[Rodney King]

FYI

[Thebaddog]

Onion?

[Paul Atreides]

INCOMING!!!

[Doodle]

The Weekly World News

One of my very favorite publications.

[SMASH IMPERIALIST LIBERALISM!!]

Update: Upon reattaching the arms, art historians were shocked to find that the famed Venus de Milo was picking her nose.

[mhking]

Just damn.

[whenigettime]

I think the news source for this is the internet equivalent to the Enquirer....did you see the baby alien on the first page?

[el_chupacabra]

Sounds like the archiologist who discovered the "James' Ossuary" is at it again.

[general_re]

“Then we did some carbon-dating and we confirmed that these are the real deal.”

Very cool. Carbon dating a marble statue. This is the kind of real science we should be pissing away money for...

[Blood of Tyrants]

Forearm model for Venus de Milo.

[Jagdgewehr]

“Instead of looking like the hands of a goddess, they look like those of a plumber!”

Josephine?

[Delbert]

I like the Weekly World News.....where else can you read stories and see pictures of The Bat Boy, The Worlds Other Fattest Man and Jesus while waiting to pay for your groceries?

[Verginius Rufus]

The giveaway is the mention of King Louis VIII. He reigned from 1223 to 1226, long before the statue was rediscovered.

I believe a geologist might be able to determine if one piece of marble matched another piece, but I doubt carbon dating would help.

If they were able to prove that one of the hands originally held a lamp, they'd have to rename it the Hillary de Milo, of course.

[aristeides]

Wasn't the Venus de Milo found on Melos in the Aegean? How would the arms end up in Croatia?

[Aggie Mama]

Well, assuming they could carbon date marble, it's not unheard of for statues to be out of proportion. One of the most famous examples of this is da Vinci's David. He has a huge hands, out of proportion to the rest of his (ahem) body. Anyway, from what I recall, da Vinci did that to help keep David balanced and not tip over.

[Bush2000]

“It’s hard to believe someone so talented in anatomy would have such trouble keeping the fingers in proportion,” notes Campbell Hauser, the archaeologist who discovered the statue’s freakish limbs. “Instead of looking like the hands of a goddess, they look like those of a plumber!”

Which might explain why the arms were cut off in the first place.

[Savage Beast]

Restore the arms.

Now. Get your scuba gear over to Samothrace and find the rest of the Victory.

[Lady Jag]

The artist could have been haptic. Lowenfeld identified two artistic styles, visual and haptic.

Lowenfeld (1957) argues that recognition and encouragement of stylistic diversity can sustain a continuum of art activity. His theory was that by about age 12 the art expression of children falls into two categories - the haptic and the visual. The 'visual' student is an observer for whom careful and ordered representation of the details of what is observed is the criterion of artistic performance. For the 'haptic' student the world is experienced in muscular, sensory and kinaesthetic terms. Art is concerned with feeling and sensation rather than outward appearance.

Since the teaching of art is usually in visual terms with accurate observation of form a prime criterion of success, Lowenfeld claimed that the haptic student is penalised. He advocated the provision of a range of stimulation which might motivate all within the haptic-visual continuum and exposure of students to a range of art works, from the emotional and expressionist (the haptic mode) to the more customary representational and realistic. Thus, Lowenfeld and his followers maintain that if inherent stylistic tendencies in students are acknowledged and attended to, art education can continue uninterrupted.

Lowenfeld's blind haptic sculptors nearly always made the hands over-sized.

[BiffSchneider]

"The work was sponsored by amateur archeologist and movie star Eddie Murphy. He stated that he was enthused by the find, but that the hands looked normal to him."

[Larry Lucido]

An excerpt from Seinfeld, October 1996:

Jerry: She had man hands.
Elaine: Man hands?
Jerry: The hands of a man. It's like a creature out of Greek Mythology. I mean, she was like part woman, part horrible beast.
Elaine: Would you prefer it if she had no hands at all?
Jerry: Would she have hooks?

[T. Jefferson]

“Instead of looking like the hands of a goddess, they look like those of a plumber!”

Nah, just turns out she looked married.