Image of the Day: Mercury Space Capsule Playground Slide

Most likely manufactured by Mexico Forge in the late 1960s to early 1970s.
This one is located in a school playground in Bellefonte, PA.
I wonder if the children crawling and sliding on this even know what it represents?

Image of the Twilight: Crows Off to Roost

When I left work a few days ago, a steady river of crows flew overhead from the Penn State Aboretum / Toftrees wooded area toward main campus. The birds just kept coming, and I believe that there were hundreds if not close to one thousand crows on their way to roost. I pulled out my camera, and took a shot with an extended exposure. When I opened it up in Photoshop later in the evening, I was amazed to see how they looked like flying pieces of paper. With a few adjustments to color and contrast, the results are above.

Pico Iyer: The Joy of Quiet

I really enjoyed reading Pico Iyer's article, The Joy of Quiet, in the New York Times. Ways that I personally find quiet and clarity in my life are early morning solitary 4 mile runs several times a week, making the time to take a 15 minute brisk walk at mid-morning while at work, and very often at least one day of a weekend making a conscious effort to not check email, blogs, and my standard web sites. What are the ways that you find and capture the “Joy of Quiet”?

Twelve Days of Holiday Travel

On the first day of travel, my true love said to me,
We better fill the tank with gas now.

On the second day of travel, my true love said to me,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.

On the third day of travel, my true love said to me,
Detour for construction,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.


On the fourth day of travel, my true love said to me,
Santa cut us off,
Construction,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.

On the fifth day of travel, my true love said to me,
I have to pee!
Santa cut us off,
Construction,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.

On the sixth day of travel, my true love said to me,
Hey we missed our exit,
I have to pee!
Santa cut us off,
Construction,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.


On the seventh day of travel, my true love said to me,
Sure is dark in Winter,
Hey we missed our exit,
I have to pee!
Santa cut us off,
Construction,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.

On the eighth day of travel, my true love said to me,
NPR is fading,
Sure is dark in Winter,
Hey we missed our exit,
I have to pee!
Santa cut us off,
Construction,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.

On the ninth day of travel, my true love said to me,
Wawa botched our order,
NPR is fading,
Sure is dark in Winter,
Hey we missed our exit,
I have to pee!
Santa cut us off,
Construction,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.


On the tenth day of travel, my true love said to me,
Let's stop for coffee,
Wawa botched our order,
NPR is fading,
Sure is dark in Winter,
Hey we missed our exit,
I have to pee!
Santa cut us off,
Construction,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.

On the eleventh day of travel, my true love said to me,
Hang on there's a pothole,
Let's stop for coffee,
Wawa botched our order,
NPR is fading,
Sure is dark in Winter,
Hey we missed our exit,
I have to pee!
Santa cut us off,
Construction,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.

On the twelfth day of travel, my true love said to me,
Wish we had a TomTom,
Hang on there's a pothole,
Let's stop for coffee,
Wawa botched our order,
NPR is fading,
Sure is dark in Winter,
Hey we missed our exit,
I have to pee!
Santa cut us off,
Construction,
Traffic is backed up,
And we better fill the tank with gas now.

(Are we there yet?)

The Wayward Wish

For as long as anyone could recall, the tradition of sending wishes aloft in luminaries always occurred at nightfall. Whether it was for something joyous, like celebrating a holiday or anniversary, or a more reflective time for healing the heart or body, this ritual was woven into the fabric of the land.

Artisans hand-crafted the hot air balloon-like luminarias so that they would remain floating long enough to travel to the Granters. Who the Granters were and where they lived were part of the charm and mystery tied into the community's folklore.

Whispered into the lantern before the paper fuel was lit, the wish was safe. As it rose into the darkness, town-folks would pause from their evening chores watching the lantern climb, becoming smaller and smaller until it seemed to blend with the stars themselves. Unseen, the flame would die out, the air inside the lantern cool, and the wish would slowly descend into the land of the Granters. Some mornings it would take them hours gathering the lanterns that had been sent to them, other times but a moment. Then their real work began, listening to the wish, carefully weighing its consequences, and deliberating the spiderweb of ramifications outward.

But what happens when a wish lands in your backyard? Does the responsibility of honoring the wish now become finder's? So began the next phase of the Wayward Wish; what happened next is another tale that is yet to be told...

A short piece of fiction inspired by finding what appeared to be a deflated snowman in our yard one evening.

Devorah Sperber: American Gothic Thread Works

via designboom
“Sperber’s upside-down spool sculptures made up of 4,392 spools of colored thread create a visual experience directly connected to the method in which one's brain must piece together sensory data in a clear, physical representation. The flow of information from the eyes to the brain is known as 'top-down processing'. With each spool of thread being a dot of color, equivalent to that of a 'pixel', the human eye is able to recognize the larger visual pattern once witnessed through a clear convex surface…”

See more of her works here. Earlier versions of American Gothic were only made of 500 spools of thread. Amazing what only a limited number of spools can do. 

