Nixta Sinks

Yuki, 2005	Coke, 2006

Initially the DMC and I thought that Coke had pulled another one and ripped off someone else's idea and turned it into their own, but it turns out that they actually hired the original creative talent (Nagi Noda) and paid her coke money to do the same thing again.

The new one is slightly slicker, but not much. More characters, and so a greater variation in the casting, and the new one has that inherent Coke schmaltz about it that just drops it a few notches. Plus, I think a couple of the actors in the coke one were drunk or needed a piss.

Of course, to me this is hilarious because the artist's name means Naked Node in Slovenian.

There will be a Tracy Jordan appreciation post soon. In the meantime watch a number of the Saturday Night Live crew in the show (named after the address of NBC studios at Rockefeller Center) which won Alec Baldwin the Golden Globe TV Comedy Series Actor award.

30 Rock. When it comes to the UK, watch it.	Quick NBC promo. Concentrate on Kenneth, Tracy Jordan, and Jack Donaghy. It's a bit poorly done, but covers the bases.

Surrealistically brilliant, exemplifying how the US is steadily and surreptitiously learning to go round for round against the UK in surreal comedy. It's a more muted and subtle surrealism, and for me it works better. But the US does have about 10 times as many writers per script line than anyone else in the world. Who cares? Bravo!

Labels: 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin, Tracy Jordan

For gonzo journos

I think this whole concept is utterly wankworthy, but there are some good pieces in there. Sadly, it's cheap enough that a lot of tossers will get something for their machine. It's not a personal statement if you're picking it from a list now, is it? I've always enjoyed Steadman's stuff (the Old Farts Club has an Arts Club Ball poster he did in the 70s - posters from the 60s and 70s all seem to have naked chicks on them - his is bent over), so it was good to see two of his pieces in there, one of HST.

I'd rather have a custom Colorware MacBook, but the premium is retarded. If Colorware and Gelaskins got together in a 3-way with a custom artwork upload bit they could make some awesome babies.

“Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom”

Lieberman said (via).

Er. I'd always thought that tortoises were the tortoises of the animal kingdom [NB: it's not Joe Lieberman saying this, it's the Harvard Professor of Anthropology no less]

Little boys' wet dreams (Avro Lancaster from this incredible Russian archive)

I'm still fascinated by cutaway illustrations. As a child they were my staple, being core to any decent book on aircraft and tanks, and being the son of an architect who also happened to be a frustrated RAF pilot, himself a young boy during the war, guess what I was surrounded by (click for some more examples: F35B, Camper, and E-Type and a bunch more)?

Even toys of the time came in cutaway form (warning - I'm about to go into Star Wars mode). A kid's imaginative bridge into other worlds was best facilitated in this way, and a small boy's curiosity is piqued by nothing more than miniaturisation and despotic facilitation (making bugs fight, saving lives in Corgi car crashes with Corgi ambulances, building better Lego masterpieces for a better Lego world - actually, those little lego people never had toilets!). What little boy didn't want the Millenium Falcon's chess set, Wookie rules or otherwise? I would myself have settled for a Millennium Falcon or AT-AT walker toy.

I never had one... (images courtesy of)

Barnes Wallis's Wellington - real life cutaway

And who didn't imagine their toy soldiers actually getting up and beating the crap out of each other? Perhaps I went too far - my imaginary maulings and dismemberings, my armies being run over by tanks, painted sandbags blown to bits, brick-effect building walls crushing plastic head-scratching squaddies, turned me into something of a pacifist. I guess girls liked the same miniature animation and control thing with their dolls houses, but a disco ball? Really? No, only baby Maggie Thatchers of the world would have taken that the extra step to doll wars and utter domination of one's miniatures.

I never understood how anyone would have had the patience to draw these things. They were marvellous. Each "weave" in a Vickers Wellington basket-frame drawn as the fuselage was cut away to show the inside, where the detailing was also exquisite. I couldn't even draw the outside properly (I was about 7 at the time), so how could anyone draw something so intricate, let alone design it in the first place? Of course, Barnes Wallis was himself something of a Crazy Monkey Genius so perhaps I was setting my standards a little too high.

I had thought that with the onset of powerful computing abilities, with very lucrative gaming markets driving computer graphics theory and applications, that this was a lost art. But today, DMC set me straight. It's alive and well, and incredibly intricate.

