As a synecdoche for the tragedy of our historical moment, consider a news item about the murder of nineteen schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas. One victim, ten-year-old Maite Rodriguez, was identifiable only by the green Converse sneakers she wore. She had drawn a heart on her right shoe. After the actor Matthew McConaughey, for some reason delivering a press briefing at the White House, made this detail known to the public, the shoes sold out as appalled consumers ordered them online.It is impossible to understand a society whose response to the slaughter of children is to purchase green Converse sneakers as anything other than psychotic. It is impossible, I believe, to wish for such a society to continue—a society that is also bent on murdering as many other forms of life as possible, driving entire species extinct, rendering the planet uninhabitable.
We were surrounded by a maze of folding tables, chairs, and couches draped in kente cloth. In the center of the room sat a four-by-four-foot metal cage that had been used by a search and rescue team to airlift people from the roofs of inundated houses after Katrina. Every inch of the wall space around us was occupied, covered with artwork depicting the storm’s ravages, and with Omar’s photos. On one wall hung a large tarp affixed with handwritten accounts by survivors and aid workers: Triaging a nursing home patient who handed me a wet plastic grocery store bag & said “This is everything I have left.”
Images and text from Webb Space Telescope. Click the image to supersize, then click again to super-super-supersize.NASA's Hubble Space Telescope made the Pillars of Creation famous with its first image in 1995, but revisited the scene in 2014 to reveal a sharper, wider view in visible light, shown above at left.A new, near-infrared-light view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, at right, helps us peer through more of the dust in this star-forming region. The thick, dusty brown pillars are no longer as opaque and many more red stars that are still forming come into view.While the pillars of gas and dust seem darker and less penetrable in Hubble’s view, they appear more diaphanous in Webb’s.The background of this Hubble image is like a sunrise, beginning in yellows at the bottom, before transitioning to light green and deeper blues at the top. These colors highlight the thickness of the dust all around the pillars, which obscures many more stars in the overall region.In contrast, the background light in Webb’s image appears in blue hues, which highlights the hydrogen atoms, and reveals an abundance of stars spread across the scene. By penetrating the dusty pillars, Webb also allows us to identify stars that have recently – or are about to – burst free. Near-infrared light can penetrate thick dust clouds, allowing us to learn so much more about this incredible scene...
Sometimes known as “the world’s loneliest orca”, Kiska the killer whale spent more than four decades in captivity at MarineLand, a theme park in Niagara Falls, Canada.For the last 12 of those years, despite wild orcas being social and intelligent animals that live in tight-knit family pods that hunt together and communicate through underwater clicks and calls, Kiska swam alone, in a featureless tank, with no calves, mate or mother by her side. She was the last captive orca in Canada...Kiska’s death comes four years after Canada passed bill S-203, banning the captivity and breeding of whales, dolphins and porpoises. Although the new law was too late for Kiska – individuals already in captivity were excluded from protection – activists say her story was instrumental in drawing public attention to the plight of captive marine mammals.
