magpie's shiny things

Transportation

It’s final­ly warm again today but you nev­er know what the rest of the
win­ter may bring. For those of you who insist on rid­ing not matter
what. The next best thing to a Zamboni.

Phil Rudge, writes about rebuild­ing a 1931 Rudge Ulster. Did you know
that EMI once owned a motor­cy­cle man­u­fac­tur­er? I did­n’t. Excellent
Vintagent write up.

More machine video. This time instead of build­ing, it’s unbuilding.
Disassembling a Hyundai. Short and sweet. Light music.

Cars in camo look stu­pid. Except maybe this McLaren decked out for
win­ter test­ing in Sweden. Or maybe I just lust after the car.

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Science and Technology

The steel indus­try is alive and not so well. But not as bad as it was.

Twitter aids sci­ence. Local twit­ter reac­tions to earth­quakes leave
evi­dence for geologists.

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Society

The artists being ripped off by the record com­pa­nies (in Canada) may
find relief and the rest of us may find vin­di­ca­tion. There is talk of
the artists’ using the dam­age awards that RIAA has claimed in
copy­right infringe­ment cas­es as the basis for dam­ages to be claimed in
their fight for pay­ment. Ouch.

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Art, Image, and Design

Holiday cheer — Mr. and Mrs. Cthulhu Claus.

Scrap book­ing brought col­lage to the atten­tion of the mass­es. Here’s a
look at some of the his­to­ry of the form and some of the best
con­tem­po­rary work.

I don’t care for Roger Federer but look fur­ther into Hellovon’s
port­fo­lio for some fresh mono­chrome work.

More book art. This time a set of 3‑D adven­ture sto­ries carved out of pages.

Reg Mobasssa’s work is prob­a­bly famil­iar to many of you. The
Australian painter has been putting out pop images for 30+ years. He
answers ques­tions for Planet Blog and they pro­vide a nice selec­tion of
his work. (Vaguely NSFW — adam and eve)

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Animation

More fun with com­put­er ani­ma­tion soft­ware and Ninjas. Brett sent me
this one and owes me a keyboard.

Happy Tuesday campers,

Transportation

Indonesia born Charles Burki did illus­tra­tions in the 30’s and 40’s.
Vintagent brings us a cou­ple of Norton’s done from mem­o­ry while he was
held in a Japanese prison camp.

There’s a flickr pho­to­stream for every inter­est includ­ing Citroens.
This old van is unla­beled but cool in a rusty old way.

A much nicer old (style) truck is this bike hauler. (Also from Vintagent.)

Total Moto pr0n video. How the MV Agusta Brutale chas­sis goes togeth­er. And
the engine video as well. Say good­bye to your cof­fee break.

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Science

Last week I told you about Google Earth’s new tools for look­ing at
satel­lite pic­tures and track­ing eco­log­i­cal changes. The num­ber of
trees lost isn’t the only thing turn­ing up in the images. An entire
pre­vi­ous­ly unknown ancient civ­i­liza­tion has emerged.

Barbie famous­ly com­plained that “Math is hard” at least she didn’t
have an ele­phant in the class­room to dis­tract her. Giggle.

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Society

Another sal­vo in the war of con­tent own­ers on their customers.
Objections are being raised to treaty terms that would help to
guar­an­tee access to books in alter­nate for­mats for the blind. Claiming
that it would “begin to dis­man­tle the exist­ing glob­al treaty structure
of copy­right law.” The exist­ing struc­ture serves nei­ther cre­ators nor
audi­ence so why would I wor­ry about it’s demise?

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Art, Image and Design

Bakelite was (arguably) the first com­mer­cial plas­tic. Unlike most of
today’s plas­tics Bakelite improves with age. These brooches from the
col­lec­tion of Susan Kelner Freeman are for sale at Bonhams.

Tim Biskup is open­ing anoth­er show in Spain. The poster alone is
wor­thy of wall space.

Salvage sculp­ture takes a new turn when Miguel Rivera guts dead hard
dri­ves for their com­po­nents and cre­ates new objects. The moto is
fea­tured in the sec­ond image.

