notes from an alumnus written on illuminated aluminum

Rachel Osby registered at Shelby Center, Room 301.

David kingsbury(?) opened UAH alumni lunch-&-learn lecture.

Dr. Lillian Joyce.

UAH dept of art and history moved into Wilson Hall.

Available degrees:

  • BA in Art (studio art or art history)
  • BFA in graphic design, painting and drawing, photography, printmaking and sculpture.

 

POMPEII

Archaeology. Bay of Naples — former Roman navy/shipping center, home of Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius.

Vesuvius volcano report issued like weather reports because of active volcanic activity. 217 BCE last known eruption. 5 Feb 62 CE — major earthquake before devastating eruption in 79 CE. Many eruptions since.

The Pompeii ruins are getting worse due to tourist funding reallocation by the government.

Negative spaces that were once bodies in the volcanic ash were filled with plaster to show what the bodies looked like as they fell, before they deteriorated.

Dr. J worked out of one the large four level houses built on the city wall overlooking the Bay of Naples.

Popular art on Pompeian walls: Abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus, picked up by Dionysus.

All the Pompeian houses had relatively plain exterior walls – luxury was displayed on the inside, created by artisans specialising in plaster, mosaic, painting, sculpting, etc.

Pompeii covered with both informal and professional “graffiti” artwork — 98 percent were commissioned for political campaigns. Ex: “vote my candidate for aidae.”

Around 10000 people lived in Pompeii — about 2800 political campaign paintings on walls in town.

Women wore wigs to emulate fashionable hairstyles on statues.

Many fresco portraits in Pompeii were cut out and displayed in Naples museum.

Running water in rich people’s houses and public fountains for everyone else.

“Cave canem” – beware the dog. Warning at doorway entrances where dogs were chained to keep people out because rarely were locked doors used. Dogs, like people, suffocated of poisonous gas exposure before buried in ash.

In homes, there was a public receiving area for men to get visitors and be attended by women and slaves.

Pretty garden scenes painted and created in mosaics on walls.

[Advert: the Department of Art and Art History and the Archaeological Institute of America, North Alabama Society’s lecture The Mosaics of Zeugma on the Euphrates, January 28, 7:30 p.m., Wilson Hall Theatre (first floor 001); presented by Dr. Katherine Dunbabin, Professor Emerita, from McMaster University. The lecture is free and open to the public.]

Alexander the Great was popular subject for mosaic tilework.

Nouveau riche land speculators came in, such as former slaves, and built elaborate palaces in Pompeii, collecting objects such as marble/stone water basins like some nouveau riche collect cars or velvet Elvis paintings.

Houses were rooms for entertaining and hosting business get-togethers — invitation only to visit gardens in back of house.

The kitchen was not a public gathering place — used by slaves only.

No bathroom per se, either. Public latrines and baths usually.

Bath house water temp was regulated, heated from below. Some bath houses had libraries and shops.

Two theaters, one with a fixed roof and one with a retractable roof (seated 3100-3500)

Amphitheater offered gladiator fights and wild animal hunts. Had retractable roof / awnings (seated 15000).

Romans had fast food eateries on street corners. Dozens of them in Pompeii.
Standing room only.

UAH sponsors Dr. J’s summer research.

Frescos are falling apart with time – exposure, polishing by guards, etc.

Sent from my iPad

Tribute to a former neighbour

The neighbour down the hill from my parents’ property, Mr. Greer, stood between me and my junior high school.

He was the kind of neighbour we want — solid, upstanding citizens who care for and tend their house and grounds.

Except when you’re a kid who wants to take a shortcut to get home from school.

Mr. Greer mowed his lawn twice a week and kept twigs/sticks to a minimum, desiring little in the way of rambunctious boys trotting through his manicured grass.

I mowed all the lawns around his — the lady next-door who was elderly and enjoyed fixing cold glasses of tea/lemonade for me after I mowed; the busy father of three infants who was willing to pay the local lawnboy for basic mowing but expected grass raking and bush trimming for free; my parents who insisted that a low payment for mowing our lawn was an incentive to find other work to pay for my hobbies.

I never knew Mr. Greer personally, except with the shouts of “Hey, didn’t I ask you not to walk down my driveway?,” “Next time you mow along my property line, be sure you get the grass clippings you shot over into my yard,” or “While you’re raking the leaves of the tree in your yard, you can rake the ones that fell on my property, too, if you don’t mind.”

He was just that guy we kids talked about or made up stories to fill in blanks of a mysterious personality.

The older he got, the less he talked to my parents when they were working in the vegetable garden while he was picking up magnolia tree seedpods a few feet from them.

