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| June 21, 2025 |
- The cast-steel axle from the first Ferris Wheel
was
located in 2019, underneath St.Louis. Erected for the
1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Wheel was dismantled
and rebuilt in St.Louis for their
1904
expo. And speaking of, Rest Of World
reports
on the China pavillion at this year's, in Osaka.
- How
to turn off "Search the Web" when using the Task Bar's Search
in Windows 11. Worked for me; still seeking an effective way to
suppress Google's annoying requests to log in, at so many
websites.
- Also in Japan, a Van Gogh show has just opened
at
the Pola Museum, near Tokyo.
- Today's image by John Singer Sargent. A certain girl gave me a copy of
this
painting, which I immediately put on the wall
of my first apartment, in old Greenbelt; a parting gift
before I went off to Europe the first time.
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| June 16, 2025 |
- It's the
International
Atomic Energy Agency's flag. Flags of the World has
a long
list of these rarely-seen UN flags.
- Two new artists:
Daniel Rich
translate photographs into
paintings, of buildings and cityscapes;
and Thibault Drutel makes photos of
symmetric
subway platforms.
- I linked to this sequence of vintage cars demonstrating their
retractable headlights previously, when it was on Twitter. Watching
it again on Reddit I don't see the early 60s Corvette so
here's
a '66 Sting Ray doing its thing.
- A lot of programmers are now using LLM "AI"s to
generate sub-routines and code they'd previously
write themselves. In fact
people
are talking with these ChatGPT AIs, falling in love
with, even believing they've found a channel for conversations
with God. Scary, perhaps; and now I understand those
programmers' frustration with the software, spending
hours tweaking their prompts to get just the right
output. Like I do: here's my current 'achievement', courtesy
Perchance.org.
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| June 12, 2025 |
- CNN:
A
brief history of airline food’s rapid descent.
- Radioactive Quack Cures at the
Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity.
- The
Truth about White South African Refugees. A loaded,
complicated issue; but SA is Winston's country so I
find him more credible than mainstream media on this
issue. This recent group may have jumped a queue, but
white people in SA are
targeted for ethnic cleansing now. As is so typical
these days, there was no follow-through, their entry
into the US was just for the optics, support for and
interest in the group evaporating afterwards —
No food, job or
phones: Afrikaner ‘refugee’ family ‘stranded’
or rather dumped in Montana.
- Today's image is a color-shifted detail from a postcard
advertising one of 12
Variety
Acts by the Wiener Werkstätte in 1907. This one
depicts A.Lucci, the famous Hunger
Artist, [who] had gone 132 days without food, and though
reduced to a skeleton was still smoking, reading and
in pretty good spirits. Also at Flashbak,
Photographs
of The Romanovs' Final Ball, in Color in
St.Petersburg in 1903 (such opulence!) and
Surface
Designs for Die Quelle, also from Vienna, 1902.
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| June 11, 2025 |
This is from Displaced by
Lucy Knisley, just
read it again, where she accompanies her grandparents on a
Caribbean cruise. She's also posted a 17-years-later
Part 2
sequel to her wishful song about time travel,
The
Last Time.
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| June 10, 2025 |
sticker-graffito spotted in Fremont, California
- More about this
Barbara
Kruger at Art Net. (It's called
Questions.)
A member of Pussy Riot involved also, she's in a cell
inside the museum, right now; doing a performance called
"Police State."
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| June 9, 2025 |
What's going on in LA? Who knows, really; but there's
a
connection between a 1990 tale I wrote about my life
there called 'A Trip Downtown' which explains the setting
of this recent confrontation there, between
law enforcement and the media.
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* Reminding me of
the Gary Snyder:
Stay Together
Learn the Flowers
Go Light.
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June 5, 2025
- Navigation within, a learned skill, but
Weimar Berlin.com
(by the mysterious "Al") is worthwhile, many fascinating
things therein (including this painting from 1930 by
Hanns Kralik, "Out My Window"). Inspired by
Babylon
Berlin, which I'm now catching up on, courtesy
the
Internet Archive. Challenge! As it's a German production,
natürlich, keine englischen, spanish sub-titles only!
Summaries available online enable some level of comprehension,
and library DVDs are coming.
- More Weimar at
Secret
City Travel.
-
Two words for truth, istina and pravda; and also, two
words for lies: lozh and vranyo. The Conversation delves into
vranyo, Russian
for when you lie and everyone knows it, but you don’t care.
Meanwhile, according to the BBC, one should
beware
pokazukhas and zakazukhas in Russian media — empty spectacles, and paid propaganda.
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