new default category
Something I saw while looking up something else, or how all your science fair solar systems are bad science:
In Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s “Can’t Help Myself,” an industrial robot works away inside a glass box at the Guggenheim Museum.
What’s it made of? Kuka industrial robot, stainless steel and rubber, cellulose ether in colored water, lighting grid with Cognex visual-recognition sensors, and polycarbonate wall with aluminum frame.
Is it making art? Is it commenting on how art is made? As a robot uses a giant brush to push liquid around, are we watching a creative act or a programmed act? What determines these actions? Where does this leave viewers? In awe of a machine in motion?
Check out one of the Guggenheim’s newest additions to its collection:
Tr-mp in the final debate was bigly horrifying, should’ve been important, and yuge, but he was weak. Sad!
So if he loses, maybe he’ll disappear, but I truly fear that his biggest contribution will be to alter the English language. More and more people are adapting his braggadocious terminology in sarcastic ways — I’m sure you’ve heard it among friends, classmates, and colleagues, who are suddenly saying and/or writing “yuge” about the mundane things. A high school reunion was touted on FB as “it’s gonna be huge. It’s gonna be phenomenal. The other classes all wish they could have a reunion this great, actually.” This mock braggadocio *is* fun, but will it go away when Tr-mp is no longer on TV everyday? Or will it linger, and the sarcasm end, and it will become an embedded and accepted part of language, with its users in a few years forgetting its origins?
For book-lovers, one of the best things to come out of this endless campaign are the #TrumpBookReports on Twitter. Lots of people have written about To Kill a Mockingbird (“I could stand in the middle of 5th Ave & kill a mockingbird and not lose votes” from @LemonsandLaughs), Death of a Salesman (“I prefer the salesmen who DON’T die” by @dreamweasel), and Shakespeare plays (“Hamlet? Such a disaster. Can’t decide to be or not. Bigly indecisive. And Ophelia? Not my first choice.” by @KDanielGleason).
My favorites, though, deal with “Lord of the Rings,” because I could never see Tr-mp reading the books, many of the jokes are very insidery, and it proves Junot Diaz’s theory in his brilliant novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” that one of the best lenses upon which to make sense of a dictator’s evil is “Lord of the Rings.” Considering how much has been written and said about Tr-mp as being not only a bully and a strongman wannabe, but also authoritarian, the connection seems apt for this period of the political campaign.
With that in mind, here is a curated selection of #TrumpBookReports featuring “Lord of the Rings.”
https://twitter.com/chelsealindsay/status/789238355653332992
Came across this at the Cornell Plantation botanical garden.
I like the name. “Feverfew.”
My dictionary gives the origin as “Old English feferfuge, from Latin febrifuga, from febris ‘fever’ + fugare ‘drive away.’
It’s also a fun word to type, mostly two fingers on the left hand, until that final “w.” It gives it — “feverfew” — a satisfying rhythm to my fingers on the keyboard.
Here’s some more info about it from the state of Missouri: The name “feverfew” indicates the plant was used medicinally. Some Native American tribes made a poultice of the leaves to use for treating burns. Apparently the plant was also used as a diuretic. Today people plant it as part of a prairie restoration or native wildflower garden.
And here are some citations of “feverfew” from the Oxford English Dictionary:
c1000 in T. Wright & R. P. Wülcker Anglo-Saxon & Old Eng. Vocab. (1884) I. 134 Febrefugia..feferfuge.c1000 Sax. Leechd. I. 134 Curmelle feferfuge.c1425 in T. Wright & R. P. Wülcker Anglo-Saxon & Old Eng. Vocab. (1884) I. 645 Hec febrifuga, fevyrfew.1562 W. Turner 2nd Pt. Herball f. 79v, The new writers hold.. that feuerfew is better for weomen.1597 W. Langham Garden of Health 234 Feuerfue comforteth the stomacke, and is good for the Feuer quotidian.a1646 D. Wedderburn Vocabula (1685) 18 Matricaria, feverfoyly.
