sta^lagm^ltes

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Much more relaxing.

1. Stare at the centre of the image for at least 10 seconds

2. Look at something else.

3. Enjoy!

4. Please don’t do this if you are driving a car.

Via TED via speigl.org via verylowsodium:

Tasmania – like New Zealand, only tastier!

“A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”
- H. Lecter

Obviously these people are somewhat sheltered from the gusty winds of politics and, what’s more, they don’t care who knows it.

If you see her as spinning clockwise, it’s supposed to mean you’re right-brain dominant (uses feeling, “big picture” oriented, imagination rules, symbols and images). If you see her spinning anti-clockwise you are supposedly left-brain dominant (uses logic, detail oriented, facts rule,words and language).

Whichever you see, it’s possible to switch to the other, although it’s perhaps telling which direction you perceived straight off.

For me, she was spinning clockwise. Definitely, definitely clockwise. Until she wasn’t.

What about you?

[poll=1]
Thanks to the folks at the Herald-Sun for this one.

If you prefer something less twisted (not that there’s anything particularly bent about sharpening pencils), you may like Martindale’s reference desk, or perhaps freely useable images from Wikimedia, Clusty the clustering search engine or the information rich Internet resources for Australian journos.

Robskee will be reconnecting with the world shortly.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=pR4LUa–3GU[/youtube]

As you can see, after just two weeks he’s getting around quite well. Not bad for an old 3/4 dog.

He was quite depressed post-operatively and is only just turning the corner in that regard. He’s once again food-responsive. This is good because food-responsiveness constitutes a goodly part of his general motivation, if not indeed defining his very personality!

All our friends have been great, checking in with us to ask how the old man is getting on. Ziggy was even brought a lovely, bright pot of tulips, which he brushed aside on his lunge for the chicken wings that came with them.

Good luck, old fella.

I had asked them over the phone to check out a new, small lump before they operated, but after they gave Ziggy his pre-med doggy-valium and had him sitting up on the operating table they couldn’t find the thing. At home, the plumber had just arrived to find and hopefully fix an underground leak that has been restricting our water supply for three days. Just as Scout – the kelpie – was introducing herself to the plumber in her very special way and I was trying to find a safe place to put her with both side gates open and the front & back doors ajar, the vet rang asking me to come in and help them find the lump.

It was good to see Ziggy still whole. We found the lump and the vet said I should wait a couple of minutes while they had a look at a smear of it under the microscope. She returned shortly and led me out the back door to a quiet bit of garden. This couldn’t be good.

“That new lump, I’m afraid it is something.”

A very small but highly unpredictable and potentially more aggressive type of tumour than the one on his leg, and one they recommend removing immediately. They can possibly remove both it and the leg today, but they prefer not to have him anaesthetised for such a long time.

Poor Ziggy. He’s currently recovering from his lumpectomy (a double, actually, because they found yet another one) and will be staying at the vet’s overnight.

He keeps his leg for now.

(Best not to click the video link if you have a slow internet connection or are offended by images of poo-eating)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xATAsfISPo[/youtube]

The poor thing is being operated on in a few days and won’t be as chipper as this for a little while to come.

I think about this quite a bit, as I have a few friends who are visual artists.

When you stand before a painting or photograph, framed and hung in a gallery, perhaps bearing the creator’s signature and a title or description located next to it on the wall, of course we know this is art because all the signs are there, no matter what – if anything at all – it stirs within us .

When we come across a bronze sculpture on a street corner or in a park, again we are clear: it is art – I can literally put my finger on it. Big, metallic stillness where otherwise all around is buzzing movement; it proclaims to us its conceived, designed and crafted nature.

And what if these things arouse nothing within us? Are they therefore not works of art after all, or are we in fact the deficient ones?

I do believe art should arouse something within us as viewers, as I also hope it is forged from something aroused within the artist. I want art to make me aware of something new, to make me question, to make me see or think or feel differently about something. I want it to change my consciousness in some way, or at least to be a catalyst for this.

You will notice I have interspersed this piece with photos of street name signs. They are as you would find all over Melbourne. There is nothing special about them at all. Their form will be familiar to you and indeed they are so much in the background of our lives as to be practically invisible (except, perhaps when we’re lost).

What have they to do with art?

Well …

… behold …

. . . . . . . . THIS!

When I saw it I had an incoherent feeling that something in the world was not right, yet I couldn’t identify what it was.

Most unsettling.

After a while I pinpointed the source of it: this street sign was very different. Over the next few moments the realisations unfurled: the letters of the street name were all lower case . . . in a completely different typeface . . . and serif!

I was actually stunned.

Not by the audacity (yes, audacity) of the sign’s presence, but by the thoughts and feelings which now started tumbling within me:

“Wow. That’s different. It’s a serif typeface . . . Is it Times New Roman? And lower case letters . . . . Very cheeky! I think I like it. Do I like it? Yes, I do. Definitely. But what do I think of the all the other regular ones? Wow – I’ve never stopped to think about it. What do they look like again? I don’t know, I’ve never paid them much attention and now I can’t visualise beyond this cute little serif-o-rama of Times New Roman. I was blind but now I can see! What sort of a person am I – what sort of an unconscious haze have I been walking around in – that I have never noticed the forms around me every day, let alone come to some appraisal of how I feel about them, about whether or not I find them pleasing?”

Within seconds I was not only evaluating for the first time a small (and, you would agree, insignificant) aspect of my world, but I was also in fact re-evaluating my very way of being in the world in quite a broad sense.

It’s big stuff.

And that, in my opinion, truly is art.

.

We were model tourists for our last day in San Francisco. Apart from another round of coffee at Ritual Coffee Roasters to get us started, everything we did was straight out of the guide book: Union Square, Fishermans Wharf, Pier 39, the sea lions, Alcatraz, lunch in Little Italy, Washington Square.

Saints Peter and Paul Church overlooking Washington Square Park is quite a sight . . .

. . . but don’t let it distract you too much while you’re walking through the park — every dog in the downtown area has made a deposit here.

I snapped this in the car on our way back to the hotel . . .

. . . not realising at the time that the copper-green building in the foreground is the Sentinel Building (Columbus Tower), where Francis Ford Coppola’s production company is based and which houses his cafe on the ground floor.

After a nicely full day we flew out of San Francisco around 11pm. Twenty hours and two bottles of vodka later we were flying over the stunning snowfields of NSW and Victoria. The recent cold snap has blanketed the mountain tops and ski fields with powder. No photo, unfortunately.

Home now, and sleep.

We started the day with breakfast at the Gobble & Squat in Haight-Ashbury, which must be the most photographed street corner in San Francisco. Who knew fried potatoes could make a good brekky! Of course we needed some good coffee after that, and we found it at Ritual Coffee Roasters cafe in the Mission area. They were roasting when we arrived in this gorgeous 5kg Probat:

We had to cross a little bridge to get on our way to the Sonoma Valley . . .

. . . where we saw the smallest police car in the world:

We saw all manner of strange things in Sonoma, including this stuff which I had a vague recollection of seeing before in the very distant past back home:

A small detour on the way home . . .

. . . followed by a nap, then dinner in Chinatown, a luxurious browse in the City Lights book store, a drink at Vesuvio and then back to the hotel.

Night.