Fun with mirrors

Apparently last week there was a flurry of activity concerning hidden messages in Leonardo's painting of the Last Supper.

Now Slavisa Pesci, an information technologist and amateur scholar, says superimposing the "Last Supper" with its mirror-image throws up another picture containing a figure who looks like a Templar knight and another holding a small baby.

Well certainly we wouldn't expect any random painting superimposed on its mirror image to show any recognizable shapes. Or would we?

I have included links to depictions of the original art. Click on the images to see a larger version of each.

• Peter Paul Rubens, The Judgment of Paris.
  
  Looks like an x-ray radiograph of a spine of a conjoined unpleasantness there in the middle surmounting a mass brown and foul. Overhead, there is a ghostly outline of the head of a bear - to which the twins seem to be paying homage (?). Indications are that a BAD THING is about to occur, definitely.


• Pablo Picasso's Guernica (though I grabbed the original from another site).
  
  My gaze is drawn by the light-colored Latin cross just below dead center, then, zooming out, the way the pair of lightbulbs up top assume the place of eyes for a long-snouted animal face. So this we can take to be an indictment of the destructive powers of superego and id respectively.


• William Blake's Ancient of Days.
  I see a cat's face clearly there, made up of the deity's brow and its mirror, with a backdrop of wings of a huge bird of prey. Something hearkening back to ancient egyptian worship perhaps? I kind of like how the compasses aren't precisely aligned on the centerline of the print.


• A venereal diptych: Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus (folded along a horizontal axis) and Giorgone's Sleeping Venus
  
  
  "Double your pleasure, double your fun!"


• Michelangelo's Last Judgment
  
  Aaah, it's a giant blue Stormtrooper helmet!!!

If anyone runs with these ideas and gets a thesis out of them, I'd surely like a copy, thanks.

My take on the story of the day

Bullfighters are people who fight bulls, right? Well, I think that dogfighters ought to be people who try to take on man's best friend in the ring.

To make it something like a fair fight, the dogfighter should be equipped the same way as his opponent - claws and teeth only. Anything less equitable would seem to me to be cowardly.

Evil dogs.,
originally uploaded by This Year's Love.

Accio Cliff Notes

According to Statcounter, over the last several weeks there has been a shift in the nature of search terms used to land on items on my other blog. As you can see from the results from the last 100 searches as of today, over 80% of all search queries are one variation or another on Harry Potter Cliff Notes. Over 60% of my visitors are from the U.S. Yesterday, we tried to see the new film, but it was sold out at the one theater we tried to get into. I expect it will still be possible to go see it in a couple weeks anyhow.

A sculpture I want to see

It's Omnia Vincit Armor, in the Smithsonian Archives. Based on the description as "A nude male and female figure, with winged scarab, symbolic of immortality.", I would guess that it doesn't look too much like this modern version.

I think that shirt should come with Kevlar plates attached. It should be quite popular among our troops.

In every handyman's toolbelt

I'm a little surprised this joke seems not to have been done before.