"A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery."

No, but it might have something to do with gem-encrusted gold statues.

China National Radio says: "When the gold flashes, it captures the intense interest of the public."

"I've been around iron all my life ever since I was a kid. I was born and raised in iron ore country - where you could breathe it and smell it every day."

"And I've always worked with it in one form or another. Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference."

Said Bob Dylan, who's been welding iron gates.

I read that quote out loud to Meade, and he sang in his best "Another Side" Dylan voice:

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”

When China got tough on the purveyors of shoddy statuettes of Chairman Mao.

This is a news story from 2010:

... Mao's hometown of Shaoshan sold 124 million yuan (£12.4 million) worth of trinkets last year, of which almost three-quarters were Mao statuettes. But buyers have complained that some Mao statues do not even resemble the founder of modern China and that substandard statues have melted in the heat or chipped easily.

"The new guidelines include a ban on plastic and plaster because plastic deforms and plaster is easy to break," said the head of the Standardisation department at Hunan province's Quality Supervision Bureau, who declined to give his name.

"We will have a team of art and craft experts working with factories to determine the likeness of the statues, based on photographs of Chairman Mao in historic moments, in order to decide which ones are authentically Mao," he added.

If they really cared about standards, they wouldn't revere Mao, but who's buying these things? Tourists?

I ran across that article yesterday while looking for a photograph of the statuette I saw in a house in Madison that was staged for sale.

Real estate is a subtle matter.

Who knows what will warm the heart of the buyer? It depends on the context. When you "stage" your house, what do you leave out and what do you put away? Let's say you had one of these:



Out or in? Assume Madison, Wisconsin.

"Europeans are endlessly inventive when it comes to radiator design. Why are Americans lagging behind?"

Questions asked in a NYT article illustrated by 2 photographs: an atrocious, "creative" Euro design and a beautiful, classic American radiator.

A nice example of the misguided Europe-does-it-better meme.

And that atrocious Euro-radiators — "life-size animal sculptures... draped... in skins... a red deer, a ram and an arctic fox" — cost $7,700 to $11,600. And we're told they are electric, so it seems to me they correspond to what Americans would call a space heater. (If you're wondering about all that fur, I believe NYT is generally pro-fur, so this article may be an under-the-radar service to its fur advertisers.)

Also available from European designers are...

... dozens of conversation starters, radiators that resemble a forest grove, a paper clip, a garden hose that uncoils and snakes around a room, and even a wall-hung homage to an artistic masterpiece. Hotech, an Italian radiator company, has a collection with names like Chagall and Fabergé. Its David model is a beefy male torso.

Wall-hung. That's wall-hung. Don't let the the snaking hose and the beefy male torso cause you to misread. And we've all seen David naked, so form your own opinion.

Have I started a conversation yet? Well, do you have any "conversation starters" in the interior decoration of your house? What kind of conversations do they start? 

ADDED: There's also a slideshow, here, so you can see what the hose and the torso, etc. look like. I was using my imagination, and I'm sad to report that David has no discernible genitalia.

Protest kissing in Iraq — on the charred plinth of a vandalized sculpture of a man and woman kissing.

Kamaran Najm posted a photo on Facebook and...

"The first three hours it was mainly media outlets calling me. I had no idea that this was the first public kiss in Azadi park," he said.

Although the couple were protesting at the vandalism, which included an attack on the grave of famed Kurdish romantic poet Sherko Bekas, not everyone got the picture. Kurdistan's two major Islamic groups spoke out in condemnation, believing they had set out to offend Islamic sensibilities. "Everyone should be against the kiss. It's an effort to disorient Kurdish Muslim youths," Muhammad Hakim, of the Kurdistan Islamic Group, was quoted as saying by Kurdish online news site Bas News.

Everyone should be against the kiss.

The authorities seem to agree, with local media reporting that the regional prosecutor was pursuing a lawsuit against Najm for "behaving or performing an act out of the accepted social and cultural norms".

The news that Najm could be charged has led to copycat pictures on Facebook, but he says he has not had time to pay much attention to them. "I've been told couples in and outside Kurdistan have been taking pictures of themselves kissing and putting it on Facebook. I am told it is about 10 or 11 couples now," Najm said.

10 or 11... keep it up. You can build a new social and cultural norm. I suppose, legally, it's the "accepted social and cultural norm" at the time of the behavior that's allegedly "out of the accepted social and cultural norms."

"Family at war with cemetery over 6ft 7,000lb SpongeBob SquarePants headstones they had made for soldier daughter 'murdered by her boyfriend' on Valentine's Day."

The cemetery says it must "balance the needs of families who have just suffered a loss with the thousands of families who have entrusted us in the past" and offers to pay for "a solution...that will properly memorialize Kimberly, within the context of Spring Grove’s historic landscape and guidelines."

But the family is fighting for the garish cartoon sculptures. The murdered woman's sister says: "I thought it was the greatest thing in the cemetery. I even told the people there that I think this is the best monument I’ve ever seen. It’s the best headstone in the cemetery and they all agreed. It came out really nice."

Yes, SpongeBob seems inappropriate in a cemetery, but who is to say what characters belong? If statues of angels are permitted, someone might be offended by angels. We all have our different religions and religion-like beliefs and spiritual supports. Who's to deny this family the solace they find in SpongeBob?

(Other than Nickelodeon, which owns the trademark.)

"The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore this week, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures..."

Cones! The dreaded cones!

After I read that, this song verse played in my head:

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.

