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Completed Beetle and Cicada. Booyah!

Friday, March 4th, 2011

I’m done! The complex background is done. The beasties are done. They have come together in a beautiful medley of weird art that makes me so happy. Gaze upon on the gloriousness.

I spray-painted the pattern after I weeded out the vinyl stencil. Then I painted highlights with some sparkles on some of the thicker areas of the lines. The spray-paint bled a little into the wood grain on the beetle board, but I think it looks cool, so I ain’t sweatin’ it.

Then I drilled a hole in the center of the board and affixed the insects into place. And voila! Months of toil comes to an end. I am super-pleased with how they turned out.

Posted in My Art/Design/Business, Nature | 1 Comment »

London, Part 7.

Friday, February 25th, 2011

OMG, museums! Today it’s the British Museum. But I’d like to start us off with some random shots.

The weather wasn’t always glorious. Some days were exactly what you would expect if you went to England.

Cricket and I split up one day: I went to the V&A and he went to the Churchill War Rooms and Buckingham Palace. Right next to the Churchill War Rooms is St. James Park, which has a lovely assortment of ducks and geese.

And whatever this thing is. Its legs make it look like it’s wearing a black unitard with a skeleton painted on it. Odd little waterfowl.

Doorknobs in the center of the door. Europe – things are different there!

Okay, The British Museum. I think when it was originally built there were a bunch of buildings in the Grecian style around an open courtyard, and it appears that at some point a large rotunda was built in the middle of the courtyard and a glass roof was installed over the whole thing, connecting all the buildings without having to go outside. It really is huge, the rotunda, so I tried to make a rough composite shot of the space. It’s very impressive.

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding the British Museum because a large portion of the exhibits are stolen or looted from their place of origin, like a goodly portion of the Egyptian section, or the stones off of the Parthenon (Greece really wants those back, they’re very cranky about it). But I was just excited to see all the historical things. For example, the Rosetta Stone.

And the plethora of Egyptian relics.

These ladies were terrifying. They’re about the same height as a man, and you can feel them silently judging you.

And they have so many dead things. Like mummified cats.

And a mummified ibis next to a mummified falcon.

And canopic jars for holding your internal organs.

And let’s not leave out Ginger, a seriously dead guy surrounded by his grave-goods. Ginger died in 3400 B.C. and is naturally preserved. And dead.

I really enjoyed looking at the hieroglyphics. I kept seeing this reoccurring slug hieroglyphic. I wonder what it represents. Or it could be a startled snake, with cartoon “startled” marks around its head. I also wonder what that would represent.

Aside from the Egyptian section, there’s a whole bunch of other neat stuff that we saw. They have an excellent collection of Assyrian wall art (probably stolen). I studied the Assyrian artwork in art history class. That’s where I learned something interesting about large guard-sculpture’s legs.

The stonecarvers wanted him to be able to look like he was guarding both to the front and to the side, so he has five legs. Go ahead, count them. Five.

I also had to study all these wall carvings with themes like lion hunts and battles and the like. Say what you want about the Assyrians, but they could relief-carve a lion and a horse like no one’s business.

Other things from the British Museum that caught my eye: The death mask of Napoleon.

An impression bead where the animals look like “Where The Wild Things Are” characters.

A Celtic helmet with horns.

And a Roman mosaic of a duck. I liked this especially because it used all kinds of random colors, but if you stand far away from it, your eye blends the colors correctly for you, totally anticipating Pointillism by 2000 years. Go Romans.

That pretty much covers all the musea that I hit up while in London. In the next few days I will finish up the remaining dribs and drabs of photos and then we can get back to business as usual (whatever that is).

Posted in Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Nature, Random Art Bloggery, Stuff, Travels - I Has Them | No Comments »

London, Part 5.

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

So Cricket and I were on the subway, and while he was reading the paper, I caught a glimpse of this article. I bolded the important part, the part that made me make a snorting noise in the middle of a crowded subway.

Mass murderer Jeremy Bamber today lost the first stage of his latest bid to overturn a conviction for the killing of five of his relatives. Bamber, who has always protested his innocence, has served nearly 25 years for the 1985 killing of his family in Essex. He has twice lost appeals against his conviction and remains one of 38 killers who have been given a whole-life tariff. The bodies of Bamber’s parents, Neville and June, his sister Sheila Caffell, and her six-year-old twin sons were found at White House Farm in Tolleshunt D’Arcy. All had suffered multiple gunshot wounds. A total of 25 shots had been fired, mostly at close range. At first, suspicion fell on Mrs. Caffell, who suffered from mental illness and was found holding the murder weapon. Then, attention turned to Bamber after a blood-stained silencer was found in a cupboard in the farmhouse.

