Revenki's photos

I emailed this to my KM/MT/BJJ instructor, petulantly demanding to know why he never taught us this technique. "Because you'd get your ass kicked. Once the other guy stopped laughing at you and recovered his composure."

It's not just that she looks like she's staring at a smartphone, but the whole modern feel it gives the scene in spite of the setting that makes this hilarious. Of course, I'm not the first to notice this seeming OOPART: www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5078613/Painting-appears-woman-engrossed-IPHONE.html

Not, in fact, fan art for "Lord of the Rings".

An oddly appropriate find, as I was on my way to visit friends who'd been married on this lake.

Intriguing nature study up-close. From across the room it looked like a black contortionist doing a headstand.

Upsides: takes up little floor space; augments the rowing motion with gravity. Downside: having to learn to clench your cheeks around the seat to compensate for the lack of a seatbelt.

Until you get close, it passes for a young woman looking out of an upstairs window.

Bachelor party Instagrams, Renaissance-style.

St. Stephan

Not that I object to Lovecraft-inspired art, but I'm not sure a subway platform is quite the right venue for displaying an asylum-inmate's terror-maddened pencil sketches of night gaunts and bayakhees.

One wonders whether "Mister Lady" has a companion store, "Mistress Gentleman".

The attached description claimed it was the artist's expression in tangible form of her reaction to Donald Trump's election as President, done with found materials from her studio. In other words, she pitched a tantrum and destroyed her living room because her candidate lost. I first went to Vienna in 1995, and completely missed the Secession museum. Kicked myself for it for years. That meant it was on the top of my list for this visit. Imagine my disappointment when I find inside not a museum dedicated to the Secession, or to Art Nouveau more broadly, but the usual "modernist" tripe by no-talent grifters whose work is closer to the crude figures and fingerpainting of a kindergarten art show than to anything the real Secessionists put out. This is not art. This is garbage posed randomly and affixed with a pretentious and nonsensical "statement" explaining its faux-profundity. (More here: www.secession.at/en/exhibition/nicole-eisenman/)

This is more like what I expected to see at the Secession - the knight from Klimt's "Beethoven Frieze". Which, unlike the garbage on prominent display, is tucked away in a sub-basement with the building's other scanty display of Secessionist work.

It's hard to look at this thing close-up and not think of the Space Jockey from the original "Alien" movie. In fact, it's a portable heavy artillery piece from WWI, in remarkably good condition.

The uniform the Archduke was wearing at the time of the assassination, and the couch he died on.

The car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated, triggering WWI.

The car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated, triggering WWI.

As an engineer, these angled concrete columns made me cringe. And cross the street.