Edward Hopper’s famous painting Nighthawks, like so much of his work, depicts poignant social disconnection; it also offers a cast of four characters in its bleak setting, which makes it an easy target for parody (by varying the nature of the characters). Meanwhile, the basic theme makes it easily available for symbolizing the way we live during the coronavirus.
Archive for July, 2020
Nighthawks in a time of coronavirus
July 3, 2020Variability: juncos
July 3, 2020Recent episodes in the fauna report from my house in Palo Alto.
I remind you my entire engagement with the outside world is through my little walled-in front patio, where I grow plants in containers and try to attract birds to entertain me; mostly I watch all this from the inside, through the big windows by my worktable.
The most recent development has been the reappearance of a pair of LBBs (little brown birds) / LBJs (little brown jobs / jobbies), who’d been absent since February (when they took dust baths in the shallow garden strip). This time, there was birdseed sprinkled on the ground outside my window, so they came close enough for me to study them as they fluttered about, and they were clearly juncos.
(#1) A male slate-colored junco (from Wikipedia); my juncos have dark heads, but then each junco subspecies is immensely variable
Then I learned that JuncoWorld is a marvel of variability, so I should just settle for junco as the identifying label, and be satisfied that my birds are not rare Guadelupe juncos, though slate-colored juncos (or something not far off) wouldn’t be a bad guess.
Learn to Drawl
July 2, 2020The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 6/20:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
The two big things in #1: the stereotype of Southern charm (associated here with the 2pl pronoun y’all and the “drawl” of Southern speech, plus a characteristic Southern drink, sweet tea); and the Learn to Draw family of advertisements (which evoke social worlds in which most people smoked cigarettes and in which earnest young people sought to advance themselves by taking risks to learn a new skill).
These are lost worlds: very few people smoke, and then only in highly constrained circumstances; and the US now appears to be close to be bottom of the developed economies for advancement in social class (of the sort that moved my family from the farm and factory floor to a distinguished university professorship in two generations).
Plus, a personal Wayno bonus in #1, an homage to Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski.