(while we wait to see if our planet can survive humanity’s abject…abjectness.)
is the dancer turning clockwise…or counterclockwise? look away, then look again.
test your awareness
change blindness
trompe l’oeil street art
Test Your Awareness – spot the pickpocket
I’d saved a link of optical illusion gifs a week or so ago, but i seem to have mislaid it. Bingling, i discovered this page, not nearly as awesome, but: ‘17 Mind-Mangling Optical Illusion GIFs; Don’t believe what your eyes tell you’, buzzfeed news.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
More interesting to me as it relates to the spinner curiosity is that it’s taken for granted that, if the clock’s not on the wall, it’s wisdom is read from the sky looking down, not the ground looking up. I wonder if that inclination pre-dates the wristwatch.
I used to get a mag, I think it was Omni, that had a feature in each issue with ultra-close-up photos one tried to figure out called Eyeball Benders. It’s about the de-contextualization of the normal perspective. Have you ever been lying down, in the morn in bed upon waking or whatever, and seen something in the distance that you couldn’t identify for the life of you but nevertheless, or for that reason didn’t move, insisting on trying to figure it out without putting it in a more common perspective?
(Thanks for your previous entry & updates, w’dye. I can’t comment on it. It’s too depressing and that fact alone (that, ‘oh, gee, it depresses mememe’, makes it even more so.)
do you mean like a sun dial in your first observation and surmise? and oh, yes to the struggle to make sense of an object or scene; there’s a name for that human tendency, i forget it, though. my weirdness (well, one of them) is that i identify things incorrectly, and am utterly sure that my mind’s interpretation is correct…until i’m embarrassed to find i was wrong, sometimes finally looking thru binocs.
a neighbor used to loan us his omni mags; i’d forgotten the dal–esque and other images. here’s a page of them, though not all seem to be from omni.
a fella at another website aid this, and i’m wondering if it’s so:
“At least the immigrants in the US are working.
Here in Germany they are not. They receive full social security from day 1 (free housing, free health care, and an allowance for discretionary spending).
We took in about 1 million people in 2015, and a few 100000s are coming every year. Almost all of them Muslims. Next they will be allowed to have their whole family join them. After 3 years they have the right to stay permanently.
I don’t see this ending well.”
yeah, it’s depressing at standing rock, but i’ve been so inspired by the protectors’ verve and ever-developing spiritual commitments. and woot: chase iron eyes finally spoke to Capital being the instigator of all of it. ;-)
Britain, France and Germany have all supported the U.S. butchery in the M.E. (7 countries, 5 years); so it amusing(?) seeing a German poster complaining about the immigrant invasion of Europe in general and Germany specifically.
One reaps the thing one sows, no?
No sympathy from this one, but rather for the victims of U.S. violent hegemon…
Yeah, that’s seriously rich. I was just talking to somebody about how the “for-against” immigration arguments flying about throughout the EU rest, like their Yank counterpart, upon a premise too thin to qualify as existent.
Frankly the dialogue coming out of the west; no, wait; it’s not dialogue; it’s screed, sound bites, non sequiturs, propaganda, and all, quite remarkably, fact free…
well, the more comments i read on that thread, the more hatred i saw blinding any humane understanding of what causes people to come to this country illegally, or stay illegally, and as you say, in the EU given the empire’s proxy wars in the ME.
but as for the global south, think of how many are fleeing narco-barons, and how US drug policy creates the need for illegal drugs, which are often traded for weapons used on…citizens. how many coups, both soft and hard, have been perpetrated in the global south, including guatemala and honduras most recently, causing dissenters to be forced to flee…or be killed. well, the list could go on, and it was tempting for a bit to write a small book as a comment there, but dang, i get in trouble there, and sure didn’t want to be told again to shove a cactus up my bum. and then family crises and watching the livestreams from standing rock….seemed was more worthy of my time and attention.
it’s not hard on some days to despair of humanity’s worthiness to survive.
To that fella’s fretting first: Typically overstating the case by claiming “they receive” as if “they arrive and get all those named amenities toot sweet and w/o exception”, which as exaggerations tend to go, is bullshit remarkably pure for an exaggeration.
