Feb 25, 2011 by Sushi Bird
Oh god, this is the most amazing thing I have seen in a little while. These larvae uses things around them to build their cocoons, and Hubert Duprat gave them gold and pearls and other gorgeous materials, and the larvae spun their cocoons using the material he gave them. Isn’t that amazing. You can read more about it here.
Feb 5, 2011 by Sushi Bird
Yes, I have an exciting life today. I just spent the last half hour looking at Mola Molas on youtube. My favorite fish of all time is the Ocean Sunfish, also called Mola Mola. It looks out of this world, both because of the size, and because they look sort of like they have been cut of half way through their bodies. I think this video was filmed in the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Which means I visited this very sunfish. He was super-big in real life, and it is such a humbling experience to experience something so beautiful and strange. I was locked to the glass for a good half hour while the people I was with wanted to move on. I can not recall if I have any pictures of him (the light was really low), but I am sure I have a couple of other pictures from the same aquarium which I am sure I will get around to posting some time.
Feb 1, 2011 by Sushi Bird
The Thomas Beale Cipher from Andrew S Allen on Vimeo.
Based on a true legend of the famous unsolved code. The film contains 16 hidden messages that hold clues to the characters’ secrets. Eight are fairly easy requiring only a close eye. Six are moderately difficult using various encryption methods. Two are extremely difficult requiring a genius mind to decrypt.
Jan 19, 2011 by Sushi Bird
One of my favorite artists as a kid was M. C. Escher. I discovered a book about him through a friend, and when you are an 8 year old girl and nobody else around you had heard about this magical thing you encountered, it was like finding a secret cave or a beautiful treasure. As I grew older, I realized that the entire world knew who he was and that his pictures were often used for various illustrations and publications, toys, decorative objects and prints. I still love his images though, especially the intricate details, the accuracy and the incredible amount of work that went into each piece.
I recently stumbled upon this documentary on youtube about him. It gave me a feeling of being back in junior high, when the art teacher would force the entire class to watch a strange documentary made about 30 years prior with funky music and good ol’ 70ies style animations and fancy pants on the men interviewed. I recall that my classmates rarely enjoyed the wacky old documentaries presented by the wacky old art teachers, but I always found them charming and I rather enjoyed being forced to watch videos I could not watch on my own. (There was no youtube back then kids!) Anyway, here is part 1 of the documentary, the other parts can be found at youtube. If you can withstand the cheesiness (or if you are like me, you kind of secretly like it), it is a really interesting documentary. I especially like the parts where they interview mathematicians.
Jan 16, 2011 by Sushi Bird
(This was a song that Jennifer Warnes co-wrote with Leonard Cohen and it appears on her album “Famous Blue Raincoat”. One of the great overlooked albums of the 80’s.)
I have been listening to this all weekend. It makes me want to burst out in tears – or laughter. I don’t know. I don’t get these musical epiphanies often anymore. So when they finally come, few and far between, I feel happy and overwhelmed, even though the songs that cause the epiphany usually contain some kind of melancholy.
Jan 15, 2011 by Sushi Bird
(Ok, so I cheated a little bit – I fell asleep, and it is Saturday here before I could publish this post. Whups.)
Jan 14, 2011 by Sushi Bird
I used to love this movie just a couple of years ago, and I just rediscovered it. This is the first part. The buildings in the background and the details and love that went into this film is just beautiful.
(“Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science-fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The most expensive silent film ever made, it cost approximately 5 million Reichsmark.” Taken from Wikipedia.)
