Russian Sledges

zolotoivek:

Portrait of two Armenian fighters during the Hamidian Massacres, 1895.

The owner of this exquisite moustache is Art Nouveau architect, furniture designer & painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh. When he and his artist wife Margaret MacDonald had an exhibition of the ‘Glasgow Style’ in Vienna, they influenced artists such as Klimt, who then created the Vienna Secession movement.

Plus, the man had style. Check out the careless knot on that scarf. Rawr!

This is Sybil Ludington. Today is her birthday.

Sybil is not very well known and it’s a crying shame. The 16-year old was personally thanked by George Washington for her heroic feat, riding twice the distance of Paul Revere and warning the militia and rebellion sympathizers of the sacking of Danbury, CT. But thanks to Longfellow’s severely historically inaccurate poem, more people remember Revere’s ride than hers. *sighs* 

By the way? Revere got captured by the British after his stint and had a ton of other riders out on the roads with him or to switch off with. Sybil Ludington was by herself, in the rain, and she beat highwaymen trying to stop her doing her duty WITH A STICK, still managing to get the job done and home safe.

Thanks, Syb. You should make everyone happy inside with your pure badassery.

Maude Adams (Maude Ewing Kiskadden), american actress. November 11, 1872 – July 17, 1953

Robert Downey Jr. attempts a traditional Bavarian dance while wearing lederhosen at the Iron Man 3 photocall in Germany. And yes, this is real life.

Oh, God… somebody let him go into that tracht shop in Marienplatz, didn’t they. (sigh)

godparty:

Busted by Butch T.

Well, then I am your man.

And there is why I love John Watson.

The Tetris Stackable LED Desk Lamp is a modular lamp that comes with seven Tetriminos, or Tetris blocks, in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and pink. The LED blocks light up when stacked together, and turn off when the lamp is disassembled. The creative homage to the classic video game Tetris is available for purchase from ThinkGeek.

images via ThinkGeek

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Responding to Jay-Z, who released a track this week in which he fired back at critics of his recent trip to Cuba, Perino — using her adopted rap moniker "Tiny D Day-P" — made what is presumably her hip-hop debut. Enjoy.

BOSTON — The head of the Roman Catholic Church in the city is among eight cardinals named by Pope Francis to advise him on running the church and reforming the Vatican bureaucracy.

Cardinal Sean O’Malley is among members of the advisory panel announced by the Vatican on Saturday. The group includes only one current Vatican official, with the rest being cardinals from North, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. They will hold their first meeting Oct. 1-3, though the pope is already in contact with them, according to the announcement.

The Vatican says the pope appointed the advisers following suggestions that emerged during meetings in the run-up to the conclave that elected him.

A reform of the Vatican bureaucracy was a constant drumbeat ahead of the pope’s election as were calls for making the Vatican more responsive to the needs of bishops around the world. Many cardinals said the Holy See bureaucracy must be overhauled. Including representatives from each continent in a permanent advisory panel to the pope would seem to go a long way toward answering those calls.

Many of the cardinals in the advisory panel have been outspoken in calling for a shake-up of the Vatican bureaucracy, which was last reformed 25 years ago, while others, including O’Malley, have tried to clean up the church from sexually abusive priests.

The Archdiocese of Boston posted the Vatican announcement on its website on Saturday, triggering messages of congratulation to O’Malley from the faithful.

Those who praised the choice include Julio Enrique Di Giovanni, who wrote from Buenos Aires, Argentina, that Francis, an Argentine, “is building the `Good People Club”‘ with O’Malley and the other cardinals.

Linda Ann Ballard had a more straightforward reaction: “gentle soul … holy vision … good choice … prayers begin now.”

A reform of the Vatican bureaucracy has been demanded for years, given that prior Popes John Paul and Benedict XVI essentially neglected in-house administration of the Holy See in favor of other priorities. But the calls for change grew deafening last year after the leaks of papal documents exposed petty turf battles within the Vatican bureaucracy, allegations of corruption in the running of the Vatican city state and even a purported plot by senior Vatican officials to out a prominent Catholic as gay.

fagsindubai:

i nominate this for best magazine cover of 2013

Chairs were totally legal

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Exactly one month after his election to the papacy, Pope Francis on Saturday (April 13) set up a working group of eight cardinals from all over the world to advise him on the running of the Catholic Church and on how to reform the scandal-ridden Roman Curia, the church’s central administration.

The group will meet for the first time in early October in Rome but the Vatican stressed that the pontiff “is already in contact with the cardinals.”