Nevertheless, for fuck sake: so there is relative to the US still an actual discussion in the political sphere about making life liveable for not just citizens of a country but victim’s of its criminal activity in a way that makes their stay here more likely a successful one, and of course you have locals who complain with turns of phrase like “at least the immigrants in the US are working” but the same argument, other way round says they’re taking the jobs. I think you know that one. Trust me, while it’s true we’re taking in numbers that should make Bo Rama fans blush in bottomless shame, they should be. Fuck that guy and his idea that “ending well” is not just denial that’s a river cried way too late for happy endings.
Oh, yeah, the sundial! I never learned that that was the reason the clock face is traversed the way it is, and *that* question had never occurred to me, the latter deficiency being more troubling personally.
Thanks for the links. I used to make collages out of the issues’ images, one of which is seen scanned at the foot of this entry:
http://davidly66.blogspot.de/2015/09/in-which-they-fail-to-mention-that.html
ah, thanks so much for deconstructing such a blithely nasty polemic, davidly. the big tell, i think was “they’re largely…muslim”. but it’s good to hear that actual rational discussions take place in germany, *and* that the government actually wants to help precarious people whose lives have been ruined by western Imperial wars, proxy wars, and attempted putsches. and that’s as in amerika the social safety nets are dissolving, public employees’ pensions are being raided; well, you know the list.
but that thread over yonder was…just plain wrong in so many directions.
heh. if the wizard of id didn’t sport a sundial wristwatch, he should have. ;-) kewl collage, but dayum, i dinnae stay to read the text. later, mebbe?
I think this might fit into this part of the discussion – I’m reluctant to post it as it pours hot tar on the new administration, but truth is truth. Here in New Mexico the immigration problem is ongoing and long lasting. I got my citizenship back when I still thought Bill Clinton was an okay president, along with close to a thousand others in a mass citizen signup, have a lovely paper with my (still-gorgeous) photo on it – so armed with that I went days ago to the local DMV to renew my ID – not a driver’s license as I don’t drive any longer. After the customary long wait through various procedures, at the final window I was alarmed to find there is a hold-up – the computer could not process above said document. It wasn’t in the system.
I am currently on hold.
It’s a curious feeling after all this time not to be recognized as a citizen. No doubt (well, there is some doubt) I will be receiving a corroboratory
phone call in the next few days, and not an unexpected visit from the folks who grab you and put you in one of those border-side processing facilities that don’t have windows. But for the moment, I am feeling a tad like One Of Them – only a tad, so I can only briefly imagine the hell these people are going through these days. My daughter went to the airport and banged pots in revolt against the Trump policy a week or so ago, and I’m proud of her for that.
I don’t want to see this country, my adopted home, devolving into chaos – but if Trump doesn’t do the things he should, that may well happen. And then maybe my personal deportation southward is the better option, at least for me personally. All I can think is that it must be preliminary chaos at MVD’s across the land, let alone any other ‘normal’ processing facilities.
I will keep you posted.
well this certainly would have worked on my most recent thread, but i’m confused as to your meaning here, ww: “I don’t want to see this country, my adopted home, devolving into chaos – but if Trump doesn’t do the things he should, that may well happen.” explain please, and i’ll go rest mine eyes. too many hours awake….and reading.
but of course keep us posted, beyond that, ‘woman w/o a country’. yes, too creepy for words; it just has to be in the process of being sorted out.
All I meant, wendye, was that I think his supporters have high expectations that their lot in life will be improved – those, I mean that didn’t choose him as the lesser of two evils. And I really can’t see any way out of the difficulty other than chaos as Pence certainly won’t be the working man’s savior, should ‘normal’ impeachment processes actually get underway.
But perhaps I am seeing to much darkness ahead. Just have to keep telling myself he’s not Hillary and then I sleep soundly. (After all, it’s going to be a new world with climate change in any case, so what’s a little chaos? Maybe it will turn out to be fun, like camping out.)
Thanks for your concern about me as ‘woman w/o a country.’ Actually, I still have Aotearoa as they don’t or wouldn’t deny me my birthright there; but it’s a long, long way to paddle my waka, so I’d really rather not.
thanks for explaining, ww. i guess i hadn’t known that ‘impeachment’ was gaining that much traction, but then…bubba was impeached, but not forced to resign, yes? T’s admin, and he himself, have so many irreconcilable balls in the air just now that it’s hard to know how things may shake out economically in the near term. but i did save some opinion links about the ‘trillion for infrastructure’ public/private ventures that don’t look so great for the working class, but just fine for the 15% or whatever.
no, paddling to aotearoa wouldn’t be an option, but surely it will get sorted soon; i know i’m sending good thoughts your way. that sort of fear is not to be borne.
further musings. do you still have your original mv driver’s license or at least its number? if so, it should be relatively easy to trace your u.s. citizen status….backways, no?
