Doodle Kids
Lim Ding Wen, a nine-year-old Malaysian boy, has created a finger painting application for the iPhone.
The program allows iPhone owners to draw images on the handset’s touch screen using just their fingers.
The program has been downloaded more than 4,000 times from Apple’s iTunes store in less than two weeks.
’67 Viper
Designer Rafael Reston imagines what the Dodge Viper would look like if it existed in the 60s to compete against cars like the Corvette.
I can agree with the sentiment.
wires overhead
Telephone wires and power lines lace the sky in my neighborhood.
Thing-a-day
I’m participating in Thing-a-day this year. I think it’s a bit like India’s DrawMo! but without the emphasis on drawing- although that’s what I’m doing over there. It’s been a week, and it seems I’ve stumbled onto “unexecutable” as my focus. I am currently illustrating things I cannot do. I may switch it up to things I can do- executables- but for now I like the idea of drawing things I can’t make happen.
Waiting For Good ‘Ho
Here’s a wee morsel from my recap of the most recent episode of the continuing saga that is Bret Michael‘s “Rock of Love Bus,” a reality dating show on VH1 that haunts my dreams:
Whassa goin’ on with Bret Michaels? Throughout this season of “Rock of Love,” despite–or perhaps because of–an onslaught of trashy skankitude previously unknown outside of a Joe Francis bachelor party in Tijuana–he’s been ambivalent, morose, and consumed by ennui. BRET MICHAELS. I think he’s aware of the problem, though, because on last night’s “Rock of Love Bus” he dropped by the stripper store and picked up some fresh blood to liven up what I can only describe as a train wreck of a bus tour. Desperate times call for desperate measures, people!
Let me back up a bit. The buses pull up to Larry Flynt‘s Hustler Club outside of St. Louis, and at first some of the very few non-strippers on the show (ie, Beverly) are rightfully worried they will have to do some kind of lap dance in Larry Flynt’s wheelchair in order to make an emotional connection with Bret. But, no, it’s a makeover challenge. I love makeovers! Bret brings out three obviously dowdied-up women with baggy sweaters, glasses, no makeup, etc. The idiotic skanktestants clearly believe that these ladies really look like this all the time. The challenge is to trash ‘em up the way Bret likes it. Makeover teams are formed and Natasha, Farrah, and Mindy are the captains. Each is assigned a girl to transform from drab to scab. The winning team captain gets a romantic dream date with Bret.
To read the rest, and for all of your trashy tv recap and occasionaly urgent celebrity gossip needs, please run on over to Felt Up. Select future posts will be available on both Felt Up and Clusterflock. There’s no escape!
“I hate fashion!”
Top: Valentina label.
Bottom: Valentina (Valentina Sanina Schlee), 1933.
“Fit the century. Forget the year.”
Valentina: American Couture and the Cult of Celebrity opens February 14 at the Museum of the CIty of New York and runs through May 1. A book of the same title (by Kohle Yohannan) is being published by Rizzoli.
Can you stand
to look at another drawing? If so, click here. My question, in the caption of the drawing, is about scanning drawings vs. photographing them. This is a scan of a drawing I posted a couple of weeks ago as a photo. I wonder if the resolution/quality looks better here. (This is, by the way, one of my little story drawings, currently submitted, if you can imagine it, to a magazine.)
Is Shepard Fairey a sellout?
Do we care? I don’t know, but n+1 discusses it:
Of course, the allegation of selling out is an old one in the world of art and street culture. Fairey addressed the issued in an “essay” called “Absoloot Sponsorship,” where he writes, “The other day I was flipping through a ‘lifestyle’ magazine when an Absolut Vodka ad caught my eye. This particular ad was basically a verbatim reproduction of the classic Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols cover, with the sole modification to the original Jamie Reid art being a cut-paper-style Absolut bottle silhouette behind the Sex Pistols type.…The type at the bottom of the page read ‘Absolut Pistols’ in the typestyle they have branded for years.” He’s certainly in familiar territory here, musing further, “Would I have looked at the Pistols differently if their Anarchy tour had been the Absolut Anarchy tour?” One would think the answer would be a resounding, “Fuck yes, that missing ‘e’ makes all the difference!” But Fairey is trying to justify himself, so, the answer comes: “Maybe not, because the Pistols were the originators of the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, but who knows?” This is not only tendentious but wrong. “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle” refers to the Johnny Rotten’s last words at the final Sex Pistols show, when he asked the crowd, “Ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” Fairey seems to think that it refers to all the times the Pistols took money from record companies and failed to produce albums in return. It serves Fairey’s justification more handily to think that the Pistols were the ones on the take, and the corporate record companies the dupes in the setup, but even Johnny Rotten knew that wasn’t the case, and he didn’t go to no RISD.
