New Project - AIR

http://air.dynalias.com/air

My ongoing work on a novel =)

(Yes, aspiring novelists are like lawyers...never in short supply of them)

New Blog!

Head's up!

I created a new blog, Etat d'Esprit ! (means "frame of mind" but "state of mind" literally)

It features an array of topics, from weird but interesting things to, yes, literature (of course) but current events as well.

You can check it now at: http://etatesprit.wordpress.com/ and thanks =D

Incredible Hand Paintings

Guido Daniele (I do believe he's Italian) is a bodypainter who creates extraordinary art using hands and other body parts. He mainly creates animals here, but he does numerous other things as well.

Link:

Guido Daniele - Official Website with Pictures: http://www.guidodaniele.com/bodypaint01.htm

Examples:

Lego Artist

Okay, so I know that there's already some Lego artists out there right now, but this dude has got to be one of the best.

He's Nathan Sawaya, and he's a dude who obviously has a lot of time on his hands. (Which isn't a bad thing. Dunno about you, but I would personally kill to have more than just 24 hours a day) According to the article at CNN.com I read, he's already traveled the US doing exhibitions. (Nathan also apparently built a functioning air conditioner once.)

Nathan makes a living out of his Lego art, with some pieces selling for tens of thousands of dollars.

Links:

CNN Full Article: http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/05/31/lego.artist/index.html

Blogzine with Pictures: http://haha.nu/amazing/nathan-sawaya-the-lego-artist-2


Some of my personal favourites:

Bent Objects

The cool guy who creates these photos, Terry, has, in my opinion, a brilliant sense of humour, art, and originality.

What he does is he takes these little, everyday objects such as paperclips, pieces of wire, fruit, mini hourglasses, toilet paper rolls, etc., and assembles them into these fantastic scenes, which he photographs.

Blogger Link: http://www.bentobjects.blogspot.com/

Examples:

A Slight Chemical Imbalance

Just One of Those Days

Prehistoric Citrus Were Very Clever Hunters

Italian Food Is Serious Business

Chained To His Desk

This Chap Sticks The Landing

I loved them so much I installed a little feed widget on the left-hand side of this page =D

Surrealism by Vladimir Kush & Jacek Yerka

Examples of works by Vladimir Kush (Page 2 link located at the bottom of the pictures, above the response posts): http://www.zuzafun.com/surreal-paintings-of-vladimir-kush

Examples of works by Jacek Yerka: http://www.zuzafun.com/surreal-paintings-of-jacek-yerka

Official Website of Vladimir Kush: (all works plus description with most): http://www.vladimirkush.com/


Vladimir Kush is a Russian-born surrealism painter and sculptor who refers to his work as metaphorical realism. I, however, refer to his work as inspired by Dali with a touch of Margitte, plus a whole lot of brilliant and creative work. Some examples:

There are also some pretty impressive surrealism by Jacek Yerka as well, like below...

Eyescapes

Link: http://www.art-dept.com/artists/rankin/portfolio/specialprojects/eyescapes/portfolio.html

There's no words, just large pictures of differently-coloured irises. o_O

It looks kind of disturbing at first, like they're all staring at you or something (which I guess they are) but then you look more closely at it and it's very...fascinating.

Who could have guessed that eyes were so interesting?

Some examples:

Fat Fingers

Link: http://fatfingers.com/

What this is, basically, you type in what you're looking for on eBay here, and it automatically looks it up for you with that spelling plus, like, 30 more possible wrong spellings of that word.

For example, if you look up, say, Tiffany (as in the popular jewelry company), then it looks up all these spellings as well:
Tiffamy,Tiffaby,Tifgany,Tigfany,Tifdany,Tidfany,Tiffsny,Toffany,Tuffany,Tiffanu,Tiffant,Yiffany,Riffany,Tiffiny,Taffany,Tiffann,Tiffaay,Tifffny,Tiifany,TTffany,Tiffanyy,Tiffanny,Tiffaany,Tifffany,Tifffany,Tiiffany,TTiffany,Tiffa ny,Tiff any,Tif fany,Ti ffany,T iffany,Tiffayn,Tiffnay,Tifafny,Tfifany

And the result is tons of items on eBay that not many people bid on because there's a spelling mistake. Apparently it's supposed to save you a lot of money too.

