Paul Cézanne: The Artist’s Father Reading ‘L’Événement’ (1866)
Author Archives: Cimaxion
The Drawings of Queen Victoria
Maria Popova at Brain Pickings has found a fascinating trove of drawings by England’s Queen Victoria. She is history’s longest reigning female monarch. It looks to me as though she enjoyed enlivening her letters with these wonderful little illustrations.
Line of Sight: A Film by Benny Zenga
You have to be young and crazy to ride this way. But it makes for an awesome film! This is a trailer for an upcoming documentary about bike messenger racers by Benny Zenga, made with helmet-cam footage taken by Lucas Brunelle over a ten year period.
Via Booooooom.com.
Stop-Motion Paper Animation by Studio Nos
Ray Bradbury Has Died at 91
It’s a sad day for writing and for science fiction. Legendary and iconic author Ray Bradbury has died at the age of 91. We should count ourselves fortunate that we had him for so many years, firing the imaginations of children and adults worldwide. I will never forget reading his ‘Martian Chronicles,’ ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ and ‘The Illustrated Man.’ I recently re-read 451 after many decades and thoroughly enjoyed it to the same extent that I had as a teenager. He was one of those writers more interested in the life of the imagination than in hard-core science fiction. He wrote not about the spaceship, but more about how one thought about a spaceship.
He provided much material for the movies, including the peculiar and not entirely successful Francois Truffaut adaptation of ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ He will be sorely missed and probably never equaled.
Here is a 1963 television documentary about Bradbury produced by David L. Wolper. It contains a film version of one of his short stories called ‘Dial Double Zero.’
Video found via Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds.
Live Coverage of Venus Crossing Sun
It will not happen again until 2117! So you better watch it now! Starting at 3:00 pm PST Venus will cross in front of the sun and the whole thing will last about seven hours. You can’t look at the sun. So don’t do that. But you can put a little hole in a piece of paper and let the sun shine through that onto a second piece of paper so that an image is cast. As for the video feed above, it is from the Keck Observatory.