I love the way that some of the word combinations lead to odd turns of phrase and overextended metaphors that you wouldn’t see in any normal book, such as

“My voice a light and airy soufflé, straight from the oven.”

“Roy nodded encouragingly, though his concentration had drifted out to sea in a small dinghy.”

The best part is that this method of construction isn’t arbitrary — in the end it becomes part of the plot itself. Very clever indeed.

Just click the Smilebow picture to go to the website. Register, vote, and be associated with the birth of a T-shirting legend. Also you can look at a lot af very fun shirt designs, and even buy some shirts if you want to buy some shirts.

Felix the cat! The wonderful, wonderful cat. You’ll laugh so much your sides will ache, your heart will go pit-a-pat, watching Felix the wonderful cat!

We went to see an exhibition called Reclaiming Felix the Cat at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney. Felix was on TV many years ago, but I remember him from my childhood — I think the New Zealand TV stations were a little behind the times. I always preferred Felix to that mouse character, for some reason. Maybe because he wasn’t so nice all the time.

Anyway, the reason for the exhibition is that Felix the Cat was created by an Australian, Pat Sullivan, living in New York early last century. I had always assumed Felix was European, probably because of the name. But here is this exhibition in downtown Sydney, featuring lots of books and comics, toys, and some very amusing short films from the 1920s. They just don’t make ‘em like Felix any more.

The two areas marked A and B are the same shade of grey in the picture. Print it out and fold the two parts together if you don’t believe it!

The illusion was created by Edward H. Adelson, Professor of Vision Science at MIT. His website has some more interesting illusions as well as a lot of theory to explain them.

The exhibition included the preparatory notes for a piece called “Live Work for the Black Room”, which consisted of the artist, dressed in black in a completely black room, repeatedly falling on the floor, chalking the outline of her body on the floor, and then getting up and lighting a candle in the outline. Much as I like the idea of this piece, the thing that really stuck in my mind from the whole exhibition was this sentence from the notes.

Practise falling on the floor.

It’s a sentence that you can read a lot into and get a lot out of.

It may appear to be a novel design for a carport, but I think it’s actually just a sculpture representing the exhibition’s philosophy.

It’s also one of the biggest stamps I’ve seen – you’d be hard-pressed to fit it on a small postcard. While I was poking around in my files, I also found this fun stamp.

It’s a $1 stamp from New Zealand about 10 years ago. Very nifty, though it’s a bit fiddly to tear along the perforations. Good for sending circulars.

This was the first cow parade in the Far East, featuring lots of Japan-themed cows, and one or two impressive technology-enabled cows. It was fun hunting them all down – I even found some interesting parts of town that I had never been to before.

In the end, I ran out of time – I only managed to find 61 of the 64 cows. Some of them were sneakily positioned inside buildings, and one was way over on the other side of Tokyo station. Some of the cows also moved around over the course of the parade… Anyway, I had to steal other people’s photos to complete the three missing spots in my photo album.

Cow Photo Album

As a bonus, in my album I have freely translated the names of all the cows into English. This task was made more fun by the fact that I barely speak Japanese. It’s fun translating puns…

I missed the cow parades in Auckland and Sydney, so I’m glad I just caught the one in Tokyo. Now I have moved to Hong Kong, I await the cows here. I suppose it could happen…

Link to website

Link to website

Link to website