Considering that Law & Order is the best television show that must mean that Brandon Bird’s art is the best art, ever.  Or, well maybe somewhere in between worst and best.  At least hilarious.

When I used to watch hours of Law & Order each night all I did was watch hours of Law & Order each night, Brandon decided to turn it in to a rather extensive art project Law & Order: Artistic Intent. He also has other work putting celebrities in more strange places such as No One Wants to Play Sega with Harrison Ford. Worth some of your time.

Real: Bike Film Festival Chicago.  A whole mess of events from August 12-15 that seem to be in some ways associated with a bicycle.  Oh, you’re planning on going?  Probably, see you there.

Fake: A Wes Anderson Film Festival

We won’t see each other at this film festival because it doesn’t actually exist.  But gosh dang, what an amazing graduate design project.

After one and a half months of no internet access in the apartment I’m finally back online at my leisure.  And with that leisure I’m re-assessing everything I bookmarked at coffee shops and libraries to ‘look at later,’ such as this:

A good chunk of David Horvitz’s daily ideas are way too breezy to get me excited, but this specific one really caught me most likely because I’ve never found a four leaf clover.

Let’s start with this: I’m not a twitterer.  Just wanted to clear the air.

That said, this Twitter account is awesome. Why? Because this Twitterer is not making monumental claims about how long they are waiting in line, or making “your mom” jokes while also telling the world about his new diet. This Twitterer is trying to tell you how incredible it is that a man (or two) will step foot on the moon in a few short days. The actual launch of Apollo 11 was July 16, 1969, so there are going to be a few more weeks of buildup before this particular Twitter feed gets extremely interesting. Even so, the current updates concerning relevant news and testing and public opinion of that time are really great. My amount of knowledge of Apollo 11 is that the ship took off, Buzz and Neil walked on it, took back some rocks and landed in the ocean and were quarantined. But it’s expanding by keeping up with this Twitter.

And Space, it’s cold.  Ice cold.  Super cold.  Really cold.  Like a good cocktail.  And space isn’t watered down.  The last ‘link’ explanation got way long so the rest of this post will be shortened.

“It was an audibly delicious cocktail, I said.”

Here in Chicago, IL there’s a bar with a new gimmick: seven types of ice.  It’s really not a gimmick though, ices that melt slower to keep your drink from getting watered down.  Ices that don’t make the drink too cold so that you don’t just go numb from the temperature but instead go numb from the alcohol.  It’s a place called The Violet Hour.  I haven’t been there yet, but after reading this article in The Atlantic I’m amping up to go try it out.

Away from the chills and back to space, or at least orbits.  Can photography is a page of some incredible pinhole photography.  Instead of exposures of a few minutes or hours, these are weeks and months of exposure times showing the changing path the sun takes as seasons change.

This post has the hidden agenda of proving to you that I am serious about blogging. What I mean is I am serious about letting you know how I waste my time on the internet.

I’m on the hunt for both a city of Chicago flag and state of Ohio flag and have thus far not been able to find a brick-and-mortar store to buy such items.  Once I turned my search to the internet I got quickly sidetracked, it started like this:

1. Don’t Give Up The Ship. In theory this is maybe the best 3×5 foot item to hang on a wall of an apartment.
2. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. The man behind the previously mentioned flag. America seems to have made a few mistakes when it comes to Mr. Hazard. The towns and boroughs named after him would all be better suited to have used the middle name of the Commodore; instead of the sur. Hazardopolis, Pennsylvania, lacking in alliteration sure but making up for the soft consonant with so much more. Also, relegating commodore to an honorary title.  Although even in its heyday it had very little actual significance commodore does have a touch more of class than captain.
3. How to Tie a Tie.  While on the subject of Men, might as well brush up on the ways to tie a tie.  As I watched these videos I tried to imagine what this guy is like in real life.  If he is in fact, the height of manliness or if he’s just some guy with a tripod, video camera, web domain.

Never got around to buying any of those flags.

I needed to know. A cloud isn’t a solid, isn’t really a liquid or a gas; but a “visible mass of droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth.” How do you draw that with just an outline? Gosh. I was at a loss. This was the first video that showed up in Google.

This is not how I finally decided to draw some clouds. But Timestereo has a point nonetheless.

The following things are happening on the internets right now:

• New York Times Readers’ Polaroids. A ton of generally awesome Polaroid images submitted to the New York Times over the course of a day. Didn’t find out about this until a month later.
• A review of Season 2, Episode 1 of The Wire. Over the course of the summer the author will release reviews of every episode from the season.  What?  That season came out years ago and you’ve already seen it so you’re asking ‘why review it now?’  The answer: these reviews attempt to take in to account the entire five seasons and draw to your attention details that matter on down the road. Worth a gander. Also, here is where to go for the upcoming reviews.
• Adding herbal tea to your coffee and how it makes it more better. Haven’t tried this for myself yet, but it sounds interesting.

I spend a lot of my time browsing the internet instead of thinking up ideas of projects of my own. And lately I’ve discovered myself thinking the following after finding something really awesome: “Oh wow, I want to do that as well. But if I do then I’m just copying, and anything ‘new’ I add to the idea is pretty unimportant because the basis of the idea is someone else’s.”  It’s probably just envy tied together with a long few weeks of mental stagnation.  Because I should really be responding to seeing all these great ideas by filing them away in my head as references and influences.

A Wikipedia Reader by ASDF.

If you’ll allow me some straight talk, we’ve all done this. Not the printing/documenting of getting lost on Wikipedia, but traveling from an initial search to a new subject through the many links in each Wikipedia article.

Merely documenting through a list of links a person’s wanders through Wikipedia is sort of cool, but printing out the articles in order of discovery is incredible.  Growing up I loved leafing through my parents’ multi-volume encyclopedia, the tactile sensation of turning pages.  The difference here is that instead of turning a page to a point farther ahead in the alphabet you turn the page to a related subject.