YouTube Tuesday: Interplanet

Check out this video created by stitching together NASA archival images.

According to the artist:

The footage in this video is derived from image sequences from NASA's Cassini and Voyager missions. I downloaded a large amount of raw images to create the video.

tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, Saturn, Jupiter, space, NASA

YouTube Tuesday: Having a ball

I'm not gonna lie. I've been busy.

Busier than a one-eyed cat watching nine rat holes. Busier than an Italian cruise ship captain with no life boats. Busier than a college athletic director with too many wire transfer receipts. Busier than a one-armed Miami tailor making Kevlar hoodies.

I've been a little snowed under, is what I'm sayin'. There are times in life when you're just trying to juggle all your projects. Toss most of them up in the air while you give attention to the most pressing ones, and hope you don't drop any balls.

In face, that's one reason (of several) I find this week's edition of YouTube Tuesday so engaging. You've got to be impressed with her ability to give concrete expression to such an abstract metaphor.



tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, juggling, redhead, balls

YouTube Tuesday: The cure for what ales you…

Today's the big day, guys. The big, chocolatey, hopsy, sudsy day that Kansas City has been abuzz about for weeks.

It's like Christmas in January. For, today is the day Boulevard Brewery's Chocolate Ale hits the shelves.

I know I don't have to go into a big long description of Chocolate Ale. I'm sure that by you have all heard ad intoxicum about the wildly popular collaboration of Kansas City's own Boulevard Brewery and Kansas City's own artisanal chocolatier Christopher Elbow.

Anyway, I've never tried it but apparently it's all the rage. In fact, I saw beer aficionado Chimpotle stocking up on the stuff as soon as stores opened this morning. I thought you guys might like to see the video of him bringing it home to his house.

I'm just glad he wasn't driving… his car.



tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, beer, train, Boulevard, Kansas City

YouTube Tuesday: No Joy

I didn't realize until today that Joyland had closed.

Not that I'm surprised. I just haven't thought about Joyland Amusement Park one way or another in ages. As a kid, my parents took us there two or three times, making the hour's trip from out hamlet to the city of Wichita for a diversion of bumper cars, Ferris wheels and carnival games (as I recall, I wasn't old enough to go on the roller coaster).

Anyway, as this video shows, the amusement park has undergone significant decay since it closed nearly 10 years ago.

Much like our culture in general.

No Joy from Mike Petty on Vimeo.

tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, Joyland, amusement park, Wichita, Kansas, decay

PvC art

I like it when artists have fun.

Oh sure, that seems obvious to you and me. We're just a couple of working stiffs, marking our time in the trenches, bringing home the Benjamins so we can put food on the table and shoes on the kids' feets. So to us, it seems crazy that someone who spends their day doing stuff we used to do in kindergarten should have anything but a fun life.

But then you hear stories about how all the artists are so tortured and how they suffer so much for their art that nobody will ever understand, because how could they, they're just a bunch of proletarian cretins who wouldn't know a Pollock from a used drop cloth.

But when I serendipitously run across the work of someone like Belgian visual artist Ben Heine, it pleases me to know that the art world isn't entirely populated by brooding alcoholics and stuffy joy-sucking academics. And maybe it paints me as uneducated in the art world, but I subscribe to the Montgomery Burns school of art criticism:

"I don't know art, but I know what I hate. And I don't hate this."

In his series Pencil vs Camera, Heine takes a whimsical stab at mixing the real world of photography with the fun and fantastical world of his mind as sketched on paper.

I like the fresh take and I'm I big fan of Heine's sense of humor.

There are a ton of images in the Pencil Vs Camera series, all of which can be seen at Heine's kickass website along with much of his other work.

tagged: art, photography, sketch, Ben Heine, culture, humor

Well, if that's the way the blog wind blows…

So, don't like the the old tried and true New Year's Resolutions, eh?

Gotta be all "progressive" and try to "start something new" eh?

"Tell you what, we’ll just create one, call it the Flashback meme: post your last sentence from the last post for each month of 2011."

Well, if that's the way the blog winds blow, then never let it be said that I don't blow.

Jan: What did I miss? How do you think we'll get our comeuppance?

Feb: The post-modern alt-pop-blues-folk singer-songwriter, not the Fox News crybaby.

