Clever

In the quest for clever and creative artistic endeavours I have now found the work of Belgian artist Ben Heine (he calls himself a "’visual creator’, though his rather cluttered website might belie this). His work encompasses a number of styles, but I specially like his photo-drawing hybrid pictures. He calls them ‘pencil vs camera’.

 

Clicking on the pictures will take you to Ben’s blog with information about the photos etc.

Ben’s photostream or his blog have the full range of his work.

Where would we be without maps

I don’t make any apology, I love maps. I don’t know why. I just do. It is why I have a collection of atlases and maps and why I am such a fan of the website Strange Maps. Recently, I have had two separate delightful map based pleasures.

The first pleasure came from a gift from my mother-in-law of an atlas that had belonged to her late husband’s grandfather. The Chambers’s Atlas For The People was published in 1846. It shows in both the maps and the text a very different world. Pre-Civil War United States consists of 26 states, some so-called ‘organised territories’ in the middle of the country and a huge area of ‘unorganised territories’ to the west.

With the creation of the country still 20 years away, Canada was known as British North America with a large area to the north entitled ‘Territory of the Hudson Bay Company’.  There is also reference to Russian America (Alaska) which is described as “a dreary country, inhabited by a few savages”. Yep, it was a very different world.

Of course being before the American Civil War and therefore before the abolition of slavery, the map of Africa is also interesting.

The whole centre of the continent is marked as ‘unexplored countries’ – this being 10 years before David Livingston started his explorations – and the coast of Nigeria appears on the map as ‘Slave Coast’.

The text states that “Civilisation is only to be met with in the settlements of the Europeans” No surprises in that attitude.

In 1846  convicts were still being sent to New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land was identified as a separate colony and South Australia had only recently been founded as a free colony. Although the continent was known as Australia (as well as New Holland), it wasn’t to become a country for another 45 years.

The text is even less complementary about the Australian Aborigines than it is about the Africans.

The second pleasure came when I was in London recently and visited the wonderful Magnificent Maps exhibition at the British Library.

The exhibition is subtitled “Power, Propaganda and Art” and features 80 fabulous maps, many of which were produced for rich and powerful people to display their realms. Most impressive is the Klenke Atlas which is the largest atlas in the world and displayed with the pages open for the first time in 350 years.

Other maps show the boundaries of territories, the progress of development and the fruits of wars. There are also maps which chart subtler conquests.

As with the 1846 atlas, this exhibition provides a wonderful history lesson and reminds one of how much seemingly mundane objects can tell such fascinatingly powerful stories. 

 

Alien Abductions

Do not be fooled. This picture is not a fake.

How do I know this? Because according to the Stop Alien Abductions website - 

• The photo was found by the wife of a special operations officer in the Air Force after he died. She did not know he had it until she had permission to review his papers. The photo was obtained from another investigator.

• There is an area 51 tag on the alien which may be hardly visible on the screen but can be seen better in the original photo.

• The photo is cropped but the real background is steel sheets and a chain link fence which look hastily erected, the kind that would be found in a military facility outpost.

• There is a dent in the plastic shroud around the alien which is not faked, indicating some kind of accident in transporting the creature.

If that doesn’t convince you of the veracity of the photograph, nothing will.

I had not realised that abduction and sexual assaults by aliens was such a huge problem until alerted to the issue by my daughter. She was clearly worried that I was not fully protecting myself from alien abduction with a Thought Screen Helmet

It appears that any hat will do as long as it looks silly, but the key ingredient is lining which is a volume-conductive, carbon-impregnated polyolefin called Velostat. (Don’t ask me what that means – ask 3M)

Apparently it works very well according to the anonymous testimonies on the website. A man in Kentucky has not been bothered by alien thought control since he has been wearing his helmet and women pictured below in the very fetching bonnet is quoted as saying  – "I have been abducted by aliens  for years and found stopabductions.com by a happy coincidence. The Thought Screen Helmet, invented by an expert, has stopped the unwelcome visitations and has raised me  and my family’s quality of life. Therefore I highly recommend it."

According to the website, there have only been four recorded failures of the helmet and in two of those cases the abductors were alien-human hybrids for which the helmet is ineffective. It appears that these hybrids can pull the helmets off!

We know quite a lot about aliens and their evil motives thanks to Sean Casteel who describes himself, on the world’s worst designed website, as the world’s most respected UFO journalist. I am slightly confused by this epitaph, given that on his website Sean Casteel describes Budd Hopkins as the world’s foremost expert on UFO abduction. Which is better – respected or expert? Anyway, if you can find your way around the site you will discover many stories of alien abduction.

For anyone crazy enough to want to read more, there are the fabulously po-faced International Centre for Abduction Research, Alien Abduction Experience and Research, and The Intruder Foundation, as well as the slightly disturbing Aliens and Children which bases almost all its evidence for alien abduction on some crude drawings by a child.

There is a great deal of wonderfully colourful testimony on these websites but so far I have been unable to find any information on the fundamental questions – who are these aliens, where do they come from, and how do they manage to disregard the basic principles of science? Oh and the other question – why are aliens almost singularly only interested in Americans?

Even More Gadgets

I make no apology for being a great fan of useless (or at least unnecessary) gadgets. I have previously written about Archie McPhee and Stupididiotic  and their wonderfully stupid gadget. Now here is another one – Fred and Friends – with a treasure trove of stuff you just have to have!

First up, for my percussionist grandson –

 

An elegant doorstop

Matryoshka doll measuring cups

Of course I have always wanted Easter Island ice cubes. Hasn’t everyone?

