An homage

I opened up You’re All Just Jealous of my Jetpack this morning, and this cartoon leapt out at me.

I felt so smart, like a classically trained art historian, because I knew instantly that this was a reference to a famous cartoon from Gary Larson’s The Far Side. I even remember seeing it in the newspaper back in the 1980s, and puzzling over its profundities.

It’s become the painting of a pipe for our age.

Who needs AI?

If you want a pretty picture, just visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic works. Even better, the museum has placed the vast majority of these images into the public domain, meaning they can be downloaded directly from the museum’s website for non-commercial use. When you browse the Met collection and find an image that you fancy, just look at the lower left-hand side of the image. If you see an “OA” icon and the words “public domain” (as shown in the example below), you’re free to use the image, provided that you abide by the Met’s terms.

Also, the British Museum has made 1.9 million images available.

Classy, not cheesy.

Moche spider from the 6th-7th century

The morning nothing went right

Today I decided to get out and do a little photography, and my target was the Frank Schott stone barn, about a half hour’s drive away from me, near Chokio, Minnesota. It’s an impressive construction — Schott went all out to build this rock solid cement and stone barn (and chicken coop!) back in the 1920s, finishing it in 1932. It was abandoned in the 1970s, and the wooden roof collapsed in the 1990s, but the structure itself is still standing. It’s an abandoned building that is so well built it feels totally safe to clamber around in it.

So we set off this morning. It looked easy to get to: a straight shot down highway 28 to county road 19, then left about 2 miles. No problem! Except there was no county road 19 that we could find, and we overshot and then backtracked and looked everywhere. Eventually, on pure dumb intuition — “this little gravel road feels like it’s about the right distance” — we found it.

I whipped out my nice camera, thinking the early morning light was perfect, and turned it on…nothing. What? Then I remembered — the night before, I’d prepared for the trip by getting the camera batteries charged up. The batteries were still sitting there at home, 100% charged. D’oh! At least I’d remembered the memory card.

I’d brought my drone along, too, but the wind was savage this morning, so nope, none of that, either.

I took a few photos with my cell phone. I should have taken a few selfies of myself kicking myself.

Maybe I’ll try again another day. It’s not that far away.