inkbluesky

Plain Bliss II wallpaper

Done by wallpaper artist dimage. Nice used as is , but also a good starter background to add your own enhancements.

Picasso’s Other Muse, of the Dachshund Kind

More than three decades after the deaths of the Spanish-born artist and the German-born dachshund, Mr. Duncan has published “Picasso and Lump: A Dachshund’s Odyssey” (Bulfinch Press, $24.95), a 100-page book of photographs taken in 1957 that show Lump as the top dog in the Villa La Californie, Picasso’s hillside mansion in Cannes.

The sequence starts on April 19, 1957, the day that Lump met Picasso. Mr. Duncan, who had first photographed Picasso a year earlier, brought Lump along for the ride, largely because the dog did not get along well with Mr. Duncan’s other pet, an Afghan hound called Kublai Khan.

Picasso was an a**hole, but that doesn’t mean his art and the little things, like small dogs that inspired it isn’t interesting.

Andrew Sullivan is also worthy of name calling, but he does deliver this bit of absurd and ironic news, Bush’s final gamble: giving Iraq a dictator? 

But last week the new nugget: an anonymous “military affairs expert” attended a White House briefing and reported: “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy. Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect, but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”

Indeed. The number of civilian casualties in what can now only be called Iraq’s civil war grows with each month. The thousands of innocent Iraqis killed in the past month dwarfs the civilian losses in Lebanon and Israel. The attempt by Nouri al-Maliki’s government to put down sectarian warfare in Baghdad has failed, requiring more US troops in the capital and thus abandoning the heartland of the insurgency, Anbar, to the enemy. General John Abizaid, head of American forces in the Middle East, told the Senate earlier this month that violence in Iraq is “probably as bad as I’ve seen it, in Baghdad in particular”.

Install a totalitarian puppet government like we did in Iran forty years ago and that won’t come back to haunt us? A crisis brought on by people that look like they mapped out their foreign policy using a weegie board and now that they’ve failed America and the people of Iraq they reach into a bag of obsolete old tricks. Simply brilliant in a twisted sick kind of way.