Pinheads Unite

Today, April 25, is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. I'm sure you can feel the excitement in the air. Here's how it works:

1. Build a pinhole camera
2. Take pinhole photographs today
3. Submit them to the WPPD site

This is the fourth year the event has been held, and you can see previous years' pictures from all over the world at the WPPD picture gallery.

Today's contest is only a few hours old, but they already have pictures up from New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the United States.

Come upstairs and see my etchings

Nothing says "Happy Belated Earth Day" like the gift of scrimshaw! Scrimshaw is the "indigenous art form of the American Whaleman", who, let's face it, doesn't have much else to do nowadays.

A lot of scrimshaw is now done on tagua nut, which is very similar to ivory when sanded and polished. If you're into dead animal jewelry, however, you have a range of legal options.

Elephant ivory is restricted by CITES, the same trade law that restricts trade in protected orchids. However, elephant ivory that was already legally in the US before 1989 is legal to own, buy, or sell. Sperm whale and walrus ivory is protected unless it pre-dates the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. Walrus ivory that postdates the law is also legal to own, buy, or sell if it has been carved or scrimshawed by an Eskimo. Oh, and hippo ivory is available from hippos that have been culled from protected herds or killed because they attacked humans. That'll show 'em.

But my favorite is the use of Wooly Mammoth ivory, which is completely unrestricted. I feel like this somehow ought to be illegal, but it's not as though we have to worry that the dwindling mammoth herds will be hunted to extinction for their tusks. I found these mammoth ivory pens, but alas, they've been discontinued. Here's mammoth ivory jewelry, but if I gave these people money, I'd rather order one of these soapstone polar bears.

Anyway. Scrimshaw.com sells scrimshaw beginner kits; mine is on the way. Can't let the knitting freaks have a monopoly on the sharp pointy playthings.

Glass Birthday Suit

A few months ago, the Pittsburgh Glass Center held its second annual exhibition of student and instructor work, "Glass Birthday Suit". I went in on the last day and took these pictures of my favorite pieces. I scribbled the titles and artists' names down on the back of a Borders receipt that has been disintegrating at the bottom of my purse ever since. Hopefully I've deciphered all the names correctly.

One thing I particularly liked about the exhibition was the way the pieces' shadows fell. I know nothing about galleries, but I suspect this was deliberately and carefully arranged.

Click on the thumbnails to see the full image.




"Evolution" by Michael Mangiafico

These glass wasps start out cute and abstract and become more and more realistic. Eeyucch.

Sorry about the blurriness. In the fullsize image, you can see they're walking towards the next piece, "Nesting".


"Nesting" by Michael Mangiafico

I cannot express the visceral creepiness of these wasps. These are worse than the walking wasps above; their placement on the real wasps' nest nestled in the glass sculpture makes them seem much more real, and much more likely to fly inside my car window and crawl down between the windshield and the dash, forcing me to pull the car over and open all the doors and windows and poke at the thing with an umbrella tip for fifteen minutes until it finally crawls out and takes off.

You know, hypothetically.

Mangiafico has a website with more pictures of his and his wife's sculptures, including many more glass bugs. The scorpions, spiders, and centipede are even worse than the wasps, but the iridescent beetles and dragonfly are lovely. The marbles are beautiful too.


"Lepidoptera" by Chris Clarke

This is my favorite -- it's like the Platonic ideal of driftwood. From the name, I expect it's supposed to remind me of a butterfly, but it's too... driftwoody. It's quite large, a couple of feet across. The brown curly stuff is metal, probably iron.

This was actually one of three similar pieces, all mounted on the rear wall; unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of all three together.



"Orange Vase" and "Orange Amphora" by local troublemaker Mary Tabasko

Nice work, Mary! In the fullsize pic, there's another piece by someone whose name I didn't write down -- sorry.



"Little Ladies" by Ashley Brickman

There are actually eight ladies arranged in a row in this piece; I've cropped most of them out of the thumbnail, but take a look at the fullsize pic. The way they're arranged, with the different shapes at slightly different heights, puts me in mind of some sort of odd musical instrument. Percussion, probably.

