Bird’s Eye: We offer a set of images that will amaze, and hopefully delight, you. All of these have in common is that you can’t quite believe what you’re seeing, at first. Enjoy.
* Gravity-Defying Land Art Cornelia Konrads (Thanks, Gabe!)
* Cucumbers Encumber Man Boing Boing
* The Happy Rizzi House ~ Kuriositas
* Austrian Alpacas Show Shear Delight The Guardian
* Aye Eyes
Bird’s Eye: Roses are red, / Jade-vines are green, / We’ve got flowers here / Like you’ve never seen. (“Waits for applause…not a sausage” Bluebottle, the Goons)
* The Hidden Beauty Of PollinationLouie Schwartzberg Video on TED (Thanks Don!)
* 10 Amazing Treetop Walkways Around the World The World Geography
* Top 10 Rarest Flowers In The World Most Rare Flowers
(Editor’s note: Well, 10 rare flowers with interesting stories anyway.)
* Sossusvlei, Namibia Desert Tree Eyewitness, The Guardian
Bird’s Eye: “Poetry makes nothing happen” wrote Auden. Günter Grass (who’s he?) seems to have disproved that theory, as his poem criticizing Israel resulted not only in heated debate but got him banished from Israel. Below, the poem itself (we report; you decide) and two Jewish perspectives. Rabbi Rosen’s link is devastating accurate.
* Günter Grass: ‘What Must Be Said’ The Guardian
But why have I kept silent till now?
Because I thought my own origins,
tarnished by a stain that can never be removed,
meant I could not expect Israel, a land
to which I am, and always will be, attached,
to accept this open declaration of the truth.
* Günter the Terrible Uri Avnery Counterpunch
Grass has done the unthinkable: he has openly criticized the State of Israel! And he a German!!!
The reaction was automatic. He was at once branded as an anti-Semite. Not just a run-of-the-mill anti-Semite, but as a crypto-Nazi, who could easily have served as a henchman of Adolf Eichmann! This was shown by the fact that at age 17, near the end of World War II, he was recruited to the Waffen-SS like tens of thousands of others and then – oddly enough – kept the fact hidden for many years. So there you are.
Israeli and German politicians and commentators vied with each other in cursing the writer, with the Germans easily trumping the Israelis. Though our Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, may have garnered the individual championship by declaring Grass persona non grata and banning him from entering Israel for all eternity (at least)….
So what did Grass actually say?
* What Must Be Said: We All Profit from Occupations Rabbi Brant Rosen
There’s been a great deal of analysis written about German writer Gunther Grass’ now-infamous new poem, “What Must Be Said” (in which Grass criticized Israel’s nuclear program as endangering an “already fragile world peace.”) For me, the most astute response by far comes from Mideast historian Mark LeVine, writing in Al-Jazeera.
…These facts are that Israel, however egregious its crimes – and anyone who denies them is either completely ignorant or a moral idiot – is but one cog in a much larger global machine, one that includes too many other cases of occupation, exploitation, and wanton violence to list comprehensively here (we can name a few – Syria, China, Russia, India, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bahrain, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, the Congo, and of course, NATO and the United States – whose oppression, exploitation, and murder of their own or other peoples is a far more concrete “fact” than the potential for mass destruction caused by Israel’s nuclear programme)…
The larger fact is that the global economy is addicted to war, to militarism, oil and the rape of the planet for the minerals and resources that fuel the now globalised culture of hyperconsumption that will doom our descendants to a fate we dare not contemplate. Israel’s gluttony for Palestinian territory, and its willingness to encourage a regional nuclear arms race to keep it, is ultimately no different than the the gluttony for the 60-inch TV, the iPhone/Pad, the cavernous homes and cars, the ability to live at levels of consumption that are only sustainable if most of the world lives in poverty that increasingly defines all our cultures.
Bird’s Eye: Back when I taught World Religions, my students always had one key question: which major religion has the most holidays? But in a week when Passover and Easter were both celebrated (though usually by different people) we offer both some traditional enjoyable photos…after some untraditionally challenging thoughts. The heartwrenching David Sylvester piece is a must read.
