2020 Hindsight

Dang it! I'm too late!!!!

I saw Andrei Herasimchuk @ Design by Fire throw a FlameFest Software Giveaway contest. I was jonesing for some old Adobe Software. Threw this together. Here's a link to the full sized image. Then I go back to his site and see that the contest is already over. Well, enjoy it Andrei... Blogmoving and deadlines and projects.. what's another too-late thing to add to the mix?

Extra, on the right. This is something simple (for grins), a refreshing change after that collage with layers and layers of imagery: Analog. Direct

cool origami site

Joseph Wu's Origami page. Has galleries. I like these bowls in the Paul Jackson gallery (it's a frames site; here's the link to the page-in-frame).

(the middle aged can enjoy this, too)

Paperfolding.com has a ton of links

Paintings under glass

Last night I attended Art Night Pasadena. It's been a while since I visited the Norton Simon museum. Lots of paintings were now behind glass. When looking at Kadinsky's Heavy Circles, I thought, Oh, what an interesting brushed metal look on that sphere. I looked again. No, it's not part of the painting, it's an artifact of the streaks on the glass, from whenever the glass was last cleaned and wiped down.

I found painting after painting obscured oh-so-slightly by weird reflections and streak marks. It was irritating, disheartening. Van Goghs. Rembrandts. Degas dancers. I asked a guard how long the paintings had been covered by glass. Her answer: About two years ago, someone came in and defaced some of the religious art with graffiti-- putting swastikas on the eyes of some of the paintings' subjects. So the glass is there to protect the art. No, she didn't know when the last time the janitors cleaned....

The bastards!! This is a classic case of how someone has to go and ruin it for the rest of us. Each time I see the streaks, I think of people who enter and mark and deface works of art kept for the benefit of all of us.

Also, I wonder what kind of cleaning process is used, that leaves streaks like that. I have awful pictures of a spray bottle (kssssh ksssssh ksssssh) with whatever glass cleaning solution. I'm sure that the curators see to it that it's better than this awful vision of mine, but with streaks like that, you never know....

On a separate note: the bicycle history at Pasadena Museum of History was way cool. Saw a pink and white Schwinn Lady Sting-Ray bike w/ banana seat and flowered wicker basket in mint condition. The bike I wanted to have, but didn't. Vintage 1965. Shown in the "bike history" cavalcade of bicycles. Damn, I'm getting old.

and the nominees are,,,,

Complete list of Oscar nominees. Having watched lots of the documentary and extra features for Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, I'm rooting for Peter Jackson et. al.

Art and Fear

Saw a reference to this from Scott Rosenberg, went to the original to read excerpts from a book called Art & Fear:Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by

David Bayles & Ted Orland. Looks fascinating.

Those who would make art might begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit. To survive as an artist requires confronting these troubles. Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue - or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.

and (saw this excerpted at Rosenberg, too)

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Extra! Extra! Master and Commander

I saw Master and Commander Friday night. So am glad to see this story of a person who answered an ad to be in a Peter Weir movie. And became an extra, part of the Surprise crew. [via Brianstorms]

all your candy are belong to us

Write a story; go to jail, epilogue: Case Dismissed!

But the felony charge stays on his record.

God bless Brian Robertson's Mom, who got the bright idea to Google the first sentence from his story (he borrowed a paragraph from a file he found on a school computer). (previous post about this story)

McFall, Robertson's attorney, said the tipping point in the case came when Robertson's mother uncovered new evidence last week that proved he didn't write the story's initial paragraph. After searching for the first sentence in Google, Kathy Robertson discovered the paragraph was part of a template that came on a CD-ROM for an Adobe PageMaker textbook.

"If the judge ever felt threatened by Brian Robertson as a dangerous student, this made it obvious that the writing was just an exercise in creativity," she said.

California, Donor State: For each $1 paid to feds, it gets back 77¢

It's a trend: California gives more than it gets. Each year less and less. (tho during the Reagan defense buildup, more monies poured into the state than went out)

California remains the government's largest single source of taxpayer dollars, flooding the U.S. Treasury with $256 billion in taxes during the past fiscal year. But the state received just $206 billion back in federal spending, according to the California Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

The state's share amounts to a 77-cent return for every dollar that Californians send to Washington, compared with an 82-cent return the previous year. In three years, it was a decline from 88 cents.

That's for federal tax, and for gasoline tax as well:

California is the largest source of revenue from the 18.4 cents-a-gallon federal gasoline tax, which largely fuels the Transportation Department's budget, but annually sees a shortfall in what the state gets back.

Digital Storytelling Festival Weblog

Just scrolling through the entries of the just-transpired Digital Storytelling Festival from Sedona. Color me wistful. Very intensely wistful. Man, oh man, would I have liked to have been there!