Asger Jorn, Stalingrad (aka The Mad Laughter), 1956

Asger Jorn, Letter to my Son, 1957

"In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer, and the future Prime Minister of Italy, wrote up Babbage's lecture in French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève in October 1842. Babbage's friend Charles Wheatstone commissioned Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English. She then augmented the paper with notes, which were added to the translation. Lovelace spent the better part of a year doing this, assisted with input from Babbage. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the initialism AAL. In 1953, more than a century after her death, Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been recognised as an early model for a computer and her notes as a description of a computer and software. Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason. The engine was never completed, however, so her code was never tested." Wikipedia

Leftfield, Melt

Robert Oscar Lenkiewicz, Death and the Maiden

Niccolò dell'Arca, The Two Marys, ~1460s

Pablo Picasso, Brooding Woman (recto) , Three Children (verso) , 1904

Gaetano Cellini, Humanity Against Evil, 1908

The Breeders, Off You

Alice Pike Barney, Medusa (Laura Dreyfus Barney), 1892

Pere Borrell del Caso, Escaping Criticism, 1874

"Grotto in an ice berg, photographed 5th January 1911 by Herbert George Ponting during the British Antarctic ("Terra Nova") Expedition (1910-1913). Shows scientists T Griffith Taylor and Charles S Wright at the entrance, and the Terra Nova in the distance."

Salvador Dalí, Portrait of Picasso, 1947

Salvador Dalí, Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time, 1939

Trona, San Bernardino County, California

The Flower Lover by Bukowski

in the Valkerie Mountains
among the strutting peacocks
I found a flower
as large as my
head
and when I reached in to smell
it

I lost an ear lobe
part of my nose
one eye
and half a pack of
cigarettes.

I came back
the next day
to hack the damned thing
down
but found it so
beautiful I
killed a
peacock
instead.

"We must accept our pain, change what we can, and laugh at the rest." ~ Camille Paglia, the Stoic

René Magritte, The Pleasure Principle: Portrait of Edward James, 1937