Your Daily Awesome

Over at Slate, there’s a full-length graphic novel about the life of America’s 40th president, written by Andrew Helfer and drawn by Steve Buccellato and Joe Staton. While I generally don’t like reading lengthy texts online, I had no problem with this format, and read it eagerly. It’s extremely informative and well done, and answers a lot of questions I had about Reagan’s life and legacy. Far more interesting than I expected.

This week I had the great pleasure of seeing New York-via-Seattle artist Reggie Watts perform here in Portland. (I liked his show so much that I scrapped my plans for the following night and caught him twice.) A classically trained musician, a brilliant improv artist, a stand-up comedian (of sorts), and an astounding beatboxer and vocalist, Watts defies any easy categorization, and was truly unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. This clip of a fairly recent performance from Seattle hardly scratches the surface of his bizarre, hilarious beauty, but it gives a bit of an idea of his range. (Be sure to stick with the video at least until the 2:00 mark.)

Gallery of images

See also:
Model Villages
Safety Town, Louisiana

British artist Dash MacDonald recently performed “In Your Hands, ” in which audeince members control a pair of roller skates strapped to the artist’s feet. The piece is inspired by the Stanford Prison and Milgram experiments (which have been coming up an awful lot lately), which were designed to see how abusive people would be to one another when given the authority to do so. (The answer—even more than you’d guess.) But just how cruel can you be to a hapless guy on a pair of roller skates? (Probably even more than you’d guess.)

via We Make Money Not Art

Curious Expeditions (great site) has a stunning post about incredible libraries across the planet. Most of the photos (including all the ones seen here, I believe) were taken by Candida Hofer, but I hadn’t seen most of them before. Fantastic stuff.

Abbey Library St. Gallen, Switzerland

Biblioteca Geral University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal


Biblioteca do Palacio Nacional da Ajuda Lisboa III, Lisbon, Portugal


Melk Monastery Library, Melk, Austria

George Peabody Library, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

“I’m Beginning to Think No One’s Coming to My Cinco de Mayo Party”

I mean, it’s September, so you’d figure at least the guests with kids would’ve shown up by now, because they have to get home early to set the babysitter free. What’s funny is that the fashionably late stragglers are probably going to be the first people here. And they thought they were being so cool!

Let me turn down the music. I checked out some mariachi stuff from the library to add some mexicano flavór. Now I’ve begun to suspect that four months of continuous mariachi music may have something to do with my insomnia and the mustachios I’ve been hallucinating.

One guy who has no excuse for not showing up is my neighbor Jim. He lives across the hall, has no family obligations, and just sits in his apartment getting stoned and holding staring contests with the light on his smoke detector. When I hear him walking down to the garbage room, I’ll grab a trash bag of my own and pretend to bump into him. He’ll say something like “Hey, man,” and I’ll casually respond in kind, waiting for him to acknowledge my serape. But nothing clicks. It’s true he never said yes on my Evite, but he never said no, either. He never even said maybe. In fact, no one replied at all. I feel like I wasted my time coming up with funny response headings (Yes=Sí, Maybe=Tal Vez, No=No).

Wait, did someone just knock? No, it’s just a guy outside working on his roof. Ever notice how you become hyperattuned to sound when you’re waiting for company? You think someone’s at the door, but it’s actually just a thunderstorm three states away or a stray cat’s heartbeat. The false alarms are annoying, but if I prop the door open anyone can just saunter in and crash mi loco fiesta—I mean, should mi loco fiesta come into existence…

read the whole piece
See also:
Today’s AA Speaker: Mr. Tom Waits (If Mr. Waits Is Actually Like the People He Writes Songs About)
Alligators Are the New Sharks, as Rebutted by a Shark
Having Just Completed a Three-Week Throw-Intensive Judo Course, I Strongly Advise You Not to Fuck With Me
Tom Skerritt’s Speech to the Cadets in Top Gun Is Probably Long Enough as It Is
more

“In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the cover of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and other surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each page while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose a book’s hidden, fragmented memory. The completed pieces expose new relationships of a book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.”

Brian Dettmer

Beloved visitors: For the next week and a half or so, you might notice a slight lull in posting around here. I’m working on a pretty substantial project for the day job that’s going to keep me super busy until mid-month. I’ll still be updating daily, but it might just be once a day for the next 10 days or so. We’ll get cranked back up to full speed in no time. Thank you, as always, for visiting.

Back to blogging,
Chas

Toothpicks, 2007
Depicts 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs.

Plastic Bottles, 2007
Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.

(detail)

Plastic Bags, 2007
Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.

(detail)

Chris Jordan’s website
interview

I’ve always wanted to know what went on behind the editorial doors of “the world’s only reliable newspaper.” Now that the mag has folded, one writer talks about his time there.

Then one day I spotted an online ad from WWN seeking new “reporters.” I wrote back that I was thrilled at the opportunity, because who else would tell me that Hillary was dating a space alien? I further mentioned that the “mainstream” media always censored my best scoops like “Man Doesn’t Stop for a Red Light in 30 Years, and Never Has an Accident or Gets a Ticket.” The editors asked me to send in that story as a sample, and I was off and running.

