Observe The Banana

Over at London Bananas they have a collected a surprisingly large collection of photos of banana peels spotted laying around the London cityscape.

“I see them everywhere. They’re languishing on doorsteps, hanging out in the middle of the road, dangling off street signs, peeking out of piles of garbage, reclining in the middle of the sidewalk, riding the bus for free. A great number of them are bright yellow as if they’re fresh and have just been dropped, although they appear in all states of decay.”

Banana phone spotted in Ann Arbor, MI by Flickr user stplast.

Previous post: Banana Phone Video

Over at Extremepumpkins.com they have lots of examples of fantastic pumpkin carving, but I am particularly fond of the “World’s Fastest Pumpkin Carver” video. This guy welded up a set up blades shaped like a classic jack-o-lantern face and attached them to a long pipe handle. With one swing at a pumpkin he produces a basic jack-o-lantern (or a smashed pumpkin when it goes wrong.) Nice.

[Link]

Wow, now this is a banana worth observing.

Argentine-born, Montreal-based artist Cesar Saez’s latest project is an ambitious one: at the cost of approximately one million dollars, he plans to inflate a gigantic banana with helium and float it over Texas—specifically, 20-30 miles above the Earth. He and his team of scientists, engineers and volunteers have been at work for years and plan to float the massive fruit sometime next summer.

The project is called “Geostationary Banana Over Texas”
This makes me happy.

Read more and watch video via [Boing Boing]

In his book, Fit Or Fat, Covert Bailey suggests a diet low in fat for overall health, but excludes ice cream from his lists of foods to avoid because he considers it a drug instead of a food. As someone with a rather high daily intake of ice cream, I could not agree more. He offered the example of how ice cream could be used to “cure” a child after a bump or bruise, and indeed I do seem to remember my parents administering an ice cream cone to me when, as a small child, my fingers were accidentally shut in a car door (causing more shock and fear than actual injury).

Apparently Demitrios Kargotis has taken this theory one step further with his Mr Whippy machine which doles out servings of frozen custard in serving sizes controlled by the amount of misery it detects in a voice stress analysis.

I wonder if it would give me a nice big serving because I am so unhappy about not having had any ice cream for the last 2 hours?

As I always say, “Every meal deserves a dessert doesn’t it? Well, breakfast is a meal!
and, “Life is uncertain, eat dessert first!”

whew, I better go for a bike ride and burn some calories….

From [We make money not art] via [Boing Boing]

Over at Crabfu SteamWorks an artist named I-Wei Huang is showing off some really fantastic and amazing steam powered model vehicles. He has created walkers, tanks, 4×4 trucks, 6 wheel rovers and more very cool stuff. I have always been fascinated by the basic nature of steam engines. You can make a fire, and it will move your vehicle. I also love the sounds, the deep throaty CHUFF of a really big old steam tractor.

My son drew this cool alien. Apparantly he has a hard shiny exoskeleton similar to metal.

His kind is very good at bio-engineering (the alien, not my son.)

Space now “too awesome” for space-art realists
Snip from an L.A. Times article about new challenges faced by artists whose chosen theme is space. What do representational artists do when science-reality becomes more exotic than science-fiction? Some respond by making art that is less representational:

Even space artists, who have spent their careers imagining the universe, reel at the photos of boulders on Saturn’s moon Titan or star clusters 270 million light-years from Earth. Reality, [astronomical artist Don] Dixon said with a sigh, has gotten too awesome. “NASA has overtaken us.”

Just as the development of photographic cameras in the 19th century set fine artists on the road to abstraction, new astronomical technologies are shaking the world of space art, spurring space artists to seek out new subjects and experiment with new styles.

For decades, the field was dominated by the “rock and ball” school, named after the traditional space-art approach of meticulously drawing every detail science can glean about a place — the shape of craters, the angle of light, the hue of the sky, the position of stars. Now a new school is rising, synthesizing the awesomeness of space with modern art genres. Some have dubbed the school “cosmic expressionism” or simply the “swirly” school, after the swirling sky in Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

Link
Via Boing Boing

The Sneeze reveals the secret of bananas, just when they thought they were safe.

And not without controversy.

The Robotic Giraffe - Popular Science
The Robotic Giraffe

It walks, it blinks, it seats six, and it blasts Kraftwerk: Meet one man’s 17-foot-tall pet project

It started with a seven-inch walking toy giraffe and a desire to see Burning Man from a higher vantage point. A year later, Lindsay Lawlor rode into the desert art festival atop Rave Raffe, a 1,700-pound robotic giraffe sporting 40 strobes, 400 LEDs and bone-shaking speakers.
LINK- dead link

11/7/2008 The Popular Science page is gone, here is the Electric Giraffe home page