These are but small fractions from artist Howard Hallis’ monumental project, The Picture of Everything. According to Hallis:
It all started in 1997 when I began doing a drawing of Spider-Man. This led to a drawing of other super heroes from Marvel and DC around him in the picture. Soon I had Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Spawn and The Hulk and was quickly thinking of more. Inspired by some of the works of Alex Ross and other comic book artists, I decided to try and draw as many super heroes as I could in one picture.
Soon I began to think of super heroes that were cartoon characters, such as Blue Falcon and Dynomutt and Hong Kong Phooey. If I started drawing cartoon characters, why not add all the cartoons I could think of as well? And aren’t The Beatles cartoons? Then why not all the rock stars?! And movie stars! And space ships, fantasy buildings, historical figures and places! And why not all the religious figures and iconography? Think about all the famous vehicles from movies and TV, you have to put those in… And video game characters!
Soon I had all the modern and ancient wonders of the world, 157 Pokemon, reproductions of Alex Grey, MC Escher and other famous artists works (not easy to draw, let me tell you!), and as many space ships, religious figures, cartoon characters, historical figures and places, imaginary buildings, super heroes, famous vehicles, movie stars, rock stars, corporate logos, flags of the world, and robots that I could think of in one giant picture. I even included my friends and family in there for good measure. You can’t leave them out, now can you?
The picture was done on 8.5 by 11 inch pieces of regular typing paper, held together by scotch tape and separated into four massive sections. These sections were each approximately 76.5 inches in width and 44 inches in length, bringing the completed picture to 76.5 by 176 inches. The drawing was done with colored pencils and Sharpies. The original is now framed in 4 sections.
Check out the site to witness the extraordinary thoroughness that went into this drawing (which the artist actually destroyed in 2005). The site even provides a key so you can identify everybody in the piece.
The most recent research into phantom limbs, conducted by the American neurologist V. S. Ramachandran and popularized in his book Phantoms in the Brain, shows that the phenomenon may be connected to a sort of “artificial man” in the human brain. There is, on the brain’s surface, a map of the body in the awkward shape of a man. The map is known as “the Penfield homunculus.” In the homunculus, the hand and thumb are next to the face. When Ramachandran experimented with a phantom hand patient by lightly rubbing his cheek, the patient confirmed that he felt the rubbing in his missing hand. In other words, in cases of phantom limbs, the brain receives messages in a neighboring area, though that area is not, on the external human body, adjacent. Other patients confirmed this theory. For example, two people reported sensations in their phantom foot when they had sex, and were astonished to discover an explanation for this: in the brain, on the Penfield map, the genitals and the feet are next to each other. “I never suspected,” Ramachandran wryly concludes, “that I would begin seeking an explanation for phantom limbs and end up explaining foot fetishes as well.”
Swapatorium tops themselves with this ornate love letter from prison, recently found at a storage auction. “I blanked out the address and name, as well as a small section that was a bit nasty,” the blogger writes. “If you are curious as to its content, just imagine what a sexually frustrated prisoner might say to his lady and odds are, you might come close to what I deleted.”
This Website is for all former Playboy Club Bunnies.
It does not matter which particular Playboy Club(s) you worked in or which year(s) you worked there.
This Website is a place to find old friends, leave contact messages, post new and old photographs, celebrate new achievements and reminisce about Bunny days gone by. Long live the Cottontail Queens!
Fans of the Wholphin DVD series are already familiar with Derek & Simon: The Show, the lo-fi sitcom produced by the hilarious Bod Odenkirk. Here’s a page with a ton of D&S shorts, including one with a sweet cameo by Michael Cera. This one’s called “Cock-Eyed.”
The 4,085 square-mile (10,580 square-kilometer) region is the world’s largest salt desert. The desert was once a lake 40,000 years ago, and it is now a hot spot for adventure tourism.
The blindingly white flats stretch as far as the eye can see, except for a few raised mounds of salt. Despite its barren appearance, the desert hosts cacti and rare hummingbirds, and three species of flamingos stop over each year to breed.
Until the recent tourist boom, the only inhabitants of the chilly, harsh region were salt miners, who still extract 25,000 tons of salt annually from the 10 billion tons available.
Closer to home, it recalls the dilapidated grandeur of Utah’s Saltair, just west of SLC in our own salt desert.
Saltair was an enormous tourist attraction a hundred years ago, with a roller coaster and ballroom on the resort grounds. After a few fires and wind storms, as well as decreased tourism to the Salt Lake, the rococo palace was left for dead on the side of the interstate, partially submerged in salt water from 1984-95. Whent he lake started to recede, Saltair was reopened to the public. Now it’s basically just a tiny giftshop in a gargantuan abandoned palace, but it does have the haunting air of modern ruins, which mingles with the kitsch of faux-exotic excess from the late 19th century.
