Category Archives: Art

Da Vinci

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Fan Gun
Da Vinci Bicycle Model

The practice of quarantine, first began during the 14th century in an effort to protect coastal cities from the plague. Ships arriving from infected ports, really any port, were required to sit at anchor for forty days before being allowed to land. The word quarantine, was derived from the Italian words quaranta giorni which mean forty days. That’s a lot longer time to wait than the two-weeks we are now asked to endure in quarantine due to the corona virus.

Just before we entered into quarantine and the rest of the world also locked itself down, we visited the Saint Louis Science Center. The featured exhibit there was on Leonardo Da Vinci. This traveling exhibit had visited Saint Louis before and we happened upon it then, quite by accident, when we had been bicycling around the downtown one day. Then it was on display in the lobby of a bank building. There was only one guy running it and we were its only visitors at the time. I think that this show is better suited to that venue and is not worthy of the science center. It is a history exhibit without any artifacts. Every single one of the items on display are replicas. Actually, they are even less than that. Most of these items that were supposedly invented by Da Vinci, were really only just sketched by him. From these drawings the purveyors of this show have gone on to fashion their interpretation of what they would look like in real life. I was so unimpressed by this exhibit that I have not bothered to write about it until now, but since we are still under quarantine and not much else is happening, news of it has finally bubbled to the surface. I guess that it is just a slow news day.

Trump L’Oeil

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Eye by Tony Tasset

Trompe L’Oeil is French for “deceive the eye.” It is a term used to describe an artistic technique that uses realistic imagery to create an optical illusion. It is also a term that sounds like it includes the US President’s last name. In French tromper means to decieve. In English Trump means the same thing. Abraham Lincoln, the father of the Republican party is once supposed to have said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” After more than three years, I think that we have finally arrived at the last phrase/phase of that saying. The Washington Post has kept a running count of the number of Trump lies while he has been in office. That tally reached 18,000, at the start of last month. That’s a heck of a lot of lying.

Since then, more than 36 million Americans have lost their jobs and the country is on pace for 100,000 US Covid-19 deaths by the end of May. Numbers like these are too large to lie your way out of, not that Trump won’t try. He can lie, he has lied and he will continue to lie, but like in Lincoln’s affirmation, the truth eventually comes out. Just as the weekly totals of American carnage continue to rise, Trump’s poll number are now falling. As the carnival barker that he has always been, he will continue to distract, misdirect and lie, but more and more Americans are daily awakening to their own true situation and it is not a pretty sight. While the scale of unemployment dwarfs the tragic losses from the virus, one was caused by the other. You cannot fix the economy until you cure the pandemic and there is no way that either of these changes will occur in the time that we have until the election. I don’t care how much bleach you drink.

Just as pandemics come, they also always go. It is the way of such things. It is just Trump’s dumb luck that this one occurred in an election year. He could have listened to his advisors, the expert ones, not the sycophants and if still unable to get out in front of this thing, make it look like he was at least trying. Instead, he distracted, misdirected and lied. Inevitably causing the Covid-19 tail, not to be pinned on the donkey, but rather on his own fat ass. Now he is stuck with it and no matter of wiggling will get it off of him. All signs are leading to his and his party’s suffering an election defeat of historic and monumental proportions. I just worry about how many people will have to die to bring down this clown.