N.Arthur.C

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@Manny80s_Kid @DNVR_Nuggets This is good.

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

I think explore moving Jamal. I love the guy, but he's been exposed too many times as being unable to handle intense defensive pressure and he is a total loss as a defender. Trade him while his stock is high. Get some picks and open up money to sign Watson. I think we can be successful with Tyus Jones and Jalen Pickett running point. Plus some young talent. Or maybe with the trade we get someone else to fill the void.

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@ianmiles @grok if population collapse can happen very quickly, i.e. as Musk says with Korea potentially dropping to 4% of its current population in three generations, how quickly can the collapse be reversed with high birth rates?

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@ianmiles I would think population collapse can also turn around quite quickly too?

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Why does Mary look younger than Jesus in Michelangelo's Pietà?

The answer is one of the most beautiful in art history...

Mary is holding the body of her 33 year old son, but she looks 20. Critics noticed it the moment the sculpture was unveiled in 1499. The mother of a man who has just been crucified would have been in her late forties or early fifties. Michelangelo had carved her as a girl.

His own biographer, Ascanio Condivi, was the one who finally asked him why. The answer Michelangelo gave is preserved in Condivi's Life of Michelangelo and has been repeated for centuries: "Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?"

Most modern critics treat this answer as a half-serious deflection. Michelangelo was famous for his sharp tongue and refused to explain himself to people he considered beneath his intellect.

The deeper answer is older, and it lies inside one of the greatest poems ever written. In the final canto of Dante's Paradiso, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux begins his prayer to the Virgin with one of the most extraordinary lines in Italian literature:

"Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio."
"Virgin mother, daughter of your own son."

Michelangelo, who knew Dante by heart, was carving that line into stone. Mary is younger than Jesus because Jesus is older than the universe... because she gave birth to her own creator.

But there is another reading, simpler than either of those, and it is the one I find myself thinking of today. Every mother who has held her child has held them at every age at once. The infant is still inside the toddler. The toddler is still inside the teenager. The young man on her lap, even dead, is also the boy she nursed and the baby she first carried home.

And maybe that's why Michelangelo did not carve Mary as the years had aged her. He carved her as love had kept her: outside of time, outside of grief, holding her son the way she had always held him...

Happy Mother's Day.

-- -- --

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[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@Lakeshow699 @VicLombardi @nuggets Not dog shit. Top in steals. Maybe not the rim protector you'd like him to be, but he is solid and creates havoc on defense all the time.

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@VicLombardi @nuggets And unlikely to win the MVP. It's silly.

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@COSportsNut NO. FREAKING. QUESTION.

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@Broncos @PjLocke4 Tough loss. He added such good depth in the secondary.

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@Broncos I love this guy. Such a dawg.

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@thecurioustales And so the father's DNA is also with his mate forever: "and so the two shall become one flesh."

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@LaurenWitzkeDE @thecurioustales This is exactly what I thought when I read that line, as well.

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@VDHanson Prayers for you VDH! Get well soon

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@Spike19621 Who is that woman?

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@todayinhistory Great thread!

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@StevenJosephR @JeremyTate41 Which college is this?

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@JoelWBerry @ConceptualJames Spot on.

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

https://t.co/GViA9aNmw1

[N.Arthur.C @Arthasaurus]

@xmuse_