras."5 It seems to me that only visual images had the power to expose and valorize what had previously been deemed unworthy of representation—the "unshowable" vagina, body hair, genitalia, and menstrual blood. In the brief time that has been allotted to me I would like to consider Period Piece as a period piece, that is, to view it within the context of the 1970s women's movement and more specifically to link it to the pioneering phase of feminist art. Know Thyself—nosce te ipsum—was a prevalent motto promoting the study of the human body and its anatomical intricacies by male artists throughout the [End Page 141] centuries.6 From the very beginning, feminist activists understood that to "know thyself" entailed the exploration of their own female bodies. In 1970, here in Boston, the Women's Health Book Collective published the first of numerous editions of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves.7 The cervical self-examination that Culpepper documented in her film became a paradigm for self-knowledge and empowerment. In art historical terms—the female body had been constructed as a passive object following specific conventions.8 These conventions regulated what could or could not be shown, what was worthy or unworthy of representation.9 Thus, breasts were often the focal point of countless artistic compositions; the vagina, in contrast, was a forbidden sight. Hair upon the head was considered alluring, beautiful; pubic hair or hairy legs were a no-no. The blood of Christ or of martyrs was holy; menstrual blood was a strict taboo.10 Period Piece shows the body of a subject viewing herself. The mirror in the film...

Biomechanics of microscopic appendages: functional shifts caused by changes in speed

Many diverse animals use arrays of hair-like structures to perform important jobs such as feeding, gas exchange, smelling, and swimming. Since these functions involve hair interactions with the surrounding water or air, analysis of the fluid dynamics of diverse hair-bearing appendages reveals how the morphology of an array of hairs affects it performance. Mathematical and physical models of flow between cylinders have shown that arrays of large, rapidly moving cylinders are leaky sieves, whereas little fluid moves through a row of small, slow rods. The purpose of the present study was to test this prediction for realistic appendage morphologies and to elucidate whether the design of a hairy leg can affect the range of speeds in which this transition in function occurs. We studied flow through hairy food-capturing appendages (second maxillae) of calanoid copepods, abundant planktonic crustaceans whose feeding on unicellular algae forms an important link in many marine food webs. Using dynamically scaled physical models, we found that hairy appendages undergo a transition between paddle- and sieve-like function at a critical range of sizes and speeds. The coarser the mesh of hairs on second maxillae, the smaller the size and speed at which this functional shift occurs. Thus, a simple increase in size (ontogenetic or evolutionary) or speed can generate a novel function (a paddle can become a filter), but the morphology of a hairy appendage determines the size and speed range at which leakiness to fluid flow can be affected by behavior or growth.

Things are Queer

The first photograph of Duane Michals's series Things Are Queer (fig. 1) depicts a simple bourgeois bathroom. Picture 2 introduces a pair of enormous hairy legs. As the series continues, the camera moves back, revealing that it is not the legs that are unusually big, but the toilet, sink, and bathtub that are small. The camera retreats again, and we become aware of an enormous thumb on a page. It turns out that what we have really been seeing is someone looking at a picture in a book of a man standing in a tiny bathroom. As if in a film, the camera keeps panning back. The man reading the book is in a dark corridor. In the penultimate photograph we find that this walking and looking man is merely a blowup of an image that is in the mirror in the bathroom. With the final image in the series we have come back full circle to the original toilet, sink, and bathtub.