Here’s what it sounded like to me: “At first, we thought it was Miss Scarlett with the lead pipe in the conservatory, but it turned out to be Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the lounge.” I love England. They’re so…British-y.

MUSEUMS. We went to a lot of them. Let’s take the Natural History Museum first. If the museum was empty it would still be amazing, because whoever built it included natural history elements into the actual building all over, in both the interior and exterior.

It’s like going to atheist church. At one end of the giant hall, a dinosaur skeleton (see picture above). At the other end, a sculpture of Charles Darwin. I felt like there should be a choir singing hymns about evolution and survival of the fittest.

Once again, England kicks our American butts because their museums are free and you can take pictures. Here is a coelacanth (pronounced see-lah-canth) or, as I like to call it, the “Seriously, That Is Way Too Many Fins, No One Needs That Many Fins”.

Here’s the interesting story. This is an OLD breed of fish. Like, they thought it went extinct 65 million years ago. Then – poof! – someone fishing found one off the coast of Africa in the 1930s, and they’re back! This particular specimen is from 1964, so it has lost its deep-blue color. Also, and I found this adorable, it has little mushrooms growing on it.

They also have a phenomenal amount of dead stuffed things. My favorite last time I visited was the pangolins. My favorite this time was still the pangolins.

I will never get to see a pangolin in the wild, so this was thrilling for me. Plus, one of the pangolins on the tree looks like a zombie with his little stubby pangolin arms outstretched in front of him. Evil zombie pangolin.

Aside from more dead things than you can shake a stick at, they have a stellar mineral wing. I do enjoy a good mineral. Here’s a pic of the mineral wing.

Rows and rows and rows of neatly labeled rocks. I was so happy. I learned the difference between a pebble and a cobble. Here’s a cobble full of pebbles.

And did you know pumice is just frothy lava? It’s like lava meringue.

I want these agates. I want them real bad. Especially the one on the right.

The Natural History Museum has a terrific insect area, but I didn’t have time to visit it. However, I did get to enjoy its entrance. It has that great big ole beetle over the door, but I love how the many-eyed spider looks like he’s welcoming you in. “Oh hello!” he says. “Come on in! I made crumpets.”

Museums have specialty exhibits, and those you have to pay for. The Natural History Museum has an exhibit on right now called “Sexual Nature”, about the sex lives of animals. Really.

I couldn’t take pictures in there because it was dark in an attempt to be romantic (really, they had Barry White playing in the background), but I don’t know, seeing taxidermied animals posed in states of copulation doesn’t get my motor going. I did get a shot of how foxes have sex, which was totally different than I expected. They just back up into each other, ending up looking like a dog with two heads. Very interesting.

Also, around the exhibits and informative plaques were TVs playing Isabella Rossellini’s “Green Porno”. If you’ve never seen this, clear an afternoon, take some magic mushrooms, and hunker down for some of the weirdest television programming you’ve ever experienced. Here’s one just for a taste.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BckqviVaWl0

Cricket’s favorite Green Porno episode was the salmon. I was partial to the duck one. You really must see them all.

To finish off my Natural History experience, here is a giant slice of a very old sequoia (with Cricket standing next to it for scale):

And here is a life-size accurate sculpture of a gulper eel. I made a painting on a gulper eel, but it’s different when you see one up close and personal. I didn’t realize their mouths were tetrahedronal. I was very excited. People around me were concerned.

And here is a poster outside the museum with a very startled-looking drawing of a lemur.

Posted in Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Nature, New York, Travels - I Has Them | No Comments »

Beetle. The companion to the cicada.

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

You remember the cicada I made?

Well, I made him a beetle friend. Now he has someone to talk to during the day when I’m at work.

I need to make his head less shiny, but other than that, he’s a completed beetle. I’m going to use my laser stencil designs and combine the whole process into a really cool set of pieces.

Posted in My Art/Design/Business, Nature | No Comments »

Beer and St. Francis of Assisi Day.