Miles grinned sleepily, puddled down in his uniform. “Welcome to the beginning,” he said quietly. “We have a long way to go.”“But I can’t speak Swedish,” I said.“You’ll learn,” he said. “You’ll learn, you’ll learn.”He threw on some more brush and watched the dark smoke spiral up under the sun, a warm and now comforting sun. “Let’s sail till we come to the edge.”“Not until we can deliver our secret to our respective worlds. And acquire an intact ship.”“Let’s go talk to Folimum and see what he says.” He turned back to his Master. He was ready to go.“I think that could be arranged,” I said. I turned away from the bridge and Diane offered me her arm. I hesitated a moment, then took her arm.Miles smiled. “Let the blind man show the way.”He did.We gladly followed. We walked hand in hand down the street. Somewhere on that road was Gerrith, and at its end, the starships waited. And high in the sky, an intact ship ascended until it was a mere speck, an enormous dim comet, with tail pointing along its path rather than away from the sun—and like comets of old, an omen of change. Amerie blinked, and the speck became invisible against the bright vault of the heavens.We turned our backs on the comet and went into the house, hand in hand. Rogi closed the door and got on with it: “To the everlasting glory of the Infantry?”“To the everlasting glory of the Infantry!”“To the brave, ingenious, and honored survivors of this planet? Including the dinosaurs?”“To the brave, ingenious, and honored survivors of this planet! Including the dinosaurs!”I handed the bartender my empty glass. “I just found out where we’re going: Unto the end of the world … Unto the end of the world.”“Yes, the end is not yet! Let us go!” he said. “ … someday soon. When I have time.”“We’ll take a quick bite at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe … ”
“I’m an engineer by training, and my wife has her PhD in speech communication,” said Matteliano...He ran some trials with notoriously delicate phyllo, finally learning how to attach uncooked phyllo sheets to paper before passing them through an inkjet printer loaded with nontoxic ink. The Mattelianos printed pages from Homer’s Odyssey on phyllo, mounted them with more phyllo baked into a flaky, many-layered dessert, and there it was: “Booklava: An Edible Odyssey.”“The printed phyllo turned yellow and started to crack, so it looked even more like an old book,” said Matteliano, whose creation won first place. “I don’t know that we’ll be able to top it this year.”
Rep. Stan McClain’s (R) proposed legislation, House Bill 1069, seeks to restrict the educational materials used in state schools, which critics have likened to book banning. The bill requires course material and instruction on sexually transmitted diseases, health education or material on human sexuality to “only occur in grades 6 through 12,” according to the legislation.During a Wednesday House Education Quality Subcommittee, Rep. Ashley Viola Gantt (D) asked McClain if this bill would prohibit girls younger than 6th grade from discussing their periods in school.“Does this bill prohibit conversations about menstrual cycles ― because we know that typically the ages is between 10 and 15 ― so if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in fifth grade or fourth grade, will that prohibit conversations from them since they are in the grade lower than sixth grade?” Gantt asked McClain during the committee hearing.“It would,” McClain responded.
"Outside the ranch fence, pronghorn sometimes pass in the light. Pronghorn are the world’s fastest mammals over long distances. They can sustain a speed of sixty miles per hour for hours on end; their eyes can see three hundred degrees; they can detect movement four miles away. Pronghorn, Antilocapra americana, are the only surviving species of the Antilocapridae family—and barely. Pronghorn, of which there were roughly thirty-five million in the early nineteenth century, were largely hunted out of existence to feed the European settlers and construction crews that facilitated the westward takeover of the continent. Their habitats were ransacked, their migration routes disarranged, truncated, cut off. By the late twentieth century, only twelve thousand remained: those that outran the extinction, or outsaw it. I believe them to be a miracle."
"...the community of Beloit, Wisconsin came together on the banks of the Rock River to recreate George Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte."They are performing a tableaux vivant to reproduce the famous pointillist painting shown here:
Furthermore, the inclusion of symbols, most obviously a monkey on a leash and a woman fishing, is indicative of the painting’s satirical nature. In nineteenth century slang, ‘singesse’ (female monkey in French) meant prostitute. The wordplay of ‘pêche’ (fishing) and ‘péché’ (sin) was a pun often made in French cartoons with reference to prostitution. Such symbols speak to the ability of “the proletarian woman [to] become superficially bourgeois through prostitution.” Through this subtle imagery, Seurat adds another dimension to the comparison of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, noting the superficiality and immorality within high class society.That was all new to me, so I searched the web for pictures of women with monkeys, and after discarding those with Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, Fay Wray, and Jessica Lange, I found this one by Aubrey Beardsley (source):
"Oddly enough, both were created with very small dots, one just has better resolution than the other."And finally, since I won't have another chance to blog tableaux vivant again, I'll close with this old but quite remarkable music video by Hold Your Horses:
