Second Intermission

A few things to mention today....

On the way to work I heard a very interesting discussion about a Vermeer forger named Hans Van Meegeren on Think (KERA 90.1). Forgery was not something that was covered in any of my Art History classes, and it was fascinating to learn about different aspects of it, and about the Van Meegeren story. He was a Dutchman, selling Johannes Vermeer forgeries to major museums during WWII and to Hitler and the Nazi party. He was arrested on charges of treason, but the paintings were so good that no one suspected forgery. The Dutch officials were horrified that he had sold the nation's beloved Vermeer masterpieces to the German opposition. Now he was in quite the pickle...if he was found guilty of treason he would be killed, but the only other option was confessing to forgery. He chose, of course, the latter. But when he told official that these were forgeries, not authentic Vermeers, he was laughed at. The officials began to wonder if he was telling the truth, and one of them came up with the idea of giving him a canvas and paints in his jail cell and making him "paint for his life." (I just love that phrase.) This was all researched for the book The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Harper Collins, 2008), written by Edward Dolnick. Library, here I come!


This post on the Wooster Collective cracked me up, especially given my Olympics Logo post from June 2007.


Finally, several friends and I were recently chatting about our least favorite fonts. Among the top hated fonts were (no surprise here), Mistral, Cat Scratch, and Comic Sans. I was searching online today for information on retinal degeneration (yesterday my greyhound Clive was diagnosed with having this), and this article, written entirely in Comic Sans, came up in my search. I have no idea if it even has any good information in it, because between the offensive font and the busy paw prints in the background, my eyes can't focus on it. Why do people love to abuse this font? Ugh. Two paws down!