I am mor­ti­fied at hav­ing to present you with some­thing lodged on a
site called “wed­ding bee pro” but the Moyle sis­ters have the nicest
round up of images from the mid-century team of Alice and Martin
Provensen. (The sis­ters’ design work does­n’t suck either. I’m just a
lit­tle too expe­ri­enced to find wed­ding graph­ics charming.)

Ryan Berkley, a set of prints of anthro­po­mor­phic vil­lage characters.
Very British, very wonderful.

Something a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from the usu­al Urban Sketchers style.
Suggestive line work and loose col­or­ing. Views from the bus.

Annie Wu’s the­sis mate­r­i­al, quirky posters for imag­i­nary movies and
prod­ucts. Spaghetti Western meets Trigun with a lit­tle David Lynch
thrown in. Sort of.

Fabulous cut paper illus­tra­tions by Maurizio Santucci.

Get Back to Work is a stream of unat­trib­uted eye can­dy. Tank G’s
ori­gin isn’t eas­i­ly found on the web, but I’m not giv­ing up. There’s
got to be more of this good stuff.

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Video/Game

Turn off the sound. Now go here and build a robot.  You might want to
turn the sound back on when you make your robot dance. The tracks are
cho­sen with a wink.

Get back to work…

Transportation

Love the bike, love the pic­ture. Follow the link at the bot­tom for the full gallery — music warn­ing on the link.

For 2010, the Thruxton SE. I’m going to fig­ure out how to get the black cas­es on the one in the shop.

Trains and side­cars. Yay.

More trains. A Life gallery of box car logos. I grew up next to the tracks and remem­ber see­ing a lot of these, but not all of them.
http://www.life.com/image/50488757/in-gallery/37482/life-on-the-rails-boxcar-logos

What was Popular Mechanics think­ing? Some of the more ridicu­lous trans­porta­tion ideas float­ed by PopMech and Modern Mechanics. What, you don’t read the woot blog?

That damned cat is every­where. Hello Kitty flies. I just want an air­line meal that looks that close to edible.

I feel oblig­at­ed to report on this. Heels on Wheels. Sounds great — shoes and bikes. Dull.

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Science and Tech

Building Blog has a fas­ci­nat­ing illus­trat­ed inter­view on under­ground stor­age of nuclear mate­ri­als. Non-political for the most part, full of geeky geol­o­gy, build­ing tech, and gen­er­al sci­en­tif­ic good­ness.

From under­ground to the upper reach­es. Alien ori­gins of cer­tain gas­es hint at out­er space being as impor­tant as inner space in form­ing earth­’s atmosphere .

Speaking of space, Google opens up a suite of tools to use with satel­lite imagery to track changes on earth.

Eric Schmidt thinks you can avoid pri­va­cy prob­lems by not doing things that you’d be embar­rassed to have made public.(Okay that’s a lit­tle shal­low as an analy­sis of his state­ments.)  Bruce Schneier points out that pri­va­cy mat­ters not because you might have to explain to your boss why you drew a mus­tache on the Mona Lisa but because pri­va­cy is the anti­dote to tyran­ny.

I’ve always won­dered exact­ly how bad­ly fubared the eco­nom­ic mod­el for cell phone sales in the US is. Here’s a set of data points for the iPhone. Interesting. The cel­lu­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tions busi­ness mod­el should implode in about 30 minutes.

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Art, Images, Animation

Amanda Visell’s char­ac­ters make me smile. Check out the rab­bits. And there are pen­guins. Real pen­guins, fur­ther down the page.

Andy Kehoe is from Pittsburgh and now lives in Portland. This inter­view talks about his work for “The World Unseen and Those In Between” show­ing at Thinkspace, and his very cool stu­dio space.

Brandon Graham turns 33 and pro­vides us with a mas­sive, jum­bled post of his work. (NSFW for lan­guage and lingerie)

Today’s ani­ma­tion. Freaking beau­ti­ful images, adorable sto­ries. Click the Music Off link in the low­er left cor­ner. (Music/Christmas)

Stills from the ani­ma­tion with no music here.

