shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: KTM

Morning Linkage (Dec 14)

Transportation

We’ve had some bad weath­er around here late­ly. Too much rain leads to sat­u­rat­ed ground which leads to mud and rock slides. Here’s one of the fab pics from the WA-DOT of some of the clear­ing activ­i­ty. This one is on Chuck­anut Dri­ve a bit north of here.

Some­thing spe­cial for afi­ciona­dos of the small­er makes. A visu­al his­to­ry of KTM. Sad­ly with­out iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion for the bikes. Still fun.

Science

Per­haps all those flood myths in the mid­dle east have a basis in a pre­vi­ous round of glob­al warm­ing? Are the remains of a once thriv­ing civ­i­liza­tion damply wait­ing for us beneath the Per­sian Gulf.

Art, Design, and Images

A lit­tle over the top for most office recep­tion areas but if you have the need… TF2 sen­try gun. (WETA, of course)

Thomas Perkins draws trip­tych comics. Every day. On his three kids’ lunch bags. And he posts them for the rest of us to enjoy.

Animation

Is it even pos­si­ble that I did not post this the first time I saw it? BLU makes ani­ma­tion on build­ings. Real­ly. The evo­lu­tion of life on earth.

There you go my dears, see you tomorrow.

Morning Linkage (Dec 7)

Transportation

Seem­ing­ly ran­dom, Japan­ese, custom-bike guy blog. I pre­fer look­ing at these with­out the assis­tance of Google trans­late. The sto­ry of one guy’s life, his friends, his lunch­es, and his bikes. (Occa­sion­al bits of NSFW — most­ly ani­me girls.)

For all of you drinkers of the Orange kool-aid who were dis­ap­point­ed by the small (125cc) size of the pro­posed KTM mini machines can relax. There’s a new pro­pos­al — for a 250 or 300. Some­time in 2012? Maybe that’s long enough for them to find some­one to do some­thing about the 1980’s era water­craft graph­ics. Urk. (And, yes, I know that’s the pro­mo pic for the 125.)

The pho­tog­ra­pher’s site is down for main­te­nance. But here are a hand­ful of Christo­pher Wilson’s images from the salt. Ethe­re­al indeed. (thanks Chicane)

Science

A lit­tle fic­tion leads to a whole bunch of facts and a cou­ple of videos about giant squid.

Art, Images, and Design

Anoth­er of the Por­tuguese artists from the turn of the last cen­tu­ry. Amadeo Souza Car­dosa is lit­tle known out­side of his home coun­try. Bright, often geo­met­ric, paint­ings full of life and good humor.

Do pup­pets count as design or ani­ma­tion? The giant pup­pets of Roy­al de Luxe arrived in Mex­i­co City with a spe­cial per­for­mance for the bicentennial.

Lit­tle, frag­ile, ephemer­al bits of the real world are added to Micheal Aaron William’s street art. Heartbreaking.

Animation

I want to like this. I think I like this. The trail­er for O Apos­to­lo. Fright­en­ing folk and fairy tales from North­ern Spain. Review in Eng­lish, trail­er in Span­ish. (Video 1:06)

keep calm and car­ry on

Morning Linkage (Aug 20)

Transportation

Cher­ry picked from the var­i­ous flickr tags and a cou­ple of col­lec­tor web­sites. Dark Roast Blend brings you Clas­sic Trash Trucks. Includ­ing a Dempsey Dump­mas­ter seen all over West­ern PA dur­ing my child­hood and ori­gin of the term Dempsey Dump­ster for a drop box. I did­n’t know they had any oth­er name until I was in my 20s.

If the H1 were a lad, it would be the sort of boy you des­per­ate­ly hoped your daugh­ter would­n’t bring home. Fast, noisy, dan­ger­ous — and such bril­liant fun to be with.” A nice write up about one of the first hooli­gan bikes. A pleas­ant stroll down mem­o­ry lane for one or two of my fav boys.

Rumors, teasers, pho­to gal­leries. It’s all here. Now if KTM would just give us a date and a price for the lit­tle 125 stunter we’d all be happy.

Ancient Cultures and Archeology

We’re so used to the view of clas­si­cal Greece as a white mar­ble par­adise that we build our own great mon­u­ments to look like them. Um, not so fast. The Wash­ing­ton Post exam­ines the ori­gin of the clas­si­cal look

… and Colour Lovers gives us a look at what those cold clas­si­cal fig­ures actu­al­ly looked like in glo­ri­ous col­or. (Oh my eyes)

Art, Images, and Design

The take away from this col­lec­tion of Japan­ese sub­way posters is — don’t take up more than your fair share of space, remem­ber your umbrel­la, and don’t drop your chew­ing gum on the floor. M’kay? I love the graphics.

