Karl Blossfeldt.

Karl Blossfeldt, Cucurbita sp., pumpkin, tendrils (courtesy D.A.P.).

Karl Blossfeldt, Polystichum munitum, western swordfern, young furled frond (courtesy D.A.P.).

As someone who gets obsessive about shooting plants, all the various bits, and finds them endlessly fascinating, Karl Blossfeldt has long been a revered icon. There’s a new book of his photos out, and they remain some of the most beautiful botanical photos ever taken. That beauty is magnified by the fact that Blossfeldt was using a homemade camera.

Karl Blossfeldt originally made detailed photographs of plant specimens as teaching tools for his applied art students, building his own camera to magnify the sculptural qualities of seedpods, pumpkin tendrils, and horsetail shoots at up to 45 times their size. The 1928 publication of his book Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) suddenly brought the Berlin professor widespread artistic acclaim, with critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin describing the “astonishing plant photographs” as revealing “the forms of ancient columns in horse willow, a bishop’s crosier in the ostrich fern, totem poles in tenfold enlargements of chestnut and maple shoots, and gothic tracery in the fuller’s thistle.”

[…]

We’re so familiar with macrophotography today that it may be hard to return to the early-20th-century context and imagine how these images would have startled viewers with their revelations of intricate beauty in even the smallest bud of a violet. Yet they remain compelling examples of looking closely at the world around us.

I love macro photography, and indulge in it often enough, but for me, none of it takes away from Blossfeldt’s work. There’s a joy and purity to his photos which are simply unparalleled.

Hyperallergic has the full story.

The Daily Bird #338.

Birds in a cherry tree, from Charly: To brighten the day a little.  The female tree sparrow was busily picking insects and I just could not get her in close up. The male tree sparrow was just swaggering and grooming himself.  The female bullfinch was grooming herself and just sitting there sleepily. The male bullfinch was busy gorging himself on the buds but I managed to get him in the end. Who would have guessed that bullfinch is a de-facto pest and sparrow is useful.  Click for full size!

© Charly, all rights reserved.

The Mad, Maniacal Dash.

Tucker Viemeister.

In spite of the Tiny Tyrant’s insistence that the first 100 days just don’t matter, he’s tipped over into the obsessed side to rack up something, anything, and he’s driving everyone else more than a bit crazy. So basically, business as usual, amplified by magnitudes of order.

President Donald Trump has dismissed the idea of measuring the success of his first 100 days in office as “ridiculous.” But the president and his top officials have made a number of startling moves this week with the deadline in mind, and Trump has privately obsessed over getting a win before the cutoff.

The last-minute moves have frustrated some of Trump’s allies, caused a scramble across his government and proved once again that decisions are made by one man on his whims — and often with an eye to his media coverage.

To his supporters, it looks like the kind of action Trump promised as a candidate. “That’s how a CEO makes decisions,” said Rep. Chris Collins, a New York Republican.

Trump’s promise last Friday to deliver a tax plan within five days startled no one more than Gary Cohn, his chief economic adviser writing the plan. Not a single word of a plan was on paper, several administration officials said, and Treasury officials worked all weekend to draft a one-page summary of his principles with a news conference the president demanding the action.

“The reason your head is spinning on this is that the plan isn’t even written yet,” one senior White House official said this week as conflicting details emerged about what would be in the plan. “This was all about doing something in the first 100 days and really it’s doing the process backwards.”

When White House officials demanded last week a health care vote by the 100-day mark, Speaker Paul Ryan was traveling in Europe and taken aback. The leader of the House of Representatives wasn’t in on the plan, had no desire to vote this week and feared it wasn’t even possible. No one even knew what the bill would say because the language had not been written.

“It was totally insane,” one senior GOP aide said. “It made no sense. There was no reason to say a vote was happening this week.”

[…]

Still, aides described the lead-up as mad-dash, even by the typical Trump White House standards, with more focus on optics than substance.

Definitely business as usual for the regime. There’s much more to the story, click on over to Politico for the full article.

Still Workin’

Work, Work, Work 80. After playing about a bit, I decided to use DMC Perle 3 for the foliage; I have it in abundance, thanks to the generosity of Kestrel, and in all the colours needed for Autumn foliage. I hadn’t noticed at the time Kestrel sent me all this bounty, but all of the Perle is vintage, all the labels are old style, and there’s not a bar code in sight! As I’m already using a good amount of vintage threads, that makes the choice all the better. The quality of it is fantastic, and it’s a joy to use. Current Hours: 1,098.5 1,100.* Skeins Used: 161. For those who don’t know, one skein is 8 meters (8.7 yards). Click for full size.