Happy Friday,

Transportation

I adore the rear fend­er on this Bonneville cus­tom. New builder too, hmmm.

Mad Max, 1979. I only kind of got the bike thing back then; I wanted
the black inter­cep­tor. Lots of peo­ple loved the bikes. Especially
Goose’s police bike, liked it enough to build repli­cas. Lots of them.
A sum­ma­ry and a bunch of pointers.

A word of warn­ing for those liv­ing a lit­tle south of the hooved rat
zone. Anyone here hit a pen­guin?

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Design

Exploiting the exist­ing nature of your mate­ri­als is a hall­mark of
con­sid­ered design. Here wine bar­rels are recy­cled into stools. Not at
all what you’re expecting.

NMS. Nature Matching System. A pub­lic art project and a palette based
on pro­duce. Food through anoth­er lens. There’s not a col­or here that
would­n’t be nice on your walls.

I’ve post­ed the occa­sion­al point­er to cool ship­ping con­tain­er reuses.
WebUrbanist has a round up of 20 such. Hours of brows­ing and
daydreaming.

Sugar is good! Just ask Mary. Watusi, favorite word of the day.

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Art, Image, Illustration

How can run­ning out of gas be so roman­tic? Jonathan Viner’s lovely
Noble Pursuit. (It’s worth click­ing through to his full — flash -
portfolio.)

I’m going to spend more time look­ing at Patrick Hoelck’s por­traits.  A
selec­tion on Modern Met high­lights his use of dark, inky shad­ows.

The full set of por­traits and much, much more on his port­fo­lio site.

Letter press trad­ing cards. The seal is for marks­man­ship and the
goril­la is for sand rac­ing. It’s about a cat. (hint: card #7)

Off you go my dears, play nice­ly with one anoth­er today.

Transportation

American Motor Drome and the Wall of Death. And a woman named Sam who rides a ’31 Indian.

Hitting the pages of the WSJ means some­thing. In this case that motor­cy­cles have blipped the radar of the rich and love­ly. A cou­ple of nice pics and some commentary.

BMW goes with black and white graph­ics and a splash of red to pro­mote the S1000RR. The design­er has­n’t a clue. To wit: “We want­ed to avoid the typ­i­cal man­ga style, as it wasn’t aggres­sive enough to por­tray the per­son­al­i­ty of the S1000RR.” Not sure how such nice work could have come from some­one with such a lim­it­ed knowl­edge of the work of so many tal­ent­ed man­ga illustrators.

Kimi Raikkonen has one foot in the door of the WRC. ’nuff said.

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Society and Tech, Culture

The ACTA treaty is shap­ing up (in the dark…) to be a mon­u­men­tal dis­as­ter for artis­tic and tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion. No doubt the US big con­tent and their lack­eys the US gov­’t are right to fear sunlight.

And they’re doing it at the behest of scum like these record com­pa­nies who dai­ly rip off artists under the exist­ing sys­tem. Protecting whom?

If you found fun­ny tan­gles in your horse’s mane and tail recent­ly you might want to start a neigh­bor­hood witch hunt. But most­ly the My Little Pony pic is adorable.

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Images, Illustration Photography

Jean-Jacques Sempé pro­vid­ed cov­ers and car­toons for the New Yorker mag­a­zine dur­ing it’s glo­ry days. A gallery in Paris brings togeth­er 48 of them.

Lovely sketch and expla­na­tion of the infor­mal traf­fic code that allows so many cars to share so many nar­row roads and alleys in Korea.

A mar­velous­ly sur­re­al build­ing wall in Rotterdam by Brazilian Dalata

Benja Harney makes paper art for adver­tis­ing and edi­to­ri­als. These wings became part of a Hermes Christmas win­dow dis­play. Lots more work on his blog.

Another Hermes win­dow dis­play. A video image of an actress blows on the real scarf which gen­tly sways. The illu­sion is lovely.

I’m sav­ing up my quar­ters for a 50mm lens that I can crank all the way up (down?) to 1.4f, This col­lec­tion of images shows why I’ve got glass lust. (SFW)

Happy very chilly Monday my dears.