[gallery] ancientart:
The Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek, Lebanon, ca. 150 AD. This stunning Roman temple, still very well preserved, is actually larger than the Parthenon of Athens.Photos courtesy of Varun Shiv Kapur.
[gallery] Kazimir Malevich, Composition with the Mona Lisa (1914)
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Via John Overholt, the permissible colors for decorating the interiors of Victorian neo-Gothic churches. It is necessary to avoid those garish colors that lead to “the utter destruction of repose.”
[gallery] blech:
Landmark 1979 California Water Atlas Debuts Online, from the David Rumsey Historical Map collection in 2010.Originally published in 1979, The California Water Atlas, a monument of 20th century cartographic publishing, has been scanned and put online for free public access by the David Rumsey Map Collection. Linda Vida, Director of The Water Resources Center Archives of the University of California asked David Rumsey and Cartography Associates to scan and make available to the public this extraordinary book. The copyright holder, the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, agreed to allow free public access online.
My ideal burger is bun, cheese, burger. Sometimes bacon. Ketchup on the side, so I can control it. Pickles—yes! Obviously. And the cheese thing has to be very clear: American cheese only. American cheese was invented for the hamburger. People talk about it being processed and artificial and not real cheese—you know what makes it real? When you put it on a hamburger.
[gallery] architectural-review:
The Dragline Silk Project. The project will aim to push the boundaries of biomimetics, and how these ideas can be applied to form a low-carbon, ecology-based industrial template.
Is the writing life as strange as people think? Not at all. I wake pre-light to the piercing cry of the Dawn Bird, a phosphorescent creature whose species I have not yet identified, and witness its meteoric flight toward the eastern horizon. Then I check Twitter while the coffee brews.The holy water is kept in a crystal vial, hidden inside a hollowed-out copy of The Astral Visions of St. Ignacio the Blind, a 12-century mystic who was found, upon his death, to have grown a third eyeball in the center of his heart. I add a generous splash to my coffee and gulp it hot, and once my hallucinatory seizures have subsided, I perform my ablutions outside at the well of vapors. There I must concentrate my strength against the devilkins — malignant spirits that emerge from the trees and speak to me with forked, enticing tongues. “Return to sleep,” they say. “No one cares what you write, this day or the next. Eat, be merry, and think no more of your illusory endeavors.”
I weaken their influence with ritual incantations, tug the axe from the gnarled stump, and wait for the morning’s first rays to penetrate the mist. Once the sun has warmed my flesh, I stride into the forest, catching glimpses of my fellow writers — or do I only imagine their presence in the distance? — until I find the sacred tree and cut its tenderest branch for use as the day’s scrawling implement.