A country of contrasts

First, we have the killer whale. It seems that there is a vigorous campaign going on in and around Florida to release a killer whale which has been living in a tank for our entertainment for getting on for 45 years. I puzzle about how it is that animal lovers can get so soppy about such an animal, which makes its living by eating seals and other such animals, more or less alive. I associate to some senior ladies who had been incarcerated, I think on grounds of having a child out of wedlock, for a similar number of years in one of the Epsom hospitals. In a round of cost cutting, the authorities thought they would dump these ladies out in the community. Which, in my recollection, attracted a robust response which I paraphrase as 'sod that. You have destroyed us and our lives by locking us up for all these years, you can jolly well carry on looking after us for what time we have left'. I imagine the killer whale, if it could talk, might say something similar.

Second, we have the super sniper. Now to me a sniper is a necessary evil; not quite as bad as a spy, the James Bond variety of which makes its living by deception of & lying to those among whom they live, but tendencies in that direction. I associate to a story, by Andrei Makine I think, about a Soviet sniper who hides in trees overlooking German camps during the second world war and shoots soldiers at breakfast, or while they are shaving. Not the same at all as knights in armour assembling at the designated field at the designated time to fight it out honourably, in the open. From whence I associate to the Spaniards who thought that shooting someone with a gun, at long range, was base and cowardly. Real men killed each other close up, with knives.

Which is not quite where Gary Younge was coming from in his Guardian piece headlining the latest 'Hang 'em High' from Clint Eastwood called 'American Sniper', a film based on a true story of a serial killer, a film which is being watched by many people and which is set to make a great deal of money - but I think we share a distaste for it. Again, perhaps a necessary evil, one which involves what sounds like rather unpleasant people on both sides of the fight, but it does not seem very tactful to highlight this evil in quite this way. Ironic that the serial killer in question should end up shot dead by a deranged veteran, due to come to trial shortly.

And third we have the Getty foundation. Now according to wikipedia, Getty was an interesting as well as a very rich man. A graduate of our own Oxford University. The man who invented Saudi oil and who learned to speak Arabic in the process. A man who seems to have been exempted from conscription in the first world war - perhaps on the reasonable grounds that he was of more value to the US war effect drilling for oil than in a trench - although the chaps in the trenches might not have been quite so sure about that. And also famously mean. So it is ironic that his web site now offers free, quality images of things that were in his collection.

Brought to my attention by the current edition of the NYRB which offers a full page advertisement for Manet's 'Jeanne Demarsy', said to be 'of exquisite beauty and extraordinary painterly quality'. Going to http://www.getty.edu/, I find that I can download, for free, a digital copy of this picture, some 5,900 by 9,200 pixels and occupying just over 80Mb, a volume of data which it would have taken hours if not days to move about when I started out on computers, back in the seventies of the last century, and which now downloads from the other side of the world in a few minutes. Such images must be a great help to art teachers, trying to interest wannabe Hirsts 'n Traces from up north in the art of the past. And they almost make it worthwhile to acquire a huge flat screen to hang on the wall to display them. I offer a sample above and there is the usual small prize for the first person who correctly positions the sample in the real thing.

I wonder if the computer display being active, and emitting its own light rather than reflecting the ambient light (of uncertain quality), is therefore more faithful to the real thing than a reproduction printed - or even painted - on paper?

PS 1: the third item in this post is a reprise of the third item in a previous post, to be found at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/mrs-seacole.html.

PS 2: slightly irritated that I do not know why 60,000,000 pixels makes 80,000,000 bytes.