This was a slightly disconcerting find tonight:
Attributed to Raphael, here’s Jesus coming out of his cage and he’s been feeling ju… er, you know what I mean. I’m not surprised by the depiction of the Son of Man and his fellows as medieval white Europeans, but that thing Jesus is holding is a St George’s Cross. Is Raphael trying to imply that Jesus was English? But at least he woke up the people loitering around his tomb…
…unlike Piero della Francesca’s pack of layabouts. Jesus doesn’t look entirely bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to me either, mind you. And he’s packing the England flag again. I jest somewhat when I call it that, but I do see it occurring in quite a few paintings of him getting out bed that fateful Sunday (I’m only researching it now cos I was looking for something else entirely and somehow happened on the first painting), I see similar things by Botticelli, Bellini, a few others, and I’m just wondering what it’s about… I did find one article suggesting it’s about symbolising Christ’s overcoming of death, but that article also posts some pictures where he’s not carrying a banner at all…
…or, in El Greco’s version, a strategically flapping all-white one (with, apparently, a red cape and a weird square halo)…
…or, in Rubens’ version, an all-red one.
Then there’s this, by Juan Bautista Maino/Mayno, in which Jesus appears to be collecting for the Red Cross or something. I’m particularly fascinated by this because of the bloke who’s about to draw his sword on Jesus: “Didn’t you die last Friday? All right, you pasty undead weirdo, let’s get you back in there permanently…”
To end this post, my own favourite resurrection image:
So this poor bastard’s heart is evidently breaking that people don’t like the CybertrucKKK and he can’t understand why they don’t. How to improve people’s perception of it? …Hmmmmmm. Well, for a start, maybe make it LESS FUCKING UGLY, perhaps. Make it less of a box, put a bit more curvature in. (Apparently the truck’s famous stainless steel frame means that’s actually quite difficult to do, so… I don’t know, use something else?) I suspect people might also feel better supposed towards it if Tesla could demonstrate it’s actually safer than they’ve been fearing; if you google “cybertruck dangerous”, you get a truly remarkable number of articles wringing their hands over just how dangerous these things might be to pedestrians, cyclists, other vehicles, time and space itself, etc. I don’t see the same sort of fear around other cars. Also, that dickhead Musk has to stop associating with the company so that people won’t associate the truck with him; otherwise the only people actually excited about this fucking monstrosity will continue to be his cultists like the twit who wrote this nonsense in the first place…
Book #8 for 2024. Oof, we’re not doing terribly well, are we? Another time-consuming project on top of the classical music collection organising has kind of got in the way, but ANYWAY here we are again… Back to 1915 this time round; I’ve seen two film versions (Hitchcock’s famous one and Ralph Thomas’ less famous one) but it’s been so long that my memories of both are dim… on reading the book for the first time, though, I do notice certain differences between it and the films, most notably the lack of female love interest for Hannay which you could evidently get away with in a 1915 magazine serial but not in a 1935 film. Anyway, our hero Richard Hannay is newly returned home from the dark continent, and London life is boring him; yearning for excitement, a chance meeting provides just that, dropping him in among international intrigue, but he soon finds the true story is a lot bigger than he originally thought. The book is basically kind of a rewrite of the outbreak of a certain war that was going on when it was written, and I don’t think it’s too big of a spoiler to say that Hannay’s efforts don’t stop it from breaking out in the end; the story relies on a few too many coincidences in place of plot development, characterisation is somewhat negligible, and the literary style is kind of blunt. But that does work in the book’s favour; it compresses a surprising amount into a fairly small span and it keeps your attention all the way through, and you want to see how Hannay gets out of the various scrapes he gets into (and where he finds time to breathe in the course of one damn thing after another happening). Can’t exactly call it a literary masterpiece, and that’s fine; solid proto-pulp adventure has its own valid place too, and a bit of B-film vigour never hurts…
Oh dear. I don’t describe myself as a “queer ally”—I only say that I do my best to be one—cos I am entirely in sympathy with queer folk that say non-queer folk don’t get to call themselves that, it’s something the queer community should judge… but I have some idea of how to be an ally to said community and, um… I’m fairly sure this isn’t the way. I mean, Pride is something I’ve previously 
Spotted this on Tumblr, an ad for the Rosicrucians published in something called The Occult Digest in the early 1930s. All I can say, if I were an enslaved god, I’d be pretty piss-poor as a god if I let myself become enslaved like that…
So, someone posted this on Bluesky because, well, clearly they’d decided that if they had to see it then so should everyone else, and in the same spirit I post it here. When I first looked at this… thing, I literally said “what the…?” out loud, cos what else was there to say about it? Jesus dragging some young Asian girl through apparently ankle-deep rainwater while a bus being driven by an apparently disproportionately small driver bears down upon them (while someone just stands there capturing the action on their phone)? That fucking thing’s uncomfortably close even for the Son of Man… and it’s got Jesus as its destination, too, so how determined is it to hit him? Meanwhile Jesus is apparently carrying his own lower body in his other hand while still running with it…?