New header “Look Up” in honor of the space spies who made an awesome, new discovery last week.

Remember when like, waaaay back in the beginning of Novemember 2011, when we all were pretty sure the Milky Way looked like this?

Surprise!

It really looks like this:

“What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic centre,” said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who first recognised the feature. “We don’t fully understand their nature or origin…”

When the leader of the Harvard team responsible for the discovery is reduced to an elementary summary like this:

“They’re big,” said Doug Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of the team that discovered them; the New York Times draws an analogy to Jabba the Hut, and “Wow,” is what David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who was not involved in the work had to say…You know something jaw dropping has happened.

50,000 LIGHT YEARS OF HOT PINK. Almost as big as the entire galaxy, but completely unsuspected until now. If this doesn’t make us regret the decision to cancel our radical shuttle program, nothing will.

All images and videos from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Dominic Wilcox on his speed creating project:

The main aim of the project was to make things instinctively and force myself into making decisions quickly. I believe that some things can only be discovered by getting your hands dirty and just doing it. Try it, see if it works, if not then adjust it or learn from it and do something different. I think when the mind is concentrating on what the hands are doing then the sub-concious mind gets freed up to observe and make creative links.

Between lampshades made out of bread, onion ring fabric, beautiful repeats and hilarious hillshoes designed to make walkin up and downhill easier (below), Wilcox seems to access to a free form creative association many people lose as children.

When you are fully charmed by the originality of his whimsical inventions, then you should immediately click over to his cartoon drawings for some Shel Silverstein style chuckles.

I’ve been studying styles for an animation project I’m working on. I keep coming back to these two. Thinking to mix them together.

1) Los Tres Caballeros
2) Aerial, The Roadrunner

via

When I catalogue images, I’m really bad at recording the name of the artist. I always appreciate the artists who anticipate this problem and label their .jpg with their last name.

I wish I could track down the artist who made this image, because I think it’s great even though it reps rainbow sherbet which was definitely not as good as the plain orange.

In particular, a watch worth going back in time for. A watch worth risking the indignities of disco and the threat of tearing a hole in the fabric of space.

Two watches, actually, as long as we’re going through all the trouble.

Well, H. John Benjamin and Brendan Small are responsible for a lot of funny. Consider the following list of hilarious animated series that one or both have been involved in: Lucy Daughter of the Devil, Frisky Dingo, The Venture Bros., Metalocalypse, Aquateen Hunger Force, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, the Dick and Paula Celebrity Special, etc.

But dig back to the semi-precious years between 1999 - 2004 and you will find a gem worthy of any African mine: Home Movies. A series about three kids who make LOTS of movies, their mother (voiced by Paula Poundstone!) and the alcoholic soccer coach John McGuirk.

I don’t want to start loading video on this site, but I hand picked this clip just for you to enjoy.  It has a wizards, a cow, and home shopping swords. What could be more compelling?

This series is really funny. The animation is creative. It was canceled too early. It has a major cult following. Haven’t you always wanted to join a cult?

One of the many things that’s awesome about Anne Hardy is that she builds these elaborate sets for the photos she takes.

And sometimes makes these abandoned 1970s missile-space-serial killer silo spaces.

When I look at this last picture, I’m reminded of a basement because that’s the only place where I’ve seen windows covered with leaves like this. This in itself was a cool thing to remember and acknowledge. But, the height of these windows suggests this space was used for viewing - you don’t put 8 foot windows on the ground if your space is secret. If you did, the potential spies you were being secret from wouldn’t have to do any spy shit - they’d just make a visor out of their hands and look in.

If you accept my spurious logic, then you can enjoy imagining how enormous these leaf piles must be to almost cover the windows of a high watch tower. The trees must have the real old kind.

Point is, the imagination in her work is contagious and the colors are fantastic.

P.S. I’m going to see the Senator over Thanksgiving. It’s 3,500 years old. Like most of our Senators. Yuk Yuk.  Seriously though, what a bad name for an awesome thing. Unless, I guess, when you think of Senators, you think of someone like him.

I have looked at the picture of that palm-Hawaii-Flordia door and this abandoned dolphin fountain maybe 50 times in the last year. I’m pretty into items that are so awful they disappear into the wormhole of taste and become awesome again.

The door picture has given me so many deep laughs, but I always ask myself: How could that work?

I know it seems insane and in a way it is insane. It might be true that this works best as a framed photo as the artist (unknown to me) intended. It’s easy to own a mid-century chair. But it takes some real work to take a poorly designed, laughable item and reframe it - to place the ugly in a context where it becomes beautiful, original.

It’d be easy to hang the door as a piece of art in a room while lots of camel and carmel colors.  It’d be funny to have this be the exterior door to an extremely minimal, all white room. It’d be awesome to have this be the interior door in a room piled with gaudy pieces from all eras. Think cheetah prints, white bear rugs, baroque vases in pink and blue, lucite tables, maybe some taxidermy or neon. Teddy Ruxbin and velvet paintings. I’d say a Precious Moment or two, but that seems too awful…at least for now. Maybe Shary Boyle figurines instead. That chic knows what I’m talking about.

As for the fountain? Anyone could put that fountain in their front or backyard and strike me as a genius of comedy.  I would love to see that in front of almost any style of home, but I also have a decanter sitting on my desk right now that is shaped like deer with its front legs on a rock. You pull the head off to pour booze out.  God bless Jim Beam.

Samara Golden is in a fist fight with minimalism.

Have you really looked at Margriet Smulders (outstanding self portrait above) melted flower mirror fabric oil painting photography?

Go ogle her nice big pictures, she’s a real talent.