Just yesterday I was thinking to myself that I wanted to know more about spam (the internet variety). I get a few hundred junk comments on this site’s spam filter everyday, and while most of them are either about sluts or Paxil, some have a distinctly literary quality to them. It made me wonder about the humans behind spam, and I thought that I should research the phenomenon. Within 24 hours, I ran across this article in the new issue of the New Yorker about “the losing war on junk email.” It doesn’t have quite the humanist edge that this astounding story did (about a intelligent but monumentally gullbile Massachusetts psychotherapist who fell pray again and again to those Nigerian email scammers who want you to wire them money), but it’s a pretty eye-opening story about the tricky world of smoked ham.
A spammer’s job is to confound the filters. The spellings “V1agra” or “Vi-agr@” mean nothing to a machine, but almost any human reader gets the point. In 2002, the programmer Paul Graham wrote an essay called “A Plan for Spam,” which became an intellectual manifesto for the thousands of researchers trying to find a way to clean up the Internet. “I think it’s possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it,” he wrote. “The Achilles’ heel of the spammers is their message. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up. But they have to deliver their message, whatever it is. There is no way they can get around that.”
Graham compared every character—dashes, apostrophes, numbers, symbols—in thousands of genuine e-mails with those in thousands of pieces of spam. He was able to train his software to use the context of a message to guess how likely it was that an e-mail containing certain words in relation to each other was spam. The words “republic” and “madam” seem innocent enough, but when they appear together in an e-mail they are often from a Nigerian huckster who has addressed his e-mail “Dear Sir or Madam.” Mail like that is invariably spam.
As filters become more sophisticated, spam becomes more elusive. There are millions of ways to write a word using punctuation, numbers, and other symbols. One mathematically minded blogger who looked into it found that there are 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra. “If I thought that I could keep up current rates of spam filtering, I would consider this problem solved,” Graham wrote. “But it doesn’t mean much to be able to filter out most present-day spam, because spam evolves.” Indeed, most anti-spam techniques so far have been like pesticides that do nothing other than create a more resistant strain of bugs.
The new M.I.A. album, Kala, doesn’t officially come out until August 21, but this seems to have happened, and now I have a copy. I’m really digging it so far: It’s not Arular v.2 , which is a nice surpise. The beats come super hard, as in this track, “Hussel,” (MP3 REMOVED)which features Afrikan Boy.
UPDATE
I feel like I’ve finally arrived as a blogger, as I’ve received a cease & desist from M.I.A.’s people requesting that the “Hussel” mp3 be removed. They suggested replacing it with a few other songs, all of which can be found at her myspace, but I’ll take a pass. Read the whole letter (which, admittedly, isn’t that dickish) in the comments. And remember kids, Piracy Funds Terrorism.
One year ago this month, Your Daily Awesome was born out of a desire to aggregate all the links, photos, stories, videos, and mp3s that I regularly emailed to friends and coworkers. Twelve months later, more people visit this site than I would have ever imagined, and I’m deeply grateful to everybody who comes here and to any website that has ever linked to YDA.
Now that the site is a full year old, it’s time it starts growing up. So as of today, the tagline changes from “One Blast of Awesomeness A Day” to “Now With More Awesomeness Daily.” Instead of having just a single post waiting for you when you awake, the blog will now be updated several times throughout the day. (Weekdays will likely be busier than weekends. [Hi, boss!])
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some birthday cake to attend to.
A good place to start is with his recent appearance on Fresh Air, and then once you remember just how hilarious the man is, dip back and catch up on his podcasts (traditional and video-style). Sounds like a good way to spend a Friday to me.
“One of the best films of 1987-88 didn’t appear on anybody’s top ten list. It wasn’t featured on ‘Siskel and Ebert’ and it didn’t receive a single Academy Award nomination (although it would be hard to categorize a film in which the ‘best supporting’ roles were foam and fire).”—Arts Magazine official site
Here’s a big virtual high-five of gratitude to Alec Soth for turning us (me) onto the work of Kohei Yoshiyuki, who’s currently showing at Yossi Milo in NY. Yoshiyuki took these photos in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo in 1971 with infrared film; they’re of nocturnal sexcapades in public parks—and of the voyeurs who love them.
In the summer of 1955, my former boss Fred Baldwin invited himself to visit Pablo Picasso at his home in Cannes. “I don’t suppose that anybody felt less qualified or had less of an excuse than I did,” Fred remembers. He memorialized his reverent intrusion in Dear Monsieur Picasso, which has a pretty hilarious account of the trip and some great photos of the visit.
I went back to my car depressed and sat there for a while reviewing the situation. My money was almost gone, but if I conserved what remained, squeezing a meal out of a couple of pieces of bread, a square of cheese, and the remaining five swallows of wine, I could last one more day in Cannes. I decided to take the chance and try once more to see Picasso. Tomorrow morning would be the big final effort, and in the meantime I had to work on a new plan. The American journalist story was getting me nowhere. It had become a ridiculous idea even to me.
I spent the night again in my car parked just across from the villa on Picasso’s doorstep. I didn’t get much sleep. I kept waking up hearing little noises, half expecting to see Picasso’s face peering at me through the car window. The reliable laundry bag over my head only resulted in further breathing difficulties. I decided that neither sleep, inspiratrion, nor intervention was possible at Villa la Californie, so I went for a drive before dawn.
*I first met Fred in 1999; I never heard of this story until I stumbled across it online last week.