Good fences make good neighbours — so does the silence of respecting each other’s privacy when suburban backyards abut but do not hide meditative moments alone with our thoughts and our therapeutic yardwork.

This morning, my mother informed me that Mr. Greer had died.

She pointed out a few interesting biographical details of his obituary worth mentioning here:

[Mr. Greer] was raised in Dayton, TN. He was a young child when the Scopes Monkey Trial took place in Dayton. Part of the trial was held outside and he could vividly remember the big wooden stand outside the courthouse window.

During the Depression, Howard moved with his mom, dad and sister to Kingsport where his dad ran a lunch counter in downtown Kingsport.

In the Fall of 1941, Howard went to work in the Tenite Division of Eastman Kodak. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, young men in Kingsport were required to sign up for the draft and Howard received his draft notice in the mail August 1, 1942. After basic training, he discovered he would be a US Army Air Corp instructor on a teletype machine – a machine two months previously he barely knew existed. After the war ended, Howard used the GI Bill and took Eastman’s apprenticeship program in Industrial Instruments. He later worked for Dr. Bill Kennedy in the Research Division and completed his career with many years service in the Engineering Division.

He is survived by his wife of nearly 70 years…

Mr. Greer, thanks for being a great neighbour to my parents all these years. May others proudly follow in your footsteps!

Cole Slaw with Kale, Cabbage and a game of Cribbage on top of Baggage, Part Four For Fore

As secret leader of the universe, one finds oneself in charge of everything which, in itself, is interesting and attractive but not always exciting.

One may also find oneself referred to in monotheistic terms or multitheistic terms but these are just as useless to use for labels as atheistic to describe people who positively hold no theist beliefs at all.

When one knows everything, the word “surprise” has no meaning, either.

Thus, when your scientists and engineers decided to crashland the Beagle 2 onto the surface of Mars, one knew the result to follow.

One needs no supercomputer to calculate the permutations.

One can clearly see the solar-powered nanobots hidden onboard would quickly spread from the landing site and prepare or “seed” the surface for future followers.

One realises the consequences of releasing live microorganisms, too, but one does not speculate.

One observes the expected.

One concludes and reports.

That is all that is necessary for the omniscient.

One avoids the word omnipotence.

One is.

That is all.

Scott McCloud, eat your heart out

As I return to the quiet suburban woodlands to gaze at my navel orange slowly shrinking on the sunny windowsill, I practice my doodling, animating the sketches on the fly.

My first creation, after reading through the IDRAWCOMICS reference guide:

THE AQUATIC LEAPING BUBBLE BOY!!!

Hatched in our subbasement laboratory, the Aquatic Leaping Bubble Boy is allowed to see the light of day.

The Aquatic Leaping Bubble Boy

Meanwhile, after consulting with my trusty sidekick, Guinevere, who has moved on to the Martian colonies in order to let more of our creations enjoy the open air and low gravity for which they were genetically modified and bred, I will see what the next sidekick has in store for our Creative Futures Department.

TCO

What is your definition of middle-class success?

$30/day income?

$100/day?

$400?  $500?

What about the costs associated with the standard of living you provide yourself and/or family on that income?

Can you afford your own car?

Let’s take one vehicle as an example of what its cost adds to your standard of living — the 2012 Toyota Avalon Limited (as detailed here):

5 Year Details

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 5 Yr Total
Depreciation $7,139 $3,502 $3,081 $2,731 $2,451 $18,904
Taxes & Fees $3,169 $441 $398 $362 $329 $4,699
Financing $1,175 $934 $683 $422 $151 $3,365
Fuel $2,249 $2,317 $2,386 $2,458 $2,532 $11,942
Insurance $1,480 $1,532 $1,585 $1,641 $1,698 $7,936
Maintenance $42 $404 $568 $919 $2,005 $3,938
Repairs $0 $0 $96 $232 $337 $665
Tax Credit $0 $0
True Cost to Own ® $15,254 $9,130 $8,797 $8,765 $9,503 $51,449

That doesn’t include a place to park your vehicle such as a one/two car garage, driveway or public carpark.

It doesn’t include the time you spend in the vehicle driving yourself through traffic as opposed to whatever else you could be doing in that travel time.

And that’s just one aspect of the life of a car owner, one small portion of a successful middle-class lifestyle.

If you didn’t spend that money on a car, you could spend it on yourself — a nice holiday getaway, perhaps — or on someone else — a loved one or a favourite charity.

When you say the life you live is the life you want to nourish with material goods, what is the cost to the future that you’re spending on yourself today?

The purchasing power of money is a responsibility, a benefit and a danger.

I don’t have kids.

My future is here and now.

