Artists & Saboteurs

His unique creativity and confident challenging of paradigms to stay one step ahead will be missed.

The best tribute is emulation.

A classic dissection by Cracked.com legend David Wong.

Anything with ‘monkey’ in the title is usually worth reading for the lulz, but it’s definitely worth reminding ourselves of the serious point he’s getting at here.

Beautiful pics of cats as kittens and then adults, from the excellent Jack Shepherd on Buzzfeed.

It’s summer again so to counter the habitual complaining about the heat (in between rain showers of course) here’s a nice cheery pic I took last December. It’s Fulham Cemetery in the gloom and snow. Nicely atmospheric.

Mind over matter, think cool and stay cool! Plus winter will be back before you know it.

Spot the cat.

We wish you all a happy Easter weekend (and hopefully some relaxing time off work).

The weekend celebrating Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection is a good chance to highlight one of my favourite underrated Quattrocento paintings, Andrea Mantegna’s brilliantly rendered work the Cristo Morto (i.e. “dead Christ”). The sophisticated foreshortening, gritty realism, and the sheer creativity in finding and executing a new powerful way of representing the almost clichéd theme of the Lamentation… Yes, stupendo.

The Italian Renaissance: greatest era ever. Certainly beats the cuckoo clock.

Now this would be great, dawg, an Xzibit exhibit!

We’re celebrating all-time great science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s 91st birthday today (well, if he hadn’t died in 1992).

I always liked his matter-of-fact view of his birthday, which was uncertain due to calendar issues way back then and could have been as early as October 1919 according to the man himself. But because he decided on a day, that was the day from then on. It doesn’t matter if it was undocumented or wrong. It was effectively ‘true’ once he said so.

Remember, birthdays and age are merely arbitrary. Enjoy the former if you can, of course, and, within reason, we can rarely not remain aware of the latter; but they don’t determine your life in any way. That’s the key.

Heard a great story of those that the internet throws up from time to time…

Apparently a know-it-all on an internet football forum made a prediction about the recent FIFA World Cup in South Africa: he declared that only a country that already had won the cup before would win it again in 2010, and if he was wrong he’d eat a hat and upload the video of him eating it to Youtube for everyone to laugh at.

So that meant one of previous winners Uruguay, Italy, Germany, Brazil, England, Argentina, or France had to win otherwise he’d end up with egg on his face and, more significantly, fedora in his mouth.

Unfortunately this poor fool forgot European Championship holders and in-form footballing juggernauts, Spain… who as you probably know by now, won the World Cup as well to crown a superb two-year stretch of play. (Beating the Netherlands in the final btw, who had also never won it before – so he screwed up his prediction even before the damned final kicked off.)

Yessss, it’s hat-eating time!!! Alas he copped out by putting a crêpe on his head and claiming it was a hat, and eating the crêpe on Youtube. Oh well, you can’t have everything. And we wouldn’t want a random internet guy to die choking while eating something inedible on video, of course.

Found this one lurking on the old digi camera from the summer (June probably), a place on the New King’s Road getting the customers in. Good topical salesmanship!