Wednesday, March 27, 2024
JIM
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If you haven’t seen vehicles for various businesses with Jim’s face on them, you need to get out more. Starting off as Jim’s Mowing, Jim has diversified into other business fields, but still with his name and face prominently displayed.
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About Jim:
David "Jim" Penman (1952 - ) is an Australian businessman and historian in the field of biohistory. He is the owner of Jim's Group, a lawn care service franchise. He has self-published books, based partially on his work with a lab he funds at La Trobe University, to make claims on predicting human culture and history based on the activities of mice. His books have been described as eugenics, drawing on racial stereotypes. Penman described his ideas as being classified as conservative liberalism and neoliberalism.
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Further comments:
Penman commenced PhD degree studies at La Trobe University, under the supervision of June Philipp, who was part of a network of ethnographic historians called "the Melbourne Group"
His PhD thesis looked at character as a key to understanding history. Penman's thesis was initially rejected in 1981, although Penman's supervisor then suggested that he rewrite the methodology section of the thesis. Penman followed the suggestion, and the thesis was re-submitted in 1983 and subsequently accepted in April 1984.
After the completion of his PhD in 1983, Penman gradually turned his part-time lawn mowing business into a franchising business, focusing on setting up and selling lawn-mowing rounds and taking on sub-contractors.
After launching the franchise business in 1989, Penman expanded to include additional industries. The first addition was cleaning services, and by 2012 the franchise model had been adapted to over 30 service industries.
As of 2023, Jim’s Group has over 5,200 franchisees in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
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Memes and Merchandise:
Various outlets sell t shirts, stick on labels and merchandise bearing Jim’s face as above, plus other businesses that are attributed to him –
an example:
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More:
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
POETRY SPOT: FIRE AND ICE
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Fire and Ice
By Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
__________
"Fire and Ice" is a short poem by Robert Frost that discusses the end of the world, likening the elemental force of fire with the emotion of desire, and ice with hate. It was first published in December 1920.
According to one of Frost's biographers, "Fire and Ice" was inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno, in which the worst offenders of hell (the traitors) are frozen in the ninth and lowest circle:
"a lake so bound with ice,
It did not look like water, but like a glass...right clear
I saw, where sinners are preserved in ice."
Illustration of 1587 by Stradanus of The Nine Circles of Hell from Dante's Inferno
In an anecdote he recounted in 1960 in a "Science and the Arts" presentation, the prominent astronomer Harlow Shapley claims to have inspired "Fire and Ice". Shapley describes an encounter he had with Frost a year before the poem was published in which Frost, noting that Shapley was the astronomer of his day, asked him how the world will end. Shapley responded that either the sun will explode and incinerate the Earth, or the Earth will somehow escape this fate only to end up slowly freezing in deep space. Shapley was surprised at seeing "Fire and Ice" in print a year later, and referred to it as an example of how science can influence the creation of art, or clarify its meaning.
In a 1999 article, John N. Serio claims that the poem is a compression of Dante's Inferno. He draws a parallel between the nine lines of the poem with the nine rings of Hell, and notes that, like the downward funnel of the rings of Hell, the poem narrows considerably in the last two lines.
John Serio asserts that Frost's diction further highlights the parallels between Frost's discussion of desire and hate with Dante's outlook on sins of passion and reason with sensuous and physical verbs describing desire and loosely recalling the characters Dante met in the upper rings of Hell: "taste" (recalling the Glutton), "hold" (recalling the adulterous lovers), and "favor" (recalling the hoarders). In contrast, hate is discussed with verbs of reason and thought ("I think I know.../To say...").
Serio praises the poem for its compactness, arguing that "Fire and Ice" signaled for Frost "a new style, tone, manner, [and] form" and that its casual tone masks the serious question it poses to the reader.
From
. . .fire and ice are perhaps more allegorical than symbolic in Frost’s poem, because rather than leaving these deeply symbolic forces of fire and ice open to speculation and different interpretations, he goes on to link them very specifically to two particular emotions: desire for fire, and hate for ice.. . will humans destroy the world through hating each other so much that we all kill each other? Or will passionate desire actually destroy everything?In other words, what begins in rather elemental, open-ended terms (perhaps even inviting us to think of global warming, something unknown to Frost, when we read of the world ending in fire) comes to have a distinctly human aspect, grounded in human emotions and behaviour.What makes ‘Fire and Ice’ such a haunting and even troubling poem is its acknowledgment that desire and passion can be more deadly and destructive than mere hate: hate (‘ice’) may well consume us all through war (we need only look at how religious and political differences can make whole groups of people hate their neighbours), but desire (‘fire’) may prove even more powerful because it can provide the zeal, the irrational belief in something, that will fuel even more destructive behaviour.
Monday, March 25, 2024
Sunday, March 24, 2024
ART SPOT
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TYPEWRITER ART
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James Cook (not the guy who claimed Australia for England in 1770) is an artist, but not your garden variety of artist.
From his website at:
Welcome to James Cook’s collection of typewriter art. From small commissions to drawings made of more than 500,000 characters, James has produced close to 300 pieces of work on his growing collection of more than 60 typewriters.James describes his artwork as “a picture worth a thousand words” and has produced artwork for celebrities, public figures and musicians.
His words:
I am a 23-year-old London-based typewriter artist. I consider typewriter art, colloquially known as a “typicition”, a part-time job with architectural design as the focal point of my career goals. My subject matter delves into architecture, landscape and portraiture (both human and animal).I have been producing my “typicitions” for over 6 years and the scale of my work ranges from the size of a postcard and the antithesis of this being rolls-upon-rolls of paper. Specifically, these are drawings constructed in section and hot-pressed together thereby allowing for creations larger than the limitations of a typewriter’s traditional paper-feed.Subsequently, each drawing can take anywhere between a week and a month to complete. Each drawing is assembled from a variety of characters, letters and punctuation marks using the forty-four keys of a typical typewriter. Information is overlaid and the keys are tapped at variable pressures to achieve tonal shading.
Whilst most of my work is straightforward by its frame of reference, the use of perspective and concept of concealing of information plays and important role in how the drawings are observed by the viewer. Some of my more recent works feature hidden written messages which only become visible from up-close and thereby add another dimension to the drawings. Comparatively, my work is difficult to be distinguished as type-written from a far distance.Museum Week Magazine
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Gallery:
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Keira Rathbone is another typewriter artist who makes detailed drawings on a typewriter she bought from a Poole charity shop.
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