Update: If you can't figure out what the ladies are supposed to look like, it may help to know that the figures don't have heads, arms, or legs.



"Mangy Dogs" by Tom Brown

Balloon animals! Their surface has an interesting frosted effect; I'm not sure how it's achieved.



This was a tall glass birthday cake made by the staff and students of the Glass Center; it sat on a small table at the gallery entrance, next to the guestbook.

The Pittsburgh Glass Center offers workshops, classes, and other good things. If you're in town, you should check it out.

Mighty Good Road

CNN has an interesting article about Americans building an "ice highway" from the Antarcticic coast to the South Pole. The road is a "packed surface 20 feet wide and lined with green flags, winding through huge crevasse fields, snow 'swamps' and flat pack ice."

Two years into the project, the South Pole Traverse Project now covers 425 miles; it should be complete in another two years. I would love to see a video documentary about the making of this road, especially to see the terrain close-up:

"Last year it took us three months to go three miles across a crevasse field ... full of dangerous hidden crevasses. This year we were ... 'breaking trail,' a long, slow slog in soft snow."

In the "snow swamp," a 180-mile-wide, 6-foot-deep field of powder snow... tractors and sleds plowed deep into the snow, stuck fast and had to be hauled out by vehicles traveling behind them.

Wright said the route's newly compacted surface will remain solid over the winter and be useable next year, though the road itself will move, as the whole ice shelf is in slow, fluid motion.

From one summer to the next the crevasse field moved about 1,000 feet north and grew about 100 feet longer.

"The ice had stretched," he said.

The road is intended to carry cargo to the research base, but there's concern that tourists will use it to reach the interior of the continent. Tourists are already an ecological threat and a general pain in the neck in Antarctica. The resident scientists have become so irritated that this past December they refused to sell fuel to an Australian aviator who flew to the pole and landed without permission in a homemade plane with insufficient fuel. He refused to take a commercial flight home, and eventually managed to buy fuel from a British pilot, but you have to admire his sheer blind stupidity in flying into one of the planet's most hostile environments without the means for a return trip.

Knitting for good and not evil

This is a fabulous idea. Some knitters in New York are running a knit-a-thon to benefit animal shelters that need to keep their animals warm. They are affiliated with the Critter Knitters Coalition, who regularly knit for the animals of New York. There appear to be similar organizations all over (I found one in Oregon, plus the nationwide Project Linus and the Pittsburgh South Hills Knitting Guild that make blankets for children in hospitals), but I couldn't find a local group knitting for animals. After I finish the current scarves on the needles (unfortunately, this may be a long while), I need to apply my knitting energies to a good cause.

In sillier knitting news, I'm guessing that the shelter animals would not be happy to receive the fried breakfast hat and handbag. Or at least the cats would have too much dignity; the dogs might agree to wear them if you play fetch with them for 5 minutes.

The Prosecution Will Not Be Televised

Via BoingBoing, the very latest in protest fashion: No Justice, No Quiche. Free Martha, baby.

Animal Hackers

A side comment on the Noreascon mailing list included a URL for this Russian webpage full of bizarre Photoshop animal hybrids. Some of them are gloriously, believably weird.

A bit of Googling reveals that the pictures have actually been collected from Photoshop enthusiast sites Human Descent and Worth1000.com. There are whole new dimensions of amusing time wastage at the latter site; in particular, check out their portraits from the artists as young children and Bug Swap contests.

Happy April First, everyone!

A survey of fun April Fool's web pages that amused me today:

First, the Web Standards Project pokes fun at Microsoft-related viruses and has a dream that anybody would support.

I don't quite understand the Duke buys the entire public domain page, but I did like the "concerned" quotes - they seem very smarmy and realistic.

The SixDifferentWays blog has been outsourced to India. I'm sure Lou Dobbs will be reading an editorial about it any day now.

And lastly, my favorite: The Potter News Network, breaking news and all.

Hope you all got a good prank in today.