Mar: I know we use some pretty big words, but try to follow along.

Apr: You may have heard of it. It was in the news and everything.

May: I did record video of the meeting, and it's pretty damn entertaining if I do say so my damn self.

Jun: I've got some ideas, just not the concurrent time and motivation.

Jul: Given the local temperatures around here lately caused by an infernal Heat Dome, I thought this brief synopsis of Dante's Inferno seemed apropos.

Aug: As a parent, I'm just flipping the script on them. Using the same kind of marketing tactics to trick my kids into eating something less unhealthy.

Sep: Word up Mr. P!

Oct: But I think the biggest affect this unusually vivid dream on me has been that I no longer have much of an appetite for sushi.

Nov: (Sorry, I wasn't feeling particularly bloggy this month. But I guess even choosing not to say anything is saying something, right?)

Dec: -- Patricia Highsmith (New Year’s Eve Toast, 1947)

tagged: blog, meme, New Year, review, 2011, quote

The resolution will be bloggerized

Hey guys, check this out!

This dude I know did this thing this year where he chose a list of personal goals for the year and "resolved" to accomplish them.

He called them "New Year's Resolutions."

What an awesome idea! I mean, you're using this kind of natural "beginning" to the year to sort of take stock in yourself and setting up some targets for personal improvement. I think everyone should do this. In fact, I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner.

So yeah, I sat down and tried to come up with a list of things that I can do to improve myself. Because the first step in making the world a better place is to make myself a better person. Right?

So here goes…

1) I resolve to start flossing my teeth more than three times a week. My dental hygienist says I should do it twice a day. So that's going to me my goal.

2) I resolve to try some Vietnamese food. I've heard good things. There are lots of Vietnamese restaurants around, so let me know if you have a recommendation. As far as I can tell, the toughest part is going to be paying for that flight to Vietnam.


 3) I resolve to read a book this year. Seems like people are always writing books, so I want to see what the big deal is about. Since I have an e-reader now, I might even e-read and e-book.

4) I resolve to get my car serviced. For the last few months, I've used what the Kansas City, Mo., street department calls "deferred maintenance" on my car. It's a middle-aged vehicle and needs new tires, probably new brakes and who knows what else. So, yeah, it's going to be expensive. But it's something that I just need to do.

5) I resolve to get some new shoes. I like my current work shoes so much that I've worn a hole in the heel. What is is that letter carries always say? Time wounds all heels? Anyway, it's time for me to say goodbye to these old souls and get some new kicks.

Well, that's a pretty good start. Five goals for personal improvement to start the new year.

Let me know what YOU plan to do, you damn slacker!*



* No, not you. I was talking to that other guy.

tagged: New Year, 2012, resolution, blog, floss, Vietnamese, shoes

New Year's Toast

To all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.

-- Patricia Highsmith (New Year’s Eve Toast, 1947)

tagged: quotes, Patricia Highsmith, New Year

YouTube Tuesday: Oh Hobbesy Night

I'll be perfectly honest with you, guys. I'm a bit Scrooged this year. Work has been more work than usual, and definitely more work than I prefer.

But, you don't want to hear about that right now. Buck up! Get in the spirit of the holidays!

Well, okay. This is the best I can do.



tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, Christmas, Calvin and Hobbes, music, Winter Wonderland

YouTube Tuesday: Instant Carma's gonna get you

Well we got our first snow of the season today.

Wasn't much. Barely measurable by any means other than the sight of a white glaze it left all over everything. By noon it was gone. The only thing left was the memory of the kids' morning excitement of actual snow on the ground.

That and the severely scarred tree near my office.

Because, even though the snow wasn't much to look at (or maybe even because it wasn't much to look at), it still caused some pretty sever traffic problems. Some say drivers always freak out during the season's first snowfall. That there is a seasonal learning curve for which we all have to adjust each year and during which we realize that we can't drive a slick snowy street the same way we drive the hot sticky pavement of July.

But I think today's snow had a slightly more icy character than one would normally expect, which made it deceptively slick. That in turn makes it even more important than usual not to drive like a total entitled douche.

That is a lesson the jerkoff driver who ended up sliding into the aforementioned severely scarred tree near my office presumably still hasn't learned.