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

Finally, the project that consumes me every year during the beginning of October has ended and I am free once again to do something other than work every bleeping second of every day. I will post the super-cool stuff I made for the meeting shortly, but in the meantime, let’s cover what I did this past weekend. It was jolly delightful. I met up with Jem who was in town working the Comic Con. She is really into beer, so we headed off to the East Village to traipse through a variety of bars. The first one I can’t remember the name of, but it was full, and I mean completely full, of fratboy douchebags. I actually didn’t hate it there. I watched some of the Georgia-Colorado football game (Colorado had a male bison run across the field!) and sang along with Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”. The only problem was that it was really really loud and there was nowhere to sit, so we moved on. The next stop was McSorley’s, the oldest continuously operated saloon in New York. Loads of famous people have passed through there. It was, how shall I put this, rustic. There was sawdust on the floor and communal tables and please allow me to run through the entire menu:

Two kinds of beer: light and dark
Liverwurst sandwiches
A sleeve of Saltines, a pile of sliced cheddar and a pile of sliced raw white onions

AND PEOPLE WERE EATING THIS. New York has, what, eleventy-billion restaurants, and people were eating stuff that I wouldn’t eat if it was 3:00 in the morning and I was starving and it was the only food in my fridge. By then I was pretty peckish, so as soon as Jem finished her beers (one light and one dark), we headed off to St. Marks Place for real-person food. We went to a stellar restaurant called Je’Bon which served pan-asian food. I had curry that came in a white bowl the size of a toilet. It was huge and delicious. After that glorious experience, we tottered off to my favorite place of the evening, unfortunately named Burp Castle. I deduced from the name that it would be like a Chuck. E. Cheese with beer, but thankfully I was wrong. It’s a bar built to look like a room in a monastery, with 15th-century-style frescoes on the wall. The bartenders are in the brown tunic and rope belt of a monk, the lighting is very dim and very flattering, and if you talk too loudly, the bartenders gently shush you, so it’s sort of quiet. Jem had a creme brulee beer, which I had a tiny taste of, and you know it wasn’t bad. I found a picture of Burp Castle online, so you can get an idea.

The next morning, it was off to St. Francis of Assisi Day at St. John the Divine! You should read my previous post on it before you continue because I make references to the post. This is what standing in line looks like.

There’s a great deal of chaos and butt-sniffing and barking. There was a cat there who wanted nothing more then to kill everyone in attendance. One kid brought his dragon-lizard-creature.

The service was pretty much the same thing as always. This is the 26th year that they have had the Earth Mass, as they call it. I got a better shot of the lady with the punchbowl this time.

Inside, I saw a sphinx cat wearing a blue sweater and an expression of disdain for the proceedings.

I also saw the ugliest dog I have ever seen. I swear to God, It looked like it was rotting. I couldn’t stop looking at it and thinking, “Is that…mold?”

Speaking of God, I had excellent seats this year to see the eucharist. Everyone has a different way of accepting the wafer and wine, but one guy took the wafer in his hand, then walked over to the fancy wine goblet and dipped it in and popped the now soggy wafer in his mouth, and while I was thrilled because it seems so much more hygenic then everyone drinking from the same vessel, I was also like, “Hey, I don’t want to tell you how to do your thing, but I don’t think you’re supposed to dunk the body of Christ into the blood of Christ like chip dip. Seems a litte disrespectful. This is not a Superbowl party. Just sayin’.”

And now, the annual Presentation of the Irritatingly Blurry Photos. The procession was a bit of a let-down this year. There were no birds of prey at all, there were no bees in a glass case, and most of the creatures were farm animals, which is fine, but I kinda liked the baby kangaroo and the baby gibbon from last year. There was a hysterical teenage emu. We’ll get to him later.

First, a cute chubby pig.

A festive little cow.

A mini-horse.

One of several llamas.

A dromedary.

In the middle of this procession, a young emu came down the aisle, and he must really hate church because the second he got in there he started skidding backwards on the floor and attempting to jump away and making weird beeping noises, so his handler gently brought him over to the side to chill.

Emu freaking.

Emu chilling.

Emu being carried down the aisle and flailing.

There was a fennec there, but you could barely see it because the lady carrying it was clutching it to her bosom so tight. I am aware that fennecs are wild animals and if they get loose they don’t come back, but this woman was holding that fennec with an expression on her face like, “No fennec for you! No fennec for anyone but me! Fennec all mine!” This is the uber-crappy shot I got of her. Selfish fennec-clutcher that she was.

