shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: postcards

Morning Linkage (Feb 7)

Transportation

I know a lot of 2 stroke fans. Most of them area lit­tle less than sane. All of them would do this in a heart beat. Just to have some­thing for run­ning around on the back roads.  JAWA 350 mods. (Video is loud.)

WTF? Trans­former bike for those who han­ker for both a cafe rac­er and a cruis­er but have lim­it­ed garage space. Video demon­strates the hydraulic change over. With seat height, rake, trail, wheel base (duh) and ground clear­ance all chang­ing to pro­duce two bikes. The V‑Rod based Veon by Krug­ger. It’s also not the ugli­est thing in the world. Close but not the ugliest.

Pret­ty girls on bikes. A lit­tle some­thing to bring cheer into your Monday.

Science

NASA makes the best dig­i­tal toys. Extreme Plant Makeover. Mess about with the Earth by chang­ing it’s size, dis­tance from the sun, type of sun, and age. It’s awful­ly easy to make a bar­ren waste land or fog­gy sog­gy giant. Plan­et hacking!

Art, Images, and Design

A reminder that art is not with­out its odd mys­ter­ies and ongo­ing tiffs. We all know Raphael’s self-portrait. The guy with the perky nose and a dis­tant look sit­ting in front of a brown wall, unstruc­tured hat? But did you know that there’s a sec­ond paint­ing? Hid­ing in a vault, almost iden­ti­cal, and pos­si­bly as real as the one hang­ing in Uffizi? Nice lit­tle plot for a novel.

Bet­ty Boop, Mick­ey Mouse, and Kew­pie dolls, all mad­ly out of con­text in 1930’s Japan­ese post­cards. There are also skele­tons, and danc­ing cats. Our cul­tur­al mas­cots must have seemed impos­si­bly odd to the cre­ators of these.

Fer­ris Plock. Pieces cre­at­ed while in res­i­dence. Styled after ori­en­tal wood block prints and hang­ing scrolls but with mod­ern anom­alies — the croc­o­dile wears Keds.

Animation and Moving Images

One Wing Fly aka Y & M Nathan, Look under com­mer­cial work, there is a whole series of adverts that place a woman (real­ly beau­ti­ful) on a floor and have her “walk” through scenes. Poor­ly explained by me — utter­ly charm­ing in per­son. (Real­ly, good enough to war­rant a link into a flash-based site.)

Now off you go, it’s a busy week ahead.

Morning Linkage (Aug 10)

Transportation

1960’s show cars on post­cards. Start with the Fire­ball 500. Total morn­ing waster on flickr.

Mov­ing more freight, but not on the inter­states. Marine High­ways, inter-modal freight, short sea ship­ping, and RoRos.

The world’s only Muzeti 250. (1983 GSX 250) Sweet lit­tle bike.

Clas­sic of the Day. AJS 18.

Science

Astron­o­my pic­ture. The eclipse shad­ow cone — I’ve nev­er seen this so clear­ly. No date?

Ordi­nary super­pow­ers. First off — I love the image that io9 chose to illus­trate this. Okay, so did you know that you can train your­self to rec­og­nize Haidinger’s Brush. This allows you to detect polar­ized light. Um, I’m not sure how this is actu­al­ly going to be use­ful to any­one, but hey, you nev­er know…

Per­son­al­i­ty isn’t as sim­ple as your high school guid­ance coun­selor told you when she gave the results of you Meyer-Briggs tests and sug­gest­ed that trade school was your best option. And any hope that there might be genet­ic basis for per­son­al­i­ty seems to have been squashed by these find­ings from Australia.

But most­ly the above arti­cle is a link to this piece in the New York­er about Wal­ter Mis­chel. The man behind the one marsh­mal­low now or two marsh­mal­lows lat­er exper­i­ments. And the follow-up work with the kinder­gart­ners who were his first subjects.

Art, Images, and Design

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Mark Tuck­er is back from Ten­nessee and work­ing on the lat­est Jack Daniels commercials/ads. He’s pro­vid­ed some very nice pho­tographs and a cou­ple of “mak­ing of” video out­takes. If you watch the first video with the piglets turn the sound down — they squeal some­thing fierce.

Coralie Bickford-Smith is a book design­er for Pen­guins books. She is respon­si­ble for the jack­et and cloth bind­ings of the Pen­guin Clas­sics series. Some of the loveli­est books to be pro­duced late­ly. Be sure to look at her work for the Red Clas­sics Boys’ Adven­tures series as well.

Nice­ly done pic­tures from Tara Hunt’s pho­to stream of the New Zealand farm that served as the loca­tion for Hob­biton in the LoR movies. Door and win­dows are gone but the sheep have a place out of the rain.

Morning Linkage (Apr 20)

Transportation

Very pret­ty bicy­cles.

A love­ly, par­tial­ly built out Tri­umph Scram­bler. Clean look­ing and I like the low­er look.

One of the women in my stone set­ting class is Aus­tri­an. We had a gig­gle the oth­er day nam­ing Aus­tri­an motor­cy­cle com­pa­nies that no one else in the class had ever heard of — all of them — and then rem­i­nisc­ing about the lit­tle Puch mope­ds.

Some damned sil­ly stunt­ing on 99 between Eugene and Junc­tion City. In, um, 1938. Sweet­ness. (Music)

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Food and Packaging

Choco­late is good. The odd­ly uneven break-lines on the Bold bar are fun. The orange peel in dark choco­late just begs for taste test­ing. The white choco­late with green tea is utter­ly unap­pe­tiz­ing even if the pack­age is pretty.

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Art, Images, and Design

Illus­tra­tor Iv Irlov’s work is famil­iar to many mag­a­zine read­ers. Here’s a selec­tion of his most recent images. I love the stomp­ing robots he did for CEO Magazine.

Read­ing is dan­ger­ous. Just how dan­ger­ous is shown in these post­cards from Joost Swarte. Hap­py Tin-Tin feel­ing to the images.

I have no idea what’s tem­po­rary about Gideon Chase’s tem­po­rary blog but I love his work. Things are always bro­ken. Inter­est­ing­ly broken.

…anoth­er day anoth­er post…