June 18, 2004

Thought the Da Vinci Code was Terrible?

Then you'll *love* these mocking tributes to Dan Brown's popular and completely unreadable stack of (toilet) paper.

The O'Keeffe Enigma

Becca, a hiply attractive, postfeminist "Goth grrrl" and part-time bookstore employee, accidentally discovers a shattering secret while stocking books at a Borders megastore in Sacramento. During a quiet moment of messing around with those "magic eye" books, she turns to gaze, by chance, at a Georgia O'Keeffe calendar resting on a shelf nearby. What she discovers hidden within one of O'Keeffe's famous flower paintings shocks her, and, if revealed to the public, could initiate a series of ideological tremors that will rock American culture to its core.

Art historians and feminist critics have long believed O'Keeffe's portraits of flowers to be thinly coded expressions of independent, unapologetic female sexuality; but Becca has discovered that hidden within one of O'Keeffe's iconic irises is the disturbing image of a decidedly nonsensual and matronly Betty Crocker whipping up a batch of hungry-boy biscuits for her newspaper-reading, pipe-smoking husband. What strange message is O'Keeffe sending to the future with this image?

More at the Chronicle [registration may be required], such as:

The Michelangelo Mystery

Antonio, a dashing but unassuming apprentice curator for the Vatican's vast art holdings, one morning accidentally wipes a bit too hard while cleaning the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and discovers a shocking secret: It appears that Michelangelo, in his first draft of the image of God creating Adam, did not depict the two figures gently touching fingers, but rather giving each other enthusiastic high-fives.

And three cheers for finally moving Reagan below the fold.

Posted by Jason at June 18, 2004 10:56 AM | TrackBack
Comments

You know that moving below the fold and staying below the fold are not the same? A search for coffin + low might net a search engine hit. Noticed, btw, that there is no alt attribute on the img element.. shying away from ekphraksis for the text-only browser crowd?

Posted by: Francois Lachance at June 18, 2004 3:25 PM | Permalink to Comment

Sheer laziness on my part Francois ;) I need to be a bit more xhtml compliant.

Do you use a text-only, btw?

Posted by: Jason at June 18, 2004 3:39 PM | Permalink to Comment

dial, dawn, dove.

Posted by: fritz at June 22, 2004 1:28 PM | Permalink to Comment

I do use Lynx, a text-only browser, often -- at least daily. It helps with those sites whose stylesheets lead to wonky display (like column overlap)in certain browsers. It is also a dream for being able to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate. And it is very interesting to read what an author might give as a description of an image they use -- like reading a paratext. It is worth for example reading Weez's alt tags at www.weez.oyzon.com -- you get a bit of narrative to go with the image.

Posted by: Francois Lachance at June 28, 2004 9:15 AM | Permalink to Comment
Post a comment









Remember personal info?