The adorable Fieldfare again, with an apple of their own. From Giliell, click for full size!
© Giliell, all rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
The adorable Fieldfare again, with an apple of their own. From Giliell, click for full size!
© Giliell, all rights reserved.
It’s snowing here today with high winds (gusts up to 90 km/hr) and I just can’t bear to take one more wintry photo this spring. Instead, I give you this beautiful old willow tree that caught my eye the day Jack and I went to the lake. It looked so sculptural silhouetted against the blue, blue sky. I’m actually very fond of the look of bare trees in the winter. You can see how unique each one is and that they all have their own personality. Normally, I don’t find them depressing at all. Today, though, I would give a lot to see a tree fully dressed. Heck, today just a few leaf buds would thrill me.
©voyager, all rights reserved
Count lascases — Since sixt week j learn the Englich and j do not any progress. Six week do fourty and two day. If might have learn fivity word four day I could know it two thusands and two hundred. It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand; even he could must twinty bout much of tems for know it our hundred and twenty week, which do more two yars. After this you shall agrée that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged.
The Public Domain has a fascinating article up about Napoleon’s attempt to learn English, which he disliked and had some trouble with, to say the least.
…His English teacher was Count Emmanuel de Las Cases, an historian and loyal supporter who had been allowed to voyage with him to Saint Helena. The Count would later turn their fifteen months of conversations into a publishing sensation, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (1822–23). The book recorded Napoleon’s day-to-day life on the island, his sentiments on religion and philosophy, his argument that the ideals of the French Revolution had lived on in the empire. It would be printed and reprinted throughout the century, and do much to turn the perception of Napoleon from a dictator into a liberator — a slayer of tyrannical dynasties more than a founder of his own. It is also the primary window through which we can view the development of Napoleon’s English.
According to Count Las Cases, his pupil “had an extraordinary intelligence but a very bad memory: this latter particularly upset him.” As a result, Napoleon grasped English grammar with an impressive ease but vocabulary with a painful slowness.
When it came to speaking English, the Count relates, “The pupil wished only to recognise [French] pronunciation.” Perhaps the former emperor could not bear to do his vanquishers the honour of speaking their language their way. Perhaps his approach to English mirrored his general approach to foreign territory — he liked to make it his own:
Click on over to The Public Domain for the full story!
The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel is an accompanying work of François Rabelais’ The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel. The woodcuts are wonderfully creepy, and well worth a look even though they were most certainly not done by Rabelais.
The Public Domain has an article up about this work, and there’s an excellent post about it at Poemas del río Wang. Or, you can head right to the original images at Gallica.
Just a selection of this year’s creations. The last two pictures are the same eggs from front and from back.
©Charly, all rights reserved, click for full size.
©Charly, all rights reserved, click for full size.
©Charly, all rights reserved, click for full size.
©Charly, all rights reserved, click for full size.
Juoni.
The Finnish word juoni has multiple meanings. Plot (of a book or a play) or intrigue. As a geological term it means a dike. This dike is (I think) a magmatic intrusion, probably thousands of millions years old. This rock is in Kaivopuisto, Helsinki and the (otherwise) paved seaside way/path for pedestrians goes over it.
Click for full size!
© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.
Meretricious / Vapid / PoppycockMeretricious
Adjective.
1: of or relating to a prostitute: having the nature of prostitution, meretricious relationships.
2a: tawdrily and falsely attractive. b: superficially significant: pretentious.
-meretriciously, adverb.
-meretriciousness, noun.
[Origin: Latin, meretricius, from meretric-, meretrix prostitute, from merēre to earn.]
(1626)
“I’ll say you’re right,” said Mark. “Unfortunately, Miss Marple, we didn’t realize that. We wondered what the old boy saw in that rather insipid and meretricious little bag of tricks.”
Vapid
Adjective: lacking liveliness, tang, briskness, or force: Flat, Dull.
-vapidly, adverb.
-vapidness, noun.
[Origin: Latin vapidus flat-tasting; akin to Latin vappa flat wine and perhaps to Latin vapor steam.]
(1656)
“His face grim, Conway Jefferson lay remembering and thinking. Before his eyes he saw again the pretty, vapid face of Ruby.”
Poppycock
Noun: empty talk or writing: nonsense.
[Origin: Dutch dialect pappekak, literally, soft dung, from Dutch pap pap + kak dung.]
(1865)
“And she didn’t care tuppence for Mr. Jefferson. All that play of affection and gratitude was so much poppycock.”
All quotes from The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie.
I couldn’t make up my mind today, so a twofer…
A total cutiepuss from Giliell, click for full size!
© Giliell, all rights reserved.
Over the weekend Charly wrote an interesting post about different types of fungal infections in trees. Today, Jack and I came upon this downed tree and if I remember his post correctly this is a sapwood infection with unaffected heartwood. The damage is quite extreme and I think the infection is parasitic rather than fungal. So much of the wood has been eaten away that I suspect some sort of critter made a banquet of this tree.
