Animalcules and you

Animalcules is an old term for microscopic organisms. Since it is scientifically imprecise it has fallen out of use and has drifted into the realm of archaic words. That's too bad, I think it is a wonderful and descriptive word. Anyway, on to the topic of this post, these are some microscopic videos from the YouTube channel Journey to the Microcosmos. 

On the microscopic scale, our body is an ecosystem. Our bodies host parasites, symbiotics and wandering travelers. These videos show some of the little creatures, and how they interact with us.

Artwork of Bernard Buffet

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Bernard Buffet was a mid-20th century French artist. He painted and produced prints and he was very prolific creating 8,000 pieces over his career. He was an expressionist and anti-abstract, preferring figurative art. He was popular with the public, but less well regarded by the élites of the art world. Eventually, because of his flamboyant and ostentatious lifestyle, the general public began to turn on him as well and his reputation dimmed. Currently, his popularity with collectors is increasing as his works are reevaluated.  

Bernard Buffet self-portrait

Solterito

Get ready for an immingling weekend with Sanai.

 

A weekend market in Nepal

This video is a walk through a market in eastern Nepal. It is a weekend rather than a daily market, so I suspect it is much more of a social event than regular daily shopping. It certainly is crowded, and the crowd is cheerful and energetic.

 

Old photographs of American indians

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These photos are from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They are very much a product of their time. If you looked at portraits of English ladies and gentlemen of the same era you would see the same type of posing, with a stern expression on their faces and dressed in their finery.

Photos served a different purpose in those days than they do today. Pictures are common today. Every phone has a camera, innumerable photos can be taken effortlessly, and so candid events are captured. In those earlier times photography was sufficiently complex and exotic that sitting for a portrait was the event. Today you might photograph your lunch to post to Instagram, in those earlier days the act of being photographed was not so frivolous. It was a rare record of you and your family and so it must be treated as a matter of some significance.    

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

Get ready for an auguring weekend with Hanne Boel.

 

Bossaball

With the Super Bowl over NFL fans have nothing, aside from mock drafts, to look forward to this off-season but other sports to fill the gap. May I suggest Bossaball, which is a combination of volleyball, soccer, gymnastics, kids' bouncy houses, and Bossa Nova music. Just watch the video -- it will all become clear.    

 

Trails in paint

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Roads are designed. Their routes are chosen and surveyed, their beds prepared and paved. Paths have a different genesis. They are merely a convenient path between two locations, in fact a path may start as a game trail. As the phrase 'the beaten path' suggests, they are formed by people repeatedly walking along them. They develop slowly and exist only as long as they are used. They are 'form follows function' in its most primordial sense.      

Big Boss Man

Get ready for a tyrannical weekend with Whitehorse.

 

Making refreshing summer drinks

This post topic may seem out of sequence considering the fact that is currently the winter. However, it is my duty to as well provide content for my regulars from the southern hemisphere where it is now summer. Of course, that assumes I have any regulars from the southern hemisphere, but that's a subject we don't need to delve into too deeply.

 

True love

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First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain. ― Carson McCullers

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If I said I was madly in love with you you'd know I was lying. ― Margaret Mitchell 

 

Kill the Man from Shijiazhuang

Get ready for an involutionary weekend with the Omnipotent Youth Society.