the passenger seat

First off, well done to everyone who got an answer in Saturday’s game. It was fun for me to see everyone getting them. The scores were: Janet: 9, Sandy: 4, Belle: 2, Joseph: 1, Eddy: 1, Swami: 1, Leeanne: 1, James: 1 for a total of 20. Janet gets the hundred points for convincingly getting the most right, and Sandy gets the twenty for picking the blog title.

Not much has really happened since I last blogged. I’ve stayed home both Sunday and Monday of the Queen’s Birthday holiday. Happy Birthday, Queen Elizabeth II. Not really- her birthday’s in April. It should called the Queen’s Coronation holiday, since that is what we’re really celebrating (she was coronated on 2nd June 1953).

Something interesting that did happen, however, was that we got new neighbours yesterday. The house to the left of ours is now occupied by what looks and sounds like a Lebanese family. And gee, they really are Leb. One of the girls, who must be the daughter of the family (probably just over our age) likes to stand on their patio to talk to her friends on the phone while smoking. This pretty much went on for all of yesterday. Well, yesterday we decided to have lunch on our patio, and from there we could hear little snippets of her conversation. I chuckled at just how much she fit the Leb stereotype. At one point I heard her say “Oh, what about Big Johnny?” in a full-on Leb accent. Come on. “Big Johnny”? Anyway, for some reason my mum started talking about Al Qaeda and how terrorists had moved in beside us. It was funny that my mum of all people was making the jokes, however slack it was.

From here I’ll post a few art-based things I’ve found in the past few days while procrastinating from study.

The first is a really useful Flash tool for artistic inspiration of any sort. It was posted on Drawn!, which was where I found it, and it was designed as a random sketch topic generator, but it could be used for any sort of creative outlet like songwriting or storywriting. All you have to do is click the button in the middle and it gives you three words to base your sketch on. It’s great for breaking out of those creative mental blocks. Click the image below to go to the site.

The next is a gallery called POLARIZE. In it are faux-Polaroid photographs taken by an iPhone and the POLARIZE application. Pretty neat, I’d say. See the rest of the gallery after the jump. One day I’m going to buy a real Polaroid camera (even though they’ll probably be worth a tonne). Things just look so much better in Polaroid.

Here’s an advertisement by Rona, a paint company, using a billboard for Apple’s nano-chromatic. Genius.

And speaking of colour, I recently saw a very cool video called “Dominoes Everywhere” that uses a bunch of different and interesting objects to continue the line, reminiscent of Rube Goldberg machines (like that Honda commercial that had all the moving parts of the car aligned for a chain reaction).See it here. Damn Vimeo can’t embed to WordPress.

Anyone heard of Despair, Inc.? They’re the ones that invented those “demotivator” posters you see so often on the net nowadays. I’m talking about those black rectangles with a picture and a slogan or smart line beneath it. Well, they’ve made a few t-shirt designs which I think are pretty clever. Here are two that I particularly liked:

Anyone seen the album cover for The Killers’ Day & Age? Well, the guy who designed it is Paul Normansell, and he’s also used the same technique on other artworks. In my opinion, he pulls it off better in his portraits than on the album, but I know many people would beg to differ- Rolling Stone Magazine named it as the best album cover for the year. For larger images visit his website linked above. Please excuse the subject matter; I’m more interested in the colours and the technique.

Anyway, I think that will be all for today. I’m tired. I might possibly put a hiatus on my blogging for the next few weeks until exams are over, but I’ll see how I feel. I’ll mention it in my next blog on Wednesday if I do decide to.

“Sunbeam Lights” is by Jason Reeves, from his album The Magnificent Adventures Of Heartache.