Friday Ephemera

…his unboxing video is better than yours
Oh, yeah? https://youtu.be/iTmne_Soj0g

(⊙_⊙)
Madame, please do cover up; this is a respectable place.
Although apparently rather cold.

“Oh, yeah?”
Heheh. But bloody hell, Twin Peaks – the first big internet TV phenomenon (and the only one I ever watched*) – is nearly 29 years old. There are people in their forties now who were too young to appreciate it at the time.
Somebody stop time. I want to get off.
*I still have the Sherilyn Fenn poster. Rrrrrr… even her name was hot.

Trebuchet technology would be farther along today if medieval warlords had used them to launch their armies over defenses rather than trying to beat them down by hurling boulders.

It’s not offensive speech, or offensive speakers, or an offensive ideology. It’s offending speech, offending speakers, or an offending ideology.

The small semantic adjustment makes all the difference. … Offensive speech must be roundly criticized, but offending speech connotes a breaking of taboos held dear by sanctimonious guardians of acceptable discourse. The latter draws attention to the motivations of the accuser rather than to the accused.

I still have the Sherilyn Fenn poster. Rrrrrr… even her name was hot.
Two three words, Sam: Two Moon Junction. Rowr.

Adrian Stokes, The Stones of Rimini (1934):

This is the point at which to emphasise the pre-eminence of stone as the material to be carved. I am not thinking of its durability, nor even of the shape it will allow. I am thinking of the equal diffusion of light that, compared to most objects, even the hardest and darkest stones possess; I am thinking of hand-polished marble’s glow that can only be compared to the light on flesh-and-blood. The sculptor is led to woo the marble. Into the solidity of stone, a solidity yet capable of suffused light, the fantasies of bodily vigour, of energy in every form, can be projected, set out and made permanent. …
The great virtue of stone is that unlike other hard materials it seems to have a luminous life, light or soul. Limestone in particular blends the virtues of hard and soft materials. …
As for representation of the human form, it will be readily understood that in the carving of stone’s hard luminous substance, it suffers all the stroking and polishing, all the definition that our hands and mouths bestow on those we love.
Polishing stone is also like slapping the new-born infant to make it breathe. …
The light on stone reveals the slightest undulation of its surface; and since no stone has a general circular structure, curves depend entirely on the care with which the block has been diminished. Such forms, though they may suggest the utmost roundness, will tend in reality to be more flattened or compressed than in the case of carved wood. Indeed, … from this lack of exaggeration … the slightest roundness obtains the maximum life and appeal. …

This book by Stokes is in the first place a study of the carved reliefs by Agostino di Duccio in the Tempio, Sigismundo Malatesta’s memorial to Isotta — but as a meditation it is so much more than that. I warmly recommend it to R. Sherman and everyone else moved and intrigued by the sculpture shown above. I’ll quote one more paragraph:

Hand-finish is the most vivid testimony of sculpture. People touch things according to their shape. A single shape is made magnificent by perennial touching. For the hand explores, all unconsciously to reveal, to magnify an existent form. Perfect sculpture needs your hand to communicate some pulse and warmth, to reveal subtleties unnoticed by the eye, needs your hand to enhance them. Used, carved stone, exposed to the weather, records on its concrete shape in spatial, immediate, simultaneous form, not only the winding passages of days and nights, the opening and shifting skies of warmth and wet, but also the sensitiveness, the vitality even, that each successive touching has communicated.
https://www.amazon.com/Stones-Rimini-Adrian-Stokes/dp/B0006AMMDW/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544310022&sr=1-3&keywords=The+Stones+of+Rimini
http://adrianstokes.com/