“i saw this welfare queen buy $150 worth of King crab legs w/her SNAP benefits!!!” how many BS stories like that do you hear in the US? bought that Cadillac w/my cash payments from HHS, I did. I guess ol’ Nietzsche had some words on resentment, ressentiment, the lower orders jealous grievances against their uberlords. but the way the upper orders use resentment to control people is astounding. resentment against the refugee victims of NATO, resentment against the economic migrants, victims of the capitalist order. why such resentment? cuz life in the wealthy countries is extraordinarily difficult, being a successful soccer mom ain’t easy. and of course the freeloaders below one on life’s ladder are the reason life is so hard, not the people above pitting us all against each other.
and fear. dear lord, the PBS/NPR classical station just interrupted some something to give an amber alert for a kid missing from Bridgeport. Conn. maybe the kid’s dad wanted to rescue him from the Russian subs off the coast?
“we interrupt this performance of Beethoven’s 5th to report a suspicious package at a bus terminal in Seattle. Police are investigating. Remember, if you see something, say something.”
‘trump l’oeil’, witty as all giddy-up; big grin. yes, O the many scams of the rabble class, too grievous: they should all be hung…or deported if immigrants. esp. muslims, right?
♫ da da da…da da da da…♪ beeeeeeep: this is dan rather here: it appears to be Anthrax…no wait….just in: sarin gas powder….no: a minature putin in a matryoshka doll….”
shoot, TL’o; lay some more nietzsche on us, please. resentment, ressentiment, etc. but it’s so hard to see blog comments on a self-professed ‘left-winger’s’ site mimicking the same rubbish. and claiming to be ‘fact-based’. i began to wonder if they were even concerned about jobs and employment all that much, but me, i’m more of a global citizen, i reckon.
sorry, just got done w/a lecture on the suppression of discontent among the upper orders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment#Kierkegaard_and_Nietzsche
you gave the lecture, then? no, no; unless you were trying to edjumicate the toffs. master/slave morality is almost funny, given da wiki. ‘jealousy, this a desire to enslave the masters’. willum in richard II had bastards griping that lancaster had a bit too much heart for…the rabble, no? tsk, tsk. thus: he and his son deserved to die, have their lands and possessions stolen to fund the pillage of ireland, if i understand it right.
riffing off of Oscar Wilde. there’s something, maybe, to thinking thru “master/slave” morality in the era of the Mass Man, where the slightest aberrational psychological phenomenon is a sign of a mental disorder (old or new, no matter; DSRM gets bigger every edition. More authority, please!) if that’s not the ethos of the slave, what is? the means of production are controlled by someone else, some few. these people are not “masters” or ubers or brites or anything. I mean, have you listened to mike pence talk lately? the guy can’t even boil water. an “upper” only in his capacity for mendacity & viciousness.
i’m afraid you’ve lost me, earnest, esp. w/ “DSRM gets bigger every edition. More authority, please!) if that’s not the ethos of the slave, what is?”.
as it turns out, the newest is DSM 5, they dropped the roman numerals, the reason is quite…murky. (on edit: i get it now; there will be 5.1, 5.2, etc.) but this made me howl w/ glee:
“What kinds of changes were made?
Many of the changes in DSM–5 were made to better characterize symptoms and behaviors of groups of people who are currently seeking clinical help but whose symptoms are not well defined by DSM–IV (meaning they are less likely to have access to treatment). Our hope is that by more accurately defining disorders, diagnosis and clinical care will be improved and new research will be facilitated to further our understanding of mental disorders. View fact sheets that cover the the changes in DSM–5.”
but clicking into the fact sheets link goes to…page not found…
https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm/feedback-and-questions/frequently-asked-questions
to be kinda/sorta clear: the reason i’d chosen the fact page was to see why this 5 was so much moar bigly. are there now 27 substs to “oppositional defiant disorder”. yes, one of our chirren w/ attachment disorder (un’recognized’ until a decade later) at the time) was ‘diagnosed w/ that ( a failure of testing) but i said: “me, too!, fu”
the psych-iatric/ological professions will only become more authoritarian over time. you don’t like working in a toll booth, you say? here’s some pills. how do you like it now?