* Were Jews ever really slaves in Egypt, or is Passover a myth? Haaretz
We are so quick to point out the obvious lies about Jews and Israel that come out in Egypt – the Sinai Governors claims that the Mossad released a shark into the Red Sea to kill Egyptians, or, as I once read in a newspaper whilst on holiday in Cairo, the tale of the magnetic belt buckles that Jews were selling cheap in Egypt that would sterilize men on contact – yet we so rarely examine our own misconceptions about the nature of our history with the Egyptian nation.
…It is hard to believe that 600,000 families (which would mean about two million people) crossed the entire Sinai without leaving one shard of pottery (the archeologist’s best friend) with Hebrew writing on it. It is remarkable that Egyptian records make no mention of the sudden migration of what would have been nearly a quarter of their population, nor has any evidence been found for any of the expected effects of such an exodus; such as economic downturn or labor shortages. Furthermore, there is no evidence in Israel that shows a sudden influx of people from another culture at that time. No rapid departure from traditional pottery has been seen, no record or story of a surge in population.
*Some Thoughts on Passover 5772 Rabbi Brant Shalom Rav
This Pesach I’m thinking about exceedingly radical message at the heart of the story we’ll retell around the seder table tonight. I’m thinking in particular about what the story tells us about power, about the ways the powerful wield their power against the less powerful, and about the inevitability of corrupt power’s eventual fall. And I’m thinking about what is possibly the most radical message of all: that there is a Power greater, yes even greater than human power.
…There’s no getting around the fact that our seder story is not a neat, tidy or particularly pleasant story. That’s because – as we all know too well – the powerful never give up their power without a fight. No one ever made this point better or more eloquently than Frederick Douglass when he said in 1857….
* No More Cheap and Easy Easters David Sylvester Tikkun Daily Blog
Perhaps you think I exaggerate when I say that we live suspended over this abyss of horror every day of our lives, an abyss that can crack open at any second during the most mundane moments of our lives?
Katleen Ping fell into the abyss last Monday at 10:30 a.m. Was she talking on the telephone, as she worked at the front desk, perhaps tossing a post-it note into the trash by her desk, wondering what the noise was outside her door? Did she experience a moment of peace when she faced her Good Friday? What will Easter mean to her four-year-old son? Or Grace Kim, a 23-year-old nursing student….These are two of the seven people who were murdered this Tuesday at Oikos University in Oakland, the sister campus of a school in Mountain View where I teach English as a second language. Many people at my school knew Katleen and Grace. Two of my former Mountain View students attend Oikos. (One escaped, the other mercifully absent on Monday.)
Suddenly, the tiniest, most anonymous school in the Bay Area was emblazoned across the front pages of newspapers around the world. As you probably know, a former student entered the classroom, ordered his classmates to line up and executed seven and wounded three with a semi-automatic handgun. On Tuesday, the next morning, my students and I passed around the front pages of the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. Students read them over, gazed away, shook their heads and looked up at me, the teacher….
* Easter and Holy Week The Big Picture
* Easter Eggs TotallyCoolPix
Did you know that Easter eggs came in all shapes and sizes? If so, you’re wrong. Easter eggs only come in one shape: ovoid. They do come in all sizes and colours though, and we have the pictures to prove it.
Bird’s Eye: Installations are three-dimensional works that are designed to transform the perception of a space. I’ve been a long-time fan of Sandy Skogland’s work, and the “Room for London” installation is magnificently used by David Byrne. The last two might be classified as sculpture, but they’re worth seeing.
* Incredibly Elaborate Scenes Sandy Skogland My Modern Metropolis (Thanks Gord)
High up on the roof of Queen Elizabeth Hall, a riverboat appears to have come to rest… A Room for London is a one-bedroom installation, available to rent by the public for night-long stays throughout 2012. During the year it will also transmit a programme of writing, performance and music
* A Room for London: Hearts of Darkness David Byrne
“I brought along some field recording gear to use while I was staying in the lovely pod/room/boat. I went out during the day and recorded sounds that I thought might be useful and evocative. It turned out that most of the sounds—even the church organ in Southwark Cathedral—seemed to converge around a common rhythm. It’s a bit too good to be true—that every large city should have its own rhythm, but here it is. I let the sounds dictate the groove, the tempo, and then I simply played along.”