Some Useful Condescending Phrases

One word: Ouch...

Link: http://marvin.ibest.uidaho.edu/~heckendo/usefulPhrases.html

1. Thank you. We're all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.
2. The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
3. I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.
4. Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
5. I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't care.
6. I like you. You remind me of when I was young and stupid.
7. What am I? Flypaper for freaks!?
8. I'm not being rude. You're just insignificant.
9. I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.
10. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.
11. It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off.
12. Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
13. No, my powers can only be used for good.
14. How about never? Is never good for you?
15. I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.
16. You sound reasonable...Time to up my medication.
17. I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.
18. I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...
19. I don't work here. I'm a consultant.
20. Who me? I just wander from room to room.
21. My toys! My toys! I can't do this job without my toys!
22. It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm really quite busy.
23. At least I have a positive attitude about my destructive habits.
24. You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.
25. I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.
26. Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.

500 Random Facts

Only the first 31 are posted here...I doubt anybody will have the time tor read all 500 in one go lol.

Here's the link for the rest: http://www.djtech.net/humor/useless_facts.htm

1. Most American car horns honk in the key of F.

2. The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan."

3. Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.

4. Every time you lick a stamp, you consume 1/10 of a calorie.

5. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.

6. Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself.

7. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every 2 weeks otherwise it will digest itself.

8. The citrus soda 7-UP was created in 1929; '7' was selected after the original 7-ounce containers and 'UP' for the direction of the bubbles.

9. 101 Dalmatians, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, and Mulan are the only Disney cartoons where both parents are present and don't die throughout the movie. .

10. A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.

11. 'Stewardesses' is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

12. To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs - it will let you go instantly.

13. Reindeer like to eat bananas.

14. No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver and purple.

15. The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."

16. Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots.

17. The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

18. The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II Killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

19. More people are killed annually by donkeys than airplane crashes.

20. A 'jiffy' is a unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

21. A whale's penis is called a dork.

22. Because of the rotation of the earth, an object can be thrown farther if it is thrown west.

23. The average person spends 6 months of their life sitting at red lights.

24. In 1912 a law passed in Nebraska where drivers in the country at night were required to stop every 150 yards, send up a skyrocket, wait eight minutes for the road to clear before proceeding cautiously, all the while blowing their horn and shooting off flares.

25. More Monopoly money is printed in a year, than real money throughout the world.

26. Caesar salad has nothing to do with any of the Caesars. It was first concocted in a bar in Tijuana, Mexico, in the 1920's.

27. One quarter of the bones in your body are in your feet.

28. Crocodiles and alligators are surprisingly fast on land. Although they are rapid, they are not agile. So, if being chased by one, run in a zigzag line to lose him or her.

29. Seattle’s Fremont Bridge rises up and down more than any drawbridge in the world.

30. Right-handed people live, on average; nine years longer than left handed people.

31. Ten percent of the Russian government's income comes from the sale of vodka.

StumbleUpon - Procrastinator Heaven!

Okay so I recently installed a Firefox add-on called StumbleUpon and, I gotta say, I love it!
What it does is you sign up (really quick) and it shows you lists of tons of subjects like Fine Arts, Creative Writing, Knitting, Autos, Opera...the list goes on and on. Then you tick all the boxes that interest you, and every time you click the Stumble! button on your Firefox toolbar, it leads to random website about one or more of the subjects you said you were interested in.

(Also, it adds your own website to the StumbleUpon list for a small fee if you want too...Increases your traffic substantially, or so I've heard.)

