Does Anyone Get This?

So, each one of the gentlemen has a personal hand-held communication device to hand, is that right?

If so, it would be mildly amusing. Why don't they just talk to each other instead (rhetorical question- NNTR)?

If not, then what is happening is anyone's guess.

I believe I get most of this. I cannot resolve the message in the background. I'm not even sure what language (French?) is the text apparently on the wall. The scene reminds me of an aristocratic version of the potato eaters.

It's an altered version of a classic piece by some joker...."The absinthe drinker" by Jean-Francois Raffaelli [French Painter, 1850-1924].....

I don't get it.

What? The recursive nature of human distractions?

me neither. Oh well.....

At that instant Gramps realized to his horror that, in order to truly understand recursion, one must truly understand recursion.

There were no shortcuts, no detours, oh no, not from this path. No indeed! This one had no ending, only a beginning - unless of course one considered utter madness it's sole legitimate terminus!

Programmers. Software developers. Analysts. Bluddy geeks, all! It made perfect sense at last.

"Curse you Adam," Gramps fumed, "for taking that first byte! This is all your fault. You should've listened to your Father!"

Here's JOHNNY....

I did not get it... too tired, maybe....I have been holding onto this for awhile..Some art...and a whole lot of technology... It might give a few of you elder folks a smile or six...( Rita who ?? ) http://www.flixxy.com/rita-hayworth-dancing-to-stayin-alive.htm Type v e r y s l o w l y and let me know what I did not get....

Brilliant, and I think I recognized all the movies these clips were taken from.....The great thing about art is that it's open to individual interpretation, it can inspire one to emotional highs or lows, great thoughts, deep emotion, and has been known to change peoples lives....It is communication from one mind, or a collaboration of minds speaking as one, to an unknown audience....Art is the highest form of communication and is spawned by the enlightened souls of a mature society....Not all art speaks to all people, in fact more often than not it speaks to a small portion, sometimes a very small portion...

I did not dig deep enough to see who authored it.... it puts me in a good place when I watch it, and I consider it art.... Good that you enjoyed it as well.... Can you put a spin on the other thing that I just don't get, or is it something that I will not get because it is all about feeling more than seeing.... ( that, I can relate to )..

I'll take a shot....There is of course, the literal translation, 2 guys sittin in a cafe' one with a modern tablet on the table and a modern phone in his hand, consumed in thought it would seem....In this case we would consider the composition, the color the movement of the picture, the mechanics of the brush strokes, the detail of the composition, the quality of the workmanship and skill of the artist...The overall quality of the presentation....This is a digital copy of an original oil painting that has been digitally altered and presented in this format, it is of poor quality, the presentation is sloppy, the detail is vague, the intent whimsical....The deeper meaning is the opinion of the statement that it makes, the intent, the effectiveness, the social significance....In my earlier post I tied the statement of this to the original statement of the original artist and drew a parallel conclusion....This may not be the conclusion somebody else would draw, in fact I would be surprised, and delighted actually, if someone were to draw a similar conclusion....This is the nature of art and as you stated earlier it's more about the feeling you get from it than anything else....

I think I'll leave it up for a day or two longer just to gather a few more comments.

Ok...... my gist...... guy on the left is conversing with the guy on the right..Guy on the right is conversing with the world on his electronics. Both guys were one upon a time talking to each other because it was how you did it.. Guy on the left is analog... guy on the right is digital....guy on the left is an analog guy in a digital world...he is patient and accepts the whole digital thing....... and misses the " good old days " when friends used to actually TALK to each other.. Close ?? to the what ??? If not ...... put me to the answer......

There is no wrong answer, this is what it means to you....It's funny because even the original intent of the artist becomes unimportant once it's publicly displayed....Art is personal, one person can love and the next hate it, these are both good artistically speaking, it's indifference that is deplored.....

Well..... I am so happy that I didn't get it by myself.... Might be just us... but I can live with that....... two out of a mucho...... is still fair to midilin'

Nobody seems to have mentioned the apple logo on the wall.

I told you not to mention...
Del

(Absinthe makes the fart go 'honda'!)

Was the person with the condition a Toyota executive? If I recall, the condition was all the more embarrassing because it advertised for the competition.

The "abscess makes the fart go Honda" joke was told to me once (and only once, I think) by my then father-in-law, who was also my beloved flight instructor. I presume it was told to you also... but perhaps with absinthe instead of abscess?

Same era: "Jamaica?"

"No, didn't even try."

Many jokes are not funny, of course, without the cultural and language context.

My wife was speaking with a Buddhist from Tibet recently. He said "What does that word mean? You said 'huh.' I don't know that word."

Not simple to explain.

If the pitch is rising, it means "What did you say?"

If the pitch is falling, it means "That's kind of interesting."

If the pitch is falling, with an unusually high starting pitch, it means "That's really quite interesting and maybe almost perplexing."

Then there's "Unh huh" meaning "yes".

And "Unh huh" meaning "no".

If "Unh Huh" is said almost musically, with the start of the "huh" about a fifth above the Unh, then falling almost an octave, it means "Ah ha! What a revelation!"

And what does "ah ha" mean"? Quite simple really. I can imagine a fairly long Monty Python skit in which "huh" is the only word.