Gwyneth Leech’s Hypergraphia: The Cup Drawings

My wife, daughter-in-law, and I recently discovered Gwyneth Leech’s Hypergraphia: The Cup Drawings at the Flatiron Building in NYC. We had a great time looking at the multitude of colorful patterns showcased there. Her exhibition runs through February 2012.

You can learn more about The Cup Drawings on her blog here, and about Gwyneth Leech’s other works here.

 

“If you give up, it’s all over.”

via brain pickings
A piece of existential poetry for today and relates to Japan’s most beloved flower — the cherry blossom — that began blooming a month after the devastating tsunami. Lucy Walker captures the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi. There is no direct translation in English but it connotes a way of living that finds beauty in imperfection and accepts the natural cycle of growth and decay.

Watch the video here. Viewing images of the tsunami is very emotional, but if you can, please watch this until the end, it is worth it.

3³

Twenty-seven is a perfect cube, being 3³ = 3 × 3 × 3.  27 contain numbers 2 and 7 if you take line of numbers starting with 2 ending with 7 you will get 27 in result. (2+3+4+5+6+7=27). It is the atomic number of cobalt, as well as the number of species Captain Jean-Luc Picard has made contact with in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation. The ampersand is sometimes referred to as the 27th letter of the alphabet. But most importantly, it is the number of years that I have been with the love of my life. We have had our share of ups and downs, good and bad times, sun and storms, but I would not have traded them for anything. I love you Terri, and look forward to the coming years, adventures, and accomplishments through life together. Happy Anniversary.

E.A. Séguy’s Cicadas

via PrintCollecion
“The artist, designer and etymologist E.A. Séguy was very prolific in the early part of the last century in France. This is part of a larger set of about 14 groups of insects…”
Cicadas are some of the most fascinating insects to me. Listening to their song while lying in a hammock is just one of our annual summer rituals. Be sure to mouse-over the images by Séguy here and here to see detailed close-ups; you can also purchase museum-quality prints there as well.

The Thomas Beale Cipher

pointed out via a friend
“The Thomas Beale Cipher is the true story of an unsolved code, animated in a gorgeous blend of analaog textures and digtal techniques. The film itself contains 16 hidden messages — and no one has solved all 16 yet. In this interview, the director of the film, Andrew S. Allen, shares some of his thoughts on the creative development the film and strategies for filmmakers looking to build an audience online…”
Watch the short here, read the interview here.

Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test

via Pantone
Trivia: One in two hundred women suffer from some form of color vision deficiency, for men, it’s one in twelve. The Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test consists of four trays containing a total of 85 removable color reference caps (incremental hue variation) spanning the visible spectrum.
Learn more about it here; I think it would be interesting taking this test!

Games: Kern and Shape Type

via very short list
Here are super-simple, totally addictive design-minded web games called Kern Type and Shape Type. Shape Type shows you ten letters per game, and you adjust each one, trying to get the curves to match up as neatly as possible with the ones the original font-maker designed. It takes just a few seconds (a minute or two at most) to play each individual letter. But don’t be surprised if an hour goes by…
Play Shape Type here, Kern Type here. 

Michael Winslow’s “History of the Typewriter Recited”

via very short list
“Directed by Ignacio Uriarte, The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow is a 21-minute performance that features Winslow’s audio impersonations of 32 typewriters. The film is as funny as we hoped it would be. But as you’ll see, it’s also an unexpectedly musical, and oddly moving, history lesson…”


 

A great tribute to old technology!

AIP and Henry Koerner

pointed out by a fellow AIP classmate
Henry Koerner used Pittsburgh as his inspiration, and he explains his ideas on art interpretation in this episode of Profiles in Excellence. Watching this video brings back memories of being in his class in the early 1980s. At 1:55 in the video, when I spotted the old AIP [Art Institute of Pittsburgh] logo on a portfolio I almost expected to see fellow classmates! Henry was eccentric and had a huge ego, but he challenged the way we approached figure drawing. I liked some aspects of his earlier work, especially color, but in general I wasn’t a fan of his later works’ juxtaposition of proportion and size.



More can be found here and from his obituary in the NYTimes here.