I tell you, it's perfect for procrastinators, a.k.a. yours truly.

I will be posting interesting things I found when Stumbling soon.

Here are the links for StumbleUpon :

Main Website: http://www.stumbleupon.com/

To download Firefox (IE version available on main website) add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/138

the Elusive

This could be something else.

This is the means to deliver groundbreaking news a nanosecond before they mutter, "Well, this is awkward..."

This is pinning the horseshoe upside-down and getting the devil to hold in your luck anyway.

This is watching Romeo kneel under Juliet's balcony, and not calling it teenage stupidity, but rather raging hormones and some sort of medieval crack, as a person who shall remain anonymous once said.

This is the genius who said that of course the chicken came before the egg, because eggs obviously can't have sex.

This is the battered heap of winnings slowly collected through time, and then suddenly gone, all gone, in a great gamble of cruel luck.

This means scratching out the fine line (if there ever was one) between the bold and the insane.

This is something else.

Escher's Birds

Neighbours have always found Auntie Lara to be a tad...well, odd. Some people claim it is her eccentric personality, and others say it’s more those ridiculous hats she always wears. Auntie Lara jokes around about it a lot, saying that she got lost in a garden maze once when she was little and have never been the same since. I didn’t really get it.

The day I came to visit, she was dressed in a lime-green sweater and an ivory-coloured gypsy skirt sewn with silver beads and miniature mirrors, which made it clank and jangle merrily every time she moved. As usual, there was a stuffed dove, bright orange this time, perched on top of her straw bonnet.

“Kat, darling, it’s so good to see you!” Auntie Lara gushed, enveloping me in her soft, thick arms. I stammered out a passable reply and she herded me into her house, chattering animatedly all the while. Everything went in one ear and out the other though, because her house was like an art museum: Every single whitewashed wall was crammed with newspaper clippings, photocopied images from books, and random complicated-looking doodles scribbled on torn-out pieces of scrap paper. Each picture glued, tacked and taped to the walls seemed to be all somehow alike in their peculiarity. Staring closely at the picture closest to where I was standing, I noticed some very strange and quite impossible details. Labelled Relativity, there were 16 faceless figures, all upright, left-leaning, or right-leaning. It was as if three kinds of gravity existed at the same time, and the little figures lived in their own world, oblivious to the sideways and upside-down people around them. There were also three gardens and five stairs that were even odder than the people: They were, like the people, tilted, but a few of them also had stairs on their undersides as well! One staircase had an upright person climbing it on one side, yet a left-leaning person was descending on the other side at the same time.

“Ah, I see you enjoy Escher’s art too!” Auntie Lara said happily, pricking my balloon of thought.

“Er...who?” I asked.

“M.C. Escher, darling. He was a most intriguing Dutch artist who liked to bend the rules of art to create impossible things,” she offered enthusiastically, eyes sparkling. “I find his works quite fascinating, as you can see.” Laughing, Auntie Lara gestured to the art-laden kitchen walls around us.

“Now, would you like to see your room?”

---

The wallpaper in my room was, of course, unusual. Snow-white birds entangled in curling shoots of ivy twined loosely with large bunches of leaves that somehow managed to look like miniature bird wings. No part of the picture was exactly alike, and it was easy to get lost among the swirling haze of white and green.

There was something missing on the wall that faced the bed. I couldn’t figure it out at first, but then it hit me like that time in Phys Ed. when someone smacked my forehead with a dodgeball: There was just another tangle of greenery where another bird should have been. When I pointed this out to Auntie Lara, she simply shrugged and raised an eyebrow.

That night as I lay asleep, I dreamt of Escher’s birds on my wallpaper. Cooing softly (they were apparently doves), they led me away with a soft rustle of their feathers. We were drifting over an impossible world, Escher’s world, where double-sided staircases and multiple gravities were the norm. As we flew over the strange scenes below us, the bizarre became even more bizarre. Bird people, insect curl-ups with a dozen pairs of feet, contrasting viewpoints from a dangerously tall building, hundreds of wild tessellations, reptiles coming to life from paper, drawn hands drawing themselves, fish in fish scales, magic mirrors, reflective spheres, neverending stairs, impossible architecture, and tribars, and running dwarves, and falling water going the wrong way...

