The Importance of Being Idle

Do Anything You Wanna Do

Hands up everybody who can guess what 70s classic I'm listening to at this precise moment? Not just the title either (that'd be a bit too easy), I want the band as well.
Hmmm.
So, new IR images of M31 The Andromeda Galaxy (my favourite galaxy, I like it much better than this stupid galaxy we have) have shown the huge amount of activity at the galactic centre, the location of a presumed super black hole, something that we can't really see in our own galaxy (at least not for a few years yet, they're working on it) and it really is pretty freakin' huge. The new image also reveals a far more chaotic underlying structure than the visible light images would lead us to believe. I love astronomy and cosmology. *happy face*
Last night I saw yet another 70s movie classic; Walter Hill's The Warriors. That is bloody awesome! I wonder how come it was a movie that I hadn't seen before, it certainly doesn't have a (personal) history anything like that of The Exorcist, so unless SHE banned it (which is entirely possible after all) I can't imagine why I hadn't seen it before. Still, I've seen it now, and I'm a convert! Now all I've got to do is fit Escape From New York in sometime this week, and my retro fix will be complete!
I hardly slept at all last night, and as a result I feel pretty wiped out right now. Its not like there was anything particular on my mind at all, I was tired, oh so very tired, my body just wasn't having any of it. As I believe I've commented before, I always used to think insomnia would be a laugh, having extra 'day' to go do all the things you can't do cos you're asleep. But oh no, its not like that at all, its much more like you're so tired you want to die, but you are horribly unable to sleep. I did get a few hours come 6am or so, but other than that... I spent time either lying there with my eyes closed (cos looking like I'm asleep seems like a reasonable way to trick myself into falling asleep), or reading The Da Vinci Code. Yes, I've finally succumbed and am giving it a read. I have to say that it's actually being a really good read, its a good page turner, its pretty exciting and avoids the truly awful leaden writing of most pot-boiler thrillers. In fact, in a lot of places I'd say the writing is a bit too good, cos the theories propounded by characters in the book are complete and utter trash, the history is bunk (the list of the Elders of the Priory for instance, is known to be a hoax) and yet it's written so convincingly that I'm sure lots of people really do believe that Leonardo Da Vinci really did have lots of lucrative Vatican contracts (in fact he had one, and in a move that is completely unsurprising to anyone who knows anything about Da Vinci, he didn't complete the work), and that's just one of the many factual inaccuracies that even I could spot (let's see... others would include the whole Mona Lisa thing being utter shite. Sure it does bear an uncanny resemblance to existing self-portraits of Leonardo, but it is actually thought to have been painted as a commission for a nobleman [of his wife] and somehow I don't see Da Vinci getting paid if he'd shown up with a picture of himself in a dress. And that whole anagram of Amon L'Isa thing is utter twaddle. Why would a sixteenth century Italian give a painting a name which is an anagram partly in Egyptian and partly in Italian, and please bear in mind that Da Vinci himself is not known to have given the painting a name, the name Mona Lisa [along with its supposed origin as a portrait] was coined in a biography of Da Vinci written some 30 years after his death). For a while the whole thing was actually spoiling my enjoyment of the book, but then I thought sod it, its only fiction right? Just go with it.
I've always been a big fan of Leonardo Da Vinci, not just because he was a genius and wildly ahead of his time, but also because he was one of historys most famous slackers. Seriously, while we look back at his body of work now and are stunned by his vision, as a rule, he took the money and then... did bugger all. Often for a very long time. One nobleman commissioned a statue of himself upon a horse, and Leonardo got to work on sculpting the nobleman himself almost immediately (presumably it caught his fancy that day). Then, nothing. Amazingly, twenty seven years later an entry in Da Vinci's journal says (and I am paraphrasing here, obviously) "I'd better get on with that horse now"! Needless to say, he died without ever completing it. In fact he died without completing a lot of things; whilst there are a few completed works by Da Vinci knocking about, a lot of what we see are his sketches, tests, his journals and his notebooks. Really, Leonardo Da Vinci was history's first (and possibly greatest) slacker. Next time you procrastinate, think about that horse; twenty seven years, its a record you'll never beat.

posted by BadMonkey @ 4:38 PM