All posts by keith

Monday Musings, motivation

Monday Musings — 24JUN24

Wow, it’s Monday already. Had a terrible weekend due to chemo side effects, and have nothing reallly prepared for today.

So let’s talk about procrastination. Which I have been doing a lot of lately. I talked about this with my palliative care docs on Friday an basically everyone agrees that that I need to stick to a plan and do something daily. But how to do that and be accountable is the problem. Maybe putting it out there for everyone to see is a start.

I belong to a Zoom meeting group that meets every week day morning, and that is helping me get some rough work done, if I keep it up.

Ha ve you got tips for not procrastinating? Leave them in the comments.

That’s today’s story.

Monday Musings

Monday Musings — 17Jun24

Let’s start with a poem, about crows.

ABOUT CROWS

by John Ciardi

“The old crow is getting slow; 

the young crow is not. 

Of what the young crow does not know, 

the old crow knows a lot. 

At knowing things, 

the old crow is still the young crow’s master.

What does the old crow not know? 

How to go faster. 

The young crow flies above, below, 

and rings around the slow old crow. 

What does the fast young crow not know? 

WHERE TO GO.”

Beautiful paintings and sculpture from McCreery L. Jordan

And just for the heck of it Micheal Moorcock’s advice on how to write a novel in 3 days.

  • “If you’re going to do a piece of work in three days, you have to have everything properly prepared.”
  • “[The formula is] The Maltese Falcon. Or the Holy Grail. You use the quest theme, basically. In The Maltese Falcon it’s a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Black Bird. In Mort D’Arthur it’s also a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Holy Grail. That’s the formula for Westerns too: everybody’s after the gold of El Dorado or whatever.” (Cf the MacGuffin.)

    • Love you all. Have a great productive week–if that’s what you want. Don’t let me tell you what to do.

    Science

    Permanent gene edits to tardigrades help shed light on their amazing resilience

    “CRISPR can be an incredible tool for understanding life and aiding in useful applications that can positively impact the world. Tardigrades not only offer us a glimpse at what medical advances might be possible, but their range of remarkable traits means they had an incredible evolutionary story, one we hope to tell as we compare their genomes to closely related creatures using our new DIPA-CRIPSR-based technique.”

    Source: Permanent gene edits to tardigrades help shed light on their amazing resilience

    My favorite microscopic animal.

    Uncategorized

    Modern seeds aren’t ready for climate change: Smallholder farmers may hold the key to future food security

    Humans have radically altered the evolution of agricultural plants since World War Two, remaking our seed system with industrial agricultural practices to feed a growing population. Yet in the changing climate of decades to come, UVM researchers say, the seeds that will feed the world are in the hands of smallholder farmers.

    googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });

    In a new discussion in Plants, People, Planet, Chen and co-authors examine how the emergence of professional crop breeders have “disrupted evolutionary processes” to “reshape the entire food system.”

    The mass production of high-yielding seeds in limited varieties has created a chasmic divide between a “formal seed system,” which now sells most seeds worldwide, and the “informal seed system,” which consists of farmers who select their own seeds to develop diverse, locally adapted crop varieties, known as landraces.

    Source: Modern seeds aren’t ready for climate change: Smallholder farmers may hold the key to future food security

    Art

    Tender Interactions Emerge from Wood in Fumiya Watanabe’s Delicate Sculptures — Colossal

    My work is like a diary, like a poem,” says Fumiya Watanabe, who translates daily experiences and emotions into poignant wooden sculptures. Based in Gifu, Japan, the artist studied wood carving during university, then later with a master Inami artisan. Honing a technical understanding of the medium prompted Watanabe to immortalize things he saw and experienced into delicate artworks.The artist spends time doodling in his free time, cataloguing things he has seen. “My feelings appear in various forms,” he tells Colossal. “Events in my daily life, things from the past, people around me, and the dogs and cats I live with also come to me…. I am not trying to convey some big message in my works. I just give form to what I feel. I want the viewer to freely interpret and enjoy them.”Watanabe’s work will be on view in a solo exhibition in Tokyo at msb gallery from June 13 to 23. Find more on the artist’s website, and follow updates on Instagram.

    Source: Tender Interactions Emerge from Wood in Fumiya Watanabe’s Delicate Sculptures — Colossal

    Monday Musings

    Monday Musings — 10JUN24

    What happened last week.

    Well another week has gone by. I didn’t get to last weeks MM because i had cataract surgery on my right eye. WOW! Just doing that one eye, which had the worst cataract (I could barely see anything out of it.), made a big difference in my vision. Colors are brighter, and text is sharper. A book I had to put away because the size of the text made it impossible to read, was clear as day now. I’m having the other one done in a couple of months. I’m pretty excited.

    Next

    Well I found Tubi. Free movies and TV shows. Lots of art documentaries that can’t be found on YouTube, or other streamers.

    Health

    My health is better. I’m feeling a little stronger, and am eating better. I’m still not sleeping great. I sleep until about 1:33 -2:33 and then can’t get back to sleep. I can nap during the day so it’s not that bad. I just wish I didn’t feel cold all the time. It drives the wife crazy that I still have the heat on.

    Some art to start your week.

    https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/nicole-eisenman-moves-between-materials-and-forms-in-with-and-of-on-sculpture

    Art, Monday Musings

    Monday Musings — 27MAY24

    There’s more great stuff (not political) here: https://www.saatchiart.com/neozero

    His statement:

    I am from Portland, Oregon and I am an artist here in the Pacific Northwest. Most of my work is figurative in nature but extends into abstract expressionism with a focus on portraiture, faces and geometric shapes.

    Here’s Geir Opdal: http://geiropdal.com/inks-2/

    This is my online museum and store.  You can wander from room to room and listen to conversation between paintings.  You may also buy a signed print or an original work.

    Wolff Land is the geographical state of my imagination. In my mind it is an actual place where islands are limned in gold as the sea tongues up fantastic shores.
    Sphinxes wade through clear golden water among huge fields of grass (Sphinxland), hybrid dream creatures have multi canvas adventures (Catspider) and sometimes faces of friends show up (Portraits). The stories are driven by movement and color: stars unfol)d in vertical clouds over a mountainside
    of blue thistles (The Mermaid’s Feet), a man wanders through a falling down house as birds fly through his heart (Waltz). But always I try to paint the
    impossible: Light—light of the sun on objects, on water, the light of stars, the light around an amazing event; the light of love.

    MIA WOLFF

    And, finally, here’s something from me:

    https://www.etsy.com/listing/1737681557/missionaries