Today is the semi-official anniversary of the founding of the city of Dublin, Ireland, which is said to have happened on this date in 988.

Of course, there had been a large settlement on the River Liffey for centuries by 988, and some historians think that the mention of a place called “Eblana polis” in the Geographia by Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer and cartographer, written around the year 140 AD, is a mention of a settlement with a similar name to the modern name on what is now the land that Dublin occupies. Other historians argue that this theory is incorrect.
Read More

David Hockney is 79 today.

As a painter, he is famous for his vibrant color scheme (blues and yellows) and honest portraits. I am fond of his paintings, and the fact that he is still a vital and active artist (in recent years he attracted notice for his “iPad paintings“), but I have long been fond of a project he called his “joiners.”

The “joiners” were a photo-collage idea that he explored in the 1970s and ’80s. The one at top, called “Sun on the Pool,” was made in 1982. It is made of seventy-seven Polaroid photos of a swimming pool taken as the sunlight shifted through the day, photos taken over the period of time that it would take to make seventy-seven Polaroid photos with one camera and one artist. Pretty as a sunset but with time added as a design element as important as color in the image. It is a Cubist sunset. It is a beautiful attempt at one.
Read More

The cover-up is usually worse than whatever it is covering up, and, sometimes, the initial attempt at a cover-up is also minor, but the attempts to cover-up the first cover-up? Those are what breed suspicions. On this date in 1947, the Roswell (New Mexico) Daily Record published this front-page headline: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” The “RAAF” in the headline is “Roswell Area Air Force.”

Since a few weeks before, the entire country had been “flying saucer” crazy, so this was just one of many similar headlines from the spring and summer of 1947. But this headline, this story, involved the military, which simultaneously supplied the public with two mutually exclusive thoughts: 1. a sense that authorities are in charge and are telling us the truth, and 2. the feeling that authorities are hiding something and deciding for us what truths we can handle.
Read More