Morning Linkage (Jan 10)

Transportation

One of the things I love about the back­yard and small shop bike builders is how will­ing they are to share what they’ve done. A ran­dom pic of an orange bike post­ed on a cafe rac­er site brings the pre­vi­ous­ly anony­mous builder out of the wood­work with some CAD draw­ings and build pic­tures and hints of anoth­er bike in the works. (But damn — all that orange.)
http://www.returnofthecaferacers.com/2010/12/return-of-citrus-cafe-racer.html

A look at the work of Dean Jefferies and his role in the Hollywood car cul­ture of the 60’s. For Mustang lovers, Jefferies has a hand in the phan­tom fleet of ear­ly Shelbys.

Science

I did not know that Brazil pro­duces one-third of the cof­fee on the plan­et. Other inter­est­ing cof­fee facts lurk in this graphic.

Cappuccino Coast is the name that res­i­dents of Cape Town and envi­rons give to the rare phe­nom­e­na that turns the ocean swells into a thick brown­ish sea foam. This set of pic­tures makes the descrip­tion seem entire­ly right.

Art, Images, and Design

Take the dumpy kid and one of the weird birds from UP add a lit­tle St. George, shake well. Chad King gets the mix right in this quick one-off. Quick? That’s a speed paint­ing? Okay so the rest of us suck just a lit­tle more this morning.

His “real” work is smoother and tighter, and pleas­ing­ly puz­zling.

Imaginary Transportation

Fairy tale trans­porta­tion for girls. Inspiration.

Further inspi­ra­tion for fly­ing girls.

Animation

Lego live action/stop motion short. The cheesi­est mus­tache ever and a won­der­ful wall of lit­tle doors into oth­er peo­ple’s lives. Giggly fun.

out the door and knock ’em dead

Morning Linkage (Jan 7)

Transportation

The title of the post is more than suf­fi­cient. KLR 650 Cafe Racer. Just because, I suppose.

A lit­tle Cub done up by AFS Custom with a bird deflec­tor? Really? And well, anoth­er lit­tle Cub. I think. The orig­i­nal reports are in Chinese. I don’t real­ly care, I just love the bare met­al details of the “Indian”

Look through duck­tail and ratfinkbik­er’s flickr sets to see more awe­some bikes from the RIDEFREE show.

Another nice bike from the East. Bonita Applebum. A find from the Deus build-off. From eBay wreck­er to sweet lit­tle cafe bike. CB450 , of course. Nice inter­view with the builder, Pepe Luque.

Chic, funky, retro. There are a ton of words I can use but you’ll just have to look for your­self. A scat­ter­ing of vin­tage train cars are remade into a series of warm hap­py hotel rooms.

Art, Images, and Design

Making soda-pop at home just got a lot more appeal­ing. That is if you can still get Galaxy syrups in these cool robot shaped bot­tles.

Hopes, fears, and the con­sis­ten­cy of the human con­di­tion. All in black and white engrav­ings by Winsor McCay.

Everyday scenes unlay­ered with anatom­i­cal details. Blue ink lay­ers over the black and white draw­ings to intro­duce the first hint of unre­al­i­ty. Then the artist peels back lay­ers of the sub­jects to reveal details of anato­my. Graceful and chal­leng­ing. (NSFW — nudes and bones) Michael Reedy (artist’s site also NSFW)

Animation

Okay, Rango, yet anoth­er CGI ani­mals doing clas­sic film clichés big stu­dio ani­ma­tion. Slated for March release and no doubt going to be yet anoth­er ani­mat­ed jug­ger­naut and yet anoth­er nail in the cof­fin of the real, actu­al, human actor. Or not… The ani­ma­tors are using video of the (voice) actors as the ref­er­ence mate­r­i­al, par­tic­u­lar­ly for the emo­tion­al nuances of body pos­ture and facial expres­sions. A great new twist in the ongo­ing inte­gra­tion of CGI and live actors. Or you can just watch it for the shots of Johnny Depp doing some­thing fun­ny that is not Keith Richards.

have a great week­end, see you all Monday

Morning Linkage (Jan 6)

Transportation

Classic Gulf rac­ing liv­ery has always been one of my favorites. And a bob­ber isn’t a bad thing. So here we have an H‑D bob­ber in a very nice ren­di­tion of the Gulf liv­ery. Yeah, I’ll give that one shop space.

Some dear friends are of a cer­tain age, and this Kawasaki Z1 cus­tom will bring sighs of recog­ni­tion. And then awe, this is every­thing the Z1 could have been if mod­ern forks and brakes, as well as mod­ern man­u­fac­tur­ing stan­dards had been avail­able then.

The fun of pho­tograph­ing a 1951 Cooper Mk V, and a bit of the his­to­ry of the demon. Like so many oth­er rac­ers — it’s a string of bitza pro­to­types more than an actu­al “mod­el.” It’s also way too cute.