Anatomy of a book jacket
John Hendrix breaks down his process of creation of the jacket for his new book.
His transparency manifests that much of design is a question of blood and sweat rather than genius (with all due respect, John): project completion yields multiple drafts.
everyone knows an ant can’t get stuck in traffic
Dussutour, whose earlier work showed that leafcutter ants organize themselves into separate and tightly-regulated streams of load-carrying and unburdened individuals when traveling in opposite directions on wide paths, was curious about their dynamics on narrow paths such as the tip of a treebranch — the ant equivalent of a one-lane road.
In the latest findings, published in the February issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, Dussutour’s team found that ants leaving the colony automatically gave right-of-way to those returning with food. Of the returning ants, some were empty-mandibled — but rather than passing their leaf-carrying, slow-moving brethren, they gathered in clusters and moved behind them.
“Leafcutters paths in particular look very much like car traffic,” said Dussutour. “There’s a lot of times on the highway when you’re stuck behind a truck, and sometimes overtaking it is not optimal.”
The difference between ants and humans.
“One dominating factor in human traffic is egoism,” said University of Zoln traffic flow theorist Andreas Schadschneider. “Drivers optimize their own travel time, without taking much care about others. This leads to phantom traffic jams which occur without any obvious reason. Ants, on the other hand, are not egoistic.”
How the ant model might be applied.
An experimental navigational system called Inter-Vehicle Communication tries to emulate this, with on-board navigation computers exchanging data as they pass each other and roadside base stations. It’s yet to be deployed in real-world conditions, though, reflecting the difficulty in replacing a culture and infrastructure of solitary driving.
A compromise, said Schadschneider, may be systems that improve communication between drivers and cars. “This has already been achieved by new devices which transmit information about abrupt velocity decreases to the following cars, which then start to brake automatically, before the driver even realizes the need to brake,” he said.
Beshers is optimistic about the potential of driverless cars running on ant traffic algorithms, but cautious about the timeline of their acceptance. Embracing such a system, he said, “assumes that humans could agree on an upper speed limit, which has never yet happened.”
The image at the top of the post is from Dussutour’s web site.
Tylenol Man
In a space of three days beginning Sept. 29, 1982, seven people who took cyanide-laced Tylenol in Chicago and four suburbs died. That triggered a national scare and a huge recall, and eventually led to the widespread adoption of tamperproof packaging for over-the-counter drugs.
James Lewis, the man long suspected of orchestrating the crime, is under investigation again.
“Up until yesterday, I thought this would never be solved in my lifetime or ever,” said Jack Eliason, whose sister, Mary McFarland, a 31-year-old mother, died after swallowing poisoned Tylenol.
While authorities have refused to give details about the case, we do have a brief accounting of Lewis’s other involvements.
In 1978 he was accused of dismembering a 72-year-old man who had hired him as an accountant. The charges were eventually dismissed because the cause of death was not determined and some evidence had been illegally obtained.
He and his wife, Leann, moved to the Chicago area in the early 1980s, their activities shrouded in secrecy. Authorities said Lewis was chameleon-like in his ability to change his identity, using at least 18 names and posing as a freelance writer, real estate salesman, computer assistant and importer of Indian tapestries.
He was apparently haunted by the death of his daughter, who had Down syndrome and died at age 5 during heart surgery, and sometimes carried a recording of her voice, according to the FBI.
In 2004, Lewis was charged with kidnapping and raping a woman. He was jailed for three years while awaiting trial, but prosecutors dropped the charges after the victim refused to testify.
Lewis is listed as a partner in a Web design and programming company called Cyberlewis. On its Web site, he complains about being known as “the Tylenol Man.”
