NB! · Books · Observations · Humour

How tiresome this windbag Foucault is, and yet they keep publishing him

A portrait head made of a gnarled tree trunk with branches and ivy, wearing a woven straw cloak, with a lemon and an orange on a twig, against a dark background.

Art · Museums · Humour

Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting “Winter” of 1563 at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna

Winter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1563. Strange that there are no tangerines. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

NB! · Archive · New York · Humour

Unexpected

Unexpected. The New Yorker, December 1939

Detail of an old engraved map labelled Finmarchia and Lappia, with a sea monster, riders on reindeer, tents and boats.

Geography · Maps · Humour

Olaf Magnus’s “Carta Marina”, one of the earliest maps of Northern Europe

Pointing out on the map where Santa Claus comes from. The Carta Marina of the Swedish churchman, diplomat and writer Olaus Magnus is one of the earliest and most reliable historical maps of Northern Europe

NB! · Architecture · Moscow · Observations · Heritage · Paris · Humour

Can Sobyanin Be Summoned to Versailles?

Can Sobyanin be summoned to Versailles? If only for the duration of the repairs to the Parterre du Midi and the Parterre du Nord

NB! · Faith · Art · Observations · Paris · Humour

I Cannot Stop Seeing in the New Reliquary of the Crown of Thorns a Kabbalistic Matrix Executed by the Designers of a Turkish Hotel

NB! · Observations · Pop Culture · Humour

Splendid pyjamas, Monsieur Saint-Saëns!

Splendid pyjamas, Monsieur Saint-Saëns! Might you spare us the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22? At least in the performance of Aldo Ciccolini

NB! · Observations · Pop Culture · Humour

And Cordelia will be played by Nastya Ivleeva?

Architecture · Mores · Rome · Humour

Benito Mussolini's Personal Gymnasium, the "Palestra del Duce", Designed by the Italian Architect Luigi Moretti

where, judging by the apparatus, the dictator trained, among other things, in hanging upside down

NB! · London · Pop Culture · Humour

A Christmas Tree of Pointe Shoes at the London Coliseum

Screenshot of a The i Paper article with a photograph of an astronaut in a spacesuit on the lunar surface.

NB! · Science · Society · Humour

Half of Britons would not fly to the Moon for free, seeing no point in the trip

Half of Britons would turn down a free trip to the Moon, fearing that “there is not much to see” or that it would “take too long”. People complained that there is nothing to do and nothing to look at on the Moon, and that flying there “makes no sense”

NB! · Archive · Mores · Humour