Science

I’ve seen these micro­scope images of snow flakes in a cou­ple of places. But nowhere are they as neat­ly tied to the uni­verse as here on Akira the Don’s site where they are intro­duced with “Every lit­tle girl has got the galaxy inside her/ fun­ny how we always told the very same tales.”

Tools

Things I did­n’t know… A box scraper real­ly was orig­i­nal­ly used to scrape box­es or rather to scrape the labels off of box­es so that they could be reused.

Art, Images, and Design

Bright, bold, and um, gooey? Matt Mignanelli. Way bet­ter than any of the “psy­che­del­ic” album cov­ers of our youth.

Thieves. More bikes and rid­ers done by the excel­lent French graph­ic artists at Silence TV. Clean lines, telling tonal val­ues, and miss­ing pieces.

Flat faced, elon­gat­ed crea­tures with scaly exte­ri­ors draw in black and white, Phlegm does a cou­ple of walls in Sheffield.

Happy mak­ing stor­age sys­tem. Bird hous­es on a pole for your kids room, erm, front hall.

Morning Linkage (Jan 5)

Transportation

If you’ve got 25 min­utes to kill and the desire for a new career in the excit­ing field of mil­i­tary avi­a­tion you might want to sit down with this video. Or maybe if you need at a look of the unfor­tu­nate his­to­ry of humor and pret­ty girls in train­ing films. 1943 Army Air Forces P‑47 Thunderbolt train­ing video. That real­ly is worth a watch for plane fiends. (Video 24:41)

For my SuperMoto lov­ing friends. The Black Pearl. But could you go out and get this one all dirty?

Pure, unadul­ter­at­ed yum. BSA Gold Star Daytona Special. Because some­time restora­tion is way more effec­tive than customizing.

Science

Must be some­thing about the hol­i­day hang­over but I can’t wrap my mind around any sort of seri­ous sci­ence news. Instead you get shit like this… io9 writ­ers and com­menters rule the world (again.) Why we need to do real, exper­i­men­tal sci­ence. Involves giraffes and water and no computers.

More help­ful­ly, and more seri­ous­ly. An insight­ful decon­struc­tion of the sub­tle aids that Google maps use to make their maps the most read­able maps on the web. (Arguably.)

Art, Images, and Design

Jim Flora did this Baba Yaga late in his life. Wonderful depic­tion of the wise old witch.

Tangentially, I was watch­ing a doc­u­men­tary recent­ly and saw a pic­ture of the cov­er of Charlie Parker’s Charlie Parker with Strings. Not my fav Bird album but the art work is way cool. So I went look­ing… David Stone Martin did tons of the cov­ers that I remem­ber from my child­hood. Including the one at the top of the post. (NSFW — artis­tic nudes)

Animation

Pop-up fairy tales in French. Not at all what you’re expecting.

Morning Linkage (Jan 4)

Transportation

KZ400 by Mad Crow in Barcelona. The head­light and tank details make it special.

There are many things to like about this Wrenchmonkees Ducati 750ss. The frame treat­ment, the col­ors, and the front clip.

I nev­er can quite seem to wrap my mind around the idea of a bike called a Virago. But the front end of this XV750 brings me pret­ty close to what I think it should be. On the oth­er hand, no Virago I’ve ever met had such a tee­ny inef­fec­tu­al rear end.

Science

What is the evo­lu­tion­ary pur­pose of tick­ling? An incred­i­bly impor­tant ques­tion whose answer remains a mys­tery. (And whose impor­tance is total­ly poo-poo’d by the spoil-sport commenters. )

Art, Images, and Design

The idea of deliv­er­ing teach­ing mate­ri­als as a sec­ondary use of the card­board box the food aid rice came in is … well I don’t know, either inspired or con­de­scend­ing. With some thought and effort this could work very well. More com­mer­cial­ly, Amazon should jump on this  — imag­ine a box to ship toys in that turns into a toy.

Scary octo­pus but not in the way you expect. A col­lec­tion of plas­tic bags and oth­er trash takes on new life mean­der­ing through the streets of Slovenia.

The char­ac­ter ani­ma­tions in first per­son shoot­ers make me wince every time I see one. But some of the vehi­cle and weapon designs are first-rate. Like these from Damnation. Several nice guns and a bonus of a bike and a trike at the end. Winter build project anyone?

Animation

Information is Beautiful is branch­ing out into ani­ma­tion as a tech­nique for the visu­al dis­play of infor­ma­tion. Here is a Tetris inspired retelling of the world’s spend­ing habits. Debtris. This first effort gets an A for being infor­ma­tive and a D for the sound track. Watch, but turn the speak­ers down.