Images spun around my mind like a carousel going a hundred miles an hour, and were whipped away, only to be replaced by another one in an eternal dance of the kind of reality so rare and deadly that you can afford to live it only in your dreams.

---

With a start, I woke up in a cold sweat panting in my now-twisted covers. Sitting up, I noticed that my hands were ice-cold, as if a freezing wind had struck at it for the entire night.

Glancing around the simple room filled with sunshine streaming in through the window, my eyes fell upon the part of the wallpaper with a missing bird. I nearly choked on my morning spit.

Another one of Escher’s birds was missing.

Leaping out of bed, mind whirling with impossible possibilities, I stumbled across room and stared at the two empty spaces. Resting my elbows on the smooth wooden top of the dresser in front of the doves, I felt my bare skin brush against something soft and delicate.

A single snow-white feather.

---

Image #1 - inspired by an illustration from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick

Image #2 - Relativity by M.C. Escher

Dear Diary...

I think since the first time I poured out my heart on paper, I've kept at least 6 different diaries, all no doubt crammed with childish secrets ("I didn't make my bed today...I hope Mom doesn't notice!"), typical teenage ravings (OMGG HE IS SOOO HOT), and random scatterings of philosophical musings here and there (I bet the person who said 'step on a crack, break your mother's back' didn't have a mother. Or a father. Heck, he was a heartless orphan).

Everybody should have kept a diary once in his/her life. It's like a mandatory STOP! square on the board game of Life. If you didn't buy one, then somebody must have given you one as a Christmas or birthday present, with pretty stationary and shiny lock and key. I admit, I was quite ecstatic when I first got mine. 8 years old, I think, in the little shop in the lobby of the Disney hotel where I was staying over the summer. I still have it, you know. It's tucked away, hidden under a pile of old sweaters in my closet. My first diary had Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Snow White on it, with a cutout heart-shaped mirror stuck to it and girly, exaggerated font with rather Barbie-like curlicues. (Yes, I had the Princess phase going on at the time. My next diary even had the words "Hello, Princess!" in purple font on the cover.)


You know the classic diary key? That tiny, simple one that every diary-manufacturer seems to use? That one was on my Disney Diary. I brought it along with me on a sleepover once to a friend's house, and lo and behold! My key could open her diary lock! Imagine! The coincidence! The magic! (Yes I was rather naive as a child.)

I experienced the normal teenager routine: the Dreaded Hormones!
You can imagine what was in my diary during those starry-eyed years.
(And can you believe I actually blacked out all mentions of my crush when I went back to read it afterwards? Yes, it's not just an urban myth: Girls are way too . . . )

Eventually, just like nearly every other diary-writer, my entries started appearing weekly, not daily, and then they slowly trickled to a rare paragraph here or there. Finally, I just stopped writing them altogether. They had become a burden, like a tedious task that I felt forced to keep doing, rather than an eagerly-anticipated pleasure.

It took me 3 years to finish that diary.

During that time, I had begun, but never finished, 3 other diaries.

Diaries aren't meant to be finished. That's my theory. Notice how hard it is to finish one?

They're just meant to be a sounding board for people's thoughts, randomness, rages, lovesick speeches, etc. They don't really mind very much whether or not you finish them.

What's in your diary?

Tidbits from Europe

From top to bottom:

1. Saint Peter's Basilica, Vatican City (Rome)

2. Example of art in Basilica (ooh wonder what's beyond the glowing door...lol)

3. Roman ruins beside the Colosseum in Rome

4. St. Mark's Square in Venice

5. See above

6. A canal in Venice