(no subject)

The word of the day is "apotropaic."

davidschroth says it *is* a cool word, and you should all look it up, and I should encourage you to do so.

Fishies

This painting is housed at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and I just mentioned it in a footnote (about representations of Venice as "Neptune's City." What's cool about it, to me, is that the fish are accurate and consistent with the Adriatic fish one sees in the fishmarket today. I can identify nearly all of them in the picture, and that makes me a) happy b) miss Venice a lot.

Link to painting.