Afterward there was the usual fair outside (minus the birds of prey, boo) and I donated money to all the charities and got to meet a whole bunch of very nice dogs. There was a 235-pound English mastiff there.

And who immediately wanted to get into a fight with him? Of course, the Pomeranian puppy. This is the puppy meeting the mastiff.

This is the Pomeranian putting his dukes up.

And this is the mastiff gently sniffing the Pomeranian’s junk, then exhaling heavily and laying down on the ground while the pomeranian hops around him, pummeling ineffectively at the mastiff’s snout.

Watching all this go down in the background was an extremely attentive dachshund. I thought he was adorable.

That’s pretty much it. One day I’ll get a hold of a good camera that can take good pictures of moving objects in dim light, and then I will have good pictures. It will happen someday, I swear.

Posted in Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Nature, New York, Tasty 'n' Delicious | 1 Comment »

Renaissance Fair.

Friday, September 10th, 2010

About 45 minutes from my apartment is the New York Renaissance Fair. Or the RenFair, as we called it growing up. Cricket had never been, and I hadn’t been since in a decade, so I thought, hey, let’s go pretend we all live in Ye Olden Tymes without those pesky details like complete lack of hygiene and sewage running free in the streets. Now that I have gone, I feel comfortable not going again for another decade.

Many of these photos are mine, but a bunch more are pulled from the internet. So thank you, Internet, for sharing thy bounty with me, prithy and forsooth and all that good stuff.

The RenFair takes place in a forest in upstate-ish New York. They’ve actually built a wee little Elizabethan village there.

And many people come in costume. Some are in period-appropriate costumes, but we did see one guy who was dressed as a Storm Trooper in a kilt.

As we came in, there was a cool bell apparatus on the side. A spooky guy wearing a full-body catsuit and a winged gold mask played the bells using a complicated pulley system.

Cricket was super-exited to try mead, which is a kind of wine, and a turkey leg, which is a famous RenFair food. They are advertised all over the place.

Just so you know, the food at RenFair is depressingly expensive. Turkey leg? $7.50. Funnel cake? $6.00. And this peeved me no end – pickle? $3.00. THREE DOLLARS for a cucumber soaked in salty herb-y water. What do those ingredients cost, like, seven cents, max? Oh, that really bakes my cookies.* Here’s a picture I found when they were only two dollars for a pickle, back in the good old days.

Please note the delightful skull-and-crossbones painting on the end of the barrel. There are a great many hand-painted signs all over the RenFair. Some are extremely well-painted:

Some are not well-painted:

And some are painted with totally unnecessary apostrophes.

Belly Dancer’s WHAT?!?? I feel like I’m missing something. I find it fascinating when people use punctuation where it’s absolutely not necessary at all.

There are a ton of women in costume there. I think many look forward to dressing up in interesting garb, like these women (note the peacock feather lashes which match the purse, FIERCE):

But I think the vast majority of the women just like the opportunity to dress up as the local village concubine with their corseted mammaries shoved up and out.

I’m all for hoisting your petards if you got ’em, but sometimes it’s a bit ridiculous-looking. Like when you get armpit cleavage.

Or this lady in charge of the camel rides who had the word ” T I P S ” written across her chest. Dear Lord, woman, your cups runneth over.

We saw a whole bunch of different shows throughout the day, jugglers and jesters and gymnasts, but my favorite was (surprise!) the birds of prey. But first, the parrots. The parrots were in a huge enclosure near the birds of prey. You paid two dollars (which went to the maintenance and upkeep of the parrots, so I was totally fine with that) and you got to wander around with the parrots and there were friendly little bunnies that the parrot-owners had adopted hopping around eating grass bits. I was very happy.

Right outside that area was the falconer guy with the birds of prey. He shared four with us that day. The first one was a Harris Hawk, which I didn’t take any pictures of because I was too busy staring at Bird #3, which was a Eurasian Eagle Owl named Buddaka.

The second bird was a Black Vulture named Igor, and I managed to snap one or two shots of Igor. Still totally paying attention to the owl.

After Buddaka, there was an Andean Vulture. This particular andean vulture weighs 22 pounds and has a ten-foot wingspan. She was a monster. She looked like a demonic wild turkey. I, of course, loved her.

And that was pretty much it. We watched some jousting on horses, ate some more, and went home.

