I visited Edinburgh beginning August this year at the start of the Fringe festival, which is over by now. The number of performing artists is immense as you can see from the official website, and so is the number of visitors, and it is therefore hard to get a room down town, at this time of the year.
With hundreds of performances completed, the best jokes of the festival have been picked by some 2,000 comedy critics.
Winner with 52% of the votes is:
“I tried to steal spaghetti from the shop, but the female guard saw me and I couldn’t get pasta.”
By Masai Graham
You have to have an accent to get the punch, but yes it is funny…
Runner up with 37% of the votes is:
“Did you know, if you get pregnant in the Amazon, it’s next day delivery?”
By Mark Simmons
For more background see the articles in the Guardian and on Inews.co.uk. The latter website also lists the past winners.
In the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine there have recently been a number of explosions at airfields and ammunition depots in Crimea and in the Donbast that were explained by the Kremlin as military staff being rather lax with the no-smoking rules.
On the other hand with so much happening at almost the same time, would it be possible that the Ukrainians have had a “lucky strike” in attacking these facilities?
It has been more than two years ago that some ‘artist’ taped a banana to a wall and presented this as a real work of art.
According to galerieperrotin Maurizio Cattelan’s new sculpture ‘Comedian’ at Art Basel Miami marks the artist’s first major debut at an art fair in over 15 years!
Comprised of a real banana affixed to the wall with a piece of duct tape, this new work is no different than Cattelan’s hyper-realistic sculptures lampooning popular culture and offer a wry commentary on society, power, and authority. In the same vein as Cattelan’s America (2016), this piece offers insight into how we assign worth and what kind of objects we value. The idea of this work came to the artist’s mind a year ago. Back then, Cattelan was thinking of a sculpture that was shaped like a banana. Every time he traveled, he brought a banana with him and hung it in his hotel room to find inspiration. He made several models: first in resin, then in bronze and in painted bronze for finally coming back to the initial idea of a real banana. Discover it in 📍 Perrotin Booth D24, Art Basel Miami Beach, 📆 December 5 – 8, 2019
This is all rather weird to begin with, but the madness does not stop there. This piece of art has been sold three times for $120,000.- (or more) according to Huffpost. Estimated costs:
Banana 🍌 : $1.00
Duct tape 🩹: $ 0.20
Total costs $ 1.20. Price / cost ratio 100,000❗ And that times three, of course. But now, the story takes a twist…
An artist claims Maurizio Cattelan copied his banana artwork. And now Maurizio is being sewed for plagiarism by Joe Morford, an artist from Glendale, California.
“I did this in 2000. But some dude steals my junk and pimps it for 120K+ in 2019,” Morford wrote in a public Facebook post in 2019 with an image of the artwork. “Plagiarism much?”
Joe Morford
Morford is seeking damages over $390,000 — the total amount of Cattelan’s sales for three editions of the artworks — as well as court costs and travel expenses.
As reported by Reuters and other news agencies, for Jung Ki-young, a South Korean software engineer, Microsoft’s decision to retire its Internet Explorer web browser marked the end of a quarter-century love-hate relationship with the web browser.
To commemorate its demise, he spent a month and 430,000 won ($330) designing and ordering a headstone with Explorer’s logo and an English epitaph.
There has been a lot of discussion whether the fire onboard the Moskva was caused by an accident, or whether the vessel was hit by two Neptune anti-ship missiles.
Moskva radio communication on a Telegram posting
If the alarming audio recording posted on Telegram is anything to go by, it is clear that the vessel was hit by two rockets below the waterline, and the subsequent explosions caused a serious amount of damage and panic onboard.
In the past an icon was a painting, usually on wood, of Jesus Christ, or of a person considered holy by Christians, especially in Russia and Greece. These icons often had a halo also known as a nimbus, aureole, glory, or gloriole. It is a crown of light rays, circle or disk of light that surrounds a person in art. It has been used in the iconography of many religions to indicate holy or sacred figures.
Later the meaning of ‘icon’ evolved into a famous person (or thing) considered as representing a set of beliefs or a way of life. Like David Beckham becoming one of the UK’s best-loved sporting icons.
Buddha Icon with an Aura
Nowadays we think of it as a symbol reflecting a particular file type on a PC. And within an application it’s a small picture or symbol that you point to and click on (= press) with a mouse to give the computer an instruction. Believe it or not, there are nowadays even icons for your PC with an aura, indicating concentration, enlightenment, and meditation.
American Bald Eagle
In this context it was funny to see some pictures from politicians lately taken recently, from such a point of view that they were iconified so to say. What to think about the following pictures from Joe Biden where the American Bald Eagle symbol on a blue background took the roll of an aura.
An article in the Guardian described Seafood lorries travelling to Westminster for a protest against Brexit red tape. They parked metres from Downing Street on Monday, but they stopped short of carrying out their threat last week to dump fresh fish close to No 10. Some pictures of lorries were included, of which one in particular caught my eye:
Immediately, I thought, but why would the fishing industry say that it is selfish ? Obviously, this wasn’t what the text of the lorry was all about. Reading it again, it was the following text that was on the lorry:
Obviously, this makes much more sense, and I then remembered a similar situation where my dyslexia kicked in. This was several years ago, when visiting the boat club during the weekend, where a big sign advertised:
“Welcome to an evening of time wasting“
Obviously that wasn’t what the sign said. It mentioned:
“Welcome to an evening of wine tasting“
Once I decided there was not much difference between the two, I carried on to the bar at the beach to have a beer with some friends.
