Modern Day Leonardo
Kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen's animaris percipiere made of PVC piping. One of his Strandbeests. It moves like an animal with nothing more than wind locomotion.
If you've been wondering where all the modern day Leonardo da Vinci's are, well, here's one. His name is Theo Jansen, a kinetic sculptor that lives in Holland. He calls his "animals" Strandbeests. Check out this video from the BBC's Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention, Episode 1 Preview:
http://www.wimp.com/kineticsculpture/
If that link doesn't work, here's the YouTube version:
And here's Theo's own website, Strandbeest:
Waitsel’s Best Christmas 2010
Best Movies, Best Foods, Best Gifts, Best Toys, Best Websites... Best Everything!
Best Christmas Website - The Cookie Shop
Every year, I try to do something for my friends that is unique and meaningful. This year, I thought I would share with you what I consider to be some of the best ideas for Christmas, beginning with the best website. I'm not one myself for baking, but this website by a Brazilian lady named Paula makes me want, not only to eat some gingerbread men, but to go to the trouble of baking them as well. I found her site while looking for a photograph of a gingerbread man to use in a Christmas piece I was working on. Paula's men were the cutest and most artistically done of any I found. But her whole website is that way. Her creations are works of art. I hope you will enjoy them and tell her what you think. http://thecookieshopinenglish.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/ho-ho-ho-its-gingerbread-time/
The Dumbing Down of America
Or, Whatever Happened to Hayley Mills?
People assume that Americans today are more sophisticated and less gullible because we have become a more visually-oriented society. But in the process of becoming more visual, we have become less literate and less literary, less educated and less informed, less conversational and less relational, less "thinking" (both logically and in regards to "horse sense"); we have a shorter attention span and are more inclined to addiction, violence, etc. What that means is that our society is more vulnerable to sensationalism by the media, manupulation by advertisers, gullibility of a new sort, emotionalism, repeating the mistakes of the past, following after the latest "star" (whether rock, movie or sports), etc. More than ever, we are a society of sheep going astray and less a nation of individual thinkers and doers as our forefathers were.
I don't know of any advantage of becoming a more visually-oriented society and I know of hundreds of disadvantages. The Egyptians were a visually-oriented society. What that produced, ultimately, was a weak society of god-rulers (stars) and slaves (fans).
Thinking and communication have always been based on words, not images. The Egyptians may have been great artists, engineers and builders, but they were by no means great thinkers. The Greeks and Romans were far more literary, and were therefore far greater thinkers. The British were probably the most literary of all societies and they have produced the greatest thinkers of all time, including our founding fathers.
Communism in Hollywood
As a "Whore of Babylon," Hollywood has sold its soul to the god of money, and is a tarnished lady; but is she unredeemable?
Vision Forum, the Christian homeschooling and family resource ministry, offers a CD by filmmaker Geoff Botkin called "Hollywood's Most Despised Villain." When I listened to it, I was not convinced that Hollywood had ever been the target of Communist strategists, as Mr. Botkin proports. I had been studying Hollywood for over thirty years, and knew of very few American films, besides Warren Beatty's Reds and maybe The Way We Were, that I would say were sympathetic to Communism. I felt Mr. Bodkin was preaching from fanaticism due to his own conversion from Communism, rather than from facts - much as my dad used to preach relentlessly against the evils of smoking after he had given up cigarettes. People who have been converted from something tend to be the biggest opponents to it, even to the point of fanaticism. So, I was skeptical.
When you read about McCarthyism and the hearings conducted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities back in the 1950s, the evidence is pretty unclear. Neither side seems particularly convincing. The best testimony that I know of that there was subversive Communist activity in Hollywood in the 1950s is from our film-actor-turned-president, Ronald Reagan: he said there were a lot of Communists in his profession. I believe Ronald Reagan.
But I came across another piece of evidence that helps support Mr. Bodkin's claim.
Technology Meltdown
I already nearly lost one close friend to texting and driving. I don't want to spend the next several years attending funerals of younger friends. Is the ability to text really worth your life?
No one knows the full extent of damage the gaming industry is causing to the psyches of younger Americans, but movies like this one, starring Gerard Butler, show how sick the industry is.
They say you become what you look at. Based on what we're looking at, what are we becoming?
The monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein may be strangely prophetic.
What are we becoming?
What are our children becoming? This is a sad, lonely picture.
Get ready for...
Is This Thing We're So Proud Of Destroying Us?
For the past couple of weeks, the eyes of most Americans, and the world, have been glued to their screens watching the world's greatest athletes perform wonders in the snowy Canadian countryside. And rightly so. But is this thing we're so proud of destroying us? I'm not talking about the Winter Olympics, which have been inspiring. I'm referring to the technology that is bringing those games into our homes, cars, offices, and basically every place we now occupy. We are a technology-saturated, technology-obsessed society, with new devices being introduced almost faster than consumers can absorb them.
Is all this technology destroying us?
Before you poo poo that idea, let me offer some examples.
Example #1: A good friend of mine was recently driving 70 mph, ran off the highway, hit a parked car, rolled twice and was almost killed because he was using his iPhone when he should have been concentrating on his driving. The Department of Transportation says that it is 10 times more dangerous to text and drive than it is to drink and drive.