Great Snakes!

If You Are One Of Those Folks -
 - who suffer from Ophidiophobia, also known as a "Fear of Snakes", then this is Conrad pointing and laughing at you, for though he is a colossal coward when it comes to spiders, he has no fear of our squamous friends.  In the Pond Allotment of Eden such a fear is hardly necessary, as our two native species of snake, the adder and grass snake, are surpassingly rare.  I only know of one person who has ever seen either in the wild.

A snake in the grass.

     Here an aside.  The ridiculously gigantic titular snake in "Anaconda" is patently impossible; there's a reason snakes in the real world don't grow that large, because they would collapse under their own weight.  Nor can something that large move as rapidly as the film-makers would have you believe, because again - it would physically disintegrate and most especially if it hit anything whilst travelling at said silly speeds.

Big.  But not all that big.

     Anyway, that's only peripherally to do with what I wanted to really talk about, because what popped into my head whilst taking Edna for a trot?
     Kekule.
     I know it sounds like one of the Balinese island archipelago, all giant palm trees and white sands being lapped by sapphire-blue seas -
     WRONG!  It happens to be a surname.  Once again Your Humble Scribe cannot explain just why it popped up in my head.  It just did, okay?
     "Something to do with the history of chemistry?" I mused, internally, for there were other people out walking their dogs and worrying people is never very clever.
     So, once back indoors I looked up the name, and - Hay Pesto!  Art?

August Friedrich Kekule

     This chap was a very prominent German chemist, who came up with the structure of the Benzene ring, this being the foundation of a whole field of chemistry, that of aromatic compounds.  Nobody had been able to determine the structure of Benzene, though they knew the chemical composition - C6H6, which provoked chemists a lot.  "How can this be!" they cried.
     Then Ol' Kek had himself a dream, in which he imagined snakes.  Not merely sinuous sibilant sususurring snakes, but snakes that wanted to speed along, stealthily like.  So they betook their tail in their mouth and went spinning along like hoops.  Art?

CAUTION!  Not suitable for off-road vehicles

     This was matey's subconscious at work, in the same way that Conrad's threw up Kekule.  How clever our subconsciouses are!  The hoop snake image allowed Ol' Kek to come up with a suggested structure for Benzene that worked.  Art?

Thus

     This satisfied the known qualities of Hydrogen and Carbon atoms: the Hydrogen atoms all have a single bond, whereas the Carbon atoms have four each.  Cue a satisfied chorus from the no-longer crying chemists, "Thank you O Mighty Kek!  have all these awards and recognition showered upon you for being prescient and perceptive, and also a bit worryingly keen on snakes."

Rikki Tikki Tavi, where are you when we need you?

     Okay, motley, you get on these water-skis, and we'll tow you behind the speedboat whilst throwing lit fireworks out of it.  Oh - that funny smell?  Petrol.  You'll be skiiing on petrol, not water.  Good luck!

Swerve, motley, swerve!

Back - To MNAC
Yes, you artless Philistines, time to peruse Catalan art again.  Again, apologies for the lack of information about these pictures, since there was usually only a single English translation for the first picture in each gallery.  Art?

"Altar de Tavarnoles"

"Lapidacio de Sant Esteve"

     These two are wooden artforms from the 12th or 13th century, with religious themes, which was typical of nearly all the art in the Romance/Medieval galleries.  For example -

Biblical studies - again.

We then spent time in the Gothic/Renaissance galleries, where the art had become considerably more sophisticated and included secular subjects as well.  Art?

A tapestry, and a big one, too.

Note the use of light in this composition, and the photo-realistic subject matter

     Go back and compare the first picture I posted, of frescos, and there is simply no comparison between those above here.  Depth, perspective, lighting, brushwork; all had advanced immeasurably.  And this from someone with no technical knowledge of art.  Art?

Still lives

     This is a whole panoply of still lives with the subject matter being flowers and fruits.  Such work was used by artists to hone their technical skills, seeing if they could manage to bring off what is near photo-realistic reproduction.  This might be dismissed as "chocolate-box" artwork nowadays, though it certainly wasn't back then, since it had a serious purpose behind it.

Last one, promise.

I included this one as a contrast to the illustrated manuscript volume of this afternoon's post.  This is a volume done in the printing press, with an etched lithograph as the title page, and was probably one of a print run of several hundred at least.  It would have been affordable by those with only modest means, rather than being kept in a church as an IM would have been, because of mass production using paper not parchment or <gasps!> vellum.  A printer could have run the whole lot off in a matter of days, rather than the decades an IM would require.
     Progress!

Porn for bibliophiles

"The Dark Crusader" By Ian Stuart - a.k.a. Alistair Maclean
I know what ran through the septic sewers that pass for your minds when you read the first three words of that title.
     "Oooh, oooh, it's about Batman, isn't it!  Isn't it - hang on, who is this "Ian Stuart" chap and - why Alistair Maclean, noted doyen of the thriller genre?"
     Because -

My edition

     I found this in a pile of books I intend to donate to the fledgling library at work, and since I hadn't actually read it, Your Humble Scribe buckled down and began reading it as of Wednesday.  I've now finished it and will cover it in more detail tomorrow.  But be warned as there will be SPOILERS.  Got that?  I will of course caution you tomorrow, as your butterfly minds will doubtless have forgotten.

Pip pip!