The Global Education Project puts global data and statistics into One Big Picture, a humongous wall chart with 15 maps and 99 charts and graphs, presenting "essential data and commentaries on the condition of the world's environment - both natural and human"

This one map shows the percentage of population aged 15 to 49 living with HIV. In some parts of Africa, 29 to 38.8% of the population are infected with this virus - scary, isn't it?

http://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/index.shtml

Jon Barnes drives The Ultimate Taxi around Aspen, Colorado. Checkout his awesome taxi (complete with recording studio, theater, nightclub, planetarium, toystore, and Internet connection!): Link

I can't put it into better words, folks - from the website:

Welcome to my site! My name is Simon 'Skunky' Morrison, and I very love animals. Probably it looks bizarre, but I very much like to see pregnant animals. I very much love to look at their huge, distended bellys. I have female dog named Marta, and each year she becomes pregnant, and I very like to observe her and touch her inflated belly. It's great!

http://wolfbar.servemp3.com/preganimal/ (via WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola created a $5 champagne in a can called Sofia, named after his daughter.

Link to KR Washington Bureau (via Slackdaddy) | to Sofia Mini website

Harry Finley has an interesting hobby: he is the founder and curator of The Museum of Menstruation.

Harry saves his greatest artifact for last -- his pink menstrual cup dress. It's made out of hundreds of "Instead" menstrual cups. "The company donated it to me, then went out of business. I may have the greatest single collection of cups in this dress."

Link

For more of Sandy's artwork, see: http://www.bnd.it/artisti/sandy/sandy.html (I find the set-up for this photo shoot just as interesting as the final product!)

Get straight to the point with ThinkGeek's Abusive Stamps.

Break out your inner BOFH and let your true feelings come forth, into an ink pad, and onto some paper. All without the safety of using acronyms! It's absolutely cathartic. Some tasks in the workplace are just so unbelievably prosaic and pointless that it's only fair you occasionally are enabled to call a spade a spade. And you get to do so using advanced language skills in the process!

Link

Checkout Woody Norris' and Jim Barnes' AirScooter II here: http://www.airscooter.com/index.html

A contrite French thief returned a relic stolen from a Norwegian museum 42 years ago.

The problem is, the Norwegians didn't know it was missing and still don't know what exactly it is!

Link

Danielle Manges wouldn't let her 3-year old son James play the claw machine at her local Wal-Mart to win toys.

So, James got mad, threw his juice bottle for diversion and climbed in the hole, pushed the door shut, and played inside the machine until firefighters got him out.

Firefighters thought the call meant the boy had reached inside the machine and gotten his arm stuck or something like that, said Anthony Coleman, one of the Elkhart Fire Department people on the call.

Then they walked into the store and saw the boy in the machine. "He was swinging from a bar, jumping around; he was having a ball," Coleman said.

Link

On a related note: If you can't win at those infernal toy grabber / claw machines (like me), it's obviously your fault, since Norman Wirth and Roy Kaylor win every time!

Checkout a great collection of retro video game-inspired art at I AM 8-BIT website.

Barrett Lyon's Opte Project maps the Internet in a single day (OK, if you want to get technical, they traceroute to each class C network instead of mapping every single IP address).

Why do this? Barrett's answer:

This project started as a bet, but after I warmed up to the idea I found a lot of value in the project itself:

- Mapping the Internet weekly will allow us to see major disasters in different parts of the world. The Internet is a huge disasters sensor. If I had maps of pre-war Iraq and then compared them to today, one could see how badly Iraq was destroyed. The idea of a metaphysical representation of the real world is very interesting to me.
- The project can show the Internet growth.
- The project is art.

Link (via Reality Carnival)

Photographer Jeff Wall depicts this scene from Ralph Ellisson's 1952 novel "Invisible Man":

Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man centres on a black man who, during a street riot, falls into a forgotten room in the cellar of a large apartment building in New York and decides to stay there, living hidden away. The novel begins with a description of the protagonist's subterranean home, emphasising the ceiling covered with 1,369 illegally connected light bulbs.

Link (via The Huge Entity)

From WFMU's excellent "Beware of the Blog":

If you like dreadful choreography, that is. It's the video for Finnish duo Armi & Danny's I Wanna Love You Tender ... Armi & Danny's choreographer for this peppy little number was none other than former Serbian president Slobodon Milosevic. After watching this, it's not hard to understand why he ditched the show business job for a career as a genocidal maniac.

Link