Part of the fun of “reporting” for the WWN was constructing a scenario under which such a thing, though highly unlikely, could be remotely possible. In this case, I knew the driver couldn’t live in a big city where he’d be behind other cars that stopped for lights. So I placed him in a small town, so small that for years it didn’t even have traffic lights. When the town put them in, Earl (the driver), who was colorblind, sued, claiming the lights discriminated against colorblind people. He lost, but folks in the town agreed that since everyone knew Earl and his distinctive red truck, if he honked at an intersection he’d be granted the right of way. Ergo, he never had to stop, and broke no law. His one near-accident occurred because the other driver was deaf, and couldn’t hear him honk. Groused Earl, “They shouldn’t let deaf people drive. I could’ve been killed.” Plausible? Of course not. Would you place 1,000-1 odds that it didn’t happen? I wouldn’t.

Once I was “in,” I often described my job, without a hint of exaggeration, as “thinking of the stupidest shit possible.” I once pitched a story positing that the U.S. government had data confirming that the one commonality linking all mass killers, including the Columbine shooters, was that they never masturbated. Rather than issue this report, which would save lives but promote onanism, the government preferred to let occasional slaughters take place. My editor rejected it on the grounds that it was “too plausible.”

Farewell, Bat Boy

WHAT: An alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell and sizzle of cooking bacon.

WHY: No one likes to wake up, especially by an alarm. This clock gently wakes you up with the mouthwatering aroma of bacon, just like waking up on a Sunday morning to the smell of Mom cooking breakfast. Unless you’re Jewish.

HOW: A frozen strip of bacon is placed in Wake n’ Bacon the night before. Because there is a 10 minute cooking time, the clock is set to go off 10 minutes before the desired waking time. Once the alarm goes off, the clock it sends a signal to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. We hacked the clock so that the signal is re-routed by a microchip that in responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power two halogen lamps that slow-cook the bacon in about 10 minutes.

link
thx James

via TSOYA

Your narrator there was Jim White, an incredible singer/songwriter from Pensacola

Do you want your car to have the look of a real sunroof? You can install it in 5 minutes!!

High Status at a very low price !!!

A CAR WITH A SUNROOF LOOKS EXTREMELY GOOD!!!

It’s on eBay.
via Rocketboom

My ceramic landscapes create new endings for the cartoon drama of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. In the cartoon, the coyote’s rudimentary traps backfire. His efforts to catch the bird are always for naught. In my “Death Scenes”, the traps succeed forcing the drama to end with the total destruction of the roadrunner.

“Death Scene: The Roadrunner is Struck Down by a Fifth of Bumble Bees”

“Death Scene: the Roadrunner, Trapped in a Camouflaged Pot Hole, is Eaten”

“Death Scene: While Enjoying a Cliff-top View, the Roadrunner’s Throat is Chewed Through”

gallery 1, 2
via Things

(England 1958, Spain 1983, Israel 1988)
many more
via Design Observer

Every morning of every weekday for 12 years, Thomas Montgomery punched in at the Dynabrade factory in Clarence, a small town in upstate New York. He strapped on his goggles and stood at his machine until the late afternoon, churning out components for power tools. After work, he walked the family dog, Shadow, and took his two daughters to swim practice. He became such a regular presence at the local swim club that he was named its vice president. He tried to be a good father and a decent husband to his wife of 16 years, Cindy. There were a few things he enjoyed — poker night on Fridays with the guys, playing Texas Hold ‘Em on Pogo.com, and the Dynabrade euchre tournament, which he dominated for two years in a row. For the most part, though, life was uneventful.

Which may be why Montgomery looked at himself — a 45-year-old former marine with a reddish mustache, bulging gut, and disappearing hair — and decided to become someone else. That person, he wrote on Dynabrade stationery that he stored in his toolbox at work, would be an 18-year-old marine named Tommy. He would be a black belt in karate, with bullet scars on his left shoulder and right leg, thick red hair, and impressive dimensions (6′2″, 190 pounds, and a “9″ dick”). Emboldened by his new identity, Montgomery logged onto Pogo in the spring of 2005 and met TalHotBlondbig50 — a 17-year-old from West Virginia, whose name, he later learned, was Jessica.

He began instant-messaging “Jessi,” who later also went by the handle “peaches_06_17,” and the lies flowed easier with every press of the Return key. His mom had died of cancer when he was 12, he told her, and his father was a military man. At 17, Tommy had raped a cheerleader, and his life became so hopeless that he enlisted in the Marines. After a stint at boot camp in June to train as a sniper, he was headed to Iraq. Montgomery concocted elaborate ruses to maintain Tommy’s cover story, creating a second identity as Tommy’s dad, Tom Sr., who bore a striking resemblance to the real Montgomery. Tommy’s access to the Internet was supposedly limited because of his military duties, so Dad, as Jessi soon referred to him, began shuttling messages between the two lovers. He also told Jessi to send any mail and packages for Tommy to him, because he had contacts in Iraq and could get them to the young marine quickly.

Tommy’s tales of hard luck drew Jessi in. He was in need of comfort, and Jessi provided it, saying she was proud of him despite his mistakes. Tommy responded by telling her that she was “the best thing that ever happened to him.” As their intimacy grew, he sent her a picture of a young marine, claiming it was himself, and confided that he planned to commit suicide in Iraq; she made him promise to stay alive for her. They talked on the phone when they could. But if Jessi couldn’t reach Tommy, she sometimes IM’d Tom Sr. to talk about her lover. Jessi also emailed Tommy photos of herself, care of Tom Sr. She lived up to her screen handle, whether she was running her fingers through her flowing blond hair or wading in a pool in a yellow bikini or showing off her long tan legs in a denim miniskirt…

Read the whole story here
via Coudal