Lewis appears to be writing a novel titled “The Doctor’s Dilemma.”
“This is a novel about courage and integrity,” he writes on a Web site registered at the address that was searched Wednesday by the FBI. “Dr. Rivers is driven to protect individuals from man made environmental dangers. But in the biggest case in his life, Dr. Rivers discovers something dark in his own family’s past which could destroy him if he continues digging.”
As to what finally may have lead to a break in the case:
Retired FBI agent Grey Steed, who worked on the extortion probe, said Thursday that he had been contacted by investigators to discuss the case.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if they weren’t looking for something in the way of memoirs or some type of journal he was keeping,” Steed said.
Kindle 2
is coming. Did anybody ever buy version 1? What did you think?
Evening Star
It’s quite possible that Fripp & Eno’s Evening Star was the first ‘ambient’ record I ever bought. If you can call it ambient, and if I didn’t buy Eno’s Discreet Music first.
It’s now been re-released in a nice digipak, and I just got my copy yesterday. I splurged and bought the reissue of No Pussyfooting too. No Pussyfooting is expanded to 2 disks. Both of the original sidelong tracks are included in both normal and reverse versions, and one of them is also here at half-speed.
Buyer’s Remorse
At the big grocery store today–the one we try to avoid but sometimes can’t–we had another encounter with the mentally challenged bagger who is enamored of Cindy. He appears to be in his 40s, and seems to forget exactly where he is and what he’s doing when he lays eyes on Cindy. He beams at her in a watery way and misses the bag several times a minute as he drops things in. Today it came to this:
Bagger: You need help with this I’ll take it out for you.
Me: No, that’s all right, thank you. I can get it.
Bagger: I’m taking it, I’m going to help you.
Me: No, really–we’re fine. I would rather wheel it out myself.
Bagger: (Hustling the cart out into the aisle behind the cash registers) I’m supposed to help, I’m taking it.
Me: No! Just give me the damn cart, will you!
Cindy: Daryl!
Me: Okay, okay–I’m sorry, but I’m taking my own goddamned cart out to the car, Okay?
So the bagger relents, finally, and we leave, but I feel kind of bad about the whole thing.
From the Comments
Cindy can positively not eat an ice cream cone without getting it all over her. But I guess I’m kind of happy about that–it’s endearing. And once at a Kips Big Boy restaurant (I have probably told this before) she was eating a hot fudge sundae, and when a decidedly straight-laced just-out-of-Church family looked over at us reprovingly because of our high spirits, she painted her eyelids with fudge and gazed at them in a regal way. They quickly turned back to their salads of iceberg lettuce with thousand island dressing, and I thought of how vastly lucky I was to be with a person who would do such a marvelous thing.
From the Comments
I don’t really have a preference as to towel color, just as long as they look fresh and unstained. I have similar feelings about sheets. In both cases, I prefer that the linens be of high quality and/or have amusing design features. I’d happily dry myself off with a fresh, soft NBA Houston Rockets towel made of a poly blend and then get into a bed with 600+ thread count cotton sheets in doodoo brown. Each case must be considered individually. Unfortunately, my need to evaluate these things on a case-by-case basis has led to a tremendous case backlog. For example, I still haven’t gotten around to deciding how I feel about a brightly colored, contoured towel I used in 2004. It just didn’t seem very fresh.
White linens are just fine, but I don’t like using bleach either and I sweat a lot and have a greasy head which makes preserving the whiteness without bleach problem-y.
I like cloth napkins, but don’t blow your nose in them. I don’t care how spicy the sauce is.
Dogue de Bordeaux
The type of dog in the slide show Andrew pointed to a few weeks ago is the latest official breed of the Westminster Kennel Club.
Packing about 145 pounds, and with paws the size of a lion, the hefty Dogue de Bordeaux will be sure to turn heads at Madison Square Garden next week.
This is the first year the breed, which starred in the Tom Hanks movie Turner and Hooch, has been eligible to take part in the show.
A total of 13 — eight male and five female — will step into the ring hoping to impress the judges with their calm temperament, wrinkles and imposing presence.
Hopefully they will also remember not to slobber on anyone.
