http://www.morpheme.co.uk/frenzy/
How fast can you type the alphabet? Mike’s top score so far is 2.333. seconds Notably, he beat my high score with one hand. By the time I finish posting this, he’ll probably be below 2.
So. We’re downloading Typing Of The Dead now. I may have unleashed a monster. But, hey, if the undead ever reanimate, destroyable only with a fast keyboard, this house is so where you’d want to be.
So after you’ve had your fill at Graphaids’ sidewalk sale, you should wander over to Santa Monica College’s Photography Gallery for Sachi Kato’s reception and show, Tranquility.
I met Sachi today at Cafe Balcony. She noticed I couldn’t resist taking one of her flyers and introduced herself. I’m looking forward to seeing more of her work, which is dark and lovely, and falls visually somewhere between oil paintings and silver gelatin prints.
This Saturday, December 3, Graphaids’ West LA Store will be holding a 40% off (everything in the store!) sale from 9AM to 5PM. It’s worth a stop for holiday shopping too – they’ve got a lot of excellent stuff beyond art supplies, including toys, photo albums, frames, and a great selection of frouffy pens, if that’s your thing.
There was a pretty scary morning a few weeks back, when the sky opened up and came crashing down on Newburgh, Indiana. Mike grew up in Newburgh. That morning, it took a while to get in touch with loved ones living in town, and I’ll never forget the feeling of loading a news website, just part of my normal routine, and seeing that main story. Thankfully, everyone we know was safe.
Tragically, many people lost their homes, and some people lost their lives. Thankfully, the community banded together and churches and community groups offered rescue, shelter, and assistance.
We are in town for the holiday, and today, we saw some of the tornado damage. After witnessing the destruction, I am amazed that the number of fatalities was not much higher. Thankfully, the weather has turned cold, hopefully ending this season’s thunderstorms.
Devastation is probably too light a word to describe the ruined areas. My heart broke at some of the scenes I saw today. It looked like this:
Rows of perfect houses and manicured lawns and one of the houses is missing some shingles and then there’s a little debris by the side of the road and then suddenly there’s nothing but debris. Broken trees, ruined furniture, artifacts of someone’s daily life reduced to scraps. Shattered windows, clumps of cotton candy insulation, blue tarps covering wrecked roofs.
I saw a cracked-open kitchen wall, a slate blue front door hanging off its hinges next to oak cabinetry, brass fixtures, a phone jack with a broken cord leading to nowhere. Between three perfect, intact, untouched houses.
I saw a ruined brick building, shattered windows, second story and roof gone, twisted aluminum siding wrapped around the edge, and the remnants of rescue workers, spraypaint on the walls, caution tape on the door, and an American flag hung from an exposed wooden beam.
I saw a home ripped open as if with a huge electric saw, one entire wall cleaved off, leaving three rooms open to the elements. On one side, the exposed room held only a rocking chair. The room on the other side held a computer monitor, a changing table, and a quilt. The room in the middle used to be a playroom – in one corner was the obligatory pile of dolls and toys. There was a hobby horse, the painted plastic kind, on springs, with a metal base. It was upside-down, tossed across the room from the force of the winds and pressure.
I just can’t get the image of that house out of my head – I can’t stop thinking of that family and hoping they are OK. I hope they were able to give thanks together today. Were they able to gather around a table with family and friends, eating too much turkey and stuffing? I hope so.
We did. And I’m truly thankful that we could.
When you take introductory design classes, you often hear a piece of advice: See the world as if through a child’s eyes.
It’s good enough advice, although maybe not so simple to do in practice. It’s so rare to see that actually happen, especially when it comes to the most simple concepts. Everyone knows what color is. Everyone sees color, every day. But how do you talk about color, really?
When was the last time you played with a superball? Up close, so close you could smell the rubber, feel the torn and scarred surface, holding the nervously contained material between your fingertips, just waiting to let loose and send it flying so high it might never land. And the colors, oh the colors: pure dayglow, or white, red and blue marbled plastic. My favorite was the clear plastic style with swirled pigment inside, the superballs that looked like they might be made out of glass, like a cat’s eye marble. Like something you should never, ever throw as hard as you can at top of the tallest cement staircase around, because it would shatter right away, but it doesn’t shatter… it bounces in enormous arc after arc, startlingly graceful. Hypnotic.
So why not unleash a superball at the top of the biggest cement staircase you can find? Why not film it? In fact, why not drop 100,000 superballs? In San Francisco, that’s even better than a staircase! Wouldn’t that make a great TV commercial?
Of course that’s a stupid idea. Superballs cost money, and they bounce all over, they are a pain to clean up. We’d have to block off an entire city block, or more. Someone would have to cover all the NO DUMPING LEADS TO BAY storm drains. What’s the point? We have sophisticated computer graphics, we can just CG the whole thing.
But when you see the world with a child’s eye, it’s clear there’s really only one way to do it. And they did it.
I can’t stop watching the new Sony Brevia ad. They just put the extended version online, and it’s truly gorgeous. I don’t know much about the TV they’re selling, but I can look at superballs bouncing pretty much all day long.