one funny thing is that as elon musk & spacex are to NASA (“free market!!!”), so Big Phrma to NIH. these happy mind control pills bro’t to you by Glaxo smith klein or whoever, 100% developed by your tax dollars at NIH.
to say the truth, self-medicator, i’ve forgotten how the funding interplay between big pharma and the drug companies works. but you pinged my memory of boomers’ mothers and ‘mother’s little helpers’: librium. my guess is that for those who weren’t able to be stepford wives, they seethed and raged and discovered their kind physicians would medicate their many dissatisfactions…away.
now i’ve longed wondered why the populace was never treated to some version of soma, but if the stats are right, esp. white people are dying from opiates at an alarming rate. well, more on that in part II prison state, tra la la. but yes, the trend that a shrink can give ya some pills far more quickly than spend time in talk therapy has been afoot for what, two decades? and how many can really afford counseling, anywho? anecdotal evidence says that few friends act as confidants of deep secrets, either, which could help. but most families i know continued generationally: keeping our family secrets (pretense of home stability and…well-being. ooof, yes: ‘people of the lie’ just surfaced in my noggin. scott peck?
Strangely enough, all of these, and especially the one that begins this post, remind me of the way in which places change from their original times past appearances. The home into which both I and my sister were born, which sadly no longer exists, had very much the shape of that first image – a galleon shape to one side of a very victorian structure typical to the early part of the 20th century in New Zealand. Thanks to my sister’s recent sleuthing, it turns out to have had several modifications as the families inhabiting it grew and the structure itself changed hands before we were born.
I remember it vividly from having the first four years of my life there during the second World War, always a place of mystery and adventure, its history unknown, undiscovered. The town changed, the house vanished, but it still exists in my mind, its history miraculously retrievable and so retrieved in a few precious photographs back in time. The puzzle has been – was this our house? Could it have been this one? Why yes, here’s this, and this – it all makes sense!
Another kind of illusion that is, I guess, but it has been a fascinating discovery tracing the home’s being-ness back beyond my grandmother’s childhood, into the early history of the region itself. In my mind now I can see all the changes I never knew had happened when it was in its final, elderly manifestation and I was a child exploring it – filled out into the galleon shape and the encircling veranda, the ‘manse’ as one photograph says it was – decades on from the minimal colonial farmhouse with unknown family positioned in front, a dirt road leading up.
All of it now to some degree real.
the top ‘fools the eye’ painting from quebec was brilliant, imo, in that the artist not only showed the old (i assume, remodeled) gambrel-roofed barn as under remodeling, but allowed us to peer into the imagined historical scenes within. (click on it for much larger) i also loved the imagination and created space of the trompe l’oeil facsimilated doors and garden scenes. if you get a chance, have a bit of fun w/ the 3-d street art videos.
i also left you a bit of a try on answering you questions to jaango on some other thread recently, but i kept back a couple more links to the extant ‘walls’ in israel, not knowing if you’d return.
Those were good responses, wendye. I’m getting old I guess, don’t get around much any more. Hey, that’s a song. Loved these, as I should have said. And yes, that’s why the painting up top reminded me of our discoveries about the family home – lovely. It exactly corresponds.
are you remembering the beach boys’ “i (don’t) get around”, perhaps? ;-)
it turns out that when one clicks the image to a stand-alone page, there’s also a clickable magnifying glass so even crap eyes like mine can see more of the artist’s painstaking detail. not only family life is depicted, but small businesses as well: sail makers, boat builders, a pub in which a wife seems to be tugging her husband home by the ear, a serving wench in a military family with a three chirren…and a pet racoonie. dunno what’s being hoisted up in the net, nor what the large rope visually connecting the coonie and the monk might be about. but oh, my, i love it!
Even older, wendye – this should do it (can’t do the video to verify, but who can fault Duke Ellington?)
That magnifying glass has me intrigued – thanks!
sounded like duke was gettin’ around pretty well. thanks; traditional jazz i like. modern garbage can lid clangin’? not so much. hope you’re well. we had another 6 inches of snow in the night….so soft, wet, and purdy. big bucks out play-fightin’ in the field, even though the rut is over for this year. practicin’ for next year, i reckon.
ha! thanks, davidly; i needed that. and below the muffins: