“More than 500 years ago, when the Span­ish Con­quis­ta­dors landed in what is now Mex­ico, they encoun­tered natives prac­tic­ing a rit­ual that seemed to mock death.

It was a rit­ual the indige­nous peo­ple had been prac­tic­ing at least 3,000 years. A rit­ual the Spaniards would try unsuc­cess­fully to eradicate.

A rit­ual known today as Dia de los Muer­tos, or Day of the Dead. “
(more…)

Since its debut and unvail­ing its prod­uct line, Liber­mann Inc. has recieved a spark of con­tro­versy over the legit­i­macy of the busi­ness. The site spot­lights hard­ware that cer­tainly evokes pro­fes­sion­al­ism in its keen­est sense. From the lap­tops to the desk­top con­fig­u­ra­tions, every­thing screams style. Espe­cially the embed­ded ‘L’ logo which accord­ing to their site is “carved by nature for mil­lions of years, then indi­vid­u­ally sculpted and crafted by hand into the shape that makes our trade­mark so unique.”

Why then, if the legit­i­macy hangs loosely in the air has Liber­mann been fea­tured on Mac­Cen­tral as “top prize” or Forbes — if in real­ity it’s actu­ally a hoax?

plex.us explains their the­ory and inves­ti­gates what they call a hoax:

bq. “On Sep­tem­ber 22, 2003 I was first made aware of this company’s (fic­ti­tious) dis­play prod­uct known as the Grand Canyon. I looked briefly at the press release on their site and thought: ‘oh that’s cool, but too exotic for me.’ On Thurs­day the 25^th, I some­how got the idea that there was a con­tro­versy over the legit­i­macy of Lieber­mann, Inc. I went back to their site, and went to their home page for the first time. I was imme­di­ately sus­pi­cious and, with Steve’s help, we pieced together a lot of the scam that evening. Aside from out­landish claims, gen­eral unre­al­ism and a bro­ken e-commerce sys­tem, there were numer­ous other dis­crep­an­cies con­tained within their site. Most sur­pris­ingly and amus­ingly, sev­eral Mac news sites, and even Forbes.com were befooled by this hoax — and con­tinue to believe that it’s real. [Forbes has since come to its senses.]“
(more…)

Could you ever imag­ine a Bat­man film as directed by Orson Welles? How about James Cagney as the Rid­dler or George Raft as Two Face? Some might call this ludi­crous and oth­ers might pro­claim genius. The same man who adapted H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds to radio (and fright­ened thou­sands of lis­ten­ers across the Nation) might very well have breathed new life into this comic book character.

Accord­ing to comicbookresources.com:

bq. “Orson Welles seri­ously con­sid­ered doing a Bat­man pic­ture and even got as far as pro­duc­tion designs, an early draft of a script and some cast­ing pho­tographs fea­tur­ing var­i­ous friends and col­leagues in pro­to­types of what would even­tu­ally become the fin­ished cos­tumes.” (link) 

Many of us remem­ber the movie, A Beau­ti­ful Mind, win­ning Best Pic­ture of the Year in the Acad­emy Awards in 2002. How­ever, what most peo­ple don’t real­ize (or the ones I’ve talked to) is that the real John F. Nash, Jr. is some­what dif­fer­ent from the char­ac­ter of the same name in the movie depic­tion of his life.

For instance, many of the sequences in the movie were exag­ger­ated for the typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood effect of instill­ing emo­tion and drama within a 2-hour time frame. The movie was inspired of course by the life of John Nash as writ­ten in the biog­ra­phy “A Beau­ti­ful Mind: The Life of Math­e­mat­i­cal Genius and Nobel Lau­re­ate John Nash” by author Sylvia Nasar.

How­ever, a man’s life is best told through his own words:

My begin­ning as a legally rec­og­nized indi­vid­ual occurred on June 13, 1928 in Blue­field, West Vir­ginia, in the Blue­field San­i­tar­ium, a hos­pi­tal that no longer exists. Of course I can’t con­sciously remem­ber any­thing from the first two or three years of my life after birth. (And, also, one sus­pects, psy­cho­log­i­cally, that the ear­li­est mem­o­ries have become “mem­o­ries of mem­o­ries” and are com­pa­ra­ble to tra­di­tional folk tales passed on by tellers and lis­ten­ers from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion.) But facts are avail­able when direct mem­ory fails for many cir­cum­stances.” (John F. Nash, Jr.)

http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1994/nash-autobio.html 

This is odd indeed. I mean receiv­ing an award based on your life­time achieve­ments is one thing, but receiv­ing one named after you is just strange.

bq. “Actor Charl­ton Hes­ton has been given the first Charl­ton Hes­ton award, a new prize handed out by the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute (AFI) salut­ing act­ing tal­ent. The Hol­ly­wood actor, 79, who suf­fers from Alzheimer’s dis­ease, received the award at his home on Tues­day. Hes­ton won for appear­ing in such films as Planet of the Apes and Ben Hur.“
(more…)

Al Hirschfield is one of my favorite car­i­ca­ture artists. His work has appeared in sev­eral hun­dred pub­li­ca­tions and hangs on walls across the Globe. In fact, his style inspired the ‘Rhap­sody in Blue’ sequence in Fan­ta­sia 2000.

bq. “Al Hirschfeld is a child prodigy who grew old but never up. His view of the world around him, par­tic­u­larly the Amer­i­can the­ater, is as fresh and unique and joy­ous as ever. He was born in 1903 and the twen­ti­eth cen­tury was full of oppor­tu­ni­ties for an ambi­tious young man. As a teenager, he lived in New York City and stud­ied art. After an early but short career with Samuel Gold­wyn Stu­dios (where he got his first art assign­ments doing ads) he moved over to Selznick Pic­tures and by 1921, at the ripe old age of 17, he was their art direc­tor. A short stint run­ning his own art stu­dio ended up badly when Selznick went bank­rupt. A job with Warner Broth­ers allowed Hirschfeld to pay off his employ­ees and, as a reward, his uncle bought him a ticket to Paris and gave him $500.“
(more…)

“Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know some­thing. What you know you can’t explain but you feel it, that there’s some­thing wrong with the web. You don’t know what it is but it’s there like a splin­ter in your mind dri­ving you mad.”

» Jeremy Keith’s CSS (Matrix-style) Design 

If you’ve ever won­dered how it would look if you switched heads with your spouse or what your dog would look like with John Goodman’s head don’t feel too weird because mil­lions of Pho­to­shop users know how you feel.

Photoshopcontest.com (PSC) is for any­one who thinks out­side of the box. It’s a meet­ing of the minds for sev­eral users of Pho­to­shop, peo­ple that range in tal­ent from pro­fes­sional to occas­sional dab­bler. The premise of the site is sim­ple: Every day a new pic­ture is posted on the site pre­sent­ing a new chal­lenge for the user­base. The user’s task is to incor­po­rate the pic­ture into some­thing else using a dig­i­tal photo pro­gram like Pho­to­shop or Paint Shop Pro. The results are any­thing out of the ordi­nary and guar­an­tee inter­est­ing outcomes.

I recently joined PSC to hone my skills as a dig­i­tal artist and already it’s proved suc­cess­ful. If you like you can view my PSC pro­file (and work­ing portfolio). 

Oolong is no ordi­nary rab­bit.

“Oolong is so calm and patient — he never gets angry when I take pic­tures of
him. When I put var­i­ous objects on his head, he stays still for a minute. This is just a result of an inti­mate rela­tion­ship between me and Oolong. The main theme of my site is not to show these ‘head­per­for­mance’ links, and it’s not my hope to pro­pa­gan­dize noth­ing but the strange­ness of his head­per­for­mance over the world. Oolong’s head­per­for­mance– many for­eign­ers seem to feel it ‘crazy’, but Japan­ese peo­ple feel it just cute and funny.

It is the dif­fer­ence of inter­na­tional feeling.”