Ephemera

Friday Ephemeraren’t

May 11, 2018 by David 62 Comments

Hey, it was this or nothing at all. But by all means throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I’ll set the ball rolling with some balloons in Albuquerque; a dog that’s mastered invisibility; immune cell migration in the zebrafish inner ear; Nanjing, China, circa 1929; conversational robots; and, via Julia, some pulp cover treatments of classic novels.

Oh, and the no-strings one-time date you’ve always wanted.

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Chester Draws

May 12, 2018 6:57 am

Just a point of terminology.
“Modern” art isn’t what is being produced today. I like quite a lot of Modern art — Picasso, Klimt, Vassarely etc. Modern art is the early moves away from strict realism, but still within bounds of sense and style.
“Contemporary” art, which is what is produced now, is largely a pile of steaming poo.
This is one of the few frictions in my marriage. I am extremely reluctant to go to any Contemporary art, and when my wife tricks me into it I’m quite grumpy about it. She thinks this is borderline Philistinism, to refuse to believe any Contemporary art is good. (I think some is good, I merely refuse to be dragged through all the dross to find it.)
And don’t get me started on “post-contemporary”!

R. Sherman

May 12, 2018 7:23 am

And don’t get me started on “post-contemporary”!
I live by a code. In addition to things like, “No special orders in the drive-through,” I have, “Anything with the word ‘post’ in the descriptor is going to suck, ‘post-hole diggers’ excepted.”

David

May 12, 2018 8:33 am

Taxpayers of California, rejoice!

Darleen

May 12, 2018 3:08 pm

Jordan Peterson is learning that for some “journalists”, writing libelous screeds about him comes BEFORE the interview.

Darleen

May 12, 2018 3:09 pm

Taxpayers of California, rejoice!
… excuse the expression but Holy Shit …

Hal

May 12, 2018 6:03 pm

“Contemporary” art, which is what is produced now, is largely a pile of steaming poo.
I have an occasional hobby of sightseeing open houses in the area and relatively recently found a total and utter dud. My commentary afterwards:

I have no idea of the background of the team that did a bit of rebuilding, but rather definite ideas did come to mind.
Imagine someone who gets a job as a general construction designer, not exactly architect, much more as a sort of an artist. Imagine that he does get a number of contract jobs, where he’s recurringly working with one team or another, and each such team is building or rebuilding a small hotel. This designer keeps getting assigned to designing the hotel lobby. After awhile he designs a lot of lobbies. Also, he may not necessarily be really good at what he designs, but he does keep doing a lot of lobbies.
And then he lands a contract as the sole designer of a rebuild of a house.
Now imagine a very minimalist hotel lobby and imagine that this lobby keeps going for three stories, with a scattering of four or five beds here and there. Also here and there, there are indeed bathrooms, showers, whatnot, which appear to be open spaces that merely extend off of the rest of this lobby. As far as something that might resemble a kitchen area, in the middle floor, a bit back from the front door, there is indeed something of some counter spaces that can indeed hold a few bottles of something and some party munchies. Near this area with the counters, there are indeed a couple of what look like ovens, but these ovens are on the other side of a passageway from the counterspace area, are not included in with the area where some alleged food preparation would be occurring.
And this variety of placement and arrangement goes on for three stories.
Someone’s hoping to get $4.2 million for it.
I’m not holding my breath.

At a later round of eyeballing houses I gave that description to a realtor I was chatting with. The gist of her utterly disgusted reaction was Oh, Contemporary.
—Oh, and yes, I met the “designer” during that tour. Yes, he is a hipster.

Hal

May 12, 2018 7:21 pm

Taxpayers of California, rejoice!
Absolutely.
The taxpayers of California can rejoice because we do not appear to be paying for those two instances of, as it were, completely shit writing, instead of actual reporting.
With Dailywire and nbcbayarea being what is cited there, if they wanted to achieve any credibility with anyone, they would also discuss the actual topic. They don’t and that pair of articles leaves ’em revealed as idiots . . . contemporary even . . !
That very specifically outlined area is The Tenderloin, where the wannabe reporters add an extra street on the north side to include Union Square, with the corner of Market and Van Ness added to the south so that City Hall can be included.
Reading through both “articles”, there isn’t even one single mention of “Tenderloin” given that what they are very clearly focused on is only The Tenderloin. Instead, the recurring and quite fraudulent attempt is to claim that the sole single very well known problem neighborhood is the entirety of “downtown” San Francisco.
The actual downtown SF area is basically, oh, Broadway, Van Ness, Market, and The Embarcadero. Included in that area is the Financial District, Chinatown, Nob Hill, Union Square, Civic Center and City Hall, and also The Tenderloin. As a further underline of the failure of these “reporters”, compare that map of The Tenderloin with the entirety of San Francisco.
Oh, yes, and Dailywire is attempting to get mileage with a headline of San Francisco Spends $30 Million Cleaning Feces, Drug Needles. Somehow they forgot to add that the San Francisco city budget is in the range of eight to ten billion dollars . . . and that’s with a rounding approximation of two billion dollars . . .