In the run up to the conclave that elected Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis on March 13, several cardinals had voiced concern for the mismanagement and infighting in the Curia, which is mostly staffed by Italian churchmen.

According to a Vatican press statement, Francis decided to create the cardinals’ group in order to follow up on a “suggestion that emerged during the General Congregations,” the cardinals closed-door meetings that preceded the conclave.

Only one of the eight cardinals chosen by Francis comes from Italy, Giuseppe Bertello, who currently runs the administration of the Vatican City State.

The other seven head from different regions of the world. They are:

• Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa, archbishop emeritus of Santiago de Chile, Chile;

• Oswald Gracias, archbishop of Bombay, India;

• Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and Freising, Germany;

• Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya, archbishop of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo;

• Sean Patrick O’Malley O.F.M., archbishop of Boston, USA;

• George Pell, archbishop of Sydney, Australia;

• Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, S.D.B., archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Maradiaga will coordinate the group’s work while Bishop Marcello Semeraro of Albano, Italy, will have the role of secretary.

In a brief meeting with journalists, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, stressed that the group’s creation will in no way “diminish the role” of the Curia or its responsibilities.

He said that while the Curia remains in charge for the day-to-day task of “helping the pope in the running of the church,” the cardinals will “advise” the pope when they are requested to do so.

According to Lombardi, the creation of the cardinals’ group is a “signal of the pope’s reflection and attention on the issues facing the organization of the church.”

The pontificate of Francis’ predecessor, Benedict, was marred by frequent failings in the Curia’s work, culminating in the so-called Vatileaks scandal that led to the arrest of the pope’s personal butler for stealing confidential documents and leaking them to the press.

Upon resigning, Benedict left Francis a secret report on the church’s administrative shortcomings revealed by the Vatileaks affair.

On Friday (April 12), Francis visited the Vatican Secretariat of State and praised its 300-strong staff for its “priceless commitment.”

The post Pope sets up cardinals’ group to advise on Vatican reform appeared first on Religion News Service.

An anonymous reader writes "This weekend the National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY, will display the earliest known version of the game Dungeons & Dragons as a part of their new exhibit Game Time!. The document is on loan from the personal collection of games historian Jon Peterson (author of Playing at the World), who says the document 'captures the system at around the midpoint of development, with the core concepts of dungeon exploration and fantastic combat in place, but it lacks some features of the mature game and exhibits a few intriguing variations.' Some excerpts are up on Peterson's blog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carney brushed off the question with sarcasm: "I guess nothing rhymes with Treasury... because Treasury offers and gives licenses for travel, as you know, and the White House has nothing to do with it."

By Matthew Cobb

 

h/t @JohnRHutchinson on Twitter

birthmoviesdeath:

Mad genius auteur Andrzej Zulawski working with the tentacle monster from his 1981 psychotic/supernatural familIal horror masterpiece POSSESSION. 

Watch the trailer here.  –EH

/weeping

…that’s not even the worst thing in that movie.

sarahreck:

mishawinsexster:

grumpy cat, international superstar

I love Tardar Sauce.

Possibly unpopular opinion: every time I see this cat, all I can think is, “Poor, poor kitty”. Apart from the iconic “grumpy cat” photo, I just think she looks more sad than grumpy, particularly when getting hauled around the country, handled by strangers, photographed, etc. I suppose she must actually be a very good-natured and mellow cat, but still. (And don’t get me started on the cat’s name, which is at best tacky and ill-considered.)

cuteboyswithcats:

found on sir patrick stewart’s twitter feed. ;3

-wynden

Though she is a recent graduate of the illustration program at the University of West England, Kate Barley’s style has a mature feel.

She takes inspiration in the work of great Golden Age illustrators like Kay Nielsen, Edmund Dulac and Harry Clarke, with a bit of Aubrey Beardsley and perhaps a touch of early 20th century New Yorker cartoonists thrown in for good measure.

When looking through her website portfolio, be aware that though clicking on the images themselves simply advances to the next image, there are text links to the left for viewing the larger versions, which I recommend to really appreciate her work.

There is also a quick sampler of larger images from The Olive Fairy Book on the cizgili masallar blog.

[Via MetaFilter]

f-l-e-u-r-d-e-l-y-s:

‘Blessings upon the Land of my Love
by Imran Qureshi, and “You who are my love and my life’s enemy too”.

Site-specific installation, Emulsion and acrylic on brick, 2011.

