Comments from outside the Paranormal book isle
Mood:  happy
Topic: Hmmm?

Sometimes I really love how newspapers have made their online articles comment friendly online.  While I was reading Tennant and District Times of Australia article:  UFOs frighten Marlinja family, I found a reference in the comments to something called Nibiru and how its impending approach is causing the increasing occurrences of UFOs.  

My interest is always peaked when a hitherto unknown group of die-hards or a secret society or subculture is hinted at.   I only dabble in reading things like Paranormal Magazine regularly, so I had never heard of a 10th planet on an extended elliptical orbit that's next coming was predicted by a thousands of years old Sumerian myth.  

For those of you who do also not know, and who often haunt areas of the book store that are not the Paranormal and New Age section--here's what I found out.  Nibiru was written by in depth by Zecharia Sitchin.  Before Sitchin, the Sumerian myth of a race of aliens who mined Earth for its gold and genetically altered apes to be the superworker human race and the anomalies in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.  There has also been an anomalous space object spotted in the direction of Orion in 1983 which was speculatively dubbed Planet X.  For believers of Stichin, this Planet X is Nibiru, and its approach will cause something akin to the end of the world.  

What I find interestingly thorough about the Nibiru researchers claims is that almost every astronomical prediction for the coming years--the pole shifting, the massive earth changes--can all be tied into the gravitational upset that will happen when Nibiru arrives.  The great flood, Sumerian and Egyptian technological advances, and all can also be tied into Nibiru's and its inhabitants effect on our planet.  Like so many other wholly-too-large-to-be-comprehended or proven theories about our planet, individual acceptance of Nibiru's existence is a faith thing.  

NASA discovers 10th planet. 

About.com's Paranormal Phenomena article 

Tables
Mood:  quizzical
Topic: Oh So Shiny Home

It's no surprise that I, once again, will be extolling the wonder of things that are more than the things they are.  I do so love built in surprise and function and decoration.  So, today we are looking at awesome tables that are more than they are/or appear to be. 

 

 

Vase table from Paul Loebach (via Design Milk), and Play coffee table from BCXSY (via Apartment Therapy). 

 

Sheep from Itay Ohaly (via MoCo Loco), Daydream coffee table by Yu Zhao (via Apartment Therapy).

Charles Constantine's Coffin Table (via Inhabitat).  AZE design's Messy Table Cloth (via Serious Eats) would make any old table you already have interesting.

Thomas Doyle's miniatures
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: Oh So Shiny

Thomas Doyle encapsulates worry, fear, and our ability to live without looking at the world around us all in his tiny sculptures.  More than the sculptures themselves, that they are under glass allows the viewers to remain all wrapped up in their own little worlds while looking at the members of each intricately constructed scene being similarly wrapped up.  Soon enough, I'm imagining worlds within worlds like an infinite image.  Somewhere in this house is a tiny globed sculpture of another house and its inhabitants.  And somewhere far above me is someone looking into my glass enclosure.   

(via Craftzine) 

Old but good library news: living library
Mood:  happy
Topic: Hmmm?

An article from the Times Online outlines and gives wonderful insight to a new library project where-in library patrons can borrow a person for a set amount of time in order to learn more about them and the possible stereotypes that they may represent.  

“We work on the principle that extreme violence and aggression happens between people who don't know each other. So the Living Library can bring together people who are otherwise unlikely to meet. We want to show that not every Muslim wants to blow you up, not every policeman is a bully.” --Ronni Abergel (Living Library's founder)

This article is all old hat out in libraryblogland, but I finally got around to reading it and really enjoyed some of the insights from a participating 'book' on one of the living library nights.  It's not too difficult to look around and see that the advancement of industry in many countries has made it all the more easy for people not to interact and depend on one another.  The more and more we turn in towards ourselves and our own little circle of friends and family the more we deprive ourselves of knowing some truly amazing people and of forming ill concieved notions of what these strangers are really like.  

Redecorating the office
Mood:  bright
Topic: Oh So Shiny Home

While I fantasize over the perfect way to redecorate my office area at home, I often leave out the facts that the room also serves as a guest bedroom and band practice studio, as well as additional storage for the house.  So, what follows are dream pieces for if ever my office was only my office.  

 

Read like a book:  Aluminum desk at Cole Scego Design (via Boing Boing), Eames Aluminum Management Chair, Cubistorus at Art. Lebedev Studio (via Apartment Therapy), LA Scavenger found these awesome swivel chairs. 

 

Or I could have an otherwise empty room and just live in a desk house from  design-mong (via Boing Boing Gadgets). 

Mikhail Baryshnikov
Mood:  energetic
Topic: Hmmm?

Ah, VH1's I Love the 70s is really quite addictive and way too easy to leave on when there is really nothing else going on.  And that lead to this, me wondering what was going on with Mikhail Baryshnikov.  If I watched the show, I would have seen him on Sex and the City a couple of years ago, but I missed it.  A little bit more investigating yielded a couple of stories about his photography show just last month: New York Entertainment Interview, International Herald Tribune.  

When I was growing up Mikhail Baryshnikov was doing the impossible and making ballet popular among main stream audiences.  And when he eased away from ballet and more and more encorporated experimental coriography into his dance, he was still amazing enough to get my football player little brother to admit it. I don't know if there is anything more pleasure-filled than watching someone who has perfected an art perform.  Ah, memories.  I am glad that Baryshnikov seems to be doing well.

Vermillion Pleasure Night
Mood:  happy
Topic: Oh So Shiny
Vermillion Pleasure Night is a comedy skit show from Japan, and it will be your mind blowing wackiness quotient for any night you devote to perusing an episode.  It is shiny, and happy, and raunchy, and full of singing, and guaranteed to reshape the part of your heart devoted to comedy skit shows so that no other show will ever fit in it again.  Believe me.  If you've seen the Fuccons, or the 1 point English lessons on You Tube, then you have mearly sampled a tiny taste of what is to be had with the entire Vermillion Pleasure Night show. 