©voyager, all rights reserved
Installation view of Indecline’s “The People’s Prison” (2018) at the Trump International Hotel & Tower (all photos by Jason Goodrich for Indecline and used with permission, unless indicated otherwise).
Robert Mueller may not have succeeded in bringing Donald Trump to justice yet, but for a fleeting few hours Friday night, the shadowy art collective Indecline did what millions of people in the US and beyond have dreamed of doing since November 2016: they put Trump behind bars.
It may not have been the actual maximum security prison of our collective dreams, but Indecline — most recently known for surreptitiously staging a graveyard at Trump’s Bedminister Golf Course, hanging a troupe of “Ku Klux Klowns,” and previously for planting naked Trump statues in multiple cities during the 2016 election — managed to stage a prison cell installation, dubbed “The People’s Prison,” in a suite on the third floor of the Trump International Hotel & Tower next to Columbus Circle. The work was installed in less than 24 hours, entirely undercover, and without the knowledge of hotel employees, who unwittingly helped carry all of the props and equipment to the room.
Installation view of Indecline’s “The People’s Prison” (2018) at the Trump International Hotel & Tower.
Surrounding the one-man prison cell were portraits rendered on American flags, burned and tattered at the edges, each illuminated with its own individual lamp. Indecline worked with 12 artists — including Molly Crabapple, Ann Lewis, LMNOPI, and the Panic Collective — to create the portraits of 12 artists and activists from across history, including Muhammad Ali, Leonard Peltier, Angela Davis, Hunter S. Thompson, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and even more contemporary figures like Erica Garner and Edward Snowden. Interviews with each of the portrait subjects played for the duration of the show over a background soundtrack of strangely relaxing ambient music.
All of the figures in the portraits, an Indecline spokesman told Hyperallergic, are “activists and fighters that we look up to. Activists that made a difference and made a good point. He has to sit here with the people who actually made a difference.” The spokesman continued: “Everyone on these walls fought to make this flag stand for something greater than it does currently under the Trump administration … they’re the ones who should be regarded as historical figures.”
My, my, conspiracy lunatic and asshole christian Rick Wiles has been booted off Youtube. This is a terrible event, everyone! It presages the very worst of all history wadded up together in a nasty spitball.
“America’s leftist snowflakes are furious that half the country no longer listens to their idiotic Marxist propaganda. My ancestors were German Reformed Church members who fled religious persecution in Europe in the 1700s and risked everything to come to America so they could freely worship God. There’s freedom running through my veins. My ancestors were not silenced, and I won’t be silenced by YouTube’s New Nazis. Every generation has its tyrants. We have tech tyrants,” stated Mr. Wiles.
Pastor Wiles fears America is on the verge of a French Revolution-style upheaval during which leftist mobs will try to execute Christians and conservatives to purge “Old America” speech and thoughts from our society. “France is an atheistic, socialist nation today because it never recovered from the French Revolution that started in 1789. The Jacobins decapitated Catholic priests and burned churches over a period of 10 years. Likewise, the communists who overthrew Russia in 1917 slaughtered 300,000 Russian Orthodox Church priests. Don’t tell me it can’t happen here,” Wiles remarked.
“Mao Zedong would be proud of the Marxist cultural revolution sweeping America and erasing our heritage,” said Pastor Wiles. “It must be stopped, or we will be swept into a communist nightmare that could take 70 years to escape.”
Hmm, last time I looked, France was doing okay. Haven’t noticed that it’s particularly atheistic, but yes, it is secular, as a nation should be, in order to serve all its citizens well. As for Mr. Wiles’s grasp on history, he could use a bit of work there. Missing a fair amount of bits. Perhaps if Mr. Wiles stopped braying for a moment, he’d realize no one has siphoned the freedom out of his veins – he still has the freedom to worship as he likes, where he likes.
“I have warned for years that a spirit of Nazism is rising up inside the USA,” he added. “The new Nazis are here. America is on the verge of a French Revolution-style upheaval during which leftist mobs will seek to execute Christians and conservatives in order to purge American society.”
Yes, most of us who are at least part way woke are all too aware of the nazis running about, and we aren’t happy about it. You might want to pay attention to actual news now and then, Mr. Wiles. I’ll happily settle for defanging all you deluded asshole christian conservatives. You can still have your churches to run to, where you can complain and moan to your heart’s content. I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to execute anyone. I probably wouldn’t mind gagging you lot for a while though.
Ilma.
Ilma is Finnish for air and also colloquially weather. In November 2017, it was windy and wet snow was falling in Hesperia park in Helsinki. With flash, it was possible to catch the trajectories of the falling snowflakes in the air (thanks for the advice in this blog a few months before, Caine).
Click for full size!
© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.