I want my wife and myself to enjoy our days together while we can because we’ve seen couples where one spouse or the other died at an early age, including her brother at 51.

My wife and I turn 51 this year so it is an important one in our joint psyche.

We know we’re borrowing from the future to give ourselves some enjoyment today but that’s okay.

Sure, there’s a little guilt that we’re enjoying ourselves when her brother no longer can and that’s okay, too.

Life is what it is.

There may be kids starving out there somewhere but I’m not taking the world on to raise.

With total cost of ownership there is an emotional component as well as a rational mathematical one.

Today the two crossed paths.

Tomorrow we’ll see if we’re as happy today as we thought we’d hope we’re going to be adding a few luxuries to our motorcar collection.

[I’m behind in thanking others — time to catch up soon.]

Your Evaluation Version of Windows 8 Has Expired…

…or taken its last breath?

What do you do if your credit score is in the top 90th or 99th percentile?

Rather, what have you done?

Living here 1000 years from now, with others who arranged it so, I ask myself if I should keep cracking jokes about this time period.

I have nearly recovered emotionally from the recent deaths of my mother in-law and father.

One estate has been closed, credit scores are in tip-top shape, and life presents many opportunities between now and 365000 days from now.

What about an event 13,622 days from now?

What will inspire me to move forward from this point, my wealth hidden from prying eyes/hands, my health in relatively decent shape and little in the way of wild-dogs-chasing-me, skeletons-in-the-closet-scaring-me or something-to-prove-prodding-me into the future?

Youth is in the hands of the young.  Young adulthood is in the hands of the leaders-to-be.  Leaders are in the hands of their followers.

Thus, I pause.

I do not have anyone or any subculture to compare myself against to justify my existence.

I am myself, the mix of cults and [sub]cultures which formed me.

Every person finds connection with others in one way or another, collectively called generations.

Generations of kids are led, lead and create their own mass identity.

My generation helps form world opinion from many perspectives, politically from the White House, reshaping mass identity.

The purchasing power of money buys opportunity, which may transform one’s emotions into a state of happiness.

Cultural shifts are painful to someone(s) comfortable with the way things had just become from the way they were before.

One needn’t stay in sync with the zeitgeist to be happy.

The absence of the knowledge of one’s relative poverty to another’s relative wealth may or may not make one happier than those who are not ignorant of such, including absolute differences of purchasing power.

Catchy phrases are memorable but not necessarily wise.

A pink cherry tree blooms at the end of the street on the 18th of January 2013.  I am happier for seeing its blooms in the depths of winter but sad for the insects who will later suffer from the absence of its blooms when they are ready to feed on cherry tree flower pollen.

Life out of balance — where does one’s ability to adapt to change affect one’s happiness?

= = = = =

With my evaluation version of Windows 8 having expired, do I purchase the commercially released version or switch back to Ubuntu Linux on this five-year old notebook PC?

= = = = =

Tomorrow’s blog entry: the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO) and TCO’s impact on one’s standard of living’s impact on the future 1000 years from now, subtitled, “When you live in a retirement community on the Moon, who picks up your garbage and washes your windows?”

Poe’s Law and Creationism

Are you familiar with Poe’s Law?  From wikipedia:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

The core of Poe’s law is that a parody of something extreme by nature becomes impossible to differentiate from sincere extremism. A corollary of Poe’s law is the reverse phenomenon: sincere fundamentalist beliefs being mistaken for a parody of that belief.

I guess what I’m saying is that I grew up in a community where creationism and the scientific method lived side-by-side.

So did parody and solemnity.

I quickly learned that creationism was not so much about the “reality” of a young universe as it was a set of code words we used to dupe those who made fun of creationism.

While smartypants were talking smack about the dumb creationists and their fundamentalist religion, the creationists were running the factories and businesses in town for whom the smartypants worked.

Creationism was established to delineate the true members of a subculture from the false members and/or outsiders.

The scientific method was as valid a laboratory tool for creationists as it was for noncreationists to create new plastic polymers.

But again, it was the set of code words used during coffee breaks and lunch periods that showed who was willing to suspend their disbelief in order to belong to one group or another.

Code words as ancient as our species.

So, the next time you hear someone debating just how old the universe and our planet are, remember Poe’s Law — you should pay attention to what they’re really saying, not what their words mean on a superficial level.

Outsiders and those without a refined sense of humour will miss the nuanced reasons used by those who espouse creationism as their core belief set.

Do you belong to a particular community?

What would you do to maintain your position in a social setting?

Would you repeat the community’s code words without question or a smidgen of doubt?

Not every subculture uses tattoos, piercings and the breaking of social taboos to define themselves.

Some use words and respect the boundaries that taboos provide.