Yin and Yang

A fter watching her father put up with allergy shots for 20 years, Ann Bergeron resolved to treat her own allergies another way. On the recommendation of a friend, she sought the help of a Chinese doctor in San Francisco. During her first visit, instead of the usual scratch tests, the doctor spoke to her for about half an hour, asking about her lifestyle and medical history. At the end of the session, the doctor wrote out a prescription. Bergeron took the piece of notebook paper, filled with cryptic Chinese characters, to a pharmacy deep in the heart of Chinatown. There, the pharmacist carefully measured out the ingredients, which Bergeron says looked like the components of a witch's brew: beetles with hairy legs, lichen, toadstools, and colored powders. Every other night for several months, she boiled this concoction into a tea from hell and drank it. Bit by bit, her allergies went away. Increasingly, people are putting aside their understandable squeamishness in order to sample the touted benefits of Chinese herbal medicines. Skeptics might attribute Bergeron's recovery to a placebo effect and not to any specific biochemical benefit. But many swear by herbal medicine, taking it as a supplement toor even substitute for-conventional drugs. Herbs provide a gentler way to treat ailments as well as to boost the body's own defenses, enthusiasts say. Many medical researchers in the United States and Europe suspect ancient remedies may also harbor new drugs. Government, industry, and academic research groups are zealously mining this potential source of pharmaceuticals, probing Chinese herbs for the chemical constituents that might one day yield new treatments for everything from asthma to AIDS. But proponents of traditional Chinese medicine say this fervor to isolate single compounds is misplaced. To them, the real benefits come from whole herbs and herbal extracts, since the chemicals in them purportedly work in conjunction with one another. The United States, however, supports very little research into whole herbs-in part because its drug approval process doesn't accommodate undifferentiated mixtures of natural chemicals whose collective function is uncertain, notes Mark Blumenthal of the American Botanical Council in Austin, Texas. A dearth of research in this area stems from a clash between two medical cultures-one representing a modern society searching for magic bullets, the other belonging to an ancient society steeped in history and tradition. But the public demand for remedies, no matter what they might be, is challenging scientists and policy makers to find common ground.

What Is Feminism?

Stereotypes of feminists are almost as commonplace as stereotypes of women in general and certainly as unflattering. For some people, particularly men, feminists are women with hairy legs; for others they are aggressive, strident women; for yet others, they are women who are afraid of men and who seek the protection of women's company as a shield against a harsh, violent masculinist world. Even for those women who identify themselves as feminists or with feminist issues, there is confusion over the debates that rage within feminism, over the different kinds of feminism and the relationship between women's struggles and struggles against other forms of oppression and exploitation. This paper tries to make sense of these issues by examining in turn the five main categories of feminism which prevail today; namely “liberal feminism”, “radical feminism”, “marxist feminism”, “socialist feminism” and “feminism in the third world”.

The Hairy Leg Strikes: The Individual Artist and the Brazilian Literature de Cordel

ONE SUNDAY MORNING shortly before the nationwide Carnival celebration in 1976, popular poet Jose Francisco Soares happened upon an article in the city of Recife's largest newspaper, The Pernambuco Daily. The account, which dealt with the exploits of an imaginary Hairy Leg (a single, free-standing and decidedly hirsute limb), was the work of a university-educated journalist named Raimundo Carrero. Having heard rumors about the Leg on radio and television, Carrero decided to devote his weekly column, Romance Policial (Fictional Police Blotter), to the terrible creature a joke, purely for fun.1 Soares, who had encountered similar reports, took the journalist's account as indisputable proof of the Leg's appeal. Convinced that the Hairy Leg would generate interest among his own considerably less educated readers, he quickly composed a new version of the monstrous limb's adventures. As Soares had hoped, his story became an immediate bestseller. Spurred both by the Recife-based poet's success and by the growing interest in the rumors among their own customers, a number of poets in neighboring cities began writing their own folhetos or cordel stories about the Hairy Leg.2 This paper examines three of these Hairy Leg tales in an attempt to better understand the interplay between the individual artist and his audience, which makes certain demands on him despite the fact that his is not necessarily a faceto-face performance.3 It also touches on the exchange between the mass media and thefolheto tradition. Educated observers in various countries, and especially in Brazil, have often denounced the mass media as antithetical to folk creation, insisting that it destroys or, at best, imposes a certain sameness upon art forms such as the literatura de cordel.4 I shall show here first through textual analysis, then through cordel authors' own comments, that the folheto news

Hairy legs

Hairy legs

Hairy legs.

Hairy legs.

Et hellenistisk terrakottaværksted i Den persiske Golf

Et hellenistisk terrakottaværksted i Den persiske Golf