Handwriting

Key - Ernst Neizvestny - 1984

Meduza got me started with a story about a Russian soldier who was making bank by forging Ernst Neizvestny artworks so naturally I want to see what kind of art he makes. In general, his art seems to be ugly. Kind of a reflection of many aspects of modern life. Doesn't appeal to me.

So who is this Ernst Neizvestny? 

Ernst (1925 – 2016) was a Russian artist . . . He emigrated to the United States in 1976 and lived and worked in New York City.

American playwright Arthur Miller once described Neizvestny as an "artist of the East" who is regarded by Russians as an "expression of the country, of its soul, language, and spirit" and as a "prophet of the future" who represents the "philosophical conscience of his country." . . .

Ernst's great grandfather received his surname, literally meaning "unknown," when he was conscripted for military service as a cantonist.

A cantonist? Look that up in Wikipedia and found this:

Cantonists were underage sons of conscripts in the Russian Empire. From 1721 on they were educated in special "cantonist schools" for future military service . . . The Russian state viewed the cantonist system as an effective means to induce the assimilation of its ethnic minority populations, particularly Jews, who were markedly over-represented within the schools.

Huh, imagine that, assimilation of ethnic minorities was important even back in the 1700s.

Anyway, scrivenery was one of the skills taught in cantonist schools.

A scrivener is a professional copyist or scribe . . . Styles of handwriting used by scriveners included secretary hand, book hand and court hand.

Different styles of handwriting? Well, I'll be. Here we go:

"The secretarie Alphabete": an abecedarium showing the forms of the letters used in secretary hand, from a penmanship book by Jehan de Beau-Chesne and John Baildon, 1570.

Bookhand variations using a Brause 2.5mm nib and Moon Palace ink on Strathmore Drawing 300 paper.

An abecedarium of Court Hand, including minuscule and majuscule letters and syllable variations.

BIC Ball Point Pen

How This Pen Changed The World
Primal Space

The narration is a little too, I dunno, polished? Sounds like a salesman trying to sell me something. Call it slightly annoying, but the story is pretty good, especially the bit about literacy rates. Did BIC cause their dramatic rise? No, but they certainly helped.

BIC Pens Commercial 1969
johnscans97

Never liked BIC pens that much. They never wanted to write first time, every time, like they showed in the commercials. Or maybe it was the annoying cap that didn't really clip onto anything and was forever falling off and getting lost. Can't argue with success though.

About This Blog

Gearhead

I am a gearhead. I have an affinity for all things mechanical, logical, digital. Cars, engines, aircraft, motorcycles, computers, etc. I also wonder how the world works, i.e. what makes society tick. It's mostly baffling but sometimes I come across little bits of clarity. I try to post them when I do.

YouTube

YouTube is freaking amazing. Ask for just about anything and it will deliver a zillion videos. Some of them are great, some are feeble, some go down smooth as silk, some of them just grate on you.  Of course, different people have different tastes. Some people like long rambling videos that they can play while they go on about their business. Not me, I like videos that are short and to the point. If I am watching, I am focused. Those are the ones I post. Those and music videos, but once again, people have different tastes. I seldom like the music videos posted on other blogs, and I expect most people won't like the ones I post, but maybe some people will. I have no way of telling.

Movies and TV

We spend a couple of hours most evenings watching shows on the big screen TV.  I try to write at least a short post about what we watch, mostly to just to keep track of what we have seen. I post the trailers to refresh my memory for when I go back to check on a show. The short blurbs I write sometimes aren't really enough to bring the show to mind. The trailers help.

Pictures

I like pictures, so I try to post at least one with each of my posts. I include a caption beneath each post, partly to identify the picture, and partly so when the picture disappears (which seems to happen on regular basis), I will have some idea of what to look for. Most of the pictures I steal off of the internet, when I do, I turn the caption into a link so if you want to know where it came from you can just click the caption/link.

If there is no link it's either because it is one of my own pictures, or someone sent it to me, or I got lazy.

Pictures usually disappear either because a website disappears or it gets rearranged and the link doesn't work. To combat this I try to download a copy to my computer and then upload it to Blogger. That seems to be pretty reliable.

I try to use the largest pictures I can because big pictures are more better. Clicking on the pic should take you to a larger image. Screen resolution has been increasing and shows no signs of abating, so hopefully in ten years these larger images will still be adequate, not like the low res scans from the earlier days of digitization. Many of those are just awful.

I have accumulated a zillion pictures and have been looking for someplace to put them on the web, someplace that has a extensive cataloging / search functions. One of these days I may actually invest some time in researching this. Or maybe make my own.

Code

I like puzzles, but I only like puzzles that can be easily solved, for some value of 'easily'. I have tackled a couple of unsolvable ones, but I give up on them after a bit. The ones I really like are the ones that can be solved using a computer, that gives me an excuse to write some code, some very mechanistic code. I post completed programs on github.

Dreams

I sometimes write about the dreams I have. I am not big on interpretation. I just write these down because they were so clear and and they feel so real. Some of them will stay with me for days. It's kind of weird.

Links

I embed links to many things. That's all some of my posts are - links to other sites. Sometimes it's to stuff I really like and sometimes it's just to a site where I found some bit of information. I recently decided that links should open new tabs, so I try to remember to toggle that flag whenever I insert a link.

I should post this on my profile.

How to be a successful, clandestine propagandist

Superego: Fathom by Frank J. Fleming

It looks like Frank has written a guest post for According to Hoyt. In it he lays out techniques you can use in your writing to brainwash people into thinking the way you want them to think. Tongue in cheek. Maybe.