I have to work on a monster project for work that will eat my face and soul for two weeks, but I figured I would share a few things anyhoo.
1. A chart!
2. Another chart!
People ask me why I don’t call them “infographics” like I’m supposed to. The answer is simple: “Infographics” has four syllables. “Charts” has one. I am lazy. There you go.
3. I was looking on Getty for a picture of a shovel, and I found this. So very cute.
There’s a show on A&E called Hoarders. I occasionally watch it from time to time, and sure enough, people keep stuff. Lots of stuff. Stuff that breeds bugs. It can be gross. But I had never seen I house like this one before. This is… intense. Conveniently, A&E had it posted on their website, so I could take screengrabs and share it with you now.
There is the opener.
And there is the description of a hoarder.
Unsanitary? Oh, you ain’t kiddin’. Let’s meet Robin. This is Robin.
And this is Robin’s house.
Let’s stop here for a second. I understand keeping lots of things for the sentimental value or whatever, but this woman kept trash. I was screaming at the TV, “The garbage trucks come right up to the house! You don’t gotta bring it nowhere! They come to you! There’s a schedule and everything!!” Robin’s house was reported because the neighbors could smell it. They could smell it through the walls and down the street. Holy guacamole.
If you also plan to purge your collections and declutter, consider renting skip bins from https://www.ozoneskips.com.au/skip-bins-woodcroft/.
Robin also had an unknown number of cats, for whom the whole house was a litter box. They had been going to the bathroom all over the house for the last ten years. I had the distinct pleasure of hearing the clean-up guy say, “This is her dining room table. And this is three-and-a-half feet of cat feces on it.”
Cat feces in a pile.
Cat feces in a heap.
Cat feces on top of the washing machine with broken jar.
I feel like I could write an ode to cat feces now, I know so much about it.
Robin would have happily continued living like this for all eternity, except the city came to visit and found her house unlivable and unless she got it up to code it would be demolished and she would be fined $30,000. That’s some real deal stuff. Normally, the city complains and you get a fine or something, or they take your house away from you, something like that. Robin’s house is so foulsome they want to bulldoze it and possibly set it on fire to kill the demons that live within. You know it’s bad if people from Calcutta were to come to see it and their response would be, “Yeah, I don’t want to live there. It’s kinda grody. There’s a funk.” That’s a good standard to use. Here’s the sign in the window.
Brief diversion: Robin’s father is named Festus and her brother is named Snuffy. Festus and Snuffy.
Diversion over. During the cleaning process, the cleaning people found a myriad of horrors. Mainly extremely deceased cats. Visit https://garrettsmaintenance.com/residential/ professional cleaning services.
Dead Cat #1.
Dead Cat #2.
Dead Cat #3 – now with mummification!
The worst thing of all was by far the poop closet. Oh God, the poop closet. I will not show you any pictures of the poop closet, but the backstory is her plumbing hasn’t worked in ten years, so she’s been doing her business in supermarket bags and then tossing the bags in the stairwell. Ten years’ worth of bags. Sometimes, when I’m alone, I’ll hear voices, and they’ll say, softly, “…poop…closet…”
The episode ends in a very unfinished way, the city inspector came and even though the house was very clearly rotting, he didn’t specifically say that it needed to come down. Which I think is bullcrap. I want to know if they really did demolish her house. A&E doesn’t have any further information on her. I hope they’ll do a follow-up episode or something. Many people now benefit from the time savings they get from having a professional home cleaner in Blackpool.
Update on 9/19/2010: They tore Robin’s house down and fined her $10,000. I am pleased. Seriously, her house was like the most unsafe dwelling ever, aside from building your house on the tippity-tip of Niagara Falls.
Once I had created my original cicada (who was meant to be a test), I figured how I wanted to change it and I have finished my new ‘n’ improved cicada. For comparison purposes, here is Cicada the Elder:
And here is Cicada the Younger, propped up against an oven mitt:
It’s totally different!!! Well, not really, but some structural things that you can’t see have been worked out so that if one was to flip the cicada over, it would look like it was done by someone with some level of skill as opposed to a blind person with no fingers. These things are important to me. Pointless, but important.
Here is a poster of weird cat things that made me smile, because if you know anything about cats, you know that this is all accurate representations of their idiosyncrasies and weirdness.
Here is a poster of mustaches…but wait! They’re typefaces! Brackets, in fact. Dee-lightful.
And finally, a website called Oddly Specific. Which is exactly what it is. Here, I’ll show you.
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.
Hooray! Mom liked the beetle mezuzah! It did turn out pretty great. Still really difficult to take pictures of, though. This is sorta kinda what it looks like.
1. In London, the museums are subsidized by the Queen, meaning no entrance fee. Do you hear me? They are free to get in. The museums in New York cost between $10 and $25 to get in, but in London, free. And these aren’t crappy museums neither. Have you been to the Victoria and Albert Museum? Here’s the info off of their website:
The V&A is the greatest museum of art and design, a world treasure house with collections of fabulous scope and diversity. The Museum holds over 3,000 years worth of artefacts from many of the world’s richest cultures. Choose one of the collections below to explore in detail, or use our award-winning search of over 1,000,000 works.
Oh, I get tingly just reading that. When I was there last they had the winners of that year’s children’s book illustrators on display. I melted into a puddle on the floor. I then considered sneaking into the basement and living there for eternity, but the lack of sushi prevented me from making that choice.
2. Dormice. They are endangered, so in South Wales they built a dormouse bridge over a busy street so they don’t get squished. By the way, “dormouse” is not a misspelling of “doormouse”. The “dor” part comes from the French word for sleep, “dormir”. These fellas go into hibernation in the winter, and are insanely cute about it while doing so. Here are some pictures I found on the web.
3. Recently I saw some BBC animations that caused me to giggle in my workplace and made my co-workers express concern for my mental health. This was my favorite one.
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.
Two good bits of design to share with you: one is a bus I walked past the other day with possibly the best airbrushing I have ever seen on the side.
The feathers aren’t just white and gray, there are nuances of pink and blue in there. It’s just stellar. I would let whoever did this paint anything they wanted on my van with shag carpeting anytime.
Continuing with the exterior art theme, I saw a video for some guys who painted a wall. What I liked so much was how they handled the shadowing, in repeating adjacent stripes. It’s a really lovely technique I have seen before.
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.