By the time I’d gotten to Neptune, it was the fourth of the planetary Word Art pieces I had done on that particular Thursday and I was enormously relieved that Pluto was no longer on the list. I was worried I wouldn’t find much to write about since its far distance meant that, like Uranus, […]
|
||||||
|
This planet is, of course, the one that makes schoolboys snicker upon the mere mention of the name. The symbol only makes it worse, I fear–all you’d need to do is add a pair of hands and you’d practically have a pictogram for goatse. Uranus Stress on the first syllable, schwa on the […] Last night I met someone–the new friend of an old friend–who had a symbol for Saturn worked into a tattoo on his arm. It was, to my momentary bafflement, entirely unlike the symbol for Saturn that I’d traced and rendered into Word Art. The symbol he’d chosen was one that dated back to Medieval times […] Jupiter was the first planetary symbol that, blessedly, didn’t saddle me with the tricky business of filling in words around a circle. It’s also not a symbol that has too many pop-cultural associations, so people either know what it is on sight or have no idea whatsoever. I started it on Thursday morning, the day […] I am not a scientist and have no immediate plans to become one, so when gathering the information to fill in the spaces on the planetary series I’m more interested in the cultural implications of the planets than I am in the statistics of the bodies themselves. Mars is a good example of this.
We don’t spend much time thinking about Earth being as much an astronomical body as any other planet in space, and I said as much in the text. This one was both easier and harder than the other planets because of that. Earth We live here. The most thoroughly explored planet […] This one, of course, confuses from a distance because the symbol for the planet Venus is also the common symbol for “female.” It probably didn’t help that I used the purple ink for this one–though I could have gone the distance and made the thing pink. Venus Morning star and evening star. […] About a month into my art career, I got it in my head that I would enter the art show at Chattacon, a little science fiction convention that I normally go to each year. I downloaded and read the rules and realized that I’d need something to fit the proper themes of the show. “I […] |
||||||