zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — elegant simplicity & exquisite complexity together in a terrific niche blog I now follow ]
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From the elegantly simple:

??????? Shimen-isuka-tsugi pic.twitter.com/UJ0ysYGnw2

— The Joinery (@TheJoinery_jp) April 15, 2016

to the exquisitely complex:

???? Kawai-tsugite pic.twitter.com/WQwxeZ7t4M

— The Joinery (@TheJoinery_jp) May 17, 2016

Japanese joinery has dozens of ways of associating one physical object with another, as brilliantly illustrated in dozens of tweets in The Joinery’s blog:

The complete 3D guide to joinery. The joinery design made with Fusion360.

One of my own aims has been to generate — or begin the generation of — a similar anthology of “DoubleQuotes” illustrating the methods of associative connection available in the realms of language and the aural and visual arts.

[ by Charles Cameron — a ladder of escalation? a question of quality vs quantity? — it’s hard to judge ]
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Note also that depending on whether your definition of terrorist includes state-sponsored groups, insurgents in occupied lands, etc or not, the list of “most violent” may also include the Quds Force, Haqqani Network, and Kataib Hezbollah…

And one 2014 list of The Most Violent Terrorist Groups in the World Right Now listed Al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Sharia, Hamas, Lashkar-e Taiba, Palestine Islamic Jihad, Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Abu Sayyaf Group, Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party, Hezbollah, Taliban, FARC, and Boko Haram — though the inclusion of FARC illustrates just how tricky formulating (and updating!) such lists can be..

[ by Charles Cameron — ah yes, the Crusades of happy memory.. ]
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Here’s a screenshot from an Israeli government video portraying the history of the land of Israel:

I wanted to catch that crusader plunging his sword into the Israeli family’s widescreen TV in particular, with its Game of Thrones subtitle, just because I’m, well, so very hip to all that, never having seen an episode of GoT in my life.

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However, according to this WaPo story, A satirical ‘history of the Jewish people’ released by the Israeli government offends just about everyone.. Oh?

Here it is:

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For the record, I myself am not offended on behalf of the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the British or for that matter the League of Nations / or UN. I just don’t think official governmental humor, even from Israel, measures up to, ah..

Eh, what?

[ by Charles Cameron — sadly, now dunkin’ diabetes ]
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Some might claim that Dunkin is the link between Coffee and Donuts — it’s certainly a link I’ve appreciated myself on more than one occasion. Here’s another, and arguably more subtle linkage — topology.

In verbal format, it’s a mathematician’s inside joke:

The joke goes about topologists is that they can’t tell the difference between a coffee mug and a doughnut. For those who are not familiar with topology, topology is the study of geometrical objects where you don’t care about lengths and you don’t care about angles, what matters is how the spatial relations relate to each other.

Even better, here’s the same joke, illustrated — or refuted, if you prefer — in video by a master maker:

The only problem here — it’ll all prove a little pointless if you dunk your donut into the coffee cup without first supplying some coffee..

But morphing! What an ingenious way to provide and prove a DoubleQuote!

[ by Charles Cameron — with delighted appreciation to historian Damien Kempf ]
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Damien Kempf asks, “So… what’s the apocalypse really going to be like?” and tweets 15 signs of the end times, in images from the 16th century Bodleian MS, Douce 134:

The first sign of the Apocalypse: the sea rises to the mountain tops pic.twitter.com/cA96f4Qx4t

— Damien Kempf (@DamienKempf) October 9, 2016

Now you see them — the waves, I mean —

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— and now you don’t!

The second sign of the Apocalypse: the sea descends out of sight pic.twitter.com/Xj9AZ66pQH

— Damien Kempf (@DamienKempf) October 9, 2016

Oops!

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As I wrote in Theory and Practice, Ideal and Real, War and Peace a while back:

There are two distinct scenarions that I try to bear in mind, in one of which an archipelago of islands is seen in a seascape, while the other shows a number of lakes in a landscape of mountains, hills and valleys.

The only difference between them, as I envision them, is the water level.

Raise the water level, and the lakes join to become a sea in which the isolated remaining hill and mountain tops have become islands — lower the water level, and the islands become the hills and mountain tops of a landscape, with the sea now diminished to a congeries of lakes and pools in its valleys.

Your thoughts?