Thursday, August 26, 2010

Rising waters overtake us all

On my drives to and fro, I've been rolling in Horace and blasting some NPR.  They have been talking about the Pakistani floods, and I realized that I've been profoundly ignorant about what's going on.  The BBC has a good article and incredible map that just, man.  To put a more personal face on it, I turned to Boston.com's Big Picture.  #11, a father clutching his children, seeing safety and rescue.

Donation info has been so sketchy, but it looks like the Red Cross is going, as is UNICEF.

In completely different news, you can watch video of an insane 'fire tornado'.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Amazing art stuff through time

Recently, two kind of amazing articles and accompanying pictures have kind of totally blown my mind.  There is a pretty massive period of time between each of them, but art is something we've always done.


They discovered ancient cave paintings in Petra.  2,000 years old, hidden for ages beneath, well, 2,000 years of crap.  There is a lovely article at the Guardian that delves into the history of the artists, the Nabataeans, who created this.  There is only one picture, which is so sad, I want to see more!


Speaking of pictures, fast forward just under 2,000 years. and wiggle over towards Russia.  It's 1909-1912, and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii took some crazy color pictures.  I know, color pictures?  I've seen some of these images before, but Boston.com's Big Picture feature has pulled together a ton of them, and they are seriously phenomenal.  To quote the article about how on earth they got such amazing pics:




 He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun.   



Seriously, go look at the pictures, they are fucking amazing.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

shoveling it all out

Ufdah!  It's been too hot to do anything.  It's finally approaching pleasant this weekend, so I am going to clean my studio space out.  My poor art table is buried under a solid 2 feet of crap.  Perhaps I can get down to a mere foot.  That would be exciting.  If I were more with it, I'd even post the before pictures now, but I'd rather avoid the walk of shame until I've got some after pics.

I also have a pretty incredible top sekrit project coming up, and I'm itching to shout it out, but for now, I JUST TEASE!
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