Unctional Beauty and Handmade Political Art

Folk arts are usually secluded in the area of the “ornamental”; they are seldom seen as “political” or critical. By the same token, the artifacts of political expression are not seen as belonging to a tradition of art-making.   However, despite institutional silence, there is a long standing, home-made tradition of making political art. Sometimes, these “gifts of resistance”[1] refuse the commercial appropriation and remain autonomously critical.  They are autonomously critical in the sense that their critical stance is not imposed by what an institution wants them to be critical about.  A carpet, for instance, is not always a textile floor covering but a way of spending time usefully, politically and critically and yes, it is beautiful: a beauty we fear. Starting with “the aesthetic era”, the established aesthetic theories define beauty as an ability of some objects to arise in viewers a distinctive type of unmediated pleasure – aesthetic pleasure. This ability to arise pleasure in attendants is the only purpose of beauty in aesthetic era. Then, beauty is understood as a functionless entity which merely gives us aesthetic pleasure. But is this so? Political home-made pieces don’t strive to conform to a hegemonic or paradigmatic concept of beauty but to a pluralistic understanding of it. How does beauty look is less noteworthy in comparison with what beauty does and means. Political-critical-home-made art usually exhibits difficult beauties[2], queer beauties and obscure beauties, which nevertheless, do not seem to be pleasant at the first sight (and, even if they are pleasant at the first sight in some cases, this does not mean that they don’t perform a critical function at the same time). Therefore, even if folk arts tend to be secluded in the ornamental’s domain, it does not mean that “the ornament” cannot act as an indicator of social change or as a critical reminder. And even if they are not called “art”, this does not mean that these forms of creativity from outside the mainstream artworld cannot act critically and progressively.

Critical Ornament and Functional Beauty

Ornament repeats animalistic, vegetative or geometric patterns applied to an image surface.  It is commonly held that ornament serves “to heighten an aesthetic effect, to structure, accentuate or enliven surfaces, to frame, to fill –or to dignify”[3]. Sometimes, it does more than that but being too often associated with triviality, domesticity or “popular culture” fails to convince that beauty can be clever too. From the long history of its dismissal, it would be enough just to mention Adolf Loos’s invectives: “No ornament can any longer be made today by anyone who lives on our cultural level. It is different with the individuals and peoples who have not yet reached this level…I can tolerate the ornament of the Kaffir, The Persian, the Slovak peasant woman, my shoemaker’s ornaments, for they have no other way of attaining the high points of their existence. We have art, which has taken the place of ornament”[4].

As we know, ornaments became inextricably bound up in discussions about taste and beauty. Yet, ornament does not necessarily talk about symmetry and harmony to satisfy a cataleptic aesthetics of pleasure but can talk about conflicts and injustices too. It is increasingly being used as a means of criticism: “of suffocating female role models; of totalitarian political systems; of standardizing behavioral patterns, expectations and conventions”[5]. Even mere decoration (“free beauty”[6] in Kant’s terms) acquires a political function. Then, the beautiful, “inoffensive” ornament started to be increasingly used by political artists from the art world or from the margins as a means of criticism of the disturbed conditions of the world. To take just an example, the Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi’s floor painting for the 10^th Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates) is a mixture of beauty and critique. As the curator Sabine Vogel posits: “Blood –red color everywhere. The whole courtyard is a shambles. Splatters cover even the stairs and the walls. But then you notice the little, white floral ornament. They are fused with the color of blood; they emerge from this image of violence”[7].

I know this with absolute certainty. On my acceptance letter from Harvard, your name had been crossed out and mine had been written above it.

We're looking for an experienced writer with a background in feature articles to write profiles and feature articles (ranging from 100-3,000 words). The ideal candidate has a solid publication record from outlets such as National Geographic, Outside Magazine, New York Times, Smithsonian, and travel and in-flight publications.

A few years ago Sam van Schaik (IDP) and Agnieszka Helman-Wazny (Hamburg University) started a small project on the Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang. They developed a plan to combine the results of Agnieszka's scientific analysis of the paper used in the Tibetan manuscripts with Sam's work on the textual and palaeographical aspects of the manuscripts. Selecting a group of fifty manuscripts, put everything they could find out about them into a table, and studied at the patterns that emerged. One of the most interesting results was the suggestion that manuscripts that had been brought to Dunhuang from Tibet itself were made in a different way to those made locally at Dunhuang. Though more work needs to be done, this opens up the possibility of ‘fingerprinting’ a manuscript to find out where it was made.

Read more about the project here.

The image above shows a microscopic image of Paper Mulberry fibres, more examples of Agnieszka Helman-Wazny's images of paper fibres from a Dunhuang manuscript can be found on the IDP website.

A $4,000 flute lost by its owner on the MBTA has been returned.

1975.

Hillary and Bill.