Exploring The Shift

Those Adorable Russians

I recently wrote about the soviet bus shelters and found a similar article on neatorama about the town Ramenskoye located some 50km southeast of Moscow.

The houses there are entirely painted with adorable designs which are entirely different from what I'd associate with russian suburbs. What I really adore about Russians is their ability to improvise.

Here is a picture and a link to a site with more photos, but unfortunately the comments there are cyrillic so I didn't find out much.

Link

FireFox Crop Circle

Does the sudden appearance of a Firefox crop circle imply which browser extraterrestrials prefer? Does it showcase the skill and reckless modifications of reality by photoshop magicians? Or does it maybe hint at the enthusiasm of the linux user group at Oregon State University?

Find out the answer here

More about crop-circles

Nailing Pudding to the Wall

Ahh, here is one those people, who are not keeping themselves from doing something, just because it is silly. Silly? What am I saying? This is science!

Did you ever try to get a clear answer from a lawyer or politician? Well, no matter if you tried or not, you probably know the saying that "you might as well try to nail a pudding to the wall". Or depending on the country you live in, maybe try nailing jelly or jello to the wall … in Germany it is pudding.

And here is a guy (via neatorama) who actually tried it, documented all the steps and then answers the burning question if this saying in essence (backed up by practical evidence) means that is easy, hard or impossible: Link

Twiggy the Water Skiing Squirrel

This is just too damn cute to not post (full story and background).

Via neatorama, via aborath

The Wilhelmsburg Complaints Choir

Wilhelmsburg (a part of the German city of Hamburg) followed the examples of Helsinky and Birmingham, so now Germany also has a complaints choir.

My favorite is still the one from Helsinki, but this one is nice too, especially if you understand German.

A Feel-Good Video

There are a couple of videos and sites which I sometimes just visit because they just make me smile. I'll post a couple of these over the next days, here is the first one.

Magnificent Puppet Play

Besides splendid, the word magnificent means great which of course means big and hence it is exactly the right word for this puppet play. And it is amazing how about halfway through the video my perception of size shifted (like what was normal size and what was big or small).

Contact Juggling

Did I ever tell anyone how I love YouTube? Well, I guess I mention that all the time. What I love about it most, is how this medium makes me aware of things people do, things of which I would have never heard of otherwise. I love YouTube it also because it makes people do new things, just because they know they can make and post videos about it easily.

This is why I'm offering the following video, about a man who does something which seems to be called Contact Juggling. It looks beautifully unreal and the music is great too …

Getting Back a Stolen Bag

There's a beautiful story about a Chinese woman who had her bag stolen and who was getting it back with all items. After all, there's some goodness in everybody, even thiefs.

China phone thief repents after 21 text messages

Blossosm within Bland Architecture

I'm sort of going back to the roots of this blog, wanting to show the wondrous diversity of life in this particular dimension which we call planet earth.

BoingBoing linked to Polar Inertia today, with photo series by Christopher Herwig, documenting modern society. I'm just beginning to explore the site, but the series which was featured on boingboing, is one that I that I find particularly intriguing.

(image © Christopher Herwig)

I think you won't be able to guess what this is. It is not a Bauhaus art installation, but a bus shelter from the former Soviet Union.

The roadside bus stop serves a simple purpose – to show where the bus will stop and to provide some comfort and shelter for waiting passengers. One would think that the Soviets would have come up with one universal design for this community structure – simple, functional and cheap to mass produce. However, in many instances this was not the case, much time, effort and imagination went into many roadside bus stops. The sky was the limit with different shapes and design– blocks, domes, columns, towers, A-frames and archways, even ones shaped like birds, yurts and hats. If the bus stop was less bold and daring with its architectural design then the creators would often attract attention with decorating the structure with murals or mosaics. The themes that these decorated bus stops took usually varied depending on the region, often reflecting the local culture, history, or industries.

If you check the phots, make sure you view the whole series as some of the shelters may not be so stunning individually, but seeing the sheer creativity and variety is nothing but stunning, especially because of the eerie contrast of this variety in a society which would be associated with conformity and architectural blandness compared the uniformity of bus stops in western society, which focuses so much on individuality: Soviet Bus Shelters

I also like his series about Indian Rikshaw Mudflaps, which is also about overflowing creativity in transportation.

Fearless Rabbit

I've been neglecting this blog a bit recently due to lack of spectacular insights to post here, so until I find something deep and meaningful to share with whoever reads this blog, I'll take Elias' advice from a recent session and will focus more on playfulness (but I'll keep trying to sneak in Elias catchphrases in an unobstrusive way).

Speaking of playfulness, I just found a video of a rabbit which implemented payfulness in quite a bold way.

Well, ever since Monty Python's movie Holy Grail it is well known that rabbits are deady and bloodthirsty creatures (movie scene).

One may have taken that as a typical exaggeration by Monty Python, but now a fearless and agressive rabbit has been spotted and filmed.

(Found on haha.nu (which is one of my favorite blogs, because I always find light and amusing stuff there to distract me from thinking deep thoughts :-))

Fine Art Without People

Developing an interest in art recently I just found an interesting photoshop contest on worth1000. The contest objective is to take a fine art picture and remove the people, leaving everything else in place.

The results are eerie but also entertaining and exhibit an amazing mastery in photoshop given that missing parts, e.g. background in a place where a human body part was, need to be repainted in a realistic way.

And in a way this is strangely inverse to nude art and porn. In those you see people without clothes, here it is the opposite.

Contest Link

Interpretation of Art (An Insight from the Wave of Perception)

As long as I can remember, I have been weary of interpretations of art and literature. This basically goes back to school where we were supposed to take apart great works in both art forms and come up with interpretations and meanings for details in them.

[…] Read more!

The Power of Visuals

A user on our forum posted a snippet from an Elias Session today where Elias says that visuals are the most powerful sense to create perception. Just a few minutes later I generated a nice synch by finding an animation video on haha.nu which fits the topic on multiple levels.

I'm a great fan of animation movies so this gives me a great excuse to post it here (not that I need any) together with the opportunity to create some insight, especially because the movie is quite powerful (according to haha.nu it was nominated for the Oscar in 2002).

(Warning: some blood and violence involved.)

[…] Read more!

Happy Feet for Real

A picture and story from the too damn cute photopool on Flickr (a pool featuring cute animal and kids pictures, the pool is worth seeing by itself).

This particluar picture and link however is about young penguines living in a marine center in New Zealand and about the blue shoes they got (and why): Happy Feet

As the name for that Flick pool says: Too damn cute!
(And how nicely the colors match those of this website :-))