From my vantage point at the front of the left turn lane (waiting for my signal to turn), I saw the entire incident. The light turned yellow, then red. The driver of the dented green pickup in the far right lane was already speeding when he hit the accelerator to beat the red light. Just after making it through the intersection, his redneckmobile began to slide. He over corrected, executed a graceful 360-degree turn, hopped the curb and slammed his passenger-side front quarter panel into the young tree.

The tree itself shuttered mightily, but withstood the strike of the pickup. Fortunately, there were no pedestrians on the sidewalk — a silver lining for the frigid morning temps — or they surely would have been killed (or worse).

After taking a few seconds to collect himself, the driver got out, surveyed his now barely drivable pick'em up truck, and then got back in and barely drove away. He left only some tracks in the shallow snow, a deep gash in the trunk of the tree, and a good lesson to not drive like a prick.

So I guess it could have been worse. It could have been, for example, a jerkoff driving a Ferrari like a prick. Or a bunch of pricks driving a bunch of Ferraris…



tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, car, accident, wreck, weather, snow, Ferrari, ice

ODS

tagged: Star Wars, Occupy, satire, humor

Open to interpretation

If you're like me, every once in a while you'll have a really crazy, strange, vivid dream that doesn't seem to make any sense yet it sticks with you throughout the morning and keeps you asking yourself "WTF, man???"

So here's how it went down last night. To set the scene, I find my dream self on his way to attend some sort of fishing seminar. And I'm not talking about fishing in the Internet spam sense. I mean like fishing, like actually trying to catch fish in an actual (dream) river.

So I'm on my way upstream to this seminar that takes place in the wide bend of a river. I'm in this old sputtering rust bucket of a boat that reminds me of the old vintage blue Ford pickup that my high school cross country coach used to haul the team around in (back in the day when a public school employee hauling high school kids around in the back of a rickety pick up truck didn't prompt the kind of nambie pambie safety backlash that would surely plague my coach were he in the "more refined" 2010s. Man, the 80's were awesome!).

Anyway getting back to sureality, I'm in the boat following what the instructor says about fishing (whatever that was) when it starts to get super windy. I mean gale force, Kansas summer afternoon windy. The river gets really choppy, and I'm there trying to balance in this boat of questionable river-worthiness. While trying to keep my balance, I accidentally drop a gadget of exceedingly high importance. What the object was isn't clear anymore. Could have been a tool of some kind, or keys. But it fell into the river, and it was important enough for me and two other seminar attendees to dive in after it.

And here's where things get really weird.

We're swimming down, down into the unrealistically deep river, chasing this important object. Along the way, we're swimming passed a boatload of different kinds of fish. And they're huge. I mean, they're like bigger than a Pacific Bluefin Tuna ("the cow of the ocean"). And they keep getting bigger.

Eventually the three of us dive deep enough and fast enough to catch up with the sinking object. It's really dark down here and muddy like a Kansas creek, but now the object seems to be emitting it's own light for some reason. When we reach for it to take it back to the surface, the muddy water seems to close in around us. Suddenly, we get the feeling that we're in an enclosed space, like a large conference room, but it's too dark and murky to see exactly what's going on. So I turn on my flashlight that I suddenly have in my hand (yeah I know, dream physics).

I swim a couple of yards and come to a wall. Well, a sort of slightly concave wall-like structure made of a pinkish, striated material. I follow it to the left for a few feet, then start swimming "up" and follow it some more. I then reverse myself and follow it down and find that it curves into a floor.

At last we all realize where we are - in the belly of a great fish!

We all stand around discussing the problem for a few minutes. It's surprising because we weren't really panicked, and we were breathing and talking underwater (but again, dream physics). We conclude that one of us, that being me, is going to have to swim out the exit and get help.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the exit. It turns out there was only one way out, through the exit - the natural exit that you would expect to see from inside the belly of a fish.

So it fell to me to somehow struggle through the muscular sphincter of the leviathan and wiggle Shawshank Redemption-style through the digestive track to the freedom of the river. When I got the outside of the fish, I used the 8-inch fishing knife that had dream-physics appeared in my hand to cut the fish open and free the two nameless faceless guys with me.