*Updated to include today’s hours.

© C. Ford.

Collusion: The Trump Campaign and Moscow.

Reports of possible collusion between the Trump administration and the Kremlin have led to a political storm in the US. Photograph: Elaine Thompson/AP.

The Guardian has the latest on British intelligence which highlights yet more collusion on the part of Trump and Russia.

The UK government was given details last December of allegedly extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow, according to court papers.

Reports by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer, on possible collusion between the the Trump camp and the Kremlin are at the centre of a political storm in the US over Moscow’s role in getting Donald Trump elected.

It was not previously known that the UK intelligence services had also received the dossier but Steele confirmed in a court filing earlier this month that he handed a memorandum compiled in December to a “senior UK government national security official acting in his official capacity, on a confidential basis in hard copy form”.

The court papers say Steele decided to pass on the information he had collected because it was “of considerable importance in relation to alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election”, that it “had implications for the national security of the US and the UK” and “needed to [be] analysed and further investigated/verified”.

The December memo alleged that four Trump representatives travelled to Prague in August or September in 2016 for “secret discussions with Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers”, about how to pay hackers secretly for penetrating Democratic party computer systems and “contingency plans for covering up operations”.

Between March and September, the December memo alleges, the hackers used botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs and steal data online from Democratic party leadership. Two of the hackers had been “recruited under duress by the FSB” the memo said. The hackers were paid by the Trump organisation, but were under the control of Vladimir Putin’s presidential administration.

The Guardian has the full, in-depth story.

The Problem With “I Thought It Would Be Easier”.

President Donald Trump honks the horn of an 18-wheeler truck while meeting with truckers and CEOs regarding healthcare on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Thursday, March 23, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik.

Pretty much everyone has had something to say about the whole “I thought presidenting would be easier!” comment, most of it snarky in nature, and rightly so. One thing the Tiny Tyrant can be counted on for is to continually remind everyone he’s a fucking idiot. Now, I’m sure he thought he was driving home just how difficult a job it is, therefor people should give him a break and all that. It may not have been such a brazen line of bullshit if he had actually been working the last few months. That’s not the case, however. The Tiny Tyrant has spent less time working at the job than anyone else, full stop. When you are not actually working, you don’t get to moan and whine about how gosh darn hard it is.

President Donald Trump told Reuters on Thursday that, as he reaches the 100 day mark of his presidency, he’s been surprised by just how difficult running the country actually is.

“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going,” Trump said. “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”

I’m sure people would be incredibly gracious if you disappeared back into your previous life. Problem with that one is, you never left it. The one thing you have managed to do as Unpresident is to make sure you and yours have cashed in, milking that government cow for all it is worth.

…Yet despite Trump’s frequent laments about the difficulty of his job, indications point to him spending far less time and effort on it than his predecessors.

Trump, who slammed Obama for golfing during his presidency, has spent 19 days at the golf course since becoming president. That’s a double digit lead over Trump’s three immediate predecessors (and at this point in their presidencies, neither Obama nor Bush had golfed at all).

Trump has also spent half of the weekends he’s been president at his resort at Mar A Lago — sometimes leaving for the weekend as early as Thursday afternoon. Each trip reportedly costs taxpayers over $3 million.

Even when he’s in D.C., reports indicate that Trump has taken a less hands-on approach to the presidency. Unlike previous presidents, who styled themselves as “deciders,” Trump’s aides have reportedly learned to just decide on the best course of action on their own and present that to the president — because presenting too many competing actions doesn’t work for him. Trump continues to watch hours of cable news.

When offered intelligence briefings prior to his inauguration, Trump only attended around one per week, instead of the proffered seven. And even then, intelligence analysts were instructed to pare nuance out of their reports and get them down to one page, if possible. That’s far less information than presidents traditionally receive — and is about a quarter of the information President Obama consumed.

Think Progress has the full story.

The Joy Of Cooking: Miniature Food.

These are amazing, and wonderful to watch.

There are books on the wall, a table in the middle of the room, a plant, maybe a floor lamp or two. But something doesn’t feel right in this room, like it’s a set. Suddenly, a gigantic hand reaches into the frame, revealing that the room was indeed a set built entirely in miniature form. The chopping board is maybe the size of a pinky; the knife slightly smaller. This is the world of Japanese miniature enthusiast and YouTuber ‘Joken’ aka AAAJoken, or triple-A Joken.

