A Very Merry Un-Birthday, Heydave!

I can't believe I missed heydave's birthday. Especially since, after I missed it LAST YEAR, I have had it on my calendar with even a reminder a week ahead. Except that I apparently got the date wrong. So there you go. But don't feel too badly for him - heydave does have friends who know how to do a Happy Birthday and do it RIGHT!

Still, I must make amends. When I asked him how he has been celebrating his birthday, he told me he's been painting his house (yeah! That's certainly what comes to MY mind when I think, How shall I celebrate my birthday?) and since we know now how much of a Hopper fan heydave is, this painting came to mind:



Now I know that this is a painting OF a house, but since I couldn't find a painting of Painting A House, this is the next best thing which is a painting of a house that heydave should probably feel good that he doesn't have to paint. Happy Belated Birthday, heydave!

Happy Birthday Edward Hopper

I love this one - it has a decidedly Diebenkorn-ish feel to it!

Birthday greetings also to Alex Trebek, all of 70 years young today! I was going to post a YouTube but the selection was pretty terrible ("Alex Trebek drunk"; "Alex Trebek laughs at contestant"; "Alex Trebek is a jerk"; etc. etc. - good grief, has Trebek been Breitbarted??).

RIP Dennis Hopper

Interesting character, talented man, gone too soon.

And now for something completely different

Something to cheer us up, or at least make us weep in a GOOD way:



This was sent to me in an email that included also the following:

This video shows the winner of "Ukraine's Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about $130,000.00

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated..

It is replaced by a woman's face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman's face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.

Kseniya Simonova says:

"I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there's surely no bigger compliment."

And Now For Something Completely Different

Greenwald be damned, Obama can never fall too far out of favor with me since I found out (H/T Sandy Underpants) that the man has such impeccable taste as to decorate his home with one of my favorite artists, Richard Diebenkorn! But yeah, I probably would have chosen something from the Ocean Park series: