Mark Bumgarner Couture Spring Summer 2017 

Brewers Use Yeast From Shipwrecked Beer To Make "World's Oldest Beer"

Twenty years ago, a team of divers found the wreck of the Sydney Cove. In 1796, the ship set sail from Calcutta, India, for Sydney, Australia. It sank along the way, taking 31,500 liters of tightly-sealed alcohol to the ocean floor. They were so well-sealed, in fact, that modern divers were surprised to discover that some bottles were still good!

Analyses revealed that the Sydney Cove was carrying port, grapes, and beer. The beer was an especially exciting find, because beer is a living thing, filled with yeasts for fermentation.  Brewers with Australia’s oldest brewery are hoping to use that yeast to create 18th-century-style beer.

First, they isolated the yeast from one of the beer bottles. They were excited to discovered that not only was the yeast 220 years old, but it was a rare hybrid strain, totally different from those used in modern beer. They had to experiment a lot to find a drink that was drinkable to modern tongues. One brewer described it as “taming” the yeast!

The result, The Wreck Preservation Ale, goes on sale this month.

Throwing it back to 1958, when Museum staff were installing models for the Life on the Forest Floor diorama. A forest floor is a busy place, full of decomposing debris and hungry millipedes, beetles, and weevils. The diorama shows a cross section, at 24 times its actual size! To create this scene, Museum artists studied specimens under a microscope and made models using clay, wax, wire, shellac, and even shoe polish. You can see this diorama today in the Hall of North American Forests.

my final work for mermay - the colored-in version of the gibson girl mermaid I drew a few weeks back!

Daisies

Ikeda Toshihiko, Laughing old king with beautiful black horns, 2014

i found out earlier today that this was the act that immediately followed the beatles on their first ed sullivan show performance and honestly this should be just as famous

Golden Topaz with Muscovite and Cleavelandite - Dassu, Braldu Valley, Skardu District, Baltistan, Gilgit-Baltistan, Northern Areas of Pakistan

A 1973 Jean-Michel Folon illustration for Kafka’s Metamorphosis

Mermay 2018, first works 

From Wild beasts and their ways by Samuel White Baker.

Full text available here:

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ia/wildbeaststheirw11890bake#page/9/mode/1up

Tea time, Wenyi Geng

Ararinha by Ronie Leite on Flickr.

peaceful

“James Luna often uses his body as a means to critique the objectification of Native American cultures in Western museum and cultural displays.  He dramatically calls attention to the exhibition of Native American peoples and Native American cultural objects in his Artifact Piece, 1985-87.  For the performance piece Luna donned a loincloth and lay motionless on a bed of sand in a glass museum exhibition case.  Luna remained on exhibit for several days, among the Kumeyaay exhibits at the Museum of Man in San Diego.  Labels surrounding the artist’s body identified his name and commented on the scars on his body, attributing them to “excessive drinking.”  Two other cases in the exhibition contained Luna’s personal documents and ceremonial items from the Luiseño reservation.

Many museum visitors as they approached the “exhibit” were stunned to discover that the encased body was alive and even listening and watching the museum goers.  In this way the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer was returned, redirecting the power relationship.

Through the performance piece Luna also called attention to a tendency in Western museum displays to present Native American cultures as extinct cultural forms.  Viewers who happened upon Luna’s exhibition expecting a museum presentation of native American cultures as “dead,” were shocked by the living, breathing, “undead” presence of the luiseño artist in the display.  Luna in Artifact Piece places his body as the object of display in order to disrupt the modes of representation in museum exhibitions of native others and to claim subjectivity for the silenced voices eclipsed in these displays. “   

Paradise Tanager by San Diego Shooter on Flickr.

colorful boi

this is the most powerful image on the internet.. reblog to join the circle

Reblog to destroy all evil energies in your life

Antique postcard, undated.

I’ve met some unusual cats in my time travels, collected here.

it me

(I thought the umbrella was a violin case on first glance)