MGM just sitting there on the sidelines smiling quietly, gently scratching the head of a purring “2001”.

Josef Slygazhvili

Well I’ll be gol-darned… there ain’t nothin’ new under the sun anymore.
But at least I arrived at it independently… or did I? Maybe I saw this Bernie meme some months ago and forgot about it, but my subconscious didn’t.

I can almost hear the cheesy “tough guy” slang of the time…

“It’s coitans for you, Rocky, ya hear me? Coitans!”

“Step on it, Rocky, they’re right behind us!”

“You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

It says “breakfast”, yet it also seems like it’s still dark outside.
The faces do feel like it’s 5am or something, who knows if they’ve even slept yet.

Oh my god, this new unexpected, poignant context takes the whole thing to another level.

However: the painting looks pristine compared to the room it is hanging in, so maybe it was placed there long after the building (the entire town, maybe?) was abandoned, for the photo. If so, it was a master stroke, as this image tells several profound stories on several simultaneous levels.

I’m trying to put this… thing, into words, and the one term that keeps on swirling in there, like Jupiter’s red spot it won’t go away, is spicy maths.

Maybe the turbulence was inside us all along / the friends we made along the way.

Then Einstein and Bohr broke everything again. Then Dirac and Feynman put it back together again. Now, we’ve basically got it all worked out…

Then all-depression humor all the time isn’t humor anymore, you know? It’s just… depression.

I say we take off and drop the ring from Gandalf’s eagles. It’s the only way to be sure.

And many of the most stubbornly ignorant potential voters in swing states declare smugly, from their ivory tower of lazy truthiness - which they refer to as “purity” and “enlightenment” - that bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe.

Insisting against all reason and evidence that their absence from the 2016 election sent a clear message, made them the opposite of insignificant… when what they actually did was drop a goddamned pellet of cyanide into their own drinking water, along with everyone else’s.

Demanding a charismatic messiah god-king, willfully ignoring that what they are electing (or not electing) is a system of governance with thousands of employees at all levels. Like a pathological, medieval peasant mindset that they seem unwilling or unable to transcend.
“Massage me with a single voice, who cares about the rest.”

Shitting like monkeys on the importance of the Supreme Court, unable to grasp the far-reaching importance of it.
Unable to grasp how massive coordinated republican stonewalling and sabotage can be to scuttle the best intentions of whatever charismatic messiah god-king might happen to try and arise.

They keep giving the keys to the kingdom to republicans, keep them powerful, then get pissed at Democrats when they can’t clean up the mess fast enough, with one hand tied behind their back.

You can’t change a system overnight, you nudge the inertia one election at a time, but judging from the mediocre seesaw of the flaky, lazy and petulant electorate, it seems no momentum can ever be built.

Don’t forget how:

"I’m NOT voting for an entire apparatus of executive government with thousands of employees, I’m ONLY voting for a charismatic messiah godking, because I’m still little more than a medieval peasant looking to be mesmerized.

Then if fascists take over the nation (again) and the most vulnerable among me suffer from it (again and again and again), that’s not MY problem. While (somehow) fancying myself as enlightened and special and pure. I’m at the center of my goddamned Universe!"

The Supreme Court, and how republicans effectively staged a coup of it in 2016 by turning their back on Merrick Garland, then packed it with corrupt right-wing zealots? “Not MY problem!”… until it is, but by then it’s way too late.

Es que yo no puedo enrollar mi mente en el concepto de vivir como inmigrante en otro país, ir al consulado local el día de elecciones, y votar a favor de una iniciativa que corta los lazos, que cierra puertas, entre tu país natal y tu país de residencia actual, considerándose inmune a las consecuencias: “Dame, dame, dame, yo no doy nada, nada, nada; soy especial”… hasta que ya es demasiado tarde, por supuesto. Y según tengo entendido, una mayoría de esos “expats” que viven en Benidorm votaron por Brexit.

Por cierto, sobre esa etiqueta de “expat” con la que se adornaron solos - son inmigrantes, palabra sucia para ellos, pero no engañan a nadie mas que a sí mismos.

Son exactamente los mismos idiotas que viven en Benidorm, votan por Brexit, y luego se quejan solo cuando las consecuencias los afectan personalmente en algún aspecto monetario.

Esta gente de mente y alma hueca no puede ni quiere ver mas de un centímetro enfrente de sus narices, es un torbellino de ignorancia y egoísmo andando. Y los fabrican a puños allá en su tierra.

Dude trying to get it from first principles!
Which is what I also lean towards. Give it to me step by step and I need to clearly map out each one… then the mind wanders and when I snap back to attention, I’ve lost the plot already, my mathematical surroundings are unclear, disorienting.

Add to this an erratic series of math teachers - some of them good, some of them blah - and this day trigonometry to me is a jumbled mess, but I loved calculus and was pretty good at probability and statistics.

Among so many other wonderful things, Roger Penrose contained in a single image the mathematics of infinity in our universe, which then can be folded open mathematically further, to reveal a chain of universes in a multiverse.

An adaptation or upgrade of the Minkowski 4D space diagram (extremely useful in Einstein Relativity, integrating movement through space and time), it’s now called a Penrose Diagram, no less.

Look at it for a minute. It is deceptively simple. It took generations of great minds to slowly distill to maximum visual simplicity a mathematical expression that encompasses something as wildly vast as an infinite universe with finite speed of causality/information.

Starring… a de-aged Brad Douriff, in the role of a lifetime!

Ok, I just gotta pause, take a breath, and say - the selection of art in this instance has consistently been beyond outstanding. So many surprises such as this. A Penrose doing abstract art with mathematical underpinings… so delightfully fitting.

I’ve loved the history of art for decades now, yet in every regular wave of images posted here by you, I discover so many things I never knew existed.

Meanwhile, Ignacio over there, aka Nacho:
What am I to you, chopped liver, güey? Cabrón…