sweasel.com

Oh, hey, I meant to say — if you can spare a few moments, do watch at least a bit of the Q&A from Trump’s press conference yesterday. The press is going NUTS describing it as an unhinged rant (which, by the way, is exactly how he said they’d report it).

You owe it to yourself to witness the difference between reality and reportage. C-Span version here.

Trump is playing the media like lute, and it’s deliciously fun to watch. 😜

I just love the texture of paint. It makes me want to make something beautiful with it, even though I can’t. Alas!

And yet your site has not a speck of pigment on it…

What a perfect murder weapon. (“I found this large flat spot on the side of his head,” said the pathologist, “and traces of pigment.”) I’m always looking for a new way to kill someone—on paper, err, computer. 🙂

Maybe 30 years ago I sat in my car in my driveway listening to Paul Harvey’s noon radio show. He was talking about one of the great artists who used great, thick masses of paint—Paul Gauguin maybe—but now the paintings had faded. All that brilliant color was just below thin layer of oxidized paint and there was no way to get at it without damaging the painting. Why I remember this event is because I was pounding on the steering wheel and shouting at the radio: “Lasers! Use a laser to remove the top layer of oxidized paint.”

And I don’t know that oxidized is even the right word for what happened to the paint, but I was pretty certain that lasers could remove it and then we could see all the colors again as they were in the beginning.

So my question is—are lasers being used in art restoration now? If not, we should invent it.

A hundred pounds for a ten centimeter muller???

Ouch!

So I loved that press conference. Very Fake News.

So I get up this morning. First report – Trump to nationalize 100,000 Natl Guardsmen to round up Mexicans. Minutes later, the White House says NO, false news. But the media has been running with it all day. Sometimes they even say The White House denies it! But on they go with fake news story.

Oxidize is exactly the right word, Deborah. When linseed or other drying oil dries, it absorbs oxygen and expands slightly. It is a chemical change — you can’t reverse it (unlike watercolor, where drying is a physical change and more or less infinitely re-wettable).

The oxygen absorption happens mostly in the first month, but it never completely stops. Rembrandt’s paintings aren’t completely dry 🙂

I don’t know about lasers, though. You’d have to have serious balls to suggest burning a molecule’s worth of paint off an umpty-million-dollar painting with a laser. Bet it would work, though.

More things learned from a site that pretends it’s not worthy!

Today? In addition to learning what Alizarin Crimson looks like, plus some interesting science behind pigments, dyes, etc.
There’s a color called LUST! Weee Oooooo!

Now imagine what Sister Little-Hitler-Grace at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea school for tikes would have done had THAT color been used on my stick figure artworkery! Bwaahahahahahahah!

The entire southern border wall, once built, will be painted LUST!

” Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound like an all-caps moment to you, but I assure you it was one of the stonking thinks of my lifetime. I felt like flinging off my clothes and running down the road yelling “URETHRA!”

Kinky!

I kind of wondered what that thing in the picture is used for, but now I don’t want to know….

😉

“Alizarin crimson”

I read that and instantly heard Donovan singing, “Wear your love like heaven…Wear your love like heaven…” What can I say, I’m a child of the 60s.

Maybe we can practice vaporizing the paint on a Not-a-Master. There must be some old paintings that aren’t so hot stacked in the back of the Louvre. 😉

I saw some program on how they made white paint. They had rolls of lead, covered it in urine, let it set. It would oxidize and they wd scrape the white paint off the rolls. They then put more urine on the rolls of lead and did it again.

It’s a wonder any of those craftsmen lived past 30!

Looked up white lead paint on youtube. Couldnt find the video I saw but plenty of others covering olden and modern times. One even used that glass thingamajig.

Now for something completely different —
A history of London’s back passages: http://buff.ly/2kZYIXr

New paint chips just don’t taste the same. There’s something missing.

@SWeasel: I saw this and thought of you:

https://www.reddit.com/r/evilbuildings/comments/5uyah4/the_original_churchs_chicken/

Oh, that terrifying think, Quasi! I think I even posted about it once. Brrrrr.

One of the many reasons I come here. Can’t find this info so entertainingly presented anywhere else on the ‘net.

As for oxidized linseed oil, that’s what linoleum is. Or was anyway, no idea if it’s still in use anywhere. I do know somebody who kept calling the vinyl flooring in the bathroom linoleum and when I said that isn’t what it was she looked at me funny.

To her, it was a generic word that her family had used forever. And she’s probably not alone, I expect there are people calling their kitchen or bathroom flooring linoleum who have never seen any of the actual stuff.

@SWeasel: I *thought* it looked familiar! :+)

…maybe that doesn’t sound like an all-caps moment to you, but I assure you it was one of the stonking thinks of my lifetime. I felt like flinging off my clothes and running down the road yelling “URETHRA!”

The mental image I rather-instantaneously derived from that shall, I assure you, be seared…seared! forever in my memory, even unto death…plus, I had to expend some moderate effort and time properly-cleansing my laptop’s screen and keyboard, due to the extreme onset of excessive, somewhat-explosive merriment the whole passage provoked for me.

As to actual, genuine linoleum as floor-covering: I was once recruited by a friend to assist in the re-covering of his homestead’s kitchen floor (said homestead having been recently-inherited from his then-deceased father), using an elderly roll of “battleship” linoleum that had rested, rolled into a moderately-small tube, in the loft of an outbuilding. Stout stuff, that lino – even with four of us directly-engaged, it needed judicious application(s) of a small blow-torch to persuade it to uncoil and stretch out flat. Last time I was over there, it was still seamlessly protecting the kitchen floorboards, and showing no serious signs of excessive wear, despite having been trimmed to fit and securely masticked down nearly 20 years ago.