* Paper Waves daniele papuli
Bird’s Eye: Bit of a mixed bag here… the opening is a great resource for the art teachers in your life, (or for your life, if you are an art teacher.) We follow with a look at a reconstructed Rome, as it might have been 1700 years ago. And we end with a pointed reminder that all art is political, and never more so than in its depiction of women.
* The Encyclopedia Of Painting WikiPaintings
The project aims to create high-quality, most complete and well-structured online repository of fine art. We hope to make classical art a little more accessible and comprehensible, and also want to provide a new form of interaction between contemporary artists and their audience. In the future we plan to cover the entire history of art — from cave artworks to the new talents of today.
…The site presents both public domain artworks and works that are protected by copyright.
* Rome Reborn: A Tour Of Ancient Rome In A.D. 320 Presurfer
* Art’s Great Nudes Have Gone Skinny The Guardian
Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano has taken some great (and, to be honest, not so great) paintings of nudes from the past and reimagined what they would look like if their bodies conformed to what the 21st-century thinks of as an ideal of beauty. The results are revealing – and quite shocking in what they say about our modern attitudes to women’s bodies.
Bird’s Eye: Three different members of the same species: 360º photos that allow you to pan around, zoom in or out. They have different controls, as listed… but they’re all amazing looks at places worth seeing a second time.
* Egypt. Very interactive panoramic
Cursor keys, control, shift
* Angel Waterfall of Venezuela – The World’s Highest Waterfall
Cursor keys, control, shift
* Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel
Cursor keys, +, –
Bird’s Eye: Books everywhere… pouring down the side of a building, in a desk, available pre-selected from Needless Markups, or for free online. Get reading….
* 5,000 Books Pour Out of a Building in Spain My Modern Metropolis (Thanks Gord)
* Repurposing Gives Literal Meaning To Library Information Desk (Thanks Diana)
Information, repurposed. Stacked with irony and precision, dusty old books leave their lonely shelf to serve a new purpose as the ‘library information desk.’
* Hideous “Bespoke Library” With Pre-Selected Books: $125,000 Boing Boing
For people who have more money than time, taste, or intelligence: The $125,000 “bespoke library” from the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book….As the Minnesotastan of Tai-wiki-widbee says, “Deck chairs in a library? A font on the floor? That couch? Could any decor be less appealing?”
* Kindle Free Book Finding Guide
Here are your best options to find NEW kindle free books -
Bird’s Eye: Some lovely sculptures, all using recycled motorcycle parts (and some other recycled stiff in a few cases).
* Seo Young Deok’s Bicycle Chain Sculptures
You’ve probably sculptures made from bicycle chains, but I bet they’re nothing like the ones created by South Korean artist, Seo Young Deok. The incredible ‘works of Seo Young Deok are clearly inspired by the shapes of the human body, but artists have been sculpting masterpieces based on our natural curves for hundreds of years. What makes this Korean designer special is the material he uses for his unique creations – bicycle chains. Miles of metal chains, to be exact, welded in such a way that they recreate the human body to the finest details.
* Metal Animals Sculptures Edouard Martinet Doublemesh (Thanks Kris)
* “Tanngrisnir” Jud Turner Sculpture Gallery
Bird’s Eye: Lots of dark, with sparkly lights, whether they’re fastened to dancers or to sheep, made by fireflies, LEDs, or satellites.
* Choreography + El Wire = Awesome Dance Party Boing Boing
Here’s Japan’s Wrecking Crew Orchestra performing some pretty wonderful dance moves made all the better by their electroluminescent wire garments, which cause them to seemingly wink in and out of existence on the dark stage.
* Dreams of Electric Sheep Wimp (Thanks, Spidey!)
* Satellites Around the Earth via reddit
“Sky-blue sky. satellites are out tonight.” Laurie Anderson
* Lighting Up The Night: Time-Lapse Images Of Fireflies Mail Online
* A Cathedral Made from 55,000 LED Lights Colossal
