On this day in 1793 – Charlotte Corday assassinated Jean-Paul Marat, a leader in the French Revolution, in his bathtub (painting shown), his death being one of the pretexts for the subsequent Reign of Terror.
The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David
Gioacchino Giuseppe Serangeli - www.theobjectivestandard.com: Page (Archive), Picture
This, the Lead Picture Today, Sunday, July 14, 2019, on the blog –
existentialautotrip.com
See ‘Thumbnail’ below for further description.
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Commentary
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Temperatures went up to 88*.
A very warm, very sunny summer’s day.
I woke leisurely, 5.30am, toasted some corn bread (not having anymore of Sally’s Oatmeal loaf) and enjoyed my coffee (1/2decaf) while finishing the very lovely, inspiring “Life in France” by the Divine Julia, with a little hel[p from her friends.
I caught up on my apartment work while the duck slowly roasted.
At 11.00am I made my drink for the day, Old Raj 55% alcohol gin with a mountain of ice cubes of various sizes, a squeeze of lime, and a touch of tonic.
I sat alone with my duck, some of my stored duck-goose sauce, and slowly ate the leg and other boney pieces while I watched Deadwood. Love it.
I cleaned up, prepared two plates of duck for Monday night dinner for my roommate-cousin and one of her friends, and took a nap, 30 minutes.
I hoisted my backpack and walked an hour from my apartment to the Pru where I sipped a Cortado (1/2 caff) and worked on the blog.
At 2pm I had an appointment at the Microsoft store and, after some trial and error, believe we found a solution to the problem. (Tell you tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to test it.]
Walked and took the T to Planet Fitness where I worked out.
Back at the apartment, I ate a slice of pizza while I watched more of Deadwood.
I took a nap.
Finished the blog.
Tonight I’ll pick up Lauren and we’ll go to Nordstrom’s for their pre-season sale (jeans, sneakers, a pullover for me.]
She may want to swim while I hang at the apartment.
So what?
So leisure.
Easy does.
No rush.
Loving the outdoors.
Loving the warm weather.
The lightness of dress.
The calm.
A very warm, very sunny day.
The summer.
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Chuckle of the Day:
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Walking home after a girls' night out drinking, two women pass a graveyard and stop to pee.
The first woman has nothing to wipe with, so she uses her underwear and tosses it. Her friend, however, finds a ribbon on a wreath, so she uses that.
The next day, the first woman's husband phones the second woman's husband, furious: "My wife came home last night without her panties!"
"That's nothing. Mine came back with a card stuck between her butt cheeks that said, 'From all of us at the fire station, we'll never forget you.'"
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News re: existentialautotrip
Sunday, July 14, 2019
I’m happy to announce the publication of single-chuckle videos featuring Dom as the teller.
The videos will be of assistance to our vision-impaired friends and will serve as promo pieces for the existentialautotrip blog.
The hours are ticking away and if we don’t make the most of our time another day will soon click past.
Unnoticed.
Unappreciated.
Tick Tock.
In clock language:
Enjoy today.
Enjoy the week.
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Tracking Postings – Tracking Time
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Our 464th consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
After 464 posts we’re at the 9.26 percentile of our commitment, that commitment a different way of marking the passage of time.
Posting always done by 6.00am the day of, but usually by 6pm of the night before.
On this day Boston will enjoy warm temperatures, with a high of 88* and a feels-like of 88* and sunny skies.
The next days look splendid as well although Thursday is looking wet.
Anyone complaining?
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Dinner
Posted Sunday, July 14, 2019
Friday’s dinner was at the reopened restaurant at the MFA.
We sat outside on a perfect night for it, even enjoying a rain storm from which we were protected.
We enjoyed an array of small plates, each of them imaginative and well-executed.
Bravo to the 465!
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We love getting mail.
Contact me at domcapossela@hotmail.com
Sunday, July 14, 2019
This from our dear friend, Howard D re: Accretion and beyond.
Dom
Two things. One, you do have a way, with your peripatetic MO, which takes you where it takes you, depending on what you come across in your reading and listening and communing with your, well, community, to coming up with things—also in an inimitably characteristic way—that attract my attention and I find myself compelled to think and, often enough, to comment. Two, you also have a nearly unique way of pushing the meaning of words around to your own purposes, all in service, again, to creating a recognizable style. Other aspects of that style were the substance of a very funny parody of it in a piece that I believe Sally Chetwynd recited to the assembled guests at your blog’s first anniversary party. But I’m not talking about your unique relationship with pronouns, or the idiosyncratic inverted sentence structures you deploy.