Or a tasteful milk jug?

There are pages of such wonders on the Fred and Friends website. Choose your own favourite.

I love browsing these catalogues, but I presume that people also buy the products. I am not sure that owning them is the point. There is just as much amusement in gawping unless something is really useful. Like … oh I don’t kn0w … maybe a finger food holder for parties.

 

Surely I could use a few of those.

You Can Never Be Too Careful

I am surprised this packet of thread doesn’t warn that it may contain nuts, and is 100% fat free.

Long time no write

It has been a while since I have been able to find the time to write anything, or perhaps since I had the motivation to write anything. It has left me wondering whether the blog has already passed into history, to be replace with the more immediate social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. I hope not. Don’t get me wrong, firing off a witty comment or eavesdropping on stranger’s conversations and photographs is fun enough. But hardly a fair exchange for a well-considered, well-written blog.

This train of thought is partially motivated by the last entry in one of my favourite blogs – Barista.  David has been such a reliable supplier of interesting anecdotes, stories and thoughtful articles, that I have felt quite bereft since he declared that he might be abandoning his blog – at least for the moment.

That then started a trawl through the various blogs I have bookmarked over the last couple of years. A surprising number of them have either been discontinued or neglected. Perhaps it’s not just me. It does take a fair effort to write a blog, especially if one is diligent with the hyperlinks, and it is hard to keep up the desire.

Mind you, as long as people continue to fill the web with little joys like this, it is worth having a blog to pass them on.

http://kontraband.com/videos/9269/Morphing-Maidens
Apparently I can’t post videos at the moment.

Reine, Reine Gueux E’veille

A joke entry in this week’s Guardian Weekly ‘Notes and Queries’ column , the motto of the French navy – “a l’eau, c’est l’heure”, reminded my of a book that I had forgotten about for the last 30 years which makes similar use of homophones.

The so-called, d’Antin Manuscript entitled Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames was published in the late 60’s and purports to be a set of ancient French poems.

 

The one I best remember went –

Et qui rit des curés d’Oc?, De Meuses raines, houp! de cloques.

The first time I read them, I laboriously tried to understand the French, until it was pointed out that I should read them out loud. Then the penny dropped.

Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.

Another well-know one is –

Un petit d’un petit, S’étonne aux Halles, Un petit d’un petit, Ah! Degrés te fallent

Each poem is accompanied but a straight-faced translation of the French.  “Et qui rit des curés d’Oc? De Meuses raines, houp! de cloques.” is translated as “he who laughs at the curés of Oc will have frogs leap at him from the Meuse river”.

The whole thing is a wonderfully witty read, as I have rediscovered this week.

D’Antin is in fact one time architect and later Hollywood actor Luis van Rooten. Mexican born Van Rooten was a master of languages and accents and found films roles that made use of this skill. 

How cynical can you get?

Although the main use of the Internet would seem to be for the distribution of erotica and pornography  (apart from its other use as a means of pirating copyright material), I have not been in the habit of writing about it. But as this blog is dedicated to the quest for the absurd and the odd, I cannot refrain from passing comment on this hilarious find – courtesy of Reuters (Shannon Stapleton).

 

This is from the tryouts for the Lingerie Football League. Yes that’s right. An American football competition between teams such as the Dallas Desire and the San Diego Seduction.

I suppose it is one way of livening up such a dull game. The exercise is so cynical that it does make me laugh though.

Little People

For some reason which I now don’t fully remember, I took a series of photographs back in the early 70’s of a tiny toy man I had found on the ground. I must have thought it amusing to record him in different situations.

 

So what a delight to find that someone is doing for real.

Photographer and website designer Vincent Bousserez has taken a series of photographs called Plastic Life. 

 

Some of these have been used in magazines including Esquire, Geez and Le Figaro.

More of Vincent Bousserez work can be found either via his flickr pages or on the galerie Bailly site.

Cryptic crosswords

As a parent, there are some things you pass onto your children with pleasure and pride. (Let’s forget the ones that are not such proud legacies). One of my joys which they have all inherited is the love of cryptic crosswords. We often do them together or discuss various clue over the telephone. I have extolled the virtues of global roaming on the mobile phone using one daughter’s request for help with a clue via an SMS while I was overseas as an example.

There have been many occasions when one or other of them have complained about the apparent age of the setters and the opacity of some of the older references in the clues. They do now know what a toff, swell or cove is but only after bitterly complaining about the ancient language.

How is someone in their twenties or thirties expected to associate Bob with hope let alone a shilling or Mae West with a life-jacket?  I am surprised at some that I can recognise from before my era, but another generation on it is a different presumption. There is nothing wrong with expanding one’s store of knowledge, useless or otherwise, from a crossword but some of these obsolete words really need to be retired from the crossword lexicon. 

Clearly I am not alone in this thought. A puzzle setter John Pidgeon wrote in a recent article in the Guardian 

” .. I enjoyed the erudite world into which crosswords drew me. Greek mythology, opera, literature, language, history, concealed in a coded formula that was a challenge to crack: learning made fun. Almost half a century later, however, setters are still marooned in a pre-1960s world. Recent crosswords have clued Alan Ladd and Leslie Caron, whose acting careers peaked in the 1950s, and Leslie Charteris, who created The Saint in 1928.”

He finishes

“..it is apparent that unless the crossword nudges itself into the 21st century and updates its references to connect with younger solvers, it will become as endangered a pastime as morris dancing.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The whole article is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/02/crossword-puzzles