Does anyone know anything about this?
Boy, that’s awesome. Via Wooster Collective — all I know is that it was “seen in the Palazzo Reale in Milan” and it’s by Italian artist Gino De Dominicis.
March 30, 2007
March 29, 2007
We All Know the Feeling
I’m not sure where this came from originally, but I got it from Reddit.
How Helpful!
Now available from Google Maps:
Watch out for number 33 — it’s a doozy!
March 26, 2007
Trash, Out
German artist HA Shult’s latest installation is 1,000 “Trash People” — on display in Rome:
Get the Fix
No basketball today, but you can watch this amazing clip of the last 45 seconds of the Division II national championship. It’s one of the best sports highlights I’ve ever seen:
March 23, 2007
Those Left Behind
Speaking of the latest New Yorker, it contains one of the best pieces of reporting on Iraq I have read. George Packer’s “Betrayed” describes the appalling predicament of the thousands of Iraqis who have worked with the Americans during the occupation, risking their lives in the process:
Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country’s religious and ethnic spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly young men and women who embraced America’s project so enthusiastically that they were prepared to risk their lives for it may constitute Iraq’s smallest minority. I came across them in every city: the young man in Mosul who loved Metallica and signed up to be a translator at a U.S. Army base; the DVD salesman in Najaf whose plans to study medicine were crushed by Baath Party favoritism, and who offered his services to the first American Humvee that entered his city. They had learned English from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC. Before the war, their only chance at a normal life was to flee the country—a nearly impossible feat. Their future in Saddam’s Iraq was, as the Metallica fan in Mosul put it, “a one-way road leading to nothing.” I thought of them as oddballs, like misunderstood high-school students whose isolation ends when they go off to college. In a similar way, the four years of the war created intense friendships, but they were forged through collective disappointment. The arc from hope to betrayal that traverses the Iraq war is nowhere more vivid than in the lives of these Iraqis. America’s failure to understand, trust, and protect its closest friends in Iraq is a small drama that contains the larger history of defeat.
Comedy of Errors
From the most recent New Yorker:
By the way, the New Yorker’s new website is a colossal improvement on the last one — you can even see all the cartoons from each issue.
March 22, 2007
March 21, 2007
The Originals
The title of the Backwards City post where I discovered these sites is called Nerd Crack — I think that’s about right.
What you see below are pieces of conceptual art designed by Ralph McQuarrie before and during the creation of the original trilogy. There are dozens of these!
True, but not very Funny
There are times when I swear that The Onion is altering their backlog. For example, this “Point-Counterpoint” published on March 26, 2003:
This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism
And what exactly is our endgame here? Do we really believe that we can install Gen. Tommy Franks as the ruler of Iraq? Is our arrogance and hubris so great that we actually believe that a U.S. provisional military regime will be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi people? Democracy cannot possibly thrive under coercion. To take over a country and impose one’s own system of government without regard for the people of that country is the very antithesis of democracy. And it is doomed to fail.
A war against Iraq is not only morally wrong, it will be an unmitigated disaster.
edwardhenry 