Dali House

I’m just not at all sure about this picture, which came in the mail. It doesn’t have the unquestionable provenance of our recent fish series, and I’m not even sure what it is we’re looking at.

But, hey, it’s as good an excuse as any to mention a recent New York Times story about researchers upping the estimate on how many venomous fish there are in the sea – at least 1,200, they now figure.

The story on August 22 tells the tale of William Leo Smith, a pet-shop boy who reached into a waste bin for a telephone that had dropped in there and got knocked flat by the poison on the quills of a dead “fuzzy dwarf lionfish” that had also been trashed. By way of trying to figure out what the hell happened, he turned, over the course of 20 years, into an ichthyologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. See the rest.

One of the living artists who’s garnered attention at the Art Renewal Center (Motto: “Get back to where you once belonged”) is Timothy Tyler, whose “Juggler” won a massive $250 prize as chairman’s choice award in the grumpy old website’s 2004 “Salon” competition.

“Juggler” – which, once again, just happens to be owned by the ARC’s founder and head god of thunder Fred Ross – is a clear standout among Tyler’s work, in my opinion. There are in fact six pages of his works on view at the site, mostly annoyingly realistic portraits (way too many cute kids) and still-lifes, which of course the ARC squad adores. See the rest.

I think the news media may have got a little carried away with a scientific study of Claude Monet’s paintings of the British Houses of Parliament, the the preliminary results of which were published last month.

So far, environmental scientists are merely hoping that the pictures might be read as a pollution chart. I’m not really sure why they want to do this, but I suppose having a big name like Monet at the top of your research proposal makes it a hell of a lot easier to get funding.

His series of depictions of the scene on the Thames between 1899 and 1901 have always enthralled because of the scintillating impressionistic style, which helped open the door to the relative fireworks of pointillism.

But now researchers Jacob Baker and John Thornes at the University of Birmingham are wondering if the paintings were in fact faithful depictions of the Victorian weather. See the rest.

Or is it actually more disturbing that this deep-sea vent annelid worm is so tiny that a scanning electron microscope is needed to photograph it? Just makes it that harder to keep track of, doesn’t it? Thank God there are websites like SerpentProject.com keeping an eye on these underwater horrors for us.

Larger menace takes the form of the myctophid lantern fish below, “possibly a juvenile”, the divers tell us. Does that mean he’s going to get uglier? Taken in the Indian Ocean at a seemingly safe 2,000 metres. Slid down nicely with a little meunière sauce.

See the rest.

The German Emmanuel Leutze created his best-known work 75 years after George Washington was ferried to victory at Trenton, New Jersey. Time and distance (Leutze did the painting in Dusseldorf) may be excuses for poor memory, but he was way over the top with this one.

It only bothers historians, really. The average viewer (and certainly most Americans) could care less that Washington in fact crossed the Delaware River in the dead of night in a furious snowstorm. Leutze, of course, was going for the old out-of-darkness-to-a-new-dawn effect, and actually painted the morning star directly above the lead poler, as if it’s the Wise Men at Christmas a-coming. See the rest.