Friday, April 10, 2009

Hunk saved from shark

Where are this guy's clothes? Exactly what was going on in that boat before the shark elbowed in? Horror is visible in the eyes of the young boys. The men seem merely determined to do what comes naturally.

A rich allegory of sexual maturation, I think. The shark is clearly das ewig Weibliche. (As it might have been in Faust: das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinunter).

Once rescued, this guy became Mayor of London for a year.

7 comments:

AJP Crown said...

It reminds me in some way of The Raft of the Medusa.

AJP Crown said...

Although I guess it predates Géricault by fifty-odd years.

In wiki it says 'The attack is the earliest shark attack to be fully documented'. I suppose we're lucky that nowadays 'full documentation' of a shark attack doesn't just mean having someone make a large oil painting.

AJP Crown said...

Grumbly Stu, I've been under the mistaken impression that one of those pictures at the top was of you -- probably the one on the left I was thinking, given your age and species.

It turns out that's someone called Niklas Luhmann. It's not you at all. So why not put up a picture of yourself? Please. Otherwise everybody's going to think you are the late Dr Luhmann's younger twin.

Stuart Clayton said...

JJ, that's my picture in the middle. On the right is my past, on the left is my future, in a parallel universe.

I don't have a photo of myself. Imagine a pleasingly plump, fatherly intellectual with a twinkle in his eye - like Mr. Crocodile.

AJP Crown said...

Tipsy text: How did you do that lining the text up along the top of the letters, Grumbly? (I saw you and Noetica have been playing with this stuff at LH). I can't find it in the source code and I suspect it's been photoshopped rather than coming in straight HTML, but I'm no expert in these things.

Of course, I'm not sure where I'd use it...

Stuart Clayton said...

What you see here is an image. I screenshot Noetica's text, and rotated the image through 180 degrees using PaintShop Pro.

Noetica's software doesn't use imaging, though. It simply takes certain Unicode characters which look like upside-down versions of standard Latin letters - in most cases only vaguely like. All the Unicode characters rest on the usual imaginary line, so what you have is the standard "lining up" at the bottom.

When you turn your monitor around, it appears as if standard Latin letters have been lined up "along the top".

AJP Crown said...

I don't turn my monitor around, that would be too dangerous; I hang from the ceiling.