The duel between Vice President Aaron Burr and former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton took place 212 years ago today near Weehawken, New Jersey. The illustration above is one I remember from a schoolbook from when I was a kid; I remember losing myself in the scene. Like many dramatic historical renderings, it gets almost every historical detail wrong in favor of drama.

Years of feuding between the two men had come to this: an illegal duel to the death.
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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.
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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.
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