Ant Bear / Ant Lion

Thou seek'st to leash the mighty ant bear? Fool, for I shall release the horrendous ant lion to his aid!

Actual size shown here.

More (truly interesting) ant lion info, here.

Behold! The Firmament!

Explanations follow thick and fast here.

Alan Lomax (1915-2002)

All the gen, here.

Happy Inauguration Day

In order to break with the traditional ranting, today's controversial evangelical pastor is... Jiiiiiimmy Swaggart!

Ajolote, or Mexican Mole Lizard

You are not to confuse this creature with the axolotl. It is an amphisbaenian, and you can read all about it, and them, here.

Prachya Pinkaew (1962- )

You know this guy, don't you? And this movie? Sure you do. The one where the heroine is an autistic woman, who has a mortal fear of flies and who likes chocolate? The one where she learns martial arts by watching TV? The one where her best friend encourages strangers to throw knives at her head? It's the film of the decade.

And, investigating further, there are more gems from the Pinkaew archive. I particularly like the couldn't-care-less title of the horror movie 999-9999, and the trying-too-hard moniker of the musical Hoedown Showdown. And the 'karmic thriller-romance' Dark Side Romance, about a love affair between two spirits waiting to be reborn. It'll be difficult to find all these movies, but sometimes, if you want trash, you've got to dig for it.

Current Favourite Sentence

'It's a queer business to have as our weak point a neurotic Viking.'

Klaus Kinski (1926-1991)

Friedrich Adolph Paneth (1887-1958)

More information about him here and here,even if this doesn't explain why he's my new hero. Paneth was also a fervent practitioner of the autochrome, which is as good a reason as any to love him.

Sweetpea

Spanish Humour

I was looking for photos of Klaus Kinski, but I found this en route. Worth the detour.

Current Favourite Sentence

Unfortunately, I have never had a real friendship with one of the large anthropoid apes.

Current Favourite Sentence

"I've seen the danse du ventre at Algiers, but this beats anything."

Lutenists

Frans Hals (c.1580-1666), The Lute Player (c.1630)

Frans Hals, The Lute Player (c.1625-26)

Caravaggio (1571-1610), The Lute Player (c.1596)

Orazio Gentileschi (1563-1639), The Lute Player (c.1620)

Titian (c. 1485-1576), Venus and the Lute Player (c.1530)

Reading in 2008

My older brother has a pie-chart to tell the world about his expenditure. I have a list of percentages to tell the world about the sorts of things I read last year. Here you go.

Novel, genre (i.e. detective stories, romance novels and the execrable Twilight series): 22.2%
Novel, literary (e.g. Christopher Isherwood): 19.5%
Criticism (e.g. Janet Malcolm and Slavoj Zizek): 18.3%
Poetry (read Katia Kapovich if you have a poetry slot in your schedule): 18.3%
Plays: 6.0%
Biography/Memoir (e.g. Christopher Reid's edition of Ted Hughes's letters): 3.9%
Art (books of pictures): 2.9%
Books of short stories: 2.4%
Novel, graphic: 1.7%
Religion (e.g. Jeremy Taylor's The Marriage Ring): 1.2%
Science (e.g. some books by some guys named Steve): 1.2%
History: 1.0%
Miscellaneous: (e.g. Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information): 1.0%
Journals: 0.2%
Food & Drink: 0.2%

22.2+19.5+18.3+18.3+6.0+3.9+2.9+2.4+1.7+1.2+1.2+1+1+0.2+0.2 = 100% right on the nubbin.

Workshops

New Year's Walk

I walked up the beach and down the avenue today, in order to get the memory of far too many lobsters out of my head and legs and belly. The whole town had a hangover: I felt that if I shouted all the buildings would put their hands over their ears and say '¡Joé, tio!'. There was: interesting graffiti that led nowhere;

the city, laid out like an expensive dessert on a silver plate;

a foolhardy seabird that came this close to my camera;

an edible snail which had very little choice about how close I came to it;

history and civic pride, and

only two other people taking a stroll in the whole of the old town.

If you take photos of your television with a short enough exposure...

you see the little light moving along, replacing people's mouths many times a second.

Cádiz

We're just back from New Year in crepuscular Cádiz. My family-in-law was well and happy, and I ate far too many lobsters.