Thursday, May 15, 2008
Comic Book & Cartoon Characters as Senior Citizens
Donald Soffritti has a great series of illustrations showing what some superheroes and supervillains might look like in their old age.
Along these same lines, Spirit Magazine, the inflight magazine for Southwest Airlines, recently published an article on Nickelodeon which includes a wonderful illustration of some popular cartoon and comics characters as senior citizens.
via Neatorama & Cartoon Brew
illustration by Donald Soffritti & unknown
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Monday, May 12, 2008
Give Everyone a Million
I remind you there was a TV show in the 50s called The Millionaire about a guy who anonymously gave a random stranger a million bucks. Just because the show was cancelled in 1960 doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
Here's my economic plan for America; get rid of all social programs and level the playing field by simply giving absolutely everyone a million dollars, whether they need it or not. Then people can afford whatever they need. Housing problem? Solved. Poverty problem? Solved. Medical care problem? Solved.
Traditional wisdom says this will cause inflation, but I don't think so. Prices would not go up because retailers would need to make less money because they were already millionaires. EVERYBODY isn't greedy. Americans would go on spending sprees, giving absolutely every business in America the very shot in the arm it needs, and all the sales tax would feed the government coffers. Banks would be flush with all those people paying off their mortgages and credit card debt.
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Where will this money come from? Half from taxes, in which case everyone has to get TWO million, or nowhere, just like the war in Iraq. No need to use the dead tree version of money. Why waste all that capital on printing and envelopes and postage. Direct deposit from the US treasury will work, simply increasing the debt. Let the country go bankrupt. Who cares? You're a millionaire. Move to Tahiti.
MD
ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE
Much has been said about the state of the media in our world, but how did we get to such a place where the United States can declare war without scrutiny, that Paris Hilton is a celebrity and the line between "propaganda" and "news" is almost non-existent? Well, ok, so nothing could explain Paris Hilton's popularity, but Robert Kane Pappas's documentary "Orwell Rolls in his Grave" tackles the other problems, and brilliantly so. If you haven't seen this documentary before, then you're in for a treat. If you have seen it, well, you should see it again!
Friday, May 9, 2008
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Walking Bike
Max Knight design
Here is a bike that i designed for my good friend Yorgo Tloupas at Intersection magazine.
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Wednesday, May 7, 2008
El camino del Rey
Take one of the most astonishing walks on earth.
Originally built in 1901, this walkway in Malaga, Spain, now serves as an approach to makinodromo, the famous climbing sector of El Chorro.
Cory Doctorow: Think Like a Dandelion
Regular Locus readers will have noted a recent front-of-the-book item about my recent Good News, a little daughter named Poesy, born to us on February 3, 2008. This feat of nanoengineering — mostly accomplished by my Alice, with 23 chromosomes' worth of programming assistance from yours truly — has got me thinking about reproduction, even more than usual.
Mammals invest a lot of energy in keeping track of the disposition of each copy we spawn. It's only natural, of course: we invest so much energy and so many resources in our offspring that it would be a shocking waste if they were to wander away and fall off the balcony or flush themselves down the garbage disposal. We're hard-wired, as mammals, to view this kind of misfortune as a moral tragedy, a massive trauma to our psyches so deep that some of us never recover from it.
It follows naturally that we invest a lot of importance in the individual disposition of every copy of our artistic works as well, wringing our hands over "not for resale" advance review copies that show up on Amazon and tugging our beards at the thought of Google making a scan of our books in order to index them for searchers. And while printing a book doesn't take nearly as much out of us as growing a baby, there's no getting around the fact that every copy printed is money spent, and every copy sold without being accounted for is money taken away from us.
There are other organisms with other reproductive strategies. Take the dandelion: a single dandelion may produce 2,000 seeds per year, indiscriminately firing them off into the sky at the slightest breeze, without any care for where the seeds are heading and whether they'll get an hospitable reception when they touch down.
And indeed, most of those thousands of seeds will likely fall on hard, unyielding pavement, there to lie fallow and unconsummated, a failure in the genetic race to survive and copy.
But the disposition of each — or even most — of the seeds aren't the important thing, from a dandelion's point of view. The important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions. The dandelion doesn't want to nurse a single precious copy of itself in the hopes that it will leave the nest and carefully navigate its way to the optimum growing environment, there to perpetuate the line. The dandelion just wants to be sure that every single opportunity for reproduction is exploited!
Dandelions and artists have a lot in common in the age of the Internet.
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Tuesday, May 6, 2008
China, IL: Part One - Romeo & Romeo
Necrophilia is a lovely thing in this charming and depraved slice of animation hell from Brad Neely.
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Mickey Mouse Operation
From The Progress Report
With the help of the Defense Department, the Los Angeles-based company C3 is "developing the Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience, a massive American-style amusement park that will feature a skateboard park, rides, a concert theatre and a museum" and "is being designed by the firm that developed Disneyland." More than that though, the Pentagon is also backing a $5 billion plan to create a "zone of influence" around the new $700 million U.S. embassy that will include luxury hotels, a shopping center, and condos in an effort to "transform" the Green Zone into a "centerpiece for Baghdad's future." This isn't the first time the Pentagon has turned to Disney for solutions. One year after the scandal erupted over the long-term treatment of soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Army introduced the "Service, Disney Style" program that is now required for all military and other government employees at the hospital in an effort to "revamp attitudes" and instill a sense that "poor service equals frustration." With violence escalating in Iraq, the Pentagon is again looking to the Disney model for a way out.
'ANYBODY EVER BEEN TO DISNEYLAND?': The Disneyland-style amusement park in the heart of Iraq will cost nearly $500 million. Llewellyn Werner, chairman of C3, said of the idea, "[T]he people need this kind of positive influence. It's going to have a huge psychological impact." But make no mistake, Werner also sees dollar signs. "I'm a businessman. I'm not here because I think you're nice people," Werner said, adding, "I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't making money." Trying to sell the idea to Baghdad's skeptical deputy mayor, Werner explained the significance of waterpark lagoons: they're "very important to the sex appeal, the sizzle. Anybody ever been to Disneyland?" Werner's sentiment is shared by John March, executive vice president of the firm contracted to design the park. March recently downplayed any safety concerns associated with creating a massive entertainment complex in the heart of Baghdad. "Well, you live here in Southern California and there's drive-bys and everything else. So there's danger everywhere," he proclaimed. But Werner has an idea on how to bridge the sectarian divide in Baghdad: skateboarding. He said Iraqis will see the park as "an opportunity for their children regardless if they're Shia or Sunni." Speaking in deliberately slow English, Werner told the Iraqis, "One of the fastest growing sports in the world is skate…boarding." Indeed, the skateboarding park, part of the first phase, is set to open this summer.
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