Friday Ephemera

Launching satellites with a giant gun.
The fatal engineering mistake that Dr. Bull made was to offer his engineering services to Saddam: “Sure, I can build a giant gun to bombard Israel.”

The unspanked, a possible series.
Bolshevik Lives Don’t Matter.

“Choices have consequences.”
A response: “The problem is still the same. Being a trader is not the ultimate salvation. Being an artist should not be punished with the current spastic economic systems. Imagine a world w/o artists. We probably live like savages and eat our dirt. I wish I could be an artist.”
I don’t think the message is getting through, somehow…

Morning, all.
Being an artist should not be punished
Heh. The tweeter in question, like the “99%” lady, seems to think that the limited market for leftwing students with fine arts degrees is a form of punishment, which is a rather grandiose way of looking at it. A tad self-flattering. Sort of, “People by and large don’t see a need for what I do, didn’t ask me to do it, and don’t wish to pay for it, therefore I’m being victimised.” Or, “I feel I ought to be artistic and applauded and given lots of stuff. So where’s my stuff?”
Vanity is a powerful drug. Ditto practised narcissism.

Brilliant.
Consider it a project for the weekend. Come Monday, I expect you all to be proficient.

Who says Australia is a cultural desert.
Ms Casey Jenkins, and her vast talents, have of course been mentioned here before.

Don’t think I could relax on a chair like that.
I was just wondering how seriously he’ll injure himself – and what the ambulance attendants will think – when the knot lets-go on the one length of string that holds the whole thing up.

“Pull on string” and other things seen by car mechanics.
Looks like you need a cream for #23.

…when the knot lets-go on the one length of string that holds the whole thing up.
You’ve just described about half of my experience with small-craft sailing.

Look at all the broken people. Where do they all come from?
https://twitter.com/CalebJHull/status/1314310530631454721

all the broken people
It would be interesting (or, maybe, not) to know what flavour of gender each claims.

I’ve decided to be nonchalant.
He says, modestly.

While licking his eyebrows.

I’m always getting shooed away.

She was bonkers, and a drunk, but not without talent.
Thank you! The trailer led me down a musical rathole. A fascinating electronic music pioneer, and it led me to update the Delia Derbyshire and Caroline Catz wikipedia pages. I really, really want to see this documentary!

Today in the world of woke art, #metoo Medusa, when turning someone to stone just isn’t enough, but I am guessing the artist never read Bullfinch.

This Medusa could definitely make a man hard as stone.
Put a bag over her head.

Sam, you were just ahead of your time. Wear it proudly!

With any luck, like my cat and dog did, they are wearing these because they got spayed and neutered.

Pretty sure the guy is blinking H E L P M E in Morse Code.

Today in the world of woke art…
So, why not Athena’s head?
And I guess Andromeda is chum in the artist’s alternate universe.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/02/bernardine-evaristo-slams-english-academic-for-bias-to-whiteness-and-maleness?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks
The newest Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
So stunning and brave. So principled.

So stunning and brave
Marketing and publicity at its finest.
In an era when public trust in the media runs at something in the region of 25% or so, it must be comforting for a privately educated and Oxbridge graduate dominated British media industry to know that they can still successfully – and apparently with ease – foist the latest author du jour onto a naive public.
Which brings me round to this 2019 review of Bernardine Evaristo by Will Gomperz, Arts Editor of the BBC.
Just read Gomperz’s summary of the first chapter of Evaristo’s novel, Girl, Woman, Other (original italics):

So, chapter one starts with Amma, a middle-aged, politically engaged lesbian theatre-maker whose latest play is about to be staged at the National Theatre. Next is her daughter Yazz, a precocious undergraduate who hangs with a group of similarly assertive female pals who agree that:
“…the older generation has RUINED EVERYTHING and her generation is doomed
unless they wrest intellectual control from their elders
sooner rather than later”
And then there’s Dominique, Amma’s great friend and long-time collaborator, who falls for a controlling radical feminist and moves to America.

You would be forgiven for thinking this had been written by Titania McGrath.
But no.
Instead, it is in deadly earnest and socialist realist twaddle of the worst kind (which makes me wonder – Does Evaristo even know that she’s writing in a genre of fiction developed by long dead white European males of the late nineteenth-century, ones who fiercely upheld distinctly European, and therefore to someone like Evaristo presumably distinctly “white”, values?).
Naturally, Gomperz gives it 4 out of 5 stars.
Although that doesn’t mean very much given that the possibility of him giving anything less than 4 stars to any BAME woman author would, entirely predictably, have been close to or even actually zero.
But without even having seen that review much less picked up a copy of Evaristo’s book and read it, it is evident from that summary alone that the novel will be completely unreadable shit.
It is further quite plain to see that Evaristo is a novelist that white, privileged, socially connected elites, such as Gomperz want and even need to manufacture a success for.
They want to hold her work up and say “You see! We told you this is what {BAME / LGBT / Trans} folk really think about the oppression we assured you that they suffer! You have it from the horse’s mouth that everything we told you about their lives is true!”.
And that makes Evaristo about as radical, authentic, and liberated as a bear, numbed and glassy eyed with copious amounts of vodka and squeezed into an ill-fitting red satin waistcoat, dancing a jig at a freezing outdoor market in the Urals.

Cranky when peckish.
Shouldn’t she be added to the ‘unspanked’ list?

It is further quite plain to see that Evaristo is a novelist that white, privileged, socially connected elites, such as Gomperz want and even need to manufacture a success for.
Somewhat related.

My dear Nemo, thank you muchly. Earlier this evening I read an incredibly depressing animal story – no details offered: I don’t have the heart. However, though I will remember the earlier story in bed, I will sleep, remembering yours.