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Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
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The Torment of Saint Anthony is the earliest surviving work attributed to Michelangelo, painted by him in 1487 or 1488 when he was 12 or 13 years old. This is an intense painting, the kind of thing that would have resulted in Michelangelo’s parents visiting the principal’s office had the young man painted this in a contemporary 7th grade art class.
Until 2009, it was believed the painting was a copy of a documented Michelangelo original, but a restoration and x-ray & infrared scans of the work showed evidence that the painting was done by the future master.
Michelangelo’s work was based on Martin Schongauer’s engraving Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons. This video provides a great overview of the history of the painting:
Tags: art · Michelangelo · video
The Tour Down Under’s winner won despite being blasted off his bike by kangaroos. “Two of them blasted through the peloton when we were doing probably 50 kph and…went left, right, left right, left right and I ended up hitting its backside.”
“Virginia Oliver, a feisty, salty-tongued lobster boat skipper who fished off the New England coast wearing earrings, hot-pink lipstick and an occasional scowl for more than 80 years, until she was 103, died on Jan. 21 in Rockport, Maine. She was 105.”
Wow, these paper flowers from 11th-century China are amazingly well-preserved.
I was poking around on YouTube for “how to” videos (one of my favorite video genres) the other day when I hit a small jackpot: a bunch of How Do They…? videos from the National Film Board of Canada. A favorite shows how chain link fences are made:
[This is a vintage post originally from Sep 2013.]
Tags: how to · timeless posts · video
Good god, this story: Mother Says Asking 13-Year-Old Son to Swim Four Hours to Save Family ‘One of the Hardest Decisions’. “I knew he was the strongest and he could do it.” Australia: a nation of athletes.
Been thinking a lot about this Ted Chiang quote recently: “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too.”
Haven’t watched this 90-minute video yet, but I’ve seen so many recommendations for it that I’m posting it as a to-do list item for myself: You are being misled about renewable energy technology.
A group of 50 Chilians recently spent several hours powering a human-operated chatbot. Some questions were answered quickly but “when they didn’t know the answer, they walked around the room to see if someone else did”.
Elon Musk and other internet racists started an internet war over Christopher Nolan’s casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, thereby immediately disproving their point.
Early this month, a wily coyote swam across San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz. He was in such rough shape, observers thought he’d probably die, but he’s been snacking on birds and rodents and was recently observed fat as a pickle.
For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later.
A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death, Jorge released a hour-long set of him performing those songs:
Tags: movies · music · Seu Jorge · The Life Aquatic · video · Wes Anderson
