Saturday/Sunday, July 2-3, 2011

WEB BOHEMIAN Weekend Edition (Saturday/Sunday, July 2-3, 2011)
(1)- VISITING –- Soon to be on loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Capitoline Venus, a full-scale nude, was found beneath a garden in the 1670s. In 1752 it was given to the Capitoline Museum by Pope Benedict XIV.

(2)- ONLY JUST MISSED IT -- The big news for June 28 is that it’s is Tau Day, whose organizers, celebrators and assorted others say that a constant called tau, τ (the Greek letter “t”) should take over from pi, π (the Greek letter “p”).

(3)- GUINNESS RECORDS WARNING -- As we do not wish for you to waste your time unnecessarily, by making a claim that we will not accept, we recommend that if you are making a claim/proposal … you review the following first.

(4)- SIMON WEIL -- One of her “big ideas” was that the sickness of the modern world is caused by “uprootedness.” We are, she believed, lost. The only antidote is a social order grounded in physical labor. Only manual work can save us.

(5)- PHILOSOPHY -– How can it be that philosophy, the world’s oldest profession without climactic satisfactions, remains so ill-defined? From academic pronouncement to middlebrow mulling, the thumbnails of it differ.

(6)- MARSHAL McLUHAN – Norman Mailer once observed that McLuhan “had the fastest brain of anyone I have ever met, and I never knew whether what he was saying was profound or garbage.” Many others were similarly divided.

(7)- UNDERSTANDING HIS ART -- René Magritte: enigmatic master of the impossible dream. On the eve of a major Magritte exhibition, artists with an eye for the peculiar reveal why they love the witty Belgian surrealist.

(8)- EXPLANATIONS NEEDED -- For 20 years, crime in the US has been falling and new figures from the FBI show a sharp drop in the last two years, despite the recession. Why?

(9)- DRINK MORE COFFEE -- A yet unidentified component of coffee interacts with the beverage's caffeine, which could be a surprising reason why daily coffee intake protects against Alzheimer's disease.

POLITICAL CARTOON

ENDIT