Painting Workshop.

From Kestrel, who notes: J. Chris Morel (website: http://morelart.com/ ) is a local landscape artist who does a fall workshop every year, just as the leaves are starting to turn. By great good fortune, I got to attend the workshop this year.  The workshop lasts for 3 days, and each day we traveled to two different magnificent locations to paint. Chris would paint a demo for us, explaining how he handles that particular subject and giving excellent and detailed instruction in learning how to “see” a landscape, how the color of the shadows work and many other things. On day two, the morning location was where the chamisa was in its full glory.

Chris Morel does a demo teaching us how to approach painting chamisa.

My set up, trying my hand at painting chamisa.

Another of our locations, where we set up and painted. The workshop was extremely informative and it was a great honor to be able to attend. Chris was a terrific instructor. I hope I can do it again next year!

© Kestrel, all rights reserved.

Sunday Facepalm.

Civil rights icon Colin Kaepernick and President Donald Trump, composite image.

It’s another Trump Tantrum™. Apparently, the Tiny Tyrant thinks he’s still in reality teevee land…

“If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect…our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem,” President Trump tweeted.

“If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!” the President of the United States insisted.

This is not an episode of ‘The President’, dumbshit Donny. You can’t pretend fire anyone. You can’t fire them for real, either. The twit’s tweets can be seen here. Naturally, the Tiny Tyrant couldn’t leave things be with that level of blunder, oh no…

“‘Wouldn’t you like to see one of our NFL owners, when somebody disrespects the flag, say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field,’” Trump reportedly said at the rally. Kaepernick is not currently employed by any NFL football teams, as he was not drafted after his controversial bended-knee protests during the National Anthem last year.

You can read the full story and reactions here.

In the meantime, the NFL Players Union is standing firm:

Takeo Spikes, M.B.A: “How about all of us get together & say, “get that “son of a btch” out of the White House.” #FukingDotard.

And Colin Kaepernick’s mom had something to say too…

Teresa Kaepernick: “Guess that makes me a proud bitch!”

You can read all about that here.

Naturally, the Tiny Tyrant just can’t let it rest:

The Fucking Idiot: “Roger Goodell of NFL just put out a statement trying to justify the total disrespect certain players show to our country. Tell them to stand!” More on that one here.

I have a suggestion for you, Donny. Go fuck yourself.

Buy A Bucket of Yuck, and God Refills for Free!

Oh, Jim Bakker is going a bit nuts with his yuck in a bucket, insisting that everyone buy, and that all those filthy rich people, well, they should buy a million dollars worth, really! Why? Because end times, that’s why, and money will be useless. Of course, ol’ Jim still seems to want piles of that useless stuff.

Guest John Shorey told viewers to stock up on Bakker’s food buckets and not to worry about running out because God will miraculously refill them as needed.

“When you empty a bucket of food,” Shorey said, “trust God to refill it.”

That’s right nifty. Pity Jehovah can’t see fit to just provide food directly, without the need to pour money into Bakker’s pockets. I’m sure they are counting on the rubes not giving this any thought, nor the fact that when the food bucket is empty, it will most certainly stay that way. I will admit, it’s hard to imagine one of them getting emptied in the first place.

When Shorey told those who “have the means to buy 100 buckets of food” to “buy 100 buckets of food” and give them to local churches, Bakker chimed in to urge millionaires to buy as much food as they can afford.

“Do a million dollars worth of food, I’m serious,” Bakker said. “If they’re rich, their money is going [away] anyway, John. It’s not going to be worth anything. The crash is coming, so why not sow it into the Lord?”

Shorey agreed, adding that those who don’t use all their money to buy as much food as they can will have to answer to God.

Right, money is going to be absolutely useless, so why in the name of your psychogod aren’t you giving the stuff away? Wouldn’t that be the ‘godly’ thing to do? Oh, there’s a tonne of irony comin’ up, folks…

“The Bible says that our riches will be a witness against us,” Shorey said. “When the time comes that you’ve left money in the bank that could have been used to help people, to help feed people and all you did is you just kept all your riches for yourself, it will be a witness against you. You will stand before God and he will say, ‘Why didn’t you do more to help the needy?’”

:head goes bang bang bang on the desk: Right. Let’s see your bank books, boys. Then we’ll talk.

Via RWW, there’s video at the link.

Medieval Shipwrecks in the Black Sea.

A shipwreck from the medieval period, of a type known from literature but never previously seen, was discovered during an underwater survey of the Black Sea this past summer. UConn researcher Kroum Batchvarov says seeing it for the first time was ‘a truly thrilling moment.’ (Courtesy of Kroum Batchvarov).

While conducting their mapping in late summer using the most advanced underwater survey equipment in the world, Batchvarov and his colleagues discovered a total of 43 shipwrecks. The team had expected to see sunken ships, but were surprised at just what they found.

An Ottoman period shipwreck with well preserved wood carvings. The images, which show the shipwrecks in three dimensions, were produced by a process known as photogrammetry. It combines photographs and videos taken by cameras mounted on remotely operated vehicles with distance measurements produced by sonars. (Courtesy of Kroum Batchvarov).

Batchvarov first spotted the well preserved medieval shipwreck on a screen in the control room of the expedition ship after nearly 48 hours of monitoring images from the high remote survey vehicle moving along the floor of the Black Sea.

“That was a truly thrilling moment. We spent the next six hours looking at the wreck. No one had ever seen anything like it,” he says. “We had known of it. There have been descriptions in Venetian manuscripts that survived from the 15th century describing earlier vessels. But this was the first time that we were seeing it.”

The ship was complete, according to Batchvarov: “The masts were still standing. You could see the spars [wooden poles], the yards on deck. Everything was there.”

[…]

The vessels the Black Sea MAP team discovered date over the course of a millennium, from the 9th to the 19th centuries. Many were merchant ships from the Ottoman Empire between the 15th and 19th centuries, mostly from the 18th century. But the medieval ship – dating from the 13th to the mid-14th century and probably of Mediterranean origin – provides the first view of a ship type known from historical sources but never before seen.

[…]

While analysis of the shipwrecks is ongoing, the team continues with its intended purpose, investigating the area for evidence of how humans reacted to changes in the environment in previous eras.

“We are answering an archaeological question: At what stage did the level of the Black Sea change and what once would have been marshy coastal land become inhabitable and then become inundated?” Batchvarov says, noting that the team’s findings could add to previous studies on catastrophic flooding in the Black Sea region.

You can read and see more here.