Knowledge is Power: How to Make Anything Signify Anything

Detail from a photograph of World War I cryptographers.
By facing either forward or sideways, the soldiers formed the coded phrase
“Knowledge is power” utilizing Francis Bacon’s biliteral cipher.

via The Cataloguer’s Desk and the Cabinet magazine
“The belief that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him originated in the mid 19th century, coinciding with an upsurge in his popularity and with the Victorian interest in puzzles and mysteries. Though more than 70 candidates have been proposed as the true author, for many years the most popular option was the natural philosopher and politician Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626). As a young man Bacon lived for several years in France, where he studied statecraft and learned about cryptography, a field in which that nation was leading the rest of Europe. He developed his own ‘bilateral’ cipher, which used the letters a and b to generate the entire alphabet…”
Read the rest here, and a fascinating piece in The Cabinet Magazine on ”How to Make Anything Signify Anything” here.  Though I am hardly any good at solving them, I find codes and cyphers fascinating. My wife creatively utilized many for clues to letterboxes we created.

Reckitt’s Blue, Ultramarine, and Deep Space

via scoutingNY.com and fading ad blog

The Great Hall 

ScoutingNY recently had a post on “The Most Amazing Room In Queens” which featured The Great Hall at the New York Hall of Science which was designed to give visitors the illusion of being in deep space.

Frank Jump’s ghost sign image

A few days earlier, Frank Jump posted “Reflections on the Color Blue” which gives the RGB and CMYK breakdowns of Reckitt’s Blue from a ghost sign. He wrote about this Ultramarine Blue here earlier.

Two of my favorite sites online, exploring one of my favorite colors; amazing.

Captain Scott’s Lost Antarctic Expedition Photographs

Image by Robert Falcon Scott courtesy of
Little, Brown and Company via The New York Times

via brain pickings
“The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition brings these brave men’s story to light, and does so with an incredible story of its own. Several years ago, as polar historian David M. Wilson was having a drink at a London salon, he was approached by an art collector by the name of Richard Kossow, who claimed that in 2001 he had purchased a portfolio of Antarctic photographs from the early 1900s. Wilson was already intrigued, but when Kossow informed him that the photos were from Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910-13 expedition, whose ill-fated crew featured Wilson’s great-uncle, Edward Wilson, and they were taken by Scott himself, Wilson nearly choked on his gin and tonic. The rest, as the saying goes, is history…”
Rest the rest here. Turn of the century polar photography and gin and tonic — two of my favorites.

Afternoon Tea with Aunt Maude

Samson Street in Upper Darby, PA in the mid-1970s

As the weather has begun to turn cooler, I have been making a cup of tea to enjoy in the afternoon at work. With the brewed aroma of Bigelow’s Constant Comment® orange peel and spices filling the air, my Great-Aunt Maude joins me in spirit. I have such a strong mental connection of this tea with her, most likely from early autumn days spent with her in her kitchen, while this tea brewed in white china cups. 

During my pre-dawn runs or early morning bike commutes to work, I have an eye that tears and waters from the breeze. I quietly say out loud, “Good morning Aunt Maude.” In my earliest memories of her, she always had a tissue tucked in a sweather pocket or up in the cuff of her blouse to dry her eyes that watered in the same manner. A gentle grounding presence for me, she has become a pause and a time of reflection during many of my afternoons.

There are many senses that I associate with quiet soul. The smell of a large hot soft pretzel with yellow mustard instantly takes me to center-city Philadelphia shopping with her. Other memories of our times together include:

—Buying warm cashews at G.C. Murphy’s

—Watching TV cooking shows, especially the Galloping Gourmet, and her love of cookbooks

—Walking her cat Princess on a leash in cool foggy mornings through the alleys of Upper Darby

—Her ability to butter toast without crushing the bread

—Listening to KYW news radio together in her breakfast nook

—Puppets, especially a very well-loved rabbit, skunk, and Kermit the Frog 

—Walking hand-in-hand to a nearby golf course to collect stray balls along the edge of the course

—The train and commuter stations in and around Philadelphia that we traveled through

—Shopping at the farmers, fish, and produce market and the lasting sights and smells these imprinted in me

—Her love of reading books and the daily newspaper

—Taking time to visit both large and small museums

—Exposing me to the many cultures throughout the city

—Her winding laundry shoot that dropped from the second floor to the basement

—And lastly, her appreciation of the arts

On a limited income, she made her home accessible and worldly to a small town boy who was lost in so many ways. I am glad that she still takes the time to join me now, even after all these years.

Valley View, PA in the late 1980s

Starling Murmuration

via swissmiss
“A short film that follows the journey of two girls in a canoe on the River Shannon and how they stumble across one of nature’s greatest phenomenons; a murmuration of starlings.”

murmuration
/merr'meuh ray"sheuhn/, n.
1. an act or instance of murmuring.
2. a flock of starlings.

Watch the video here. I have been fortunate to have seen and heard such a murmuration locally at Millbrook Marsh as a late autumn day draws to a close.