Courtesy of Lileks:

…neon is the most entrancing and civilized form of signage ever invented – and… the 30s and 40s style was adult and sophisticated in a way nothing has touched since. But for an adult culture, I suppose you need lots of – what’s the word? – adults.

Anyone care to discuss?

I’m probably going to lose about a thousand coolness points for admitting this, but there was a time, many years ago, when I actually liked the work of — prepare your gasps of derision now — Thomas Kinkade.

Yes, that Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed Painter of Light™ — he’s actually trademarked that phrase, you know — the guy whose brand of schmaltzy nostalgic paintings adorn everything from collectible plates (trust me, folks, those damn things won’t increase in value, no matter how long you hold onto them) to greeting cards, calendars, music boxes, and who-knows-what-else. The Thomas Kinkade whose shopping-mall retail outlets sell mass-produced copies of his paintings printed on canvas and then “texturized” by low-paid minions to make them resemble original oils. The guy who gets basically zero respect from art critics but nevertheless confounds the hell out of them by selling millions of dollars worth of stuff to adoring fans. The guy whose licensing division is so thoroughly dedicated to imprinting Kinkade’s name and gauzy fantasies onto anything salable that there are actual housing developments modeled after his work. Yeah, that Thomas Kinkade.

Now, before you shake your head and forsake me forever because of my appalling lack of taste, let me explain myself.

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A couple years ago, I took note of a new housing development in Bend, Oregon, that was to be modeled after the bucolic Shire of Tolkien’s (and Peter Jackson’s) Lord of the Rings. I recall being both intrigued by and dubious of the project, writing at the time that:

…it would be the ultimate in geek bragging rights, I suppose. “Hey, look, I live in a hobbit hole!” But ultimately, it just seems a little too contrived to be desirable…

Turns out everybody else agreed with me. Today, I read the bank is foreclosing on The Shire. Only two homes (of a planned 31) have been finished, and only one of those has actually sold. The developer behind the project, Ron Meyers, is quoted as saying, “Some people were turned off by living in ‘Disneyland.'”

Um… yeah. You didn’t think of that before you took out massive loans and broke ground? And you didn’t consider that the sorts of people who might like to live in a Disney-style re-creation of a fictional place probably don’t have the income to buy million-dollar homes? Seems to me that folks who have that kind of scratch are usually interested in something a little less… gimmicky.

Somebody didn’t do their market research, it seems…

This is interesting: according to some German scholars, the identity of the woman in Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting has been confirmed by an ancient note scribbled in the margins of a 500-year-old book. They believe this note indicates she is Lisa Gherardini, also known as Lisa del Giocondo, who was the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. (Curiously, the Mona Lisa is also known as “La Gioconda,” Italian for “the happy woman,” a little factoid I never knew and which seems to support the Germans’ theory.)

I’m somewhat ambivalent about this discovery, myself. On the one hand, items like this always catch my eye, because I enjoy history and the pleasant “a-ha” feeling that comes from making a hither-to unknown connection. I also find it fascinating that there can still be a book with the handwritten notes of a centuries-dead man in it kicking around after five centuries, and that someone can be idly paging through it and suddenly notice something that no one has ever caught before and suddenly we have an answer to an age-old question. And yet there is also pleasure in mysteries, especially the ancient and essentially unsolvable ones, and part of the appeal of this particular painting is the questions that surround it: who is this woman, and what (if anything) is she smiling about? Wouldn’t finding that woman’s diary and answering those questions once and for all defuse some of that magical quality that surrounds the painting?

To use another example, it’s a lot more fun to think about the possibility that there might be a Loch Ness Monster than to definitively know one way or the other. If you find the rotting corpse of the thing washed up on the shore, then you know that it was never anything more than a giant mutant otter or something, and it becomes mundane. And if you somehow prove that there’s absolutely nothing in that lake, well, then you lose all the fun of thinking that maybe there was something there.

Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t really matter who the woman we call “Mona Lisa” actually is. The painting remains what it has always been, a beautiful work of art and a touchstone of Western culture. As SamuraiFrog asks, does knowing the identity of the woman in the painting enhance your appreciation of the work? It doesn’t for me, and in fact it arguably diminishes the experience of viewing it… but damn if I didn’t rush to click through to that news item anyway.

Several years ago, I awoke on an overcast and wintry day to a most unusual sight: a hometown landmark called the Crane House creeping slowly down the street on the back of an enormous flatbed trailer. Evicted from its original location (which was soon to become a Hollywood Video store), the old Victorian mansion — well, it was considered a mansion when it was built, at least in these parts — was transported about a mile south, placed on a quiet side road, and reborn as the Riverton Museum, a rare case (at least in Utah) of a historic building that was spared the wrecking ball when progress came a-calling. (Incidentally, if you’re inclined to follow that link for the museum, prepare your eyes before you click; the web page on the other end is a bit… busy.)

The moving of the Crane House was one of the most awe-inspiring things I’ve ever seen. The century-old, two-story home made the trip intact, not cut in half and reassembled like other older homes I’ve seen relocated. The place always looked big to me when I was a kid pedaling past on my Schwinn; it looked gargantuan coming down the middle of Redwood Road, as tall as the telephone poles it was passing. (Of course, the trailer beneath it raised it up a good five or six feet above ground level.)

This morning I spotted something on the InterWebs that might be even more impressive:

That’s a home that’s probably about the same age as the Crane House, but appears to be much bigger to my eye, being moved moved seven miles downriver from its original site in Palmetto, Florida, to begin a new life as a visitor’s center at a nature preserve. As this article points out, moving the house by water has one major advantage over the land-based method that was used for the Crane: you don’t have to worry about power lines or automobile traffic.

Pretty amazing stuff…

My constant scouring of the InterWebs for the very best in afternoon time-wasters has uncovered a gem: Brenda’s Babes, a blog wherein a woman who collects vintage pin-up art shares her treasures with the world, one piece at a time.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I quite enjoy pin-up art (yes, kids, that’s right! It’s another Random Factoid About Me™!). The appeal is two-fold. First, there’s the obvious reason: I’m a guy, and I like looking at pictures of pretty girls who aren’t wearing much in the way of clothing (although pin-up art doesn’t necessarily require skimpy attire or nudity). The other reason is that I just like the retro aesthetic of the classic pin-ups, the general look of ’40s and ’50s-vintage illustration. It’s part of my whole fascination with a time period I never lived through, I guess.

This Brenda who runs the pin-up blog is currently a finalist in a contest that required her to make a video about her collection. She stands to win $20K if her video gets enough votes, so go give it a look, and if you like what you see, drop a vote for her.
Be aware that her collections feature lots of ladies in their underwear and occasionally some mild nudity (including a very unexpected image of a topless Betty White in her younger days. Yes, that Betty White, the one from The Golden Girls! She wasn’t always somebody’s grandmother, you know…), just in case that sort of thing bothers you…