Many geologists and fossil collectors from Europe and America visited Anning at Lyme, including the geologist George William Featherstonhaugh, who called Anning a "very clever funny Creature".
I'm not sure I'm expressing this correctly, but I've always had the feeling that throwing the ball is always going to be the better risk, if only because the ball travels faster through the air than while being carried along the ground by a funny little creature with two legs.
The annual Housman lecture at Hay is one such venue for re-identification, and this year poet, artist and children's author Frieda Hughes accepted the daunting task of explaining, all over again, what exactly this funny creature is and why we should care about it.
There's some initial fun in seeing whatever funny creature your kid has shaped appear on the iPad's screen and animate, and the gameplay is easy enough for even little ones to understand.
In the demo video above, for instance, you'll see different advertising effects projected onto the walls of a room, from a Pong game that you can play to a RSS feeds running across the baseboard as a ticker to funny creatures whose eyes you can move with your mouse.
Taped in his studio, with the artist repeating the title phrase, Mr. Baldessari comes across as a Beckett absurdity: a funny-sad creature born to make art, but adrift in a transitional age.
In these dreamlike paintings, Frida is blessed with companions -- funny creatures inspired by the folk art that surrounded Kahlo as a child and that she collected as an adult, including a devil, a jaguar and a dancing candy skull.
Miro's vocabulary of calligraphic signs, funny creatures, erotic symbols and radically simplified landscapes is familiar, but with the exception of a large, physically substantial collage on yellow sandpaper, most of the canvases look hastily and negligently made -- albeit with splattery energy -- and have none of the sensuous grace of Miro at his best (Johnson).
