Spot the warped, frustrated old man

When pondering the image of Dick Cheney in a wheelchair, this tableau sprang to mind.Original here

Thinking of Windows 7

I am certain I'm not the only one to have come up with this meme, but I may be the first one to have hacked up a promotional poster for Microsoft's next OS.

Source images here and here.

Mix 'n match

I think if I were to start a gaming store which included products of a military sort, I could do worse than to name it Rocket Propelled Games.

Alternatively, please enjoy this picture

of a Role-Playing Grenade.

Fun with mirrors

Apparently last week there was a flurry of activity concerning hidden messages in Leonardo's painting of the Last Supper.

Now Slavisa Pesci, an information technologist and amateur scholar, says superimposing the "Last Supper" with its mirror-image throws up another picture containing a figure who looks like a Templar knight and another holding a small baby.

Well certainly we wouldn't expect any random painting superimposed on its mirror image to show any recognizable shapes. Or would we?

I have included links to depictions of the original art. Click on the images to see a larger version of each.

• Peter Paul Rubens, The Judgment of Paris.
  
  Looks like an x-ray radiograph of a spine of a conjoined unpleasantness there in the middle surmounting a mass brown and foul. Overhead, there is a ghostly outline of the head of a bear - to which the twins seem to be paying homage (?). Indications are that a BAD THING is about to occur, definitely.


• Pablo Picasso's Guernica (though I grabbed the original from another site).
  
  My gaze is drawn by the light-colored Latin cross just below dead center, then, zooming out, the way the pair of lightbulbs up top assume the place of eyes for a long-snouted animal face. So this we can take to be an indictment of the destructive powers of superego and id respectively.


• William Blake's Ancient of Days.
  I see a cat's face clearly there, made up of the deity's brow and its mirror, with a backdrop of wings of a huge bird of prey. Something hearkening back to ancient egyptian worship perhaps? I kind of like how the compasses aren't precisely aligned on the centerline of the print.


• A venereal diptych: Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus (folded along a horizontal axis) and Giorgone's Sleeping Venus
  
  
  "Double your pleasure, double your fun!"


• Michelangelo's Last Judgment
  
  Aaah, it's a giant blue Stormtrooper helmet!!!

If anyone runs with these ideas and gets a thesis out of them, I'd surely like a copy, thanks.

In every handyman's toolbelt

I'm a little surprised this joke seems not to have been done before.

With this entry, the meme has officially passed its peak

attribution

My rebus won!

David of Ironic Sans had two Joost invitations to give away, so he set up a two part contest for his readers. I posted my movie-themed rebus and won part II! (Mouseover the link if you need a hint on what it means.)

Have a rebus to share? Post a link to it in the comments. Maybe I'll do the same. Just don't put anything up that looks like you're sending encoded messages to a terrorist cell which might attract unwanted attention by the authorities. (Hmmm.)

I shall give Joost video-on-demand beta a whirl and post something here about my impressions. You can find out a little more about Joost over at Ironic Sans or by doing a search. And if I need to give away any invitations, you'll find out about it here on the blog.

Tag your furniture

I heard Ruth Brown on the radio yesterday singing If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' On It and my thoughts naturally turned toward furniture. You can buy fabric spray paint to use on upholstery (thus putting a new twist on the term sofa painting), and it seems to me that with the proper tagging skills, one could produce some interesting art furniture.

Sit back and think of Mick.
What would you spray on your sofa?

Sterilized for your convenience

I was looking at this transparent German knife block (broken link) at about the same time I was reminded of Laura Splan's Blood Scarf and devised this hybrid.

The red fluid would be dyed grain alcohol, sealed into the space between the clear acrylic panels, which would serve to help sterilize the cutting edges as well as providing the festive color accent. You would fill the thing with a big syringe, which you would also use periodically as the alcohol evaporates.

Twin birthday cards

Tomorrow is my wife's birthday, a milestone I am obliged to mark using the usual tokens such as gifts, dinner out, and a card. Now, she is a twin, so of course the same goes for her sister as well. So that is how I found myself in a local Walgreen's looking for a pair of birthday cards, and among the dozens of categories (for men, for women, for religious people, for sisters, for kids, for those of different ethnicities, for co-workers, for non-English speakers, etc.), I could find no special card for twins. When I got home, two separate cards in hand, I did a search and found that such cards do exist in electronic form, but it seemed to me that an opportunity was perhaps being missed to produce an interesting product in the Real World directed at the 1% or so of the population who is a multiple.

The idea would be print cards in pairs (naturally) where the pictures on the front can be placed side-by-side polyrama-style to form a picture, sort of like a diptych. Here is what I came up with in the way of a pair of abstract designs which twin together.

• The first card


• The second card


• The two side by side

Of course, for triplets, quadruplets, ..., one would have more pictures to make a real polyrama effect.

It would really be nice to have these for the twins themselves as they exchange their cards, kind of like those pairs of rings which fit into one another. Maybe one would have a line of cards where there are different left-halves which all go along with a set of different right-halves, so the twins could be surprised to see what they come up with jointly.

Flickr Tarot

Inspired by Joey's post on someone who made a Google Images Periodic Table (broken link), I did text searches on Flickr and came up with this version of the Tarot (Major Arcana and Ace cards of the suits only). Each card image is derived from the top "most relevant" match that I came up with.















All the images are used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

Yes, the images for The World and The Star are the same. Also, I used the alternative designation of The High Priest instead of The Hierophant because, amazingly, there are no images matching the text Hierophant in Flickr at this time.

I could imagine a Flickr toy which would automate the process of image picking using the most up-to-date search results. Maybe for the King in each suit we could have it take the second search result for the suit name, third for the Queen, and so forth. It could put the cards into a tableau, and the pictures could be used in the reading itself.