Veritas or something

Tonight at a bus stop I heard a very short, slight man say that his tour of duty in the Marines had ended the day the Twin Towers came down. This was apparently on September 11, 2011. Just before that I was on a bus with a rock star who'd been on <i>The Ellen DeGeneres<i> show and met Elizabeth Montgomery there. Everyone's favorite nose twiddler died eight years before Ellen got a talk show, but you can't keep a good woman down.

If you want to talk to guys who turn into Baron Munchhausen after four beers, take public transit on a holiday only your state observes, and pretty much just government workers at that.

There is nothing like a dame

 

A tangential header to be sure, but Laura Knight was eventually titled, which resulted in her being Dame Knight.

Before that, she was an painter. An interesting and significant figure in the world of British art in the early twentieth century, she was catholic in her taste of subjects. The world of the theatre makes its presence known in her work, through the music hall performers such as those shown in Motley (above), as well as many commedia dell'arte performers and ballet dancers. She also painted sunlit landscapes and outdoor genre scenes. Later in her career she created journalistic paintings like her depiction of the Nuremberg trials.

Knight brought a nice balance of composition and looseness to her work. She also had a great eye for light.

It came from Waukegan

The Ray Bradbury Theater aired on the USA network in the 1980s. This was before original-for-cable shows had much cachet, so it kind of flew under the radar. I've watched a few episodes over the last couple of days.

Bradbury is an absolutely indispensable writer, of course. I would recommend that you track down and read any story of his before you watch an adaptation. They come from his mind and his voice.

The TV show mostly seems to do right by him, though. It should, since he's also the one writing the scripts. Some translate better to the screen than others.

What I said about cable shows not having much cachet yet? They didn't have much of a budget either. the adaptation of "The Town Where No One Got Off" looks for much of its duration like a shoestring student production. It's also the best episode of the ones that I saw, which has a lot to do with Jeff Goldblum starring in it.

The show's also an interesting relic because it's obviously shot in Canada. Eventually Vancouver would be a central shooting location for American TV production, really second only to the LA area. When this was made that process seems to have been in a very early stage.

Home of the Brave

I just recently finished reading Amerika or America by Franz Kafka. Which is quite interesting. According to the short afterward by Kafka's friend Max Brod he loved reading travel memoirs and was a big fan of Ben Franklin's diaries. The tale of travel to the United States is entirely fanciful, as Kafka never left Europe during his life.

Is it what one would call "Kafkaesque"? Certainly parts of it are. The part where protagonist Karl Rossman loses his job as a hotel lift boy demonstrates how far systems will go to destroy people who are trying to do well by them. The ending is surprisingly positive, though, and it seems Kafka would have developed it even more if he'd spent more time on the book.

Name's not Polly

 

Not your average musical duo, I reckon. You have a parrot on the song, the parrot will do some improvising. Tico is the parrot, and has a kind of contagious good cheer. I wonder if Mick and Keith have heard this version.

Unsayable

The idea that residential schools―essentially specialized parochial schools―were engaged in the slaughter of First Nations children is a horrible one. Fortunately the evidence doesn't really support that conclusion. Unfortunately, the government does. So strongly that they're weighing the option of codifying it into law, leaving anyone who denies it a criminal.

The term "denialism" does indeed recall Holocaust denial. And that leads me to the conclusion that Holocaust denial shouldn't be criminalized either. Oh, it happened all right. And saying it didn't is an insult to the survivors and their families. But those points can be claimed by any government who want an excuse to restrict speech.

It's a slippery slope, and they're holding ski poles.

Bone to pick

One book I'm reading now is Seven Skeletons by Lydia Pyne. In it, Pyne provides detailed narratives for as many human/hominin fossil finds that have occurred in the last 200 years. These include Piltdown Man and the Taung Child. And there's a certain interrelation there. 

Raymond Dart was assigned to a post in the early twentieth century, when it was not the place to be for a natural historian interested in human origins. Good thing for him, because he wound up finding the Taung Child, the first recognized Australopithecus skeleton. His discovery and his conclusion weren't universally accepted, certainly not at first, but he wound up adding more evidence to the idea that human life began in Africa, as Darwin had thought.

By that time it was generally accepted in the scientific community that Darwin had been wrong on that point, and that humans had begun in Asia or possibly Europe. And Piltdown Man seemed to supThport that theory, being a skeleton with humanlike and apelike features, as much of a missing link as anyone could ask for, and found in Britain. So perfect that it, of course, turned out to be a hoax.

This is a brief rundown of the case, but it does go to show just how much of a consensus-based practice science isn't, or at least shouldn't be.