I enjoy the dai­ly image or two from Cov­ered, a blog that posts clas­sic com­ic book cov­ers re-drawn by con­tem­po­rary artists. Some days they’re nice but unre­mark­able. Some days you get this won­der­ful rework­ing of a Tin-Tin cover.

Hours and hours of look­ing and dream­ing. Over 100 maps, new, old, and some­times incom­pre­hen­si­ble.

Black & white Hong Kong. Pho­tographs by Fan Ho. I am par­tic­u­lar­ly tak­en by the images col­lect­ed in “The Liv­ing Theater”

move along now, you have things to do.

Morning Linkage (Apr 22)

Transportation

Hel­lo Kit­ty tank — is there noth­ing that can not be made more
ridicu­lous with the addi­tion of pink paint and that evil feline?

I have a soft spot for Scram­blers. Maybe I’m just old school that way.
This one belongs to some guy named Mike — he’s work­ing his way through
his ’06 doing the lit­tle mods that make a good bike great.

Bike­EXIF gets it wrong again. And Bike­EX­IF’s read­ers do the spade work to iden­ti­fy the “Tri­umph” as most like­ly a BSA and the name of the cus­tom shop that built this chal­leng­ing­ly shiny bobber.

For those of you in the mar­ket for a new desk­top wall paper, there’s a Turk­ish KTM ad here might do. Depend­ing on your office culture ;-)

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Literature

Japan is awash in the pulp paper ver­sions of man­ga. Here’s a wry use of the result­ing waste stream. I don’t think this farm­ing tech­nique will scale but the idea of putting seeds into the detri­tus of imag­i­na­tion pleas­es me.

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Science

We’ve all been oohing and aahing over the pho­tos of the erup­tion of Eyjaf­jal­la­jokull in Ice­land. But there are storms right here at home (well Kansas and Nebras­ka) that offer equal­ly stun­ning photo-ops. This gallery from 2004 is par­tic­u­lar­ly choice.

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Art, Images, and Design

Ban­sksy’s movie “Exit Through the Gift Shop” gets a big­ger open­ing soon. Pieces of his art are show­ing up in LA.
This park­ing sign and this cop with a use­less K‑9 unit in an aban­doned park­ing garage. (video has music but not awful music) but then this hap­pened:

Exit Through the Gift Shop trail­er here.  Opens April 23 in Seattle.

and that my dears is anoth­er day…

Morning Linkage (Mar 31)

Transportation

Oh sweet baby jee­bus. A 1970 Husky 400 Cross all fet­tled up and ready to go… to the 2010 Baja 500? Mucho gory details on the build-out build-up. (The rest of the site will send cer­tain men I know into nos­tal­gia comas for a week.)

KTM’s e‑bike.

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Society and Culture

All pub­lish­ing eyes are on the iPad as the big boys of books wait to see how much fur­ther Apple can push eBook pen­e­tra­tion into the main­stream (of the tech­ni­cal elite.) Some of the self-publishing ser­vices are also prepar­ing for Apple book store publication.

Sec­ond in my heart only to car­i­ca­tures of Hel­lo kit­ty are mash-ups of My Lit­tle Pony. I bog­gle at the idea that some­one went to  the trou­ble to find 45 of these things. If you have a favorite pop cul­ture trope it’s here.  I’m dis­mayed that the crafts­man­ship dis­played on some of these has­n’t been put to bet­ter use.

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Art, Images, and Design

The pic­ture of this spider/tractor hybrid have made the rounds and end­ed up on That Will Buff Out, but here’s what they did­n’t show you. The orig­i­nal CGI footage. Sweet.

Lob­by cards adver­tise the cur­rent and up-coming fea­ture films. They’ve been around for ages. And some of them are full of awe­some. Like this col­lec­tion of Mex­i­can film cards.

I hear you can buy your own on-line. Steve Wor­thing­ton calls out three eBay sources at the bot­tom of this post. No I am not going to admit to look­ing — or buy­ing. (The video is a scream — but NSFW)

This will take you more than a few min­utes to work through but Smash­ing mag­a­zine’s col­lec­tion of 50 images of India will def­i­nite­ly give you some­thing to day­dream about.