← Feed

Posts

• Post #4500473

  Europeans, we need to appreciate & defend what we have. Americans... well, it's just not working: "[USA] without insurance, a colonoscopy could range from $1,250 to more than $4,000. A colonoscopy screening generally costs less than a diagnostic colonoscopy, which includes a biopsy or excision..." A no-insurance pay-at-the-counter colonoscopy with excision & biopsy in Italy today costs €368. Without biopsy it's €318. With any European national health insurance, it&#3...

• Post #4491937

  Egg ideas: Microwave gently in bowl ~30s, no added fat Hardboil (boil water, dip in 11.5 mins, cold water shock to peel), less for softboil Salt only after cooking in all cases Scrambled, omelet: add dash of water for fluffy steam, beat, fry (20mins on low-low with constant stirring makes egg velvet) Canton omelet (beat, spice heavily, spread wide & thin, cook well one side, then cover to steam finish) Frittata: flip using a prop plate Oeuf à plat, coddled, poached, thread soup #Reci...

• Post #4482214

  This article on Jared French is exceptionally good: https://www.artcritic.com/en/jared-french-and-the-american-kouroi/ Jared French. Washing the White Blood from Daniel Boone, 1939. Piero della Francesca. Baptism of Christ, ~1450. #Painting

• Post #4390465

  It took my brain a month of rummaging around in the mental files, but I finally found whom I had cast as Judge Holden in Blood Meridian: Major Briggs (Don S. Davis), my favorite character from Twin Peaks. He's an exact fit for me, so clear while reading: look, tone, demeanor, pontifications. And yet it took me forever to place him. I'm thrilled. Now I'm going to walk around talking like that, pretending I'm the lonely devil out collecting paranormal artifacts. In fact it's no...

• Post #4390214

  Of all the things that should fell AI, I think the thing that will get it is just how profoundly uncool it is. Even online we are still social creatures and it has no human connection, no swoon. It's the social equivalent of polyester.

• Post #4375268

  If you are trying to learn another language, here are the two best teachers I know of: 1. Having forced immersive normal conversations, knowing that you are making errors. 2. Translating random blocks of text without the use of LLMs, and then going over them with help for corrections. Both of these teach me more and faster than anything else.

• Post #4370338

  With 32c (90F) in the Arctic right now, it seems inevitable that we will all have forest fires. However, we may only have them once. I wish that were good news. The planet will not grow back as it was.

• Post #4363564

  Leonora Carrington. Les Distractions de Dagobert, 1945. This article is a good artistic assessment of a work which is almost always discussed in terms of gross financial worth first: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/leonora-carrington-les-distractions-de-dagobert-2718627 I will only add is that they elide the period of her nervous breakdown and abandonment by Ernst with a few glib words, when the reality was horrific sexual violence. She undertook an amazing rebirth which informs her later fe...

• Post #4354541

  Franciszek Honiok Famously he was the first victim of WW2, but we wouldn't know anything about him, or the origin of the false-flag Nazi operation that murdered him and started the war, except for the Nuremberg Trials. He has no memorial and his body was never found. How many others remain unknown? And how much like the regimes we're familiar with the today to plant such false flags. [This was prompted by a TIL post someone deleted earlier and I wish they hadn't!] https://en.wiki...

• Post #4347934

  Dalí. Living Still Life, 1956. I won't go into my freely-associating thoughts about this painting, but I just want to point out that it's often tagged on the internet as containing phallic symbolism, and I'm like, oh really, which one??? #Painting

• Post #4323103

  He has unexpectedly taken the day off work. He slept until 8! Then waking with uncharacteristic alertness, he first thing asked for "church music;" I was dubious but went as far as Handel, just to see what all this was about. Now, still naked, he's got both arms in the air yelling yes yes yes, bring it girrrrrl, during the crescendo of Coronation Anthem No. 1. I'm thinking I should call for help.

• Post #4268378

  Yesterday was a vision of the future: 38c at rush hour in a traffic jam on a narrow sunk channel of controlled-access black asphalt highway, each car a single fragile airconditioned bubble in a cauldron, churning out toxins & rippling heat. 1 jam turned into 4. 1 hour became 2. I started to run out of gas. Cell connectivity flickered. Then I had a random health emergency (better now thx, but I was not okay to drive). It was the 2nd time in 6 days that heat became life-threatening. #ClimateDi...

• Post #4268255

  Carl Moll. Roman ruins in Schönbrunn, 1892. Why don't we hear about him alongside his Vienna Secession peers? It wasnt lack of talent but rather that he was an early, rabid Nazi. So much so that he and his family committed suicide rather than be captured at the end of WW2. It brings questions of objective beauty, subjective intention, the "statute of limitations" we impose on art. No one queries Fragonard's political opinions. But this is too close, too alive. This we do not...

