user: Input: ARAMS_NOTES_003.TXT | Blog | The Blacklist | NBC
So today was really fun! And that's a funny, funny joke, because it was not fun, but instead, pretty intensely crappy.

We are having this problem at work, where they think someone is secretly divulging classified information. They brought me in for, like, an interrogation, which involved a polygraph machine. I've been polygraphed before, fine, whatever. But this person was basically quoting me - from my confidential psych evaluation. In what world is that okay?

And everyone else got the same treatment, so of course everybody is on edge, wondering who's responsible and why. It's stomach-churning, thinking that someone you work with - one of your friends - is secretly betraying, well, everybody. I mean, I guess it's to be expected when you work with spies and secret agents and stuff. But I've worked with spies before - and it never felt like this.

Part of me is wondering who would betray us? Who would have incentive to do that? It makes no sense. But then I have to stop myself. Meera, Don, Liz, Director Cooper - these are my friends. (Well, Director Cooper is more of a boss than a friend-friend. But still.) The leak could have come from anywhere. So, actively, and with willful disregard of any empirical evidence, I'm going to assume it came from somewhere else. Otherwise, how do I work with these people? And, by the way, we're saving peoples' lives, like, all the time.

So, on a completely unrelated note (ha), I've found out that polygraph machines are basically pseudoscience. People call them lie detectors. But they don't really detect lies. Yes, they use really cool ideas like measuring changes in skin conductivity (WHAT?!). But basically the majority of scientists say there are significant incidences of false positives, even when administered by the best professionals. In other words, it's easy for them to think you're lying, even if you're telling the truth.

Really great. I'm probably going to jail or something.
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It's about: ARAMS_NOTES_003.TXT Dear Future Aram, So today was really fun! And that's a funny, funny joke, because it was not fun, but instead, pretty intensely crappy. We are having this problem at work, where they think someone is secretly divulging classified information. They brought me in for, like, an interrogation, which involved a polygraph machine. I've been polygraphed before, fine, whatever. But this person was basically quoting me - from my confidential psych evaluation. In what world is that okay?


Input: Tate show charts history of violence against art
Statue of the Dead Christ, one of the star exhibits from Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm, lay hidden for hundreds of years. Photograph: The Mercers' Company/Tate/PA

Whether it was zealous Protestants, suffragettes or, in the case of Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII, simple fury that a public gallery could have bought a pile of bricks, attacks on art in Britain have been numerous and impassioned. Now Tate, itself no stranger to such incidents, has decided to examine their history in rigorous detail.

The exhibition on British iconoclasm, announced on Friday, will cover 500 years of deliberate assaults from the English Reformation to the present day – the first show to explore the history of physical attacks on such a scale.

It is a sensitive area for modern galleries and arguably a bold decision for Tate Britain to stage the show. Its sister gallery Tate Modern was one of the most recent victims of attack when Wlodzimierz Umaniec defaced a Rothko in the name, he said, of "yellowism". He was jailed for two years and the court was told it would take 20 months to restore the painting.

"It obviously is a difficult subject," said the director of Tate Britain, Penelope Curtis. "The decision was to treat it seriously rather than shy away from it, to try and explore it properly so that people understood its history more fully."

Curtis, whose idea it was, said it was something Tate Britain ought to do because the museum's collection "covers nearly 500 years but not quite". In fact, the show starts in the 1540s, with Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries, which led to the state-sanctioned destruction of so much art. The events were particular to Britain and changed our visual history forever, said Curtis.

Getting examples of 500-year-old destroyed art is clearly difficult, and one of the star exhibits will be a statue of Jesus that remained hidden for centuries.

Statue of the Dead Christ (1500-1520), which belongs in the collection of the Worshipful Company of Mercers in London's Square Mile, was discovered buried beneath the chapel floor in 1954 during the post war clearup. As a result of Protestant attacks it is missing a crown of thorns, arms and lower legs but is otherwise in remarkable condition, the theory being that someone concealed it to protect it from further damage.

It is a powerful statue, with Jesus graphically portrayed with rigor mortis-stiffened limbs, mouth open and carved blood oozing from wounds – it was that power that the Protestant reformers found so dangerous. The Mercers' loan is the first to any exhibition since it was discovered.

Not everything in the show will have been physically attacked. For example, a portrait of Oliver Cromwell that was hung upside down by the diehard monarchist Prince Frederick Duleep Singh (1868-1926) will be on loan from Inverness Museum. Hung upside down, of course.

Two suffragette attacks will be represented. Edward Burne-Jones's Sibylla Delphica will be on show, one of 13 paintings targeted by three women in 1898 at Manchester Art Gallery; and John Singer Sargent's Henry James which was, according to one report, attacked at the Royal Academy in 1914 by a meat chopper-wielding "elderly woman of distinctly peaceable appearance." More recent attacks will include the blue food dye splashed over Andre's Equivalent VIII in 1976 after a media storm: "Anyway you look at it, what a load of rubbish," said the Daily Mail's front page. And there will also be Allen Jones's fetishistic Chair (1969), that was attacked in the name of feminism with paint stripper on International Women's Day in 1986.

Curators said they were attempting to look at as many aspects of iconoclasm as they could, which is one reason the last room in the show will include artists "attacking" or manipulating other artists' work – for example, Jake and Dinos Chapman's "defacing" of 19th-century portraits that they bought in auctions or flea markets.

Iconoclasm is an enormous subject. "Every room is a subject in itself and could be its own exhibition," said co-curator Stacy Boldrick. It can also be a slightly opaque one, tricky as it is to get accurate figures on how often art has been attacked. Galleries do have records of attacks, deliberate and accidental, but very few make them public. "It is difficult for institutions to talk about these things," said Boldrick. "It is difficult to know exactly what the statistics are without having the full and truthful account of all of these things."

It will be up to visitors to decide how justified a lot of the attacks were. Co-curator Tabitha Barber, stressed: "We are not acting as judges, we are impartial observers. We are looking to explore and understand the reasons for attacks."

• Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm will be at Tate Britain from 2 October-5 January.
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assistant: Art Under Attack to lay bare history of British iconoclasm, covering 500 years of assaults on art from the Reformation to present day