*Cookies? $5.50.

Addendum: Snorth requested an animation of the two first pictures of the owl, and I am nothing if not amenable.

Posted in Activitays, Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Nature, New York, Stuff, Tasty 'n' Delicious | 2 Comments »

I have never been so happy to have bags of beetle corpses in my life before.

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

The beetle elytra have arrived! Let me tell you, photos totally do not do them justice. They are very very metallic, a variety of greens, and they have blue iridescence. It’s really hard to take a good picture of them.

Since I had A Plan in my mind of what I wanted to do, I sorted through through them and found about eight that were a good set of colors from light-yellow-green to deep-green-blue. This is a picture during the sorting process.

Then I took the lightest green one and started cutting it up into little squares using an X-acto knife. I didn’t know how the elytra would deal with being cut up like that, whether they would tear or snap or splinter, but as long as the blade was super-fresh, they cut up pretty nicely. The only problem is that they are concave, so it is hard to cut a reasonably 90-degree angled rectangle. I got a couple of trapezoids in there, but I made them work. The piece I’m making is a mezuzah for my mother. I spoke quite a bit about mezuzahs here, if anyone needs a refresher course.

Then I started laying the squares into the brown polymer clay, progressing from the light green into the deeper colors. Here it is in process.

I love how it looks a little like a skyscraper in Manhattan, and I could not get over how reflective the pieces were. I made an animated gif to try and share the magic with you.

Here’s an interesting thing that happened after I baked it to cure the polymer. The heat caused the blue and purple tones to come out, which was really cool. I took a picture post-baking.

Now I’m going to create a small case around it to house the scroll and give it to my mom on Sunday. We’ll see how she likes it.

Posted in My Art/Design/Business, Nature | 6 Comments »

Spam, wallpaper, and the Great Beetle Failure of ’10.

Friday, August 20th, 2010

1. I received a the best piece of spam ever today. I made me ever so happy.

I am a tickety-boo site. Don’t you wish you were a tickety-boo site? I bet you do.

2. I was watching Eminem’s new video which is supposed to be taking place in a crappy wood-paneled double-wide, and in one scene Megan Fox is getting beaten up by Dominic Monaghan and he puts his fist through the drywall in their living room and – hey, what’s up with that wallpaper?

I remember that wallpaper. I saw it on a design blog somewhere and I thought it was gorgeous and then I saw the price, which was $250 a roll and I was like, oooh, a little too rich for my blood. And now I’m supposed to believe a crappity trailer has that wallpaper in it? I think not. I could no longer suspend my disbelief. Bad set decorator. Baaaaaaad set decorator.

3. A while back I decided to incorporate different materials in my art, like eggshells and insect exoskeletons and tin cans, stuff like that. So recently I thought, hey, there are Japanese beetles everywhere, they’re not indigenous, they’re a scourge, I should collect their deceased bodies, remove their wing casings, and use it in my art. Here is a photo so you can appreciate their bronze-colored elytra.

So while I was in Massachusetts this weekend, I took my neighbor’s full bug bag. I brought it home, and yesterday Cricket and I opened it in the driveway. The good news: there were about 400 beetles in there. The bad news: they were actively rotting, all squishy and stinky. Gross. I asked Cricket what I should do. He decided I should go outside to his rose bushes in the morning, flick the drowsy beetles into a jar, put the jar in the freezer, and then remove their wing casings later in the day. I shouted, “Genius!” and went to bed. This morning I set the alarm for mad-early and when it went off, I went outside to capture my beetles. If you were Cricket’s neighbor and looking out your window at 7:15 this morning, this is what you would have seen: a sleepy woman wearing a crumpled t-shirt, her hair all jinky and unbrushed, her face all puffy, standing motionless outside with a jar in her hand, staring intently at a rosebush for ten minutes. If this was a movie, that would be the point when someone would come outside with a shawl, wrap it around my shoulders and lead me slowly inside while saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I have since learned that this wasn’t a dramatically bad season for Japanese beetles, and the season’s over now anyway. So to drown my sorrows I went on good ole eBay and found people selling environmentally-harvested beetle elytra, so I bought them. It wasn’t quite how I wanted this to go, but when life gives you lemons, you buy stuff online. Here’s what fifty bucks can get you – two of these sets (20 elytra total):

Two of these sets (20 elytra total):

And a pile of 200 random non-matching elytra.

