Mount Tethys is abandoned, the Titans gone, leaving only the old guests become residents. Primal forces watch from their guest huts, some having taken the grander homes of their children, all the time watching Olympus fade, slow grey mist covering and entombing Zeus lost domain. A card bet, a single game lost, against a trickster, a mental equal to the physicality of Heracles. Won? A guarantee of emptiness. Gaia sits in pavilion centre, some of her children around her, spreading arms across the earth, points too fine for tweezers.

Wikipedia is holding a fundraiser. They have about $9k out of a hopeful $50k. Go donate, for Wikipedia is one of the most important things humanity has made (Yes, I'm serious).

I was disappointed to find that the recent deluge and flood appears to be near to putting Srees out of business -- it apparently flooded his Sharpsburgh store, where his kitchen is, and he lacks the funds to replace it all or to move completely into the Squirrel Hill storefront. For now, he's borrowing a kitchen from a church, but there's a good chance the flood will close him for good. The same flood has closed the bottom floor of the psych building in which I work at CMU, and made the main floor smell like mouldy carpet. Yuck.

A friend recently apparently had a discussion with an art professor, who opined that art that is disturbing is not art, specifically that art is sacred and should elevate. That's such a disturbingly narrow idea of art. I guess, to linguistically analyse it, it's not the definition being narrow that's the problem, but rather how the borders that are drawn interact with other presumed terms (e.g. funding for the arts, automatic social approval for art, acceptability within typical art contexts, etc). If one were to say, call art that is not uplifting and sacred, anti-art, and methodically include it in all of the above, then perhaps the cruciality of the definition would be lessened. So ideally, we wouldn't need to fuss about definitions because they are, after all, fluid and arbitrary. However, when they play a structured role and are referenced by other things that tie to action, then we can't be quite as hands-off.

Apparently, online gamblers have another thing to worry about... Sounds like an interesting playground -- competition between human experts, novices, and all varieties of bots.

This is Marf. You actually have interpreted my story incorrectly. The prof wasn't saying that "disturbing" art isn't art. By "elevate" he didn't mean it can't be about dark subjects. He was more referring to the fact that the "art" itself was nothing more than a severely violent act.

So even though Goya's "Disasters of War" series, or hell, even gorey journalistic photography, is about the dark sides of mankind, they can still ultimately "elevate" through a visually sensitive execution of a product, followed by interpretation.

I forgot to say that the rest of your commentary about defining are was actually quite interesting. :-)