An example of the incredible cutaway work at KHulsey.com

This site contains not only countless examples of the art, but also detailed tutorials on how it's done (both for cutaways (at first glance a ghost, but look at the engine) and "ghosting", providing a fantastic insight into the workings and mind-bending attention to detail of the industry. Although DMC primarily designs accessories, bags and shoes, many of the techniques that are used in the technical cutaways are relevant there too. And it never ceases to surprise me how useful something like a three-dimensional rendering of an object is to those tasked with building it from scratch. I suppose a bag isn't quite an ocean liner, but tailors take a two-dimensional plan and turn it into a suit, so how come factories in Hong Kong can't take two-dimensional plans and turn them into a bag without being "shown a fucking picture"?

The pioneering Russell W. Porter

KHulsey.com also contains a history of the main figures in the technical illustration and cutaway drawing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two of the big names are Japanese (Yoshiro Inomoto and Makoto Ouchi), although all four people listed (Inomoto, Ouchi, Porter and Kimble) produce stunning work. Check it all out if you have the time. This Hulsey Crazy Monkey Genius has put a lot of stuff up there to look at.

Labels: Art, Crazy Monkey Genius, Cutaway, Engineering

"I'm not saying there is someone out there, and I'm not saying there is someone who is not"

Virginia Tech police chief Wendell Flinchum on the possibility of a co-conspirator. To be fair, I'm sure he didn't sign up for this and would rather be shutting down frat parties full of strippers.

Labels: BBC

Get off that phone!

Erstwhile beekeeper (and constant sneaker geek) Dr. R had his bees killed in a storm, but apparently they're being knocked off in much larger numbers (via (via)). This is something I've read about on numerous occasions, but perhaps the first time it's tied in with my longstanding belief that we're all going to die from overloading of airwaves. I also never realised it had a name: CCD.

The most important question though is this: Is there anything Albert Einstein didn't say?

BeekeeperIn BC from Vancouver, Canada writes: I'd also like to add the following observation, attributed to Albert Einstein in an interview he gave to the der Spiegel, a German news magazine:

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man".

Labels: Bees, Einstein

The Harrisons, Clockwise from top-left: Tony, Rufus, Dani and me

I've long maintained that everyone needs their own Tony Harrison (see my earlier post for a video introduction or click here if you're too lazy). I was first sent mine by the elusive disconducive TSF (you can see it above). Although only the original Tony Harrison comes with a papoose, it's clear that everyone else ought to at least see what they'll look like as TH.

I must thank Doc Vagpoker for my introduction to The Mighty Boosh. He called me up one evening allafluster to alert me to my doppleganger being on TV. I switched over to see Noel Fielding as a Goth with a gorilla and thought little more of it, switching back to Boobarella Smackdown. Some two weeks later I happened to see the same Mighty Boosh episode again and settled down to watch the whole thing. There's so much churlish childish crap on TV these days that I'd fallen into the trap first time around of lumping this in with all of that, but as I watched it rapidly became clear that this was structured, considered, and above all entirely justified and immersive.

But I don't look anything like Vince Noir, especially now that I've grown a beard. Actually, that's a big part of *why* I grew a beard, but that's another story.

Hurry up and make more episodes already.

Labels: Mighty Boosh, Tony Harrison

Watch out! They're using science on us!

This brief spout of drivel at NPR (via, of all people) talks about defining the height of things as being closer to the moon than above sea level. Fair enough, and interesting, unless you get it all utterly wrong...

I haven't had a chance to think much about it, but the argument is full of such arbitrary nonsense as would shame a thirteen year-old student flicking elastic bands and bogeys around a physics lab.

Therefore people in Ecuador, Kenya, Tanzania and Indonesia are all a bit closer to the moon (not much, only about 13 miles closer) than people standing at the North and South poles.

Allow me to elucidate: For example, what do they mean by "closer to the moon" and "closer to outer space"? I thought the moon followed a largely equatorialish orbit (i.e. it doesn't pass over the nasty cold poles by any stretch, preferring to race around the hot equatorial middle of the earth - mmmm toasted cheese). Given that, and the diameter of the earth of about 7,900 miles, a tiny bit of imagination (imagine a nearly spherical sphere), I fail to see how the poles can be 13 miles further away from the moon than the equator.

In terms NPR *might* understand.

I should have known when they got "sphere" confused with "circle" (interesting, but largely irrelevant). Let's hope no impressionable kids or NASA engineers read or heard that "report" - it could cause untold damage to future generations of English-speaking spacefools.

Until now, I thought only the moon was an alabaster retard

Labels: Mighty Boosh, Moon, NPR