The Healing Arts: New Discoveries in Pneumaticks!

By James Gillray. In this etching, he caricaturised a lecturer – most likely physician and chemist Thomas Garnett, as administering gas at London’s Royal Institution to a particularly long-winded member of parliament, Sir John Coxe Hippisley. Squeezing the bellows next to the pair is the grinning future Sir Humphry Davy. Just over a week after Hannah Humphrey published Gillray’s etching, Davy would replace Garnett as the Royal Institution’s Lecturer of Chemistry. Source.  Over to the left, toward the bottom, there appears to be an interracial couple with a child. Click for full size!

New Discoveries in Pneumaticks!: or an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air, James Gillray, Etching coloured, 1802. Subject: New Discoveries, Equipment, Supplies, Teaching.

New Discoveries in Pneumaticks!: or an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air, James Gillray, Etching coloured, 1802. Subject: New Discoveries, Equipment, Supplies, Teaching.

Z Is For Zinnia.

Zinnia.

Zinnias make for wonderful summertime garden flowers, attracting all kinds of pollinators and many birds which feed on their seeds. Snails (and slugs) also seem to like them, not only the flowers but especially the seedlings. It’s kind of a spring tradition for me, sow zinnias and hand-pick snails and slugs around them every night until they grow to a certain stage or until snails estivate. This photo was taken in November, when snails are active again, and some zinnias are still standing.

Oh, what a poignant and beautiful photo! Click for full size.

© Nightjar, all rights reserved.

The Daily Bird #714.

This was yesterday: “Oh gods, I went and filled the feeder, then took Jayne on a walk around the property, and there were DOZENS of Cedar Waxwings in the apple tree. I’ve been trying to get a photo of them for years.”  This was not easy shooting, but still, oh, this was so exciting! I sat on the ground under the apple tree, and shot up. Lots of photos here, 12 of them, most below the fold. The last set is underexposed, but I was once again shooting into the sun, so it was the only way to prevent a bunch of silhouettes. They are constantly active, so most of my shots were somewhat artistic blurs. These are also birds who excel at the quick flip the moment you get a focus, so I ended up with a lot of butt shots too. These 12 were the best out of them all. Altogether, a great and grand morning, sitting under the apple and box elder maple trees, in the shade, surrounded by the soporific buzz of bees in all the blossoms. Picked a bunch of lilacs for the studio, too. Click for full size!

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Are You Ready For Alt*Hero Crackdown?

Do you all remember Vox Day’s quest to “rescue” comics from the horrible, evil machinations of SJW thinking? If you don’t, it’s all here. Well, the comic is out:

Goodness me, lookit that stew of crackpot sciency stuff! I’ll just bet you’re all riveted now, right? Right?

Here’s the amazon link to the comic, if your tastes run to idiot. I do believe I’ll pass. Fascists are bad enough in reality, I don’t need them pretending to be entertainment, too.

ETA: Looking at that cover, it’s not awful, but those breasts! I’ll assume Vox Day is at least familiar with them, and they don’t work like that. They aren’t actual balloons.

The Healing Arts: The Gin Shop.

George Cruikshank, click for full size.

The Gin Shop, George Cruikshank, Etching coloured, 1829. Subject: Alcohol, Gin, Drunkenness, Mother's Ruin, Children, Child Care.

The Gin Shop, George Cruikshank, Etching coloured, 1829. Subject: Alcohol, Gin, Drunkenness, Mother’s Ruin, Children, Child Care.

The GIN Shop –

—”Now oh dear, how shocking the thought is They makes the gin from aquafortis:

They do it on purpose folks lives to shorten And tickets it up at two-pence a quartern.”

New Ballad.

You can read more about the Gin Craze here.

Fairy Tale Art.

A wonderful site, full of enough fairy tale art to keep a person quite busy, sent along by rq: Art Passions. Fairy Tale art and artists encompass so very many styles, and the illustrations are crucial to the stories, they inflame the imagination, and illuminate the stories from within. In this particular case, serendipity strikes, as I brought home a book of short tales by Leigh Bardugo yesterday:

The first story, Ayama and the Thorn Wood, is a grand story which I enjoyed very much. I do have one noisy complaint however, and it has to do with the fairy tale art. In the story, Ayama is described thusly:

“Ayama was clumsy and apt to drop things. Her body was solid and flat-footed, short and round as a beer jug.”

