Whipped Cream Difficulties

Mark Sutton, best known as “that guy dressed as James Bond who parachuted out of a helicopter during the 2012 Olympic opening ceremonies”, died yesterday while piloting a wingsuit in Switzerland.

Also among the dead: Barbara Mertz, noted author, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, and Egyptologist. You may perhaps know her better as “Elizabeth Peters” and “Barbara Michaels”. (Oddly enough, I don’t own any Peters or Michaels books, but I think I have a copy of Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs.)

And Bert Lance. Remember Bert Lance? Remember the Carter administration? Bank of Credit and Commerce International?

In later years, he spent increasing amounts of time at his 500-acre hilltop estate near Calhoun called Lancelot, where he cultivated his beloved rose garden and consulted for trucking and carpet companies and informally for Democrats. One side of his large home was built to resemble the White House, the other George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

That sounds like something out of a Ross Thomas novel.

For 15 years, some of the art world’s most established dealers and experts rhapsodized about dozens of newly discovered masterworks by titans of Modernism. Elite buyers paid up to $17 million to own just one of these canvases, said to have been created by the hands of artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell.

The punchline: all of those paintings were done by one guy in a garage in Queens.

(Speaking of art, this has already been on FARK, but I do want to note it here for the “Art, damn it! art watch”:

High court rules that Germans can once again give Nazi salutes while feeling up the breasts of an armless mannequin wearing an alien mask

I also want to make note of it because that’s one of the rare FARK headlines that’s pretty much accurate. If you have any doubts, click through to the article and look at the photo.)

(“a dictatorship of art”?)

(Apropos nothing in particular.)