If you have a copy of today’s Sunday Times, then do the following:

1. Find the supplement called ‘Culture’.
2. Turn to page 29, where you will find a half-page photo of the opera Mazeppa above the headline ‘An audacious act of defiance’.
3. Look closely at the photo, and identify the two executioners. They’re not difficult to spot as they’re the two men holding up severed heads.
4. Look at the executioner on the left, who is holding up a severed head by the hair. Between his body and the body of his victim there is a head in the background. The person is wearing a fur hat and their face is all in shadow apart from a highlight on their nose.

That person is my dad, who was an extra for Peter Stein’s production of Tchaikovsky’s opera at the Festival Theatre.

Yesterday was a pretty full day of interesting delights. At one o’clock h2_the_foodie, not_a_mouse and queenspanky and I met for lunch at Monster Mash. I had never met Queenspanky before and marvelled at her tea-consuming abilities. (I don’t like tea, but I didn’t let this slip at the time as I might have been disembowelled for uttering blasphemies.)

I then went with h2_the_foodie to the Glasgow Print Studio’s little exhibit on George Street to see if we could pick up a John Byrne on her parents’ behalf. Alas the one they wanted was of a very limited run and was long since gone. We also discovered that her parents had already been in to the gallery and bought something else anyway.

The streets were completely mobbed with folk being summery and festive, so I joined in by eating ice cream. We then saw The Penny Dreadfuls’ Victorian sketch show Aeneas Faversham — it was as excellent as the rave reviews would lead you to believe. I talked to Bookdrunk on the way out but I’m pretty sure I was unrecognised and confused poor BD mightily. But such is life.

Got home and watched some more of the first series of Battlestar Galactica. The writing’s improved much more from the first two episodes but the somewhat corny “no atheists in foxholes” ending to the last episode I watched was rather disappointing.

Have a look at this brilliant human space invaders game (seen at Boing Boing, naturally). I will never be able to look at a seated audience in the same way again.

Mandelbrot set pictures are a really well known example of fractal-based art. The actual fractal part occurs round the outside of the shapes (the black splodges in the middle of your typical set is not fractal).

Mandelbrot sets are a way of viewing something which doesn’t exist. Just like the electron microscope pictures of dust mites and other beasties, the colours are arbitrary. Part of the art of making the images is choosing what colours to use.