Friday Hodgepodge

Four Things

1. It has been a long season in more ways than one for this Arsenal fan, but the FA Cup win has me looking forward to the club's first full season under new coach Mikel Arteta. Rico of the Highbury House blog puts it well:

Mikel Arteta is the first man to captain and coach Arsenal to winning the FA Cup. (Image by Ronnie Macdonald, via Wikimedia, license.)

When Mikel Arteta took over at Arsenal, there were doubters. Certainly from the media because Arsenal were in such a bad place, the job was too big for a novice. A reasoned and understandable opinion at the time I think, although odd if compared to the fine appointment Frank Lampard was considered to be by the same people just a few months previous. His time managing Derby was obviously deemed to be more beneficial than working alongside Pep Guardiola for three years. Like most Arsenal fans I suspect, I was just relieved Unai Emery had gone. Then, only time would tell if Mikel Arteta was the right appointment. Not six weeks, not six months but a sustained period of time. Time during which continued improvement is key.

As much as I respected Arteta as a player and agreed he would probably go on become a good coach, I was among the doubters, because I thought he needed more time.

I have good reason to hope I was wrong: Soon after Arteta took the helm, I started liking what I saw during games, even when results did not go Arsenal's way. And soon, there were also good results to match, starting with his first big win, over Manchester United during the season.

This continued after the long break in play, and the Gunners would later defeat runaway league champions Liverpool and, en route to the cup win, Manchester City and Chelsea. I don't remember the last time Arsenal defeated all of those clubs in one season, but all this happened after Arteta took charge.

2. My wife and I are slowly working our way through the science fiction series, The Expanse, in which humanity has colonized the solar system. By coincidence, I ran into a hand-drawn map of all "the Solar System's solid surfaces stitched together" around the time we started watching. Earth and Venus put together appear to make up over half.

3. The world's largest museum exhibition to date of Bob Ross paintings is ongoing at a small museum in British Columbia:

The DePaul Art Museum in Chicago was the first gallery to make contact, says BRI [Bob Ross, Inc.]; in April 2019, four paintings appeared there in the exhibition New Age, New Age: Strategies for Survival. Later that year, the Franklin Park Arts Centre (Purcellville, Va.) opened Happy Accidents, a show devoted to Ross's TV paintings. When the PAG [Penticton Art Gallery] came calling, BRI says they were fielding similar requests from galleries around the world. Three paintings are now on view at ArkDes in Sweden (they're part of a salute to ASMR, the oddly satisfying genre of which Ross is hailed as the permed patron saint). Another solo exhibition is scheduled to open at the Museum MORE in the Netherlands this November. And a brand new attraction, a shrine to the man himself, will open this October in Muncie, Ind., long-time home of The Joy of Painting. [links and emphasis in original]

ASMR? Some of the susceptible call it "brain tingles." More on that here.

4. For any Harry Potter fans with unusual file storage requirements, I have an app for you: horcrux-ui will let you "split a file into horcruxes."

I see no need for that myself at present, but then again, I didn't for magic wormhole, either, and I now use it from time to time.

-- CAV