Photo: shch andrey

Andrey of SHCH Graphics Group draws marvelous typographical art. My favorite is his series of wonderful typographical "doodles" done on napkins!

Check out more of his work at the website above or here: Link [Flickr photostream] - via design is mine

Photo: susanhardman [Flickr] - via ok bye, the blog

Who says that cemeteries have to be all somber? Check out these colorful tombstones in the cemetery outside of Chichicastenango in Guatemala, as taken by photographer and avid traveler Susan Hardman.

Wooster Collective has a couple of more pics, though sadly not a word about the background story: Link

Elizabeth Blair of NPR has interviewed many people, but she may have just met her match in Cookie Monster. From a February 2009 All Things Considered interview:

Years before Sesame Street, Muppet creator Jim Henson made a very similar monster who ate snack foods and computers in television commercials. The basic look and spirit were there, but the character we know today was still a ways off.

Enter puppeteer Frank Oz. For nearly 30 years, Henson and Oz were an extraordinary team. Cheryl Henson, Jim's daughter and the president of the Jim Henson Foundation, says the two men shared a subversive sense of humor. Their Muppets were regulars on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show.

It was later, on a Muppet game show, that the cookie-fixated creature we know emerged, Oz says. The winning contestant was offered the chance to choose a prize: a vacation, a new house, $10,000 cash, or a cookie. He chose the cookie — and the Cookie Monster was born.

Om nom nom nom ... COOKIEEE!!! ... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18659731 | The Cookie Monster Interview [embedded YouTube clip]

Bavarian designer Hildegard Bergbauer usually creates dirndl dresses for women, but she has recently branched out to other species like cats, dogs ... and even horses!

She said she was inspired to create the outfits by watching stage shows as a youngster. 'The animals appeared on stage with little handbags and hats,' she added.

'It was a sight that I'll never forget and an experience that has shaped me. The idea has gone down really well. People think it's a lot of fun.'

Link | More pics at Oddly Enough blog (Photo: Reuters/Alexandra Beier)

Photo: Da Clapper [Flickr]

We've seen a number of very cool Star Wars cakes, but this one definitely takes the cake. Behold the AT-AT Cake by Jennifer Luxmore of Sin Desserts. Great White Snark has more: Link

Croatian politican Josko Kraljevic Risa was elected as mayor in Prolozac with a uniquely refreshing political strategy: he opted to tell voters the truth that he'll rip them off at every opportunity!

Bare-faced Josko Risa was voted in as mayor in Prolozac with a landslide victory using the slogan: "All for me - nothing for you."

"I just told them the truth. This town will be like my family business. If I get a little something, so do they," he explained.

Locals who backed Risa said they would be happy to have him as mayor, despite his bizarre campaign pledge.

Ivan Vjisnic, 57, said: "We know what we're letting ourselves in for.

Link (Photo: Slobodna Dalmacija, Google's translation of the article)

Joel Armstrong, a loan officer at the Sterling Savings in downtown Spokane, Washington, became known as the "Duck Man" when he saved a gaggle clutch of ducklings from plunging from their nest on a 12-foot-high ledge to the hard pavement below:

“I think she thinks it’s a safe place,” Armstrong said, though he later admitted he doesn’t think like a duck. “It gets good sun. There are no predators. If she nested in the park in the weeds, the marmots might find her.”

Just one problem. After the ducklings hatch, they have to leap off the 12-foot-high ledge onto the pavement to make their trek to the water.

Or at least they would, if Armstrong weren’t there to help. The ducklings began hatching about 5:30 p.m. Friday. The Sterling loan officer started his duck watch at 5:30 a.m. Saturday. He wanted to be there to catch the ducklings as they jumped off the ledge.

Jody Lawrence-Turner of The Spokeman-Review has more: Link | Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

As the mangled saying goes and TIME Magazine proclaimed, the geek shall inherit the Earth ... but they have a little bit of trouble meeting women. So Neumont University, a computer-science only school, decided to help them along by requiring courses in interpersonal communications and even creating social clubs:

Cameron Murray, a leather jacket-wearing 20-year-old from Cleveland, estimates that the gender ratio is one woman in a billion (it's actually 1 in 20). What's more, he complains, the women at Neumont "are more like dudes with long hair," which hurts the dating scene.

Eager to flirt, he and eight other members of a student group known as the Gentlemen's Order moseyed down to a mall recently and split into teams to see who could get the most phone numbers from women. The eager Lotharios wandered from food court to department store and back again, spending an afternoon in search of potential dates.

The sum total of their efforts: a single number.

"We got shot down as hell -- it was horrible," Murray said.

Alana Semuels of the Los Angeles Times' Column One has the story, that for many of us, I'm sure, hit close to home. Too close. Link (Photo: Wally Skalij / LA Times)

Most people's New Year's resolutions usually involve losing weight, but Australian underwear model and personal trainer Paul "PJ" James's was the exact opposite: he wanted to become fat to better understand his obese gym clients!

Matt Johnston of the Herald Sun has the story:

PJ, 32, has already gone from 80kg to 100kg since making his New Year resolution to boost his flab.

"I have always found it easy to tell clients what to do to lose weight, but it's hard to tell where a client is coming from and how they are feeling," he said.