Currently a member of the YouTuber management agency UUUM, Joken got his start by introducing toys for kids and creating stop motion animations using those toys. But since 2014 he’s created over 200 videos on a YouTube channel called Miniature Space. In it, he creates all kinds of miniature Japanese meals like tempura and okonomiyaki, but also everyday foods like spaghetti carbonara and corn dogs.

You can read and see more at Spoon & Tamago.

The Null Hypothesis.

All images © Jan Cieślikiewicz.

All images © Jan Cieślikiewicz.

Null Hypothesis is Jan Cieślikiewicz’s series, and they are stunning photos, most of them likely to leave you with an open-mouthed “wtf?” as they tend to evoke many questions, and a desire for more information.

The other series are just as worthy of your attention:

All images © Jan Cieślikiewicz.

All images © Jan Cieślikiewicz.

Many of them are delightfully inexplicable without further information, which is a wonderful challenge for a species that is constantly on the hunt for facts and absolutes, and insists on narrative. Go have a wonderful wander, and poke your inner existential angst a bit.

Jan Cieślikiewicz Photography.

Yeah, That Will Make Us Great.

Ahhh, the oh fucks are piling up again, a brief roundup…

Reveal News reported Friday that Trump plans to cut $60 million from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs, which fights child labor, human trafficking and slavery around the world.

“The preliminary budget of President Donald Trump’s administration would eliminate $60 million in grants from the bureau’s budget, calling them ‘largely noncompetitive and unproven,’” wrote Reveal News’ Jennifer Gollan. “It suggested that the agency instead focus its efforts ‘on ensuring that U.S. trade agreements are fair for American workers.’”

The cuts would cripple the government’s ability to monitor child exploitation around the world and potentially interfere with tenets of 13 separate trade agreements. Furthermore, the measures would ultimately have the opposite effect of what the president intends. By allowing other countries to exploit child workers and other laborers, U.S. workers will be put at a disadvantage for using fair labor practices.

Full story here. Exploiting children, that’s sure to make Amerikkka Great Again, right?

Moving on to Health and Human Services, the Tiny Tyrant has appointed a vicious anti-choice activist. Well, as we all know, women don’t count for shit, so this certainly won’t downgrade that greatness, right?

President Donald Trump has tapped a well-known anti-abortion activist, Charmaine Yoest, for the position of assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Yoest is a senior fellow at American Values, a conservative group that says it opposes a “culture of death,” and the former president of Americans United for Life. AUL’s work has been key to moving anti-abortion bills forward on the state level, since it claims to have offered state lawmakers 32 different kinds of anti-abortion model legislation, according to its website.

Full story here.

And because destruction in pursuit of oil will certainly make everything great again, fuck the land, fuck the oceans, fuck the arctic, and there’s no climate change, either!

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday that seeks to increase offshore oil drilling in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic Ocean, and the Atlantic Ocean. The order leaves out the Pacific Ocean and Eastern Gulf regions.

During the signing ceremony on Friday, Trump emphasized that the order will open the Arctic for drilling.

“It reverses the previous administration’s Arctic leasing ban,” the president said. “So hear that: It reverses the previous administration’s Arctic leasing ban, and directs Secretary Zinke to allow responsible development of offshore areas that will bring revenue to our Treasury and jobs to our workers.”

President Barack Obama protected 98 percent of the Arctic Ocean from oil leasing in December 2016, under Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. The new order directs all areas protected as of July 2008 to be preserved, but anything else — including broad swaths of the Atlantic and Arctic — has been reopened.

Full story here.

The Tiny Tyrant spoke to the NRA, pledging his undying love and sucking up so damn hard, I’m amazed he didn’t swallow himself. Odd how weapons weren’t allowed at his little suck up session. Of course, what Amerikkka really needs to make it great are more guns, more, more, more! They are now sacred. Yep. There’s one lobby that will get whatever the fuck it wants. Way to drain the swamp there.  :Spits:

Trump pledged his allegiance to the powerful National Rifle Association, the country’s leading gun-rights advocacy group, at a convention attended by thousands. Elected in part on a law-and-order platform, Trump was the first sitting president to address the NRA since fellow Republican Ronald Reagan in 1983.

“As your president, I will never, ever infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” Trump told thousands of people attending the NRA’s annual convention in Atlanta, Georgia.

[…]

“You have a true friend and champion in the White House,” he said. “We want to assure you of the sacred right of self defense for all of our citizens.”

Full story here.