The Red Notebook

Colin Purrington FCD of the Axis of Evo has requested examples of Darwin/evolution-related postal art for Darwin Day. So I put together this post card:

Colin, the card’s in the post.

The University of Cambridge Zoological Museum is currently displaying artist Tolly Nason‘s cast glass sculpture installation Seeing the Light: Finch by Finch, which is based on the beaks of Darwin’s Galápagos finch specimens. It’s pretty cool.

While I was there, I managed to take a short video (observe Michael Barton making an appearance in the background):

Some soft porn yesterday.

The UK’s National Heritage Memorial Fund has announced that it will be donating £10 million of our National Lottery losings to the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery. (I don’t think I’ve ever used the word National four times in one sentence before.)

The donation is to help the galleries keep Titian’s masterpiece Diana and Actaeon on public display in the UK. Jenny Abramsky, chair of the NHMF, reportedly said that it is as “important as ever” to protect the UK’s cultural heritage.

Erm… The last time I looked, Titian was a Johnny Foreigner from Venice, in modern-day Italy. How the loss of such a painting—magnificent as we are assured it is—would be a loss to the UK’s cultural heritage is quite beyond me.

It seems to me that there must be better ways of spending TEN MILLION pounds’ worth of quids. Like, say, oh, I dunno, building TWO HMS Beagles. One should really be enough, I suppose, but, hey, if they’ve got £10 million to give away, why not build two? To doubly celebrate our great scientific heritage. Instead of frittering it away on some old soft porn.

It’s just a thought.

But all this talk of Titian gives me the perfect excuse to repeat one of my favourite limericks (not, alas, written by yours truly):

While Titian was mixing rose madder,
A model posed nude on a ladder.
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition,
So he snuck up the ladder and had her.

(And there you were beginning to think I was some sort of philistine.)