They should be here next week. We’ll see if I can get them to do what I need them to do.

Posted in Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Music Videos, My Art/Design/Business, Nature, The Telly | 2 Comments »

The Zucchini Festival.

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

I went to Massachusetts to The Zucchini Festival. A festival! Devoted to zucchinis! Hurray!

On route to the gaiety I saw a man shining up his ancient vehicle. Check out the wooden spokes.

And then lovely, hand-made zucchini signs informed you of all the important things like times and locations.

There were also signs peppered all over telling you important facts.

I got up very early because I knew the day began with the Pet Parade. People take their pets and decorate them to look like zucchinis and then parade them down a tiny, short street and prizes are given at the end. I couldn’t miss that. I got to meet some great beasties. First I met a dachshund who was totally rockin’ the look. It wasn’t hard for him, being all elongated-squash-shaped and all.

Then there was a goat, painted green, in a cage filled with leaves.

Large woman with tiny chihuahua? Check.

Herding dog with creepy blue eyes dressed as a zucchini flower? Check.

The dog’s name is Ellie, and she was lovely and super-psyched to be wearing a costume. You could almost hear her. “Look at me, I’m a flower! See me? Flower! Oh boy! Flower flower flower!” etc.

Cooper, I learned, loves to carry things in his mouth. So he carried his little identification sign around with him all day.

There was also a three-legged poodle…

…a baby goat…

…a half-corgie, half-irish setter wearing a old futon mattress…

…and two girls who are members of 4-H and brought some delightful companions with them, two of which were Pig-ccini and a lion-head rabbit. An award-winning lion-head rabbit, I’ll have you know.

There was also Stephanie the cat. Poor Stephanie. Clearly this was the backstory: a three-year-old boy told his parents that he wanted to be in the pet parade, in a wagon, with his beloved cat by his side. The parents, being high on crack or something, decided this would be a good idea. So Stephanie the cat was placed in a wagon adorned with antlers and a dried crocodile skull (you see them on the front there), had a leash put on her, and sat there while this young feller aggressively pet her. She so clearly did not want to be there, AT ALL. You know that night she barfed in each and every one of her owner’s shoes. And rightfully so, I would add. I would do the same thing had I been in her place. Hork away, Stephanie, hork away.

Leading the pet parade was the Master of Ceremonies, with his festive hat and his ornately-decorated golf cart and his bullhorn.

Once the parade was over, the fun was not done. Oh no. There were all these vendors selling things ( I bought Cricket a t-shirt and I bought myself zucchini relish and zucchini bread). Here’s a list of some of the other fun things they were doing.

The nice 4-H girls live with their parents on a farm, and aside from bringing the green goat in the cage, the pig and the rabbit, they set up a petting zoo with heirloom chickens, two geese, a flock of the sweetest sheep from Turkey, two ponies and my cow. I clearly called it “my” cow because I love this cow. Really. My favorite picture of the day is a girl with a skull painted on her face feeding my beloved cow. I want to live with this cow.

By the way, the MC was not the only person wearing a zucchini-themed hat. Ooooh no.

People were bringing their gigantic monster-zucchinis to be weighed and entered into a competition, and this guy, who reminded me of Alton Brown, was in charge of the weighing area.

I walked, I ate, I talked to people, I talked to their dogs, the whole thing was wonderful. I don’t know what my schedule holds for next year, but if I’m free, I’m going again. It’s a hoot.

Posted in Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Nature, Stuff, Tasty 'n' Delicious | 3 Comments »

The bowerbird is amazing.

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

I’m watching Life right now, the David Attenborough/Oprah Winfrey-hosted BBC nature series. It’s very similar to Planet Earth, but they focus on different animals this time. One of those animals is the bowerbird. I would love to describe the bowerbird to you, but I think it’s best you see for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1zmfTr2d4c

Yeah. My favorite part is when part of his display tries to leave, and he’s like, “You’re ruining my vision! You go here!” Here’s another video of the male bowerbird in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFMXrBWswl0

PILLARS, people. The bird understands ARCHITECTURE. I’m so impressed.

So, anyway, I saw a photo the other day, and I was convinced it was a piece of environmental art by the famous artist Andrew Goldsworthy. Nope. Bowerbird house. I found some pictures by Andrew Goldsworthy and mixed the bowerbird photo in there, so you can appreciate how freakin’ awesome this bird is.