Travel Photo of the Week

This is what Paris will look like later tonight.

‘A Look at Banned Books’, An Infographic Describing Where, When, and Why Books Have Been Censored Through History

This guide, created by Printerinks.com and shared on Laughing Squid, gives a look at well known books that have been banned over the last century and a half or so, and gives you the when, where and why of it.

It's hard to imagine Green Eggs and Ham being banned by China for its "portrayal of Marxism," but then again, they're pals with North Korea.

Aaron Draplin Creates a Logo From Scratch in 15 Minutes

Aaron Draplin Takes On a Logo Design Challenge

Stacked Cargo Containers in New Haven's "LEGO" Apartments

Fun Time! John Cleese in Conversation with Eric Idle!

Build a Hawaiian Home for the Cost of a Vacation

Random Christmas Display Photos. Happy Christmas!!

Travel Photo of the Week

Christmas In Ice Festival - North Pole, Alaska

Five Questions Asked of Popular Public Radio Hosts on "This Is Radio"

From This is Radio

The Amsterdam Light Festival

If you're going to be in Amsterdam before January 18th, you can enjoy this.

Amsterdam light festival 2014/15

Tiny Oregon Cabin With Japanese Influence

Here's a beautiful cabin I found on Tiny House Swoon. The decor is spare, but the exposed wood is just gorgeous.

The structure was made almost exclusively from recycled materials.

More photos HERE.

Fun Time! How To Make An Origami Frog!

You can also make and origami dinosaur and whale.

Legendary Maker Becky Sterns' Favorite Things

Really, We're Just Borrowing This Place From The Beach

And a follow-up to yesterday's travel photo.

Travel Photo of the Week

Race Point Lighthouse, Provincetown, Cape Cod, MA by Bill Wakeley

No One Expects the French Revolution

How to Manufacture Your Own Designer Toy and Start a New Small Business

Bryan Brutherford has posted an 11 step Instructable on this subject and it is quite illuminating for anyone that hasn't done something like this before. Most of us think we have some great idea for a toy or product. Brutherford shows you how to take it all the way.

Metal Sculptures Made of Car and Motorcycle Parts

Tomas Vitanovsky creates some pretty amazing art from
spare parts.

"All my pieces are made from recycled car and motorbike parts, some special little bits discovered in car-boot sales, and some parts donated by kind people. Combining my love for art and the automotive world with the desire to use metal scrap, I create sculptures that are appreciated for their unique appeal and for their very personal and unique style of art work."

You can find more on Etsy.

Fun Time! Dutch Real Estate Broker's Small Roller Coaster Gives Tours to Prospective Buyers!!

Retro Light Fixtures Made of Salvaged Objects

Afterglow Studio

House Truck Transforms Into Fantasy Castle Home

Travel Photo of the Week

Frederick County, VA

Always Wanted To Shoot Fireballs From Your Hands? Now You Can.

Get it HERE.

Minimaliste SEQUOIA

Absolutely gorgeous tiny home. For more photos and pictures of the interior, click HERE.

A Favorite Place

I get to spend almost two days here. Those of you who know, know.

Fun Time! Lumino City: A Handmade Paper Video Game!

Lumino City - Official Trailer

A Growing Paper City by Charles Young

Charles Young is creating a marvelous paper city, Paperholm.

‘Cataquarium’ Gives Shelter to Stray Cats Left Out in the Cold

Winter has been cold the last couple of years and animals outside can suffer. From Laughing Squid comes an idea that can keep feral cats from freezing to death.

Travel Photo of the Week

Fort Jefferson, Key West, FL

Trash, Found Objects Transformed into Birds by ‘Bordalo II’

Found on Colossal.

Occupy Madison Tiny Home Village

Super Final NYC Fun Time!! James Earl Jones in You Can't Take It With You!!

Fun Time Part Five! At the Met - Assyria To Iberia!

Super Fun Time!!! Big Bird at Lincoln Center Library!!!

Fun Time Part Three! Times Square!

On the way to O'Donoghue's for lunch.

Fun Time Part Two! Whitehall Street Subway Station!

Fun Time! On The Ferry, Headed to Manhattan!

Bye, Staten Island!

After Dinner Entertainment

Pythons live DVD.

Thanksgiving Dinner

Here's where we had dinner.

Snow on Thanksgiving

And I was just telling my students that Jingle Bells was composed for Thanksgiving, not Christmas.

Happy Thankgiving

No post this morning. Perhaps later today. In the meantime I wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving day.

Travel Photo of the Week

North Oregon Coast

Italian Street Artist Blu Turns 48 Windows Into Faces

See more HERE.

Watch Little Kids React to a Realistic-Looking Barbie Alternative, Lammily

What's Wrong With America?

Although I'm not a big fan of MSNBC (I never watch it), I think Ms Maddow has hit on something here.

Fun Time! Watch Three Grannies Smoke Pot for the First Time!

Artist Sculpts Glass Horse in Under Two Minutes

Found on Colossal.

And The Best Parent of the Year Award Goes To.....

From Laughing Squid...

"Illinois artist Christy Kilgore creates vivid colored pencil and marker drawings on her kids’ otherwise bland brown lunch bags each day. Some drawings are of popular characters like Hello Kitty and Homer Simpson while others are her original design."