Given this description, why in the fuckety fuck is Ayama drawn like this?:

This never should have gotten a pass from anyone, let alone the author. It is not a crime to depict characters correctly, and all girls do not need to be tall and thin with a teeny waist. FFS, seeing this sort of thing is infuriating, and it went a long way to souring a very good story. In the story, Ayama is strong, courageous, imaginative, and thoughtful. In the drawing, she’s just another generic pretty, skinny girl. That’s not doing anyone any favours. We all come in different shapes and sizes, and that’s a message all kids need. What they don’t need is yet another cookie cutter shape to try and stuff themselves into, regardless of fit.

Hey, Better Than Pharaoh!

Screengrab. Man looks like he was unwrapped after a a few decades of mummification. Yeah, I know, but still…

Here’s a somewhat novel defense of the Tiny Tyrant – he’s better than Pharaoh. Yep. Naturally, the first question springs to mind: um, which Pharaoh would we be talking about? There were a bunch of them.

“Throughout biblical history, God continually raises up imperfect leaders,” he said. “In the days of the Pharaoh of Egypt—let’s not be Pollyannish here—anything that is inappropriate for young children, it was far worse in the king of Babylon’s time and the Pharaoh. When they partied, they partied and they didn’t even have an X-rated label because anything went.”

Uhhh, X-rated kinda means anything goes, and that’s not even touching on the absolute idiocy of trying to paste that over various Egyptian dynasties. I don’t think it a terribly wise focus either, given the Tiny Tyrant’s penchant for nasty partying. All throughout history, pretty much  everything was worse for children, so I’m afraid that’s not much of a winner either. This is also a display of complete ignorance about Egyptian history, which in many aspects, was highly civilised, with a whole lot of very smart people running things.

“Donald Trump, like so many other leaders in the Old Testament, was raised up by God not because he was perfect,” McGuire added. “Other men in the Bible were pagan kings, in fact, they made the people worship them as gods. God has a historical record from Genesis to Revelation, over and over again, God says in his word, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ He chooses who he will raise up and put down.”

Monarchy, regardless of where it’s taken place, has always been considered to be of divine origin and choice. Nothing new there. The ancient Egyptians had gods, you know, and they took them pretty damn seriously. Just like you do. That means god[s] first, monarch second. Most monarchs were quite smart enough to play up their various god[s], and simply relied on their authority as ruler to keep people in obeisance, and being fodder for wars often fought over…god[s]. “Thus saith the lord”. Yeah, there was a lot of that, and a lot of what Jehovah said was hideous, psychopathic bullshit. So fucking what? I could walk around every day saying “Thus saith Caine”, and writing “Thus saith Caine”. Wouldn’t mean a thing, except perhaps as an announcement I had decided to be an obnoxious ass.

“He put Trump into office for a reprieve,” he continued, “because our Founding Fathers, the pilgrims and Puritans, entered into a holy covenant with Almighty God, based on Deuteronomy 28. It’s an everlasting covenant. That’s why America is great. So here we have a man, a billionaire, and they don’t like him because they can’t control him. He isn’t a lapdog for Pharaoh’s new world order.”

Oh FFS, what a stew of crap. Yeah, Deuteronomy 28 is interesting. 28:14 begins:

And thou shalt not go aside from any of the words which I command thee this day, to the right hand, or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them. (Emphasis mine. Heh.)

That’s followed by an astonishing amount of curses, truly horrible shit, from petty infliction of hemorrhoids to family doing the worst things to you. Oh, and I guess you fellows haven’t heard, but all the pharaohs are dead. Long dead. As for the Tiny Tyrant, he cant control himself, in any sense of the word. That’s why he can’t run any business successfully, and resorts to cons and grifting.

RWW has the full story.