I write in margins

Table and Chair shelter for horses was a troll. Yesterday I asked my students whether they had seen the fake Facebook postings of "Facebook copyright disclaimer" and "lottery winner giving 1 million $ away for a random liker" . Everyone had seen these and many had seen those distributed by their friends. Many had been trolling. There has been three big trolls out there within just a week. Generating millions of repostings and thousands of blog postings. Most of them believing the fake story behind them. The third one was the posting of horses sheltering under a giant table and chairs claiming that horse owner built them because he was denied the building permission to build a traditional horse shelter by a city council. Sorry to say but the posting was untrue. The photograph is real, these chairs and tables do exist, but they were originally built by a German furniture manufacturer in order to advertise their products. The photo was first published by TIM...

The painting hanging on the wall of the country house has always intrigued me. Definetly it belongs to the mid 19th early 20th Century tradition of horse paintings. Horse art became a major genre in the British decorative painting in the 19th century. Themes by equestrian and hunting horses and scenes became very popular - and also owners of great horses wanted their animals painted. Also the first class French artists like Degas, Delacroix and Manet contributed to the scene. However the most visible - as a cultural phenomenon - were hundreds and hundreds of paintings by English artists like Ben Marshall, John Frederick Herring and many more which produced paintings as their main artistic theme. Often scenes of the horses were presented in Romantic landscapes. One sub-niché of this popular theme were to portrait horses and dogs together. It took of with the fox hunting scenes to the typical stall pictures which is presented in the picture in our wall. Dog and horse resting in t...