• Post #4209682

  4 separate notes came today to see if we are on fire. Such times. We're not on fire, yet, but I was right in the heart of a parched tinderbox woodland over the weekend and it was so scary, until it rained hard at last on Sunday morning before dawn, rained and hailed for 3 whole hours. It was an awful destructive storm in other ways, but at least it dampened the fuses for a few days down in that driest area. Stock masks, y'all. And keep a bugout bag with car keys in it.

• Post #4207882

  Raoul Dufy. Seaside, 1960. I went looking for happy distraction but even Dufy seems foreboding today. #Painting lithograph

• Post #4162904

  Podcast in Italian: "Burnham is above all focused on bringing down the cost of living, for making affordable things like beer and whatever else English people may consume."

• Post #4161609

  Reading about painting, I often run into the pat phrase "Virgin and Child." I know what it signifies but find it humorous for two reasons: 1. the in-your-face ko-an; and 2. the hijacking of the focus from the singularly redemptive male baby onto a female Mother cult. To me "child" makes it sound like just any kid she happened to have handy, like virgin with psalter or lapdog or curling iron. Stefano da Verona. The Madonna of Humility, ~1430. (Imo this Virgin is anything but...

• Post #4134289

  I've said this before but people seem overly focused on the Nazi comparison. A much more exact and useful comparison imo is Mussolini's Italian Fascism of the 1920s. In that vein you will never run out of parallels. "It's the same picture."

• Post #4133067

  Ramon Casas i Carbó. Patio, 1889. To have lived in such turbulent times, he sure could capture the peace of home. Even more than his spectacular technology and landscape pictures, I love his domestic interiors, like this one. Like other favorite interior artists, Koch, Valls, Hammershøi, Vermeer, Clara Peters, we can see the same rooms and furniture move around. This is the same porch from breakfast and sewing, and the same table and palm seen elsewhere, and of course the woman. #Painting

• Post #4133025

  Santiago Rusiñol. Moulin de la Galette Ticket Seller (or, Le Grand Bal), 1890. Just a little tweak with the color brightness (2nd version here) and this feels like a photograph from today. I like the longer title better because it tells us who she is, not a guest but a worker. He was close friends with a lot of famous contemporary artists but here you can see a very clear overlap with Casas i Carbó. #Painting

• Post #4132793

  In the last days I was twice in the home of a very very old person who does not even have a cell phone or computer. The house is upholstered in bookshelves full to sagging, encyclopedia sets in multiple languages, & hardcopy dictionaries that alone took up about 3 meters of shelving. There is a desk with no pc stacked all around with magazines and newspapers on the floor. The walls are taped over in physical maps and hardcopy photos. It was like a time capsule and I nearly wept both passes.

• Post #4131617

  I spent the weekend isolated in a small meeting of highly intelligent, thoughtful, driven people. The hardest part but also the best part was how intensely we disagreed on certain basic premises. At one point during a shared meal a woman told me rather matter of factly that she was a Christian. It's a good lesson in what unity is necessary to get things done, and what is not.

• Post #4131423

  When opposition forces these days take down a monument to racist, fascist or whatever oppressive past, they "put it into storage" or in a museum, so careful to examine history and respect its legacy for all. Meanwhile when the Right destroys something they crush it to dust and scatter it in the wind. There is the difference right there, and the so-called left would do well to learn it. The surveillance state only works one way.

• Post #4129154

  The very bad news is that the general public still appears to be absolutely clueless about the dangers of corporate AI. The good news is that when you sit them down to explain it, they are by now very used to hearing downsides and mitigating talk about hyped-up "miraculous" tech. They are also accepting of nuance! They just need someone friendly to take the time to explain it to them in a calm tone.

• Post #4115513

  Highly recommended https://roughlydaily.com/2026/07/24/never-trust-people-who-promise-to-make-you-rich-in-a-day-they-are-generally-crazy-swindlers/

• Post #4062751

  I knew that there were 3 basic ways to trim olive trees, but today I learned firsthand from a very old man, the son of an olive farmer, why the "right" way to cut them is like this. The downward facing branches of olives produce the fruit, he said, or at least the most fruit. I am charmed (and now have to rethink my own trees). #Gardening

• Post #4050147

  I read somewhere that the net effect of the tightening of the nooses all over tech may result in less internet use for everyone. After all, the internet is already dead in the way we've known it. ID laws, enshittification, surveillance, gatekeeping and media consolidation may push people to simply stop using the web altogether. I thought it was an exaggeration but 3 days later I can't get to YouTube because of stringent new requirements. My response: I don't need to see what's on...

• Post #4041938

  It's not the end of the world. Don't exaggerate. It's only the end of us.

• Post #4029851

  Sigrid Hjertén. Window with Wooden Horse & Flowers, 1934. I've looked at this painting for 2 days, trying to discern why I like it so much when anything it "says" is so cryptic as to be inconsequential. I believe it has to do with her positively trippy perception of color, a perception with which I empathize innately. And even though I know biographies are always told in bias, what they did to her is unforgivable. That pathos is there, too. She was part of the whole von Dardel...

• Post #4025491

  This scene now appears to have been more prescient than historical.