• 2 Posts
  • 92 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Regarding your Robert Engel from previously, there’s a whole load of artists historically, who have virtually no information about them. If they weren’t famous whilst alive, who would bother to write down a biography at the time? Afterwards, you’re left with researching records from census, school, sales, newspapers, possible living relatives etc.

    A lot of museums and galleries with permanent collections have 3 to 50 times as much stuff in stores as is on display. You’re not allowed to get rid of anything, but any year, you might receive another truck-load of badly labelled and badly maintained artworks from some rich bloke’s private collection, or someone’s tax write-off. You’d have to choose which ones get processed or researched first (after the existing backlog). Sometimes the information just isn’t there though - that’s why you get all those works that just get labelled “Unknown Man with a blue hat, likely Dutch School, circa 1650s”.

    I think the information and documentation of such things is actually getting better, compared to pre-internet, certainly - but yeah, some people will have no information, and some will have information, but it’s still in a paper folder, waiting for someone to type it up :)




  • It looks like one of those “vague, unsure” ones, it’s perhaps too old a word, and with too many vague, possible sources.

    Some bits of dictionaries suggest various etymologies - it likely drifted from words in Gaelic, Scots, Arabic and French, like “jupe”, “jump”, “juppe” “jubbe” and so on, which tended to mean things like “smock”, “jacket” or whatever. It’s been around in English for various clothing types for a few hundred years, and referred specifically to the woollen pullover thing from the picture above for 100-150 years.

    It has no relation at all to jump as in “leap”.











  • It may simply be the photographer/scanner used, or when it was taken. For example, ones in public ownership in the UK tend to all be photographed for artuk.org (the link is to other paintings by the same artist), with pretty consistent guidelines, so they all tend to be fairly consistent with each other in terms of colour, brightness, contrast etc - although ones taken as little as a few years ago may be completely different in visual quality. Ones in private ownership, or overseas galleries may be done with completely different lighting, settings and colour reproduction.



  • ‘A spokesman for Northern said “We are inexcusably greedy and both organisationally and morally corrupt. Our constant quest to trick people so we can punish, prosecute and fine them, at the expense of putting any effort into having more than 50% of our dirty, overcrowded trains actually turning up, means we’re not fit to run a train service and we need to be nationalised immediately”. “Our CEOs and upper management deserve to be ritually executed by being tied to train tracks by a moustache-twirling villain”, he added’.

    I might have paraphrased a little bit, but essentially that’s what I heard them say.


  • People always post really awesome ones and make everyone else jealous, so here’s a disappointing one to make you all feel better:

    There’s a mildly red patch in the middle.

    Though it is indeed some kind of light, and the local region is definitely considered Northern, and therefore it’s definitely some form of Northern Light, it’s quite possible it’s not the sort of Northern Light we’re aiming for.

    It’s probably just pollution or a stray bit of light from an event - though maybe I’m too early, and it’ll look awesome in a few hours?

    [Edit] I’ve just looked at this photo on my computer and it’s far clearer - on my mobile (which I used to take it) the red was a barely visibly smudge in the dark sky.



  • On a similar note, with an “absolutely” and a word ending in “ed”, you get words which mean “very inebriated/stoned”

    Common

    • absolutely battered
    • absolutely blathered
    • absolutely pissed
    • absolutely wankered
    • absolutely trolleyed
    • absolutely shitfaced
    • absolutely twatted

    Less common

    • absolutely potatoed
    • absolutely cultured
    • absolutely traffic coned
    • absolutely fishcaked
    • absolutely Belgianed
    • absolutely bin-bagged
    • absolutely cabbaged
    • absolutely Tobleroned