At that moment we see below us an even bigger fish waiting on the bottom of the river. It's like the older, bigger, scarier uncle of the fish whose digestive tract I just crawled out of. Given the harrowing ordeal we'd just gone through (not to mention the 20 or so feet of fish doo doo), we start kicking for all we're worth toward the surface. But before we could make it...

... the sound of my wife's hair dryer from the master bath woke me up. Man, I hate that sound.

I know this kind or weirdo scenario is rife with all kinds of symbolism. There's the whole being chased thing, losing something valuable (but you don't know what it is) and of course the Old Testament "Jonah and the Whale" parallel. Feel free to offer your own armchair psychoanalysis in the comments.

But I think the biggest affect this unusually vivid dream on me has been that I no longer have much of an appetite for sushi.

tagged: dream, fish, river, fishing, Shawshank Redemption, sushi

YouTube Tuesday: Bucking the trend

Some of you may know that I've taken up cycling again after a long hiatus. Just for my health, mind you. Not really competitive.

Anyway, it was such a beautiful weekend a couple of weeks ago that I decided to hit up a nice trail i know of in the Konza Prairie Reserve. My friend and I were cruising along one of the trails. Luckily, he had his video camera on getting some shots of the beautiful landscape (if you've never been, you really should), when...

... Well, let's just say, I'm glad I was wearing my helmet.



tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, cycling, mountain biking, wildlife, environmentalist

YouTube Tuesday: Performing Lights

For those of us unlucky enough to not be there (sheesh, double negative split infinitive much?) on opening night, here's a video of the quite kick ass light show displayed on the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

I'm proud to say that a long time friend and one of the most talented people I know was one of the architects on this project. Word up Mr. P!

Opening Night 'Projections'. Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Kansas City - September 16, 2011 from Quixotic Fusion on Vimeo.

tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, Kansas City, Kauffman Center for Performing Arts, architecture, Moshe Safdie

Making the UTmost of history

Around about 500 years ago Machiavelli was writing The Prince, Martin Luther was denouncing abuses of the Catholic Church, and the ecosystem on Easter Island was beginning to fail.

I'm not trying to imply that those events are causally related, but I think they each reflect, on a thematic level, some of the baser human traits which seem to be coming so much more prevalent today.

The case of Easter Island, in particular, is the one I want to focus on now.

For about 700 years, the Polynesians who settled Easter Island (Rapa Nui, as they called it) had it pretty good —nice beaches, plenty of fish, fertile soil to grow their taro root, yams, and cassava.

Thing were so good that there was plenty of leisure time that needed to be filled. And the Rapa Nui invented a cool kind of puppet theater using giant stone statues they called Moai. They were like the action figures of the day. You'd set them up on a field and pretend they're having treasure hunts, or wars or deep philosophical discussions.

No, don't judge. What might seem a bit ridiculous to you and me was really a smashing success on Rapa Nui. The pastime became so popular that the Rapa Nui people decided to create more and more of these giant statues. They would dress them in garish attire and sometimes pretend they were in great sporting events.

It was all great fun.

Until…

It wasn't.

At some point, the theater and games the Moai were imagined to play became less important than Moai themselves. Different tribes began to compete to see who could build the most and the biggest Moai and who could dress them in the craziest uniforms. Giant (by Easter Island standards) corporations got involved to sponsor the creation of the Moai and market them to the Rapa Nui public.

But it didn't take too long for that public to take a look at the insane Moai arms race, at the completely batshit crazy amount of resources it was taking up, and realize that something had gone terribly wrong on Easter Island.

The Moai that they once depended upon for entertainment and diversion from their idyllic life on Rapa Nui had come to consume the very resources they depended upon for survival.

And by the time the Rapa Nui powers-that-had-been saw what their audience saw, the island had been completely deforested. There were no trees to build boats, so fishing came to a halt. With no forests to hold the soil, it began to erode and became less fertile.

With less capacity for farming, the people began to eat the birds and small rodents on the island. When those were pretty much gone, they began to eat each other.

They had, in essence, entertained themselves into cannibalism and near extinction.

---

On a bit of an unrelated note — Man, the Big XII used to be a really great football conference, right Texas?

tagged: Easter Island, Rapa Nui, history, unsustainable, BigXII, Texas, Longhorns, college football, realignment