Funny and accurate....

That would be in Room 14B, down the corridor to your left...

I always heard it (again a father-in-law) that it was a dentist.

And he had to pull the tooth because the abcess made the fart go honda!

Bizarrely, I was watching QI Series D last night, and a whole question was about the Green Fairy...and SFry cracked another version of that joke...just a dy after I first read this thread. Spooky or what

(PS Thanks Ken, I hadn't spotted that, neither here nor a couple of weeks ago when I first came across the poster).

Absinthe is still legal in the UK - it never really caught on here, so there's was no call to ban it. Belgium was the first country to ban its sale.

Ah... "Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder."

My son's name is Stephen. I've been wondering if he's been moonlighting in the UK. Incredible makeup job!

Pretty early on, my dad bought my son one of (the other) Stephen Fry's books. We often say that my son graduated Cornell university at age 5. (He was in an experimental early childhood program there, which he graduated out of by virtue of age.) Looking at his bookshelf, you'd have to conclude that he was a published author by the age of 8 or so.

Sure they did, 'cept nobody noticed that, either - in spite of the numerous and obvious (okay, for this bunch, subtle) additional hints, both graphical and in the text which follows.

Whole Lotta Not Noticin' Goin' On!

The picture was too small for me to identify anything on the wall..... even with glasses on (mine dark down under UV light!)

I had assumed it was taking place in the future where the fashion cycle had taken almost full circle and was back in the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th Century....

Of course everyone has a handheld device in the future (now?)

You all know how fashion repeats itself in cycles......

A fun blog......

Ctrl + to increase zoom,

Ctrl - to decrease

Great tip but I could only confirm that a bunch of grapes are depicted......nothing else interesting.....Janes?

They're both sat down, how on earth can you see that. Is there a bottle of ointment in the pic ?

LOL!!!

It did go thru my mind to go in that direction, but I somehow stopped myself as its a pain in the a**e.....

Not necessarily not interesting, just not obvious. (A bit more absinthe and all will be crystal clear :)

It can mean all things to all people, but I like 'things change, yet they remain the same'. Sort of 'technology is the opium of the people'.

"Apple, improving the quality of life around the world". Yep, m/s do their bit. Are the original dudes any more connected than people now. It would be kind of funny to see what happened if we has some form of world 'no gadget day'. Teenagers would go loopy. Come to think of it, I'd be crawling the walls myself.

Out of work Apple developers at an internet Cafe!

Subtitled, "If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker".

"Ask an Engineer the time, and he'll tell you how to build a watch."

ka-ching!

Perhaps it's a play on words. From Wikipedia: "...Absinthe has often been portrayed as a dangerously addictive psychoactive drug..." The connection between our obsession with tech toys becomes obvious.

I did hear once that "Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder!"......

No need, got it, cool!

All clear. Took a minute to spot the 'message' - I was looking too hard.

This (the original) has been the subject for many works of art, old and newer, many of which could be 'shopped in a similar way, giving more or less lnteresting effect.

Its not obvious at first too the eye, but right in the centre of the back ground is a large apple logo, which fits in with the suggestion, we are all addicted to apple but cant see it?

Regards JD.

Well, just in case anyone wants to know what was on the mind of the creator (the poster, not the painting), listen here...

Being involved with art, I was familiar with the several post-impressionist attempts to capture the very odd physical and psychological state of those that consumed absinthe on a regular basis. I suppose it can be summed up with a lethargy, a lack of social interaction, and perhaps a dull sense of introspection. Of course, today we identify this type of behavior with psychoactive drugs.

While drinkers of most alcoholic beverages become somewhat more social, absinthe seems to have the opposite effect, causing withdrawal from one's surroundings. It was outlawed by many countries, including the US, because of fears that the drink caused damage to the Central Nervous System. Whether that's true, I do not know.

Anyway, the other day I was sitting out in front of Starbucks. Typically, caffeine causes a mild form of agitation and increased social activity--I mean, it ain't Meth, but you get the idea. However, as I looked around, I noticed that the patrons were all sort of self-absorbed and generating a "don't disturb me" vibe. Their behavior seemed to me so contradictory for a coffee shop, that my mind immediately remembered the old painting of the two gentlemen.

Are applications on mobile devices a new form of electronic psychoactive agent? I can't really say. It did, however, inspire me to go grab an image of the old painting and Photoshop it to contain a smart-phone, a tablet device, and (perhaps the new nymph in the bottle) the Apple logo... I purposely tuned the logo down to almost not being there, so as to ask: "Is the nymph really there or is it just in our minds?"

Thanks to those that participated in my little experiment. You'll find a food pellet under your chairs.

So t'was thee I viddied at the Korova Milk Bar, with Georgie, Pete an' Dim, Dim being very Dim, with Ludwig van and waiting for the knives to kick in? What then? A bit of the ultraviolence, like an old friend? Synthemesc, perhaps? drenchrom for thy grozhny avatar, O my brother? T'would look smashing in a bowler. :-))

Saw it, then read it.

By the way you were among the few that seemed to suss out my idea fairly well.

Thanks!

And well done, O my brother!

Woof!!! Did he age fast or what?!

That reminds me...and avatar reversion is due......