John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark.

Apparently at the MFA here in Boston, though I’ll admit I haven’t seen it.

some background on the events depicted in the painting by way of wikipedia. 

The painting is based on an attack that took place in Havana harbour in 1749. Brook Watson was a 14-year-old orphan serving as a crew member on his uncle’s trading ship. While swimming alone, he suffered two attacks by a single shark. On its first attack, the shark bit off a chunk of flesh from Watson’s right leg below the calf; on the second attack, it removed his foot at the ankle. The crew of a small boat, which had been waiting to escort their captain to shore, fought off the shark and rescued Watson. His leg was amputated below the knee, but he went on to live a full life, including a term as Lord Mayor of London. This is the earliest attack by a shark on a human to be fully documented.

The article goes on to say that Watson was friendly with Copley and had the painting commissioned.
“John, did I ever tell you about how I’m missing my leg?”
“Yes Watson, only every time you get a bit of wine in you.”
“I want you to paint that shit. It’s epic. Way better than some boring portrait of a silversmith.”

Mimicking a cubist collage, linear windbreaks of densely planted trees surround farmsteads in this winter landscape near the city of Komsomolets in northern Kazakhstan. Image courtesy of USGS.

via CIA World Factbook: Kazakhstan.

I was watching this talk by Chairman Bruce and he goes “you would not see publications like ‘Entropy, Death, Collapse’” and so, of course, I think: I would LOVE to see a publication with that name…and I’ve been wanting to throw together something with newspaper club. So, here’s my pitch to you all. 

email me at that address, send me a theme you’d like to work on for your page of the paper: things like, the new aesthetic & the collapsing fidelity of media, your inability to stave off death with publishing efforts, entropy & the heat death of the universe in the films of Woody Allen, the collapse of dictatorships in the middle east, retirement of Italy’s favorite old lecher Brulesconi & Putin’s declining popularity coupled with imploding Eurozone. You know: things we want to hear about. CIA’s pullout of Lebanon, the inability of the COP conference to even breath some life into the DOA Kyoto protocol, let alone replace it with anything worthwhile.

Again, please pitch me a page at ENTROPYDEATHCOLLAPSE@mind-gloaming.net and if it sounds like what I’m thinking of, I’ll let you give me the $20 to print up this sucker. Once I fill 8 pages with potential work, I’ll put up a page to order the paper itself. Not sure how the postal regulations work yet. As my uncle used to say, “we’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it.” It might be better advice if I’d known him better and it wasn’t nearly 2am. 

kickstarter:

Booze books. Repurposing used books to conceal Italian glass flasks. Don’t tell Mum, but we love this.

yes please. I need one or two of these in my life.

I have an accelerating (one might even say…rocketing) fixation with the Soviet N1 rocket. There are a few articles here to be written about this massive hulking thing.