Travel Photo of the Week

Garamba National Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Will Our Children Be A Different Species?

Sculpting With Nails

John Bisbee scavenged an abandoned house looking for items to incorporate into a series of found-object sculptures and he kicked over a bucket of old rusty nails. He had an epiphany. The nails had fused together into a bucket-shaped hunk of metal.

Bisbee has since spent nearly 30 years using nails as his sole medium to create geometric sculptures.

The 100 Year Old Steampunk Computer

Fun Time! Sesame Street Censored!

Remember: Anything you think you're hearing or seeing is in YOUR head!!

The GOOD City Index - The World's 50 Most Inspiring Cities

What makes a great city? Jobs? Access to culture? Educational opportunities? The folks at GOOD have a different metric.

'At GOOD, we believe that a city’s heartbeat is best measured in "possibility"—the pervading sense that though a place may be far from perfect, its citizens are taking a bold stake in its future through a mixture of creativity, hustle, and civic engagement.'

That sounds pretty (ahem) good to me. And for the second year in a row they are presenting their GOOD City Index, "a celebration of the 50 cities around the world that best capture the elusive quality of possibility."

Another good (again, ahem) thing is that five American cities made the list.

A Sense of Scale - Our Solar System

Travel Photo of the Week

Sicily, Italy

Two Minutes and Fifty Seconds of Amazing: Astronaut – A Journey to Space

Astronaut - A journey to space from Guillaume JUIN

Paper Pop-up Sculptures by Peter Dahmen

When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem

A  new study from Duke University explores the notion that people faced with a problem will deny its existence if they don't like the solution. The researchers conducted three experiments on three different issues -- climate change, air pollution that harms lungs, and crime.

“The goal was to test, in a scientifically controlled manner, the question: Does the desirability of a solution affect beliefs in the existence of the associated problem? In other words, does what we call 'solution aversion' exist?" said Troy Campbell, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke's Fuqua School of Business.

Conservatives and liberals are equally as guilty in this case, the study claims.

“The cure can be more immediately threatening than the problem," said Campbell and added that solution aversion can help explain why political divides become so divisive and intractable.

Fun Time! Meet Clet, Street Sign Artist/Anarchist!

JoJo's Sriracha. Yum.

One of my favorite food finds is JoJo's Sriracha. I comes in various levels of heat. I especially like to drizzle it on smoked herring and salmon and add a touch of it to ketchup on scrambled eggs.

Made in small batches in Brooklyn, it has a very rich flavor. Now we know why.

Yaybahar by Görkem Şen

Travel Photo of the Week

The Coast of Lima, Peru

Janet Echelman's Dazzling Art Transforms Cityscapes

Sharing Activists Plan To Turn LA Into Sharing Mecca

Everyone that doesn't have their head stuck in another part of their body realizes that there are some almost intractable problems facing our nation and the biggest one seems to be economic inequity. But since these problems are "almost" intractable, what's to be done and who's doing something about it?

In Los Angeles, Arroyo Sustainable Economies Organization (ASECO) have a bold plan to turn the notoriously unequal city into a community-oriented, resource sharing city for all. The folks at the website Shareable have interviewed a few of their board members to find out how they intend to do this. If you are concerned about issues of inequality in your area, this is a good place to start looking for answers.

A Japanese Kokeshi Doll Emerges From A Spinning Block Of Wood

Fun Time! Glen Keane's The Duet!

Happy Halloween! This Way Up!

This Way Up from Nexus on Vimeo.

Halloween Post #3 - Everything Will Kill You

Halloween Post #2 - Travel Photo of the Week

Transylvania

Halloween Post #1 - Severed Hand Prank

High Speed Evolution

The next time someone around you casts doubt on the work of Darwin, you can now offer the humble green anole and this article from the University of Texas Austin as proof of the theory of evolution.

Here's an excerpt from the article...

"After contact with the invasive species, the native lizards began perching higher in trees, and, generation after generation, their feet evolved to become better at gripping the thinner, smoother branches found higher up.

"The change occurred at an astonishing pace: Within a few months, native lizards had begun shifting to higher perches, and over the course of 15 years and 20 generations, their toe pads had become larger, with more sticky scales on their feet."

It's just another boot to the head of the anti-science rabble

The Tiny House Movement Is Growing

Here's an excerpt from an article on Lloyd Kahn's Shelter Blog site.....

"As a result of the bursting of the housing bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, world recession and growing concern about our national and personal debts, America is downsizing its houses, cars and lifestyles."

Fun Time! LEGO Electronica!

Play House from Alex Allmont

Trailer For Animated Short Film "Tant De Forets"

Tant de Forets from Acme Filmworks.

Are Tiny Houses a Viable Solution For Homelessness?

From BillMoyers.com

Travel Photo of the Week

Martinique

Future NASA Contractors Will Be Using 3D Printers

It looks like NASA is taking 3D printing very seriously for building habitable structures. They have awarded a grant to Contour Crafting to pursue further research into their unique process of 3D printing large structures using a paste like material similar to concrete.

If they can figure out how to use materials found in space (asteroids, moons), housing and work space could be available to spacefarers when they reach their destination.

Rotating Glass Sculpture Contains Four ‘Hidden’ Paintings

This is the work of Thomas Medicus. You can see more of this piece on Colossal.