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.

 

Making bowling balls

This is a Korean company that makes Swag brand bowling balls. I know nothing about bowling and was surprised by how varied the core of the balls were. Some illumination from the comments to the video:

This brings back a lot of memories as in the early 90’s  I learned to drill bowling balls and had my own pro shop, eventually drilled for highly talented tournament bowlers.   I drilled balls for almost 20 years. This particular ball that they are manufacturing is a high-end ball with a symmetrical or non-symmetrical weight block which allows the driller to position that block in a location That will handle different oil conditions for the bowler plus allowing them to hook or not hook the ball more or less. If you notice on the label of the box each ball at the end of the process is weighed in a way that tells the driller where the center of gravity is, where and how the weight block sits, how much top weight is Positioned in various places on the ball and allows for more flexibility in the drilling process. The simple “ house balls“ that bowling alleys carry for every day bowlers to use off the rack have a pancake weight block or no weight block at all and the process is 90% straightforward and easier as it’s just a simple solid pour and a clean up label and shine.    Nice video as it brings back many memories of my pro shop in Alaska. - rickalford

  

Samples of Medieval art

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The Medieval period spanned nearly 1,000 years, from 476 A.D. to the mid-15th century. The Medieval art style was formed by a blend of Roman and northern European barbarian art. It was later to get an infusion of oriental influences via Byzantium. Although some of it was secular, it was primarily religious in nature.  

It did not strive for realism. Rather, since European peasants were illiterate, it was used to illustrate common stories and the lessons they conveyed. Many of their artistic conventions look odd to modern eyes. There is no perspective and so the images look flat. The figures are also elongated and their proportions can be askew. 

A lot of the images are allegorical and the symbols they use, which would have been well understood by their viewers, are baffling to us, which gives them a surreal feeling.  

Alone Again (Naturally)

Get ready for a sequestered weekend with The Moon Loungers. 

 

Walking through a terraced rice paddy

Terraced farming lends itself to some amazing photos. They're usually taken from a distance so you can see the full hillsides covered with terraces. This video is a walk through some Indonesian paddies. It gives a good look at them up close and gives an idea of the engineering and labor needed to build them, much less raise the crops. 

 

Tropical beaches

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I figure many of my regular readers are from northern climes where you are currently freezing to death and covered in snow. For that reason, I decided to give you a picture post full of tropical beaches that you could enjoy between bouts of snow shoveling, scrapping ice off your car's windshield, and being stupid enough to sit on top of a frozen lake trying to fish.

Last Kiss

Get ready for a terminal weekend with the Marty Ray Project.

 

Railroad crossings

We've all sat at railroad crossings watching a train go by. I'm always struck by the fact that the graffiti artists are generally careful to avoid painting over logos, reporting marks, and other codes on the cars. It is a dance between the railroad companies and the graffiti painters. One thing I don't think about is how the crossing signals work, I just take them for granted. The above video discusses that, and it is interesting what they have to do to get the whole process to work properly.  

 

Paintings by Waldemar Fink

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Waldemar Theophil Fink was an early 20th century Swiss artist. He started as a commercial decorative painter. He then studied art in Munich and moved onto becoming a landscape painter. His works featured the Swiss Alps. He painted in the impressionist style, and so his palette is much brighter and more vibrant than you usually see in landscape paintings of mountains.

Waldemar Fink