The theft of five paintings from the house of a South African
collector is the catalyst for a complex plot of murder, forgery, and political
intrigue. But the further Michael Meade,
a once-glittering American reporter looks, the more complicated the case gets. The most valuable of the paintings--a Vermeer
that was the thieves' real target--was almost certainly a forgery. They didn't want the painting, but a
mysterious document hidden inside it, something called the missing sixth dating
back to the Nazi seizure of the Vermeer. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/mark-graham/the-missing-sixth/
Complete online catalogue of
paintings of Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675)
Link to the Complete Interactive
Vermeer Catalogue at http://www.essentialvermeer.com/
In one brightly colored canvas after another, Pieter Bruegel chronicled the
varieties of human folly -- from individual hubris ("The Fall of
Icarus") to public brutality ("The Massacre of the Innocents"),
from private lunacy ("The Blue Cloak") to apocalyptic carnage
("Dulle Griet"). Some of his
biographers suggest that he belonged to an Antwerp circle of humanists who
believed that man is driven to sin by his own foolishness. In his antic novel, "Headlong," the
British playwright Michael Frayn has constructed an ingenious plot around a
missing Bruegel painting, and in doing so, created his own resonant portrait of
human folly. In this case, it is the
folly of one impulsive Englishman who allows greed, snobbery and intellectual
hubris to lead him astray and to risk his marriage, his family's savings and
his good name -- all for the sake of a painting that may or may not be a
long-lost Bruegel Michiko Kakutani
List of paintings by Pieter
Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569)
Using ‘literally’ metaphorically is literally
spreading like wildfire by Adam
Lewis Google
searches for “literally” have more than quadrupled, suggesting both a public acceptance of the term
however it’s used and a general curiosity about its use (leading search terms
include “literally + meaning”, “definition + literally”, and “literally +
means”). We have also seen references to
“literally” in books nearly triple since 1700. Masked
as hyperbole, the misuse of this term should probably not surprise language
purists as much as it does. As the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) editor at large Jesse Sheidlower pointed out last
year, “literally” has been used in a contradictory way for centuries by some of
the most famous and well respected authors.
Mark Twain described Tom Sawyer as “literally rolling in wealth”. F Scott Fitzgerald remarked that Jay Gatsby
“literally glowed”. James Joyce wrote
about a Mozart piece as “literally knocking everything else into a cocked
hat”. As Sheidlower notes, authors’ use
of “literally” to mean its opposite was actually quite popular in the 18th and
19th centuries, extending to other writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens
and Henry David Thoreau. Over time,
we’ve seen words take on opposite meanings for a range of reasons (they even
have a name: auto-antonyms or contranyms).
For instance, “symposium” used to mean a drinking party, “egregious” used
to mean remarkably good and “harlot” used
to mean a man of good cheer. Some words
have even retained their contradictory meanings, like “sanction” (meaning both
to permit and to punish) and “oversight” (meaning both supervision and not
noticing something).
Read more at http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/oct/24/mind-your-language-literally
Almost 30 years after his death, cineastes could finally take a glimpse of screen
legend Orson Welles' final directorial effort.
Royal Road Entertainment, an LA-based production firm, managed to snag
the rights to the Welles' unreleased 1970s drama, The Other Side of the Wind,
the New York Times reports. Royal Road is actually planning to release
the picture in time for Welles' 100th birthday -- May 6, 2015. Welles conceived the film as a satirical look
at Hollywood. The movie stars late John
Huston, himself an Oscar-winning director and father of equally-acclaimed
actress Angelica Huston, who plays as the aging and washed out moviemaker
yearning to revive his career. Peter
Bogdanovich (another real-life director) and Susan Strasberg, whose character
was said to be inspired by prominent Welles film critic Pauline Kael,
also joins the cast. Welles started out
as a stage performer, until he found success in radio plays. He was only 23 year old when he terrified
nearly all of America with his adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, which
aired on CBS Radio. Listeners have
almost gone crazy believer they were actually hearing actual reports of an
alien invasion as Welles' radio play progressed. Christian George Acevedo http://www.chinatopix.com/articles/19684/20141030/orson-welles-unfinished-film-slated-for-release-2015.htm
Fabaceae is a very large family in the order Fables,
including three subfamilies, at least 630 genera and more than 18,860
species. Pretty much all are toxic, very
mildly to extremely deadly, but out of that list of species there are a few
important culinary plants. The most
important are listed, along with pictures and descriptions of varities of peas,
beans and lentils. Lentils probably originated in Turkey and/or Syria, these
pulses are smaller than most beans and disk shaped rather than bean
shaped. Optical lenses take their name from this shape. Lentils were one of the very first cultivated
crops. Read about carob, ice cream,
jicama, kudzu, licorice, pigeon, sataw,
soybeans and many other plants at http://www.clovegarden.com/ingred/bp_legumev.html
Microscopes "Magnification
by simple lenses has been known from ancient times, but the development of the
modern microscope dates from the construction of compound-lens systems, which
occurred some time in the period between 1590 and 1610. The credit should probably go to the Dutch
lensmakers Hans and Zacharias Jannsen (father and son), who in about 1600
constructed a simple instrument made of a pair of lenses mounted in a sliding
tube. A compound-lens system using a
convex lens in the eyepiece was described by Johannes Kepler in 1611, probably
deriving from the Jannsens' work.
Telescopes "Tradition
attributes the invention of the telescope to the accidental alignment of two
lenses of opposite curvature and diverse focal length by Hans Lippershey in
Holland in 1608. The principle, however,
may have been known to Roger Bacon in the 13th century and to the early
spectacle makers of Italy. Galileo
Galilei constructed (1609) the first lens, or refracting, telescope for
astronomical purposes. Using several
versions, he discovered the four brightest Jovian satellites, lunar mountains,
sunspots, the starry nature of the Milky Way, and the apparent elongation of
Saturn, now known to be its rings. http://web.cerritos.edu/cmera/SitePages/Ph102L/labs/Ph102labs/Ph102/tele-microscope.htm
November 2, 2014 Acker Bilk, who has died aged 85, was a jazz clarinettist and
bandleader who became a hugely popular figure in the wider world of
entertainment; his recordings, in particular Stranger On The Shore, figured
among the bestselling records of the 20th century. Bilk’s popular appeal owed almost as much to his unaffected
and avuncular manner as to the warm, sentimental sound of his clarinet. Similarly, his bowler-hatted figure was as
instantly recognisable as his tone and style. Bernard Stanley Bilk was born on January 28
1929 in Pensford, Somerset, the son of a cabinet maker. His mother played the organ in the chapel
where his father acted as a lay preacher. Bilk acquired the nickname “Acker”, a local
word meaning “pal” or “mate”, as a boy.
In 1960 he
recorded his composition Stranger On The Shore with a string orchestra, as the
theme music to a BBC television play for children. The tune caught on and became the first-ever
simultaneous hit in Britain and America, remaining in the Top 30 singles chart
for 53 weeks, gaining an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. See pictures and link to 2:51 video of Stranger on the
Shore at
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1212
November 3, 2014 On this date in
1493, Christopher Columbus first
sighted the island of Dominica in
the Caribbean Sea. On this date in 1911, Chevrolet officially
entered the automobile market in competition with the Ford Model T.
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