In this case, I’m talking your meditation on your trait of being someone who indulges in what you call “accretion,” which is to say, the foundation of being a “layerer” (which gives rise to all kinds of semi-interesting speculation of what the other categories would be in the taxonomy implied: layerer, stacker, piler, leveler…).
All of which gives rise to a third thing. You create a straw man.
“Accretion.
Doesn’t get its due.
As a word; as a way of life.”
You say.
All by way of an excuse for you to delineate what you do as a presumptively unique methodology, if not a philosophy, pitted against how such a course of action is performed by some larger body of mankind, who, by implication, don’t appreciate—don’t give due recognition to—yours.
In fact, given the illuminating example you relate of the anticipated development of your business proposal, through some iterative process, whereby it will be shared through several steps of suggested additions, improvements, reconfigurations, etc. would produce, as is reasonable to expect, not only a tweaked operative version, but a very much enhanced one. And furthermore, you suggest, this fruitful and productive way of operating against an objective is little appreciated—except, inferentially, by you and your fellow rare breed of “layerers.”
It comes as a surprise to me. I’ve always understood that the process of recursion—identified as occurring in nature, certainly a paradigm of the so-called scientific process—has been going on, well, forever, in human terms. It’s the foundation of what you call accretion and prefer to see as a model built of layers, as opposed, say, to sequential blocks, characterized by incremental changes; some of them tweaks, some of them added refinements, some outright augmentations. Not that the trope used to describe the paradigm matters. Layers or stacks or trains of blocks… they’re all the usual product of a MO that in many ways is the rubric of our age. I mean collaboration, an idea and model that the world of business is still enamored of and without a sign of fatigue for its value.
My best income-earning years were in the world of business. I initiated my share of projects based on original ideas of my own, and I’ve moderated and managed the process altogether, in projects initiated by others as well. None was ever born whole, so to speak, with all appendages and all appurtenances and all internal constituent parts perfect in every way, and ready for deployment, exactly as ginned up by the conceptualizer (I can do that word thing, too).
What is amusing (usually these things are amusing, and taken lightly and analyzed with all good will) is that I just read yesterday that Microsoft just announced something really important in their realm of commerce.
What they announced is that their product, Microsoft Teams, which is their branded version of a group-chat platform—the foundation of productive engagement and communications of teams, in short of collaborations—is now bigger than Slack, a leader, until now, in the same software category space.
Slack was introduced in 2013, and in due course, as I noted, became a market leader, with millions of users. Microsoft introduced Teams to its users only 27 months ago. They announced yesterday they have now registered 19 million weekly users of the applications (13 million daily users).
I don’t know how you’re going to take this, and I assure you I’m not trying to take anything away from you in having told you all this.
But Dom, take heart.
You’re not alone.
xo
hd
Web Meister Responds: We always enjoy Howard’s way with words and depth of knowledge.
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Today’s Thumbnail
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), known as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French Revolution.
Charlotte Corday, painted at her request by Jean-Jacques Hauer, a few hours before her execution
In 1793, she was executed by guillotine for the assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was in part responsible for the more radical course the Revolution had taken through his role as a politician and journalist.
Marat had played a substantial role in the political purge of the Girondins, with whom Corday sympathized.
His murder was depicted in the painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, which shows Marat's dead body after Corday had stabbed him in his medicinal bath.
In 1847, writer Alphonse de Lamartine gave Corday the posthumous nickname l'ange de l'assassinat (the Angel of Assassination).
I love Charlotte Corday.
Have a copy of that painting in here.
She new how to treat villainy.
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Good Morning on this Sunday, the fourteenth day of July, 2019
Our lead picture is the Death of Marat by David.
Our commentary reflects on a terrifically leisurely summer’s day.
We posted a tip on salad-making, the Boston weather report, the ticking calendar, and the growing number of posts as a calendar marker.
We posted a long piece from Howard D, a comment of the MFA’s new restaurant, and a chuckle.
Finally, our Thumbnail a brief on the assassin Charlotte Corday.
And now? Gotta go.
Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?
See you soon.
Your love.