I’m sure there’s a half-ass stand-up routine here somewhere
A South Korean grandmother has failed her driving test 771 times.
The 68-year-old, identified only by her last name Cha, has taken the test almost every working day since 2005 in the southwestern city of Jeonju. She failed again Monday for the 771st time.
“It was a record-breaking number here,” Choi Yong-Cheol, a police sergeant supervising the test in the city’s Deokjingu district, told AFP.
Police estimate she has spent almost five million won (3,600 dollars) to take the written test, with each test costing 6,000 won in addition to other expenses.
“I feel sorry every time I see Cha fail. When she passes, I’ll make a commemorative tablet myself and give it to her,” one officer was quoted as saying.
alt.Frost/Nixon
Written on my BaseFook Wall:
Today I saw “Frost/Nixon” @ a theatre in Encino during a rainstorm. I was bored. It would have been a lot better if Chris Rock had played Nixon and Adam Sandler had played David Frost, if U ask me! They only played one Donna Summer song in it and it wasn’t my favorite one either, which I’m sure U can guess is “Love to Love You Baby!” They shoulda had that debate relocated to Studio 54 to punch it up a little bit entertainment-wise! I wish Ron had brought me onboard as a consultant! My fave moment was when she goes down to get take-out food from Trader Vic’s @ the Beverly Hilton! YAY, Trader Vic’s ! I began to crave a Trader Vic’s Mai Tai!
I never knew
there was a Saint Raymond till yesterday, when I saw the holy card in the gift shop at the Dickeyville Grotto (Dickeyville, Wisconsin).
Help prevent the vilioration of flosculations!
The link’s been going around for a while, but have you looked at savethewords.org? And if you have, did you manage to use it in spite of their godawful so-called user interface? Although the Flash bullshit deeply misquemed me, I am now a mere jobler and was otherwise sitting in my nidifice doing nothing all day today, so I made myself suffer through the annoyance for just long enough to adopt the following words:
- flosculation
- n. an embellishment or ornament in speech
- jobler
- n. one who does small jobs
- misqueme
- v. to displease
- nidifice
- n. a nest
- viliorate
- v. to become less good; to deteriorate
Aren’t they cute?
Isn’t This a Lovely Paragraph?
My friend Rick loaned me a book by Camilo José Cela–Journey To The Alcarria–translated by Frances M. López-Morillas. It concerns the author’s travels on foot through the Spanish countryside, in a region described by the writer of the introduction (Paul Ilie) as “a territory in New Castle, northeast of Madrid, surrounding most of Guadalajara province.” Here is an early paragraph in the book–the one that pulled me right in:
The Alcarria is a beautiful region which people apparently have no desire to visit. I walked through it for a number of days, and I liked it. It is a region of great variety, and except for honey (the dealers buy up all of that), it has everything: wheat, potatoes, goats, olives, tomatoes, and game. The people seemed like honest folk; they speak magnificent Spanish with a fine pure accent, and though they didn’t know much about what I was doing there, they treated me well and fed me, sometimes scantily, but always with kindness. There was one town where they even made me a guest of honor of the town council and paid my bill at the inn; in another, perhaps by way of compensation, they threw me in jail by order of the mayor (who was a drunken, tongue-tied albino), and kept me there for a day and a night, locked in a stinking cellar and nourished on garlic soup and a couple of mouthfuls of wine dregs. There was a gypsy about my own age in the cell, who had stolen a mule. He thought, Heaven knows why, that I was a traveling actor, and kept asking me, “If you’re an artist, why don’t you say so?” The poor fellow simply couldn’t get into his head that it wasn’t because I didn’t want to say so, but simply that I wasn’t an artist. I don’t mention this town in the book because I couldn’t say much of anything pleasant about it.
‘I don’t think I want to get mixed up in all that.’
Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge. Nowadays time lacks the expansive quality it had when I was eleven years old. But more than three weeks and less than five months elapsed between the day she moved in and the terrible afternoon he noticed her crouching behind the frosted glass shower door in the front bathroom, and kicked her out.
Maud Newton, in Granta 104: Fathers
(Via Richard)
Dear casual readers of clusterflock
As I’ve said before, come for the posts, stay for the comments.