"There are health risks, I won't shy away from that. But I'm trying to do it as responsibly as possible, with regular blood pressure and health checks."

He said his body had tried to reject the fat at first, but he had worked hard to make sure he stacked on the kilos, and was now starting to notice people looking at him differently.

"Especially when I'm trying to train clients and they are doing sit-ups and I'm standing there with a massive gut," he said.

"My gut is pretty big. That's where most of the weight seems to be going."

Link (Photo: Rebecca Michael) | More pics at Australia-Bodybuilding Blog

Paleontologist Jorn Hurum lead a team of scientists to analyze a 47-million-year-old fossil above (named "Ida") and came up with this intriguing conclusion: it is a critical missing-link species in the evolution of primates!

The fossil, he says, bridges the evolutionary split between higher primates such as monkeys, apes, and humans and their more distant relatives such as lemurs.

"This is the first link to all humans," Hurum, of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway, said in a statement. Ida represents "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor."

Ida, properly known as Darwinius masillae, has a unique anatomy. The lemur-like skeleton features primate-like characteristics, including grasping hands, opposable thumbs, clawless digits with nails, and relatively short limbs.

"This specimen looks like a really early fossil monkey that belongs to the group that includes us," said Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study.

This Clock Clock by Humans Since 1982 uses 24 individual analog clocks to tell the time! Technabob explains:

It took me a second to figure out what was going on when I first got a look at this table full of analog clocks. But once I stood back from my screen, I realized that none of the clocks have the correct time and the whole thing is a macro timepiece that tells the time using 24 individual clocks.

Created by Swedish designers Humans Since 1982, the Clock Clock installation features 48 electronically-controlled analog clock hands which automatically rotate into the proper positions to form a giant digital display.

Link (with embedded YouTube clip of the clocks in action) - via Inspire me, now!

Jon Lund of New Media Trends wrote a fascinating post about the Danish Free Newspaper War, which happened when newspapers tried to "out-free" a free Icelandic paper that entered their market. The whole thing ended up costing the collective newspaper industry in Denmark more than $150 million ...

On October 6 2006 “Nyhedsavisen”, a new Danish daily newspaper hit the streets. A quality newspaper staffed with 100 journalists and ambitions of being the largest Danish newspaper with a daily circulation on 500.000 and 1 million readers (total Danish population equals some 5,5 million). The newspaper should feature an editorial mix prioritizing both prize-winning critical journalism and stories close to the everyday life of ordinary Danes.

The prizing of Nyhedsavisen was simple: it was free. And, as something entirely new: it was (intended) to be delivered to the homes of all Danes – without any costs. Not only the newspaper itself was free, delivery was free as well. It was in effect “double-free”.

Image: Alistair Boettiger

The meticulous design of a seashell sure is pretty to you and me, but when UC Berkeley biophysicist George Oster looked at one, he saw something else entirely: neural networks. Here's why:

During shell construction, the mantle is always extended just a bit beyond the lip of the shell, inspecting its prior handiwork; Oster and Ermentrout hypothesized that pigment patterns from days past are scanned and interpreted by the mantle’s nerve network, triggering waves of excitation and inhibition that yield detailed instructions for the next round of construction. “What the mantle is doing is ‘tasting’ back in time,” says Oster, “so it can predict what it should do the next day and so that the pattern will be continuous.”

By charting these discrete patterns of neural excitation and inhibition, Oster and Ermentrout were able to build a mathematical model for shell formation that accounts for virtually any design observed in nature, from the zigzagging lines of Natica communis to the seemingly random patterns of mottled patches on a cone snail’s shell. “A single equation is sufficient to explain this tremendous diversity of patterns,” says Alistair Boettiger, a Berkeley graduate student who developed a computational modeling program for Oster and Ermentrout based on their findings. The team has modeled more than 30 shell types, and in each case the simulation bears a striking resemblance to the real thing. The program is even able to compensate for changes in growth and patterning caused by scratches and scrapes picked up in a mollusk’s tumultuous life at sea.

Michael Eisenstein of Seed Magazine has more: Link

Image: TastyPaints.com [Flickr]

Steven Lefcourt of TastyPaints was inspired by the controversy over the violence in video games to create this set of 8-Bit Fatalities:

Before Mortal Kombat, violence in video games was largely unheard of or ignored because of its extreme pixelized simplicity. But when Liu Kang and Sub Zero came along to finish off arcade goers the world changed and parents were in an uproar (not mine though).

I couldn't understand what the big deal was though, because as a videogame player all my life I had already considered my actions life and death. Just because you didn't see pac-man violently tearing into the ghosts with his jaws, or mario smashing in the brains of a goomba, thats what I knew was happening. I knew my goal was to kill these enemies, so Mortal Kombat wasn't a big change for me. To me, it was still just a game, where fake deaths happened as part of game progression. To uninformed adults, however, Mortal Kombat was a photo realistic depiction of kids becoming complicit in virtual murders. And so, I decided to show everyone just what I imagined was happening when these little blocky, pixelized abstractions did when they came into contact with eachother, but in a much more visceral, and gory way than could ever be shown with limited graphical systems.

I'm totally digging the Dig Dug fatality! Link - via kottke