About

Why Does This Blog Exist?

I try not to blog unless what I am trying to convey could be interesting and cannot be found elsewhere.

The posts about art, and indeed this blog itself, owe their existence to La Fée Culturelle: after leaving a few rather lengthy comments, I thought I should probably write down properly what I was trying to say, and add a few images! Then, despite my best intentions, it started to grow…

What Is It About?

Museum Art

Many posts are about Museum Art. I am not interested in “look to your left, and now look to your right, this was created by an artist A in year Y, considered a typical example of style S, …” Instead, I attempt to find links between the art objects, what inspired them, and what these objects have inspired, link them to a wider context. This is akin to the deduction method of Sherlock Holmes, but applied to art rather than crimes solving. And this is about putting together facts-based stories and trying to make sense of them, rather than just listing the facts. Inevitably, the stories are about the past, but, as per the only episode of the Game of Thrones that I liked, it takes to know the stories of the past to be able to see the way into a better future:

Social Science

Indeed, one of the definitions of intelligence is the ability to tell, understand and recombine the stories. This definition comes from the paper “The Right Way”, penned by a prominent MIT professor Patrick Winston. It is mentioned in a post of this blog that belongs to Social Science category. The posts in this category have a very wide range of subjects – finance, diversity, intelligence, dating – but I try to make them all entertaining, facts-based and, hopefully, occasionally enlighting.

Shakespeare

The third category is about the works of one of the greatest story teller of all times, William Shakespeare. I am a big fan of the Bard because of the universality of his works, and the very wide range of insightfully crafted human behaviour patterns that can be found in it. I struggle with the Olde English language (No Fear Shakespeare is very helpful). But these struggles are worthwhile because his way of conveying the finest details of the meaning by skillfully using the widest possible range of verbal techniques is truly beautiful.

Food

Last but not least, I publish some Recipes because it is an easy way to bookmark them, to take notes when I adjust the original receipts (e.g. by changing the units or using different ingredients), to share them with friends and also to balance the abstract nature of the rest of the blog!

Disclaimer

I have no professional knowledge of the subjects I write about, so please doubt, correct me if I am wrong, and leave your comments!

It is not meant to be taken too seriously, just something to read over a coffee.

English is my third language, and this shows. Please let me know if you find any such issues.

Have fun!

Images

The image sources I use most frequently are:

• Wikimedia Commons – the biggest and the easiest to use.
• Museums’ digital collections, including The British Museum, The Royal Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum and The J. Paul Getty Museum.
• Art databases Artcyclopedia, Europeana collections, Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais (in French), La Red Digital de Colecciones de Museos de España (in Spanish) and Bildindex (in German).
• Clipart comes from Pixabay, Kisspng and freepik.

Images-related tools I use are:

• 1001 fonts and 1001 free fonts: both these websites are free, the allow to try fonts online;
• Pixlr Editor: my favourite image editor;
• Pic Monkey: it can rotate an image by an arbitrary angle.

Website image credits:

• My favicon is based on Cup of coffee by Filip Nohe via Wikimedia Commons.

WordPress Setup

This is a WordPress website hosted at Bluehost.com. I use:

• Pinboard as a base theme, see onedesigns.com for further details. I wanted to customise Pinboard a little, so I have created a child theme using this tutorial;
• Filezilla to manipulate theme and image files on the host server;
• Google Analytics; to enable it, I have installed this WordPress plugin.

This is how I debug my WordPress site: in public_html/wp-config.php, I set define('WP_DEBUG', true);, define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true); and define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);. This allows to write to /wp-content/debug.log using PHP’s built-in error_log() function, e.g. error_log( print_r($multidimensionalarray, TRUE) );. More details here.

Text Tools I Use

• Grammarly is great for spelling, grammar and punctuation checks;
• English @ StackExchange.com: the English language forum;
• BrokenLinkCheck.com: the name of this website is self-explanatory! It is easy and free to use.