Green Porno with Isabella Rossellini
Mood:  energetic
Topic: Oh So Shiny

So, Green Porno by Isabella Rossellini has already been much discussed all over the web.  Really all over--too many links on a Google search to list.  I'd read about it so long ago and thought, hey, that sounds interesting, I'll have to take a look at those sometime.  Yeah, but I took my time with it.  Thanks to the miracles of Digital Cable (discount trial) On Demand channels, I have now seen these Green Porno shorts.  I find it very hard to discribe my reactions to their fullest except to say that I laughed so hard, and Rossellini is a genius, and I would show these to children even if they might be too imaginitively explicit for their fragile brains by popular opinion.  And I learned something--in the earth worm episode. 

If  you don't already know,  Green Porno is a series of short films by and starring Isabella Rossellini concerning the sex lives of various insects.  Her dead pan delivery of many informative and surprisingly funny lines makes them hilarious.  

Paper Fascination
Mood:  happy
Topic: Oh So Shiny

 You'd think that someone who likes to litter the floor with little bits of rubber stamp block and scrap paper creating her own stamps and collages for her own line of stationary would be able to resist snatching up every beautiful notebook and letter set that happens too close to her fingers.  Alas, that is not the case.  I create and buy more pretty papers than I can use, and I'm even attempting to be regular at real live writing to people.  So, in the effort to indulge my addictions with placebos, I will share these beautiful papers with you lucky people.

 

Your Secret Admiral's Etsy shop and Blog. 

Present & Correct (via Design*Sponge).

Maker's Notebook From Make: magazine (via Boing Boing). 

May Day Studio Etsy shop and website. 

Atomic Soda French Paper goods for sale at Heliotrope (via Decor8). 

Chewing the Cud Etsy shop (via Oh Joy!). 

floor plans
Mood:  bright
Topic: miscellanea

 

Josie and the Pussycats - better than you think it is
Mood:  happy
Topic: Oh So Shiny

Ok, so I've heard plenty of people trash this movie.  I'm hoping its not general opinion and I just hang around a lot of contrary people.  I mean, how can a movie about programming teenager's consumer behavior through music, that is also completely saturated with ad imagery be bad?  Everything is so candy colored and tongue in cheek, and yet still revolves around a story worthy of any Archie Comic. 

Allow for me to describe for you a scene.  The currently famous band Du Jour does an impromptu concert at the air strip for gaggles of pink clad lip glossed pre teens.  The girls are screaming for the band.  The band is singing "Back door lover."  Is there anyway that in a similar real life scenario those squealing teens would really know that they were cheering these lyrics?  

"... Runnin' my hands across your cheeks
they're oh so smooth and white
so leave the light on baby
and unlock your back door
i'll be comin' through that way tonight
to love you for sure

Lyin' on your bed starin' up at the moon
you got me crazy
but i'll love you soon

i'm your back door lover
comin' from behind with the lights down low..." 

 --Ok, so teens aren't innocent anymore ( maybe they never were), but that song 's just so WRONG in the funniest way.  You can be sure that the album would be banned by every parent and Wallmart in the country.  There are plenty of similarly 'just so WRONG' moments in the movie that really make it.  That's why it is awesome.  Really.

Vege frying pans
Mood:  happy
Topic: Hmmm?

 

So, over at NOTCOT is a post about the cast iron frying and blini pans designed decoratively for vegetarians by Mikko Laakkonen at Selki-Asema.  I have to admit, I am normally attracted to decoratively designed useful items, but I wonder about this.  I mean, how am I supposed to get my spatula under my pancake to flip it over?  For that matter, how much more difficult would this be to clean?  If I were a sensitive and adamant vegetarian I might be offended by the idea that I am seen as someone more concerned with aesthetics than utility simply because I am vegetarian.  And I would percieve this as some sort of meat eater's sadism--designing a pan that would make my kitchen time harder all the while wooing me with a vegetarian specific kitchen utensile.  I am currently talking out of my butt--but I'm having fun doing it.  Really, the whole cleaning issue irked me from the first time I saw this design, but it is pretty.

Bushnell Trail Camera and the secret lives of animals
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Ignore me please

Because this picture makes me imagine a crazy, mysterious, and secret life of animals, I must bring up the Bushnell Trail Camera award for the first picture of big-foot taken with their cameras (oh, thank you Cryptomundo). 

Now, I personally think a fantastical animal society where racoons use wild boars as transportation animals is more exciting than pictures of big foot.  But then, its like this picture from Fortean Times magazine I clipped long ago with a rat seemingly alighting from a landing duck.  Its just like The Rescuers.  

Draw yourself as a teen meme
Mood:  a-ok
Now Playing: Miyavi
Topic: miscellanea

I miss art class assignments, so a quick and fun drawing challenge was irresistable.  Though it doesn't look like I've changed too much.  Anyway, it all started here and there's a great list of most of the people who have participated so far.   Oh, the teen me is on the left and the now me is on the right.

 

 

 

World of Social Networks
Mood:  a-ok
Topic: Hmmm?

So, if you were really interested in making friends in other countries, you could use this handy map to pick the right social network.  Finding pen-pals has never been so easy.  From a little agency add in the back of a magazine that matched you up match-maker style with someone who suited you, to this.  I might actually have a reason to explore other social networking sites.  I always figured one was enough, but as they all pick their regions and their sub-cultures, one might not be.   From Le Monde, via Azeem Azar on twitter, via Tim O'Reilly's blog, via Boing Boing.