ADDED: Meade reads this post and asks: "Was it even a federal highway?" Yeah, was it the interstate? Why don't they close down the whole interstate highway system? Obviously, they're not doing everything they can, they're just choosing particular things, trying to be annoying in just the right way to sculpt public opinion. They're poking at us. With orange cones. And we are annoyed. But which way are we annoyed?

AND: If the giant head of the President has blocked your sight line to the giant heads of the Presidents, here's another sculpture for you:



ALSO: The government doesn't seem to know that a lot of those visitors to South Dakota ride motorcycles. A motorcycle can get right in there between the cones.

IN THE COMMENTS: TosaGuy said:

I lived in South Dakota for five years. Orange comes don't stop anyone from doing anything in the land where every sign on a rural road has a shotgun blast in it.

Mr Obama, tear down your Barrycades!

Hagar said:

This has to be State Highway 244 that goes by Mt. Rushmore. U.S. Route 16A is farther away, and, of course, neither has anything to do with the interstate system. However, South Dakota, like every other state, receives Federal money for their highway systems through the FHWA, and per Murphy's Golden Rule, whoever controls the gold gets to rule.

That's not true in Wisconsin! Scott Walker resisted the pressure to shut down state parks.

No Federal money comes without strings, but in this case I think the FHWA would have to side with the Park Service, and I think it is not like they have any actual jurisdiction; all they could do would be to threaten to be difficult and withhold future funding for this road (and other projects?), I think.

Yeah, that too happened in Wisconsin, after Scott Walker rejected the federal money for a "high speed" train. But let's remember that at some point, conditions on spending count as coercion and the federal government cannot force state government to do its work.

Looking for the war protest. Part 2: The video.

Meade and I approach the Capitol, here in Madison, Wisconsin, on a Saturday morning, thinking if there's going to be action, it will be here. This is before Obama emerged to say that he was going to ask permission from Congress. This is a 10 minute video, but it's edited and moves quickly, I think. Look at the tags below to get an idea of what's in store:

"Ancient Egyptian statue at Manchester Museum moves on its own."

They haven't figured out why, but one clue is the hieroglyphics on the back. They say: "bread, beer and beef."

ADDED: More here. The inscription is: "An offering which the king gives to Osiris, Lord of Life, that he may give a voice offering, consisting of bread, beer, oxen and fowl for the Ka-spirit of."

"I have just discovered a whole new dimension to classical sculpture."

"If you dress the sculptures as hipsters it gives them an awesome new look. They become contemporary and totally badass...."

"Who is so devoted to the park, and to the rules of grammar..."

"... that he or she would break the law to correct these mistakes?"

"In Monte Alto near La Democracia, Escuintla, giant stone heads and potbellies (or barrigones) have been found..."

"... dating back to around 1800 BC. The stone heads have been ascribed to the Pre-Olmec Monte Alto Culture and some scholars suggest the Olmec Culture originated in the Monte Alto area. It has also been argued the only connection between the statues and the later Olmec heads is their size. The Monte Alto Culture may have been the first complex culture of Mesoamerica, and predecessor of all other cultures of the region. In Guatemala, there are some sites with unmistakable Olmec style, such as Chocolá in Suchitepéquez, La Corona, in Peten, and Tak'alik A´baj, in Retalhuleu, the last of which is the only ancient city in the Americas with Olmec and Mayan features."

In Guatemala, today's "History of" country.

"An ancient marble sculpture of the god Pan (a part-human, part-goat figure) having sex with a she-goat is not to be segregated..."

"... as it has been since its discovery in 1752, but displayed openly with the other exhibits – a liberal move by London, if also one which dulls the object's impact. Getting this story into the news ensures that centuries of censorship are not swept under the carpet, and that Pan, and the show he speaks for, remain 'hot property.'"

Say what you will about porn and censorship through the ages, I just want to observe that it's not bestiality to have sex with a goat when you are a goat.

At the Spherical Café...

... there's a balanced conversation.

"There is a statue outside the Federal Trade Commission of a powerful, rambunctious horse being reined in by an extremely muscular man."

"This used to be a metaphor for liberalism. The horse was capitalism. The man was government, which was needed sometimes to restrain capitalism’s excesses."

Wrote David Brooks, getting just about everything wrong.

Oh, well, we all get distracted and lose our minds when gazing upon extremely muscular men, do we not?

Champagne chair contest.

Previously noted here. Winner announced here:

Champagne chair...

... contest.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lauderdale Vet said:

I passed that along to my wife, who seems interested :) She'd make a nice chair, I think.

Which made me think of this famous Thurber drawing:

>

There must be a comical drawing of a woman as a chair or an actual chair in the form of a woman. I looked for furniture in human form, and found some stuff in the general neighborhood — the Dali-inspired lips sofa — and this amused me:



And you can unburden yourself here:

"I'm switching to Polish now, in stores and elsewhere. But I find that I have that American softness to my speech. The Polish melodic inflection is gone too."

"I hear its absence, but I do nothing to force it back. I'm kind of enjoying the reaction. At several points, people think that I am an American who has learned Polish very very well. Nearly perfectly! The accent isn't perfect, but so what! Which brings me to this question that I come back to again and again: why do so many Poles love America so much? Even as that love is not at all reciprocated. I mean, America let them down. Again and again. Thinking back to the war (and I do, every time that I am here)...."

My colleague Nina, in Warsaw, with lots of photographs, including one of a snow-covered statue of Ronald Reagan.