On the 5th here, postings on the patron saint of bears and on Swiss saintly dogs (with a bow to the city of Bern(e)). Now: more on Bern; on the movie BearCity; and on two California cities of bears, Big Bear City in San Bernardino County and Los Osos in San Luis Obispo County.
Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
News for bears: cities of bears
December 8, 2018News for bears: St. Corbinian
December 5, 2018Recent news flashes for bears: the 11/17/18 posting “Teddy Bears’ Picnic Day” (with the customary bow to possible gay subtexts); and the 12/4/18 posting “Santa Barbara: smite him with lightning”, with image #2 — Corrado Parducci’s Horace Rackham Fountain at the Detroit Zoo (1939), featuring a pair of sculpture bears. Now, continuing the lives of the saints theme, but disregarding the many saints named Ursus or Ursula, we come to St. Corbinian, the patron saint of bears (thanks to the 8th-century Miracle of the Bear).
Santa Barbara: smite him with lightning
December 4, 2018Today is Saint Barbara’s feast day. Draw near and sit with me, for today’s telling of the lives of the saints. There will be miracles.
(#1) St. Barbara as envisioned by sculptor Corrado Parducci at St. Barbara’s Church in Dearborn MI
A morning in the Blue Period
December 2, 2018That morning was 10/29, and the morning name then was Paloma Picasso: an alliterative double amphibrach. Bringing with it an allusion to her fashionable clothes and accessories, and to her father’s paintings.
Green flowers
November 30, 2018It starts with this design by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky on her Instagram account on the 8th, with her comment “Not sure why I keep making flowers green”:
(#1)
And then it leads all sorts of surprising places, botanical, cultural, and linguistic.
Swiss Tasmania
November 29, 2018The raw material: a poster on Pinterest, which led to photos of a quaint village:
(#1) Mt. Ida and Lake St. Clair, in the highlands of central Tasmania
(#2) The faux-Swiss village of Grindelwald, near Launceston, TAS
A grotesque word
November 29, 2018Tuesday’s Zippy:
(#1)
Another chapter in word attraction: Zippy’s (and Griffy’s) enjoyment of “funny words”. Here, gargoyle, which Zippy, absurdly, analyzes as a compound of the nouns gar (referring to a kind of sharp-toothed fish) and goyle (a rare, mostly dialectal, term for a deep trench) — so, roughly ‘fish ravine’. Turns out the actual etymology of gargoyle is entertaining enough on its own.
On the Swiss poster patrol
November 27, 2018… from a hundred years ago. Two items that popped up on Pinterest a while back after I posted about things Swiss:
(#1) Pilatus Railway poster (unknown artist for Burlingham Travel Pictures, 1918)
(#2) Swiss military “Flag Guard” poster from 1914, the year the Great War began
Mandala swimmer, Kali tat, Banksia stamp
November 5, 2018(Hunk in a swmsuit, oblique literate raciness. Plus religion, art, and plants.)
Today’s mailing from the Daily Jocks company takes us to the beaches of Oz, where an ad for the Aussie homowear firm 2eros’s Mandala swimsuit is framed as a postcard, complete with a 2018 Oz-floral stamp. Plus a caption of mine:
(#1) The flower of his manhood
Ramble down the
Rocks to revere his pink
Lotus flower, to
Lose yourself on the
Blue wheel of desire
News for pumpkins: art and science
November 3, 2018Two bits of recent pumpkin news: the pumpkin as an artistic platform; and the evolutionary history of pumpkins.