Now on nice white backgrounds:

You can still see the old images with black backgrounds here. Compare and contrast!

This book has been taunting me at work. It sits there, all blue and ugly and unfunny from one of the tables.

From the editorial review:

Cheryl Caldwell pairs lively humorous illustrations and satirical humor with to-the-point observations on life to ensure readers maintain a laughing perspective:
“I may not know karate, but I know crazy.”
“What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?”
“It has been lovely but I have to scream now.”

Wait, this is supposed to be satirical humor? It’s not even as funny as a Family Circus strip:

Currently, there are used copies for sale on Amazon for $0.01.

I think it’s supposed to be a feel-good kind of book, but I can for the life of me figure out how it’s supposed to accomplish that other than by making me say, “I could so do better than this!” Dammit, if something like this can get published and sold at a big name bookstore, then so can I!

So I realize that there is an awful lot on this web site relating to my Master’s Thesis and yet, for all the wordage I’ve wasted here whining about it, I’ve never actually posted the final version for everyone to read so that y’all know the hell I went through.

Sorry to say this, but you’re just going have to keep waiting. Besides, you don’t really want to read it anyways. It’s over 5500 words! And no one on the internet has time for that.

But I found a way for you get the gist of it without having to waste any of your time. Thanks to this java applet called Wordle, I can boil my thesis down into a cloud of words:

See, isn’t that better? And prettier? And you don’t have to deal with all those boring “and”s and “the”s and other common words that are really just filler anyways.

Wait, what? 150 words is still too many? How about just 50 then?

Sigh? Really? Will 10 words work for you?

What? WTF? Fine, whatever. Here’s my thesis in one word. Just know that I’m really disappointed in you:

That’s right, my thesis is about cans. CANS. Got a problem with that?

That’s what Sarah Palin would’ve named me!

Through the Mind Hacks blog, I’ve learned about a group of very interesting painters, a group of thirteen talented individuals who just happen to share the same body.

Kim Noble has what is, perhaps, the least understood of psychological conditions, Dissociative Identity Disorder, more commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Her story is very inspiring:

For nearly two decades Noble was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and was repeatedly misdiagnosed. It was only 13 years ago when the artist, now 46, was finally given a diagnosis of DID that she was able to receive the therapeutic treatment she needed. Her condition first came to public attention in 1976 film Sybil which told the true story of a woman with 16 separate personalities.

Since her diagnosis, Noble has been able to live without medication and has not returned to hospital. A further turning point came four years ago at an art therapy class when a therapist convinced her to paint for pleasure and show her work publicly. She now paints daily. Or rather, Noble’s different personalities, including Patricia, Judy, Mimi and MJ, paint daily. (Source)

Kim has 20 different personalities, 13 of which are now painting:

In just two years, Kim has painted over 200 canvasses, getting up at 3am to start work so that she has time alone in her art room before daughter Aimee wakes up at 6.30am. Of course, it’s not always Kim doing the painting.

“I have no memory at all between the personalities so when I come back, I don’t always know who’s been around. The best way to tell is to look at what painting is out at the time. Or Aimee will tell me. Since we started the artwork, there’s actually been a lot more control in my life. If they’re painting, they’re achieving something and when they don’t, they get very restless.”

To all intents and purposes, each of Kim’s personalities is an artist in their own right: Patricia paints the solitary desert landscapes, Bonny’s pictures often feature robotic dancing figures or “frieze people”, Suzy repeatedly paints a kneeling mother, Judy’s canvasses are large, conceptual pieces while Ria’s work reveals deeply traumatic events involving children. (Source)

There’s a slideshow available at the guardian.co.uk website with short descriptions of each of the artists. More can be found on Noble’s own website.

(The image above is Wrong Time, by Ria. It’s not backwards, it was made with the mirrored writing.)

Because September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

As a member o' th' Church o' th' Flyin' Spaghetti Monster, I’m lookin' forward t' this holiday and even this website will be participatin' in th' festivities.

May ye all be blessed by his noodly appendage!

Thanks for noticing!

This is something that has been bothering me for a while now…

At work, my boss posted a flyer for an upcoming lecture here on campus. The speaker is a man named Ray Kurzweil, an “inventor, entrepreneur and futurist who is a key innovator in the development of artificial intelligence and radical life extension.”

Wait! Back up the train! He’s a futurist?

The term does not have positive connotations. As someone who has a rough knowledge of art history, a futurist isn’t one who speculates about the future. No, the futurism I’m familiar with was an aggressive attempt to become the future, to destroy everything old and embrace everything new. And they were fascists.

Take one look at the Futurist Manifesto and you’ll see that there’s nothing warm and fuzzy about this ideology. Especially point number nine:

9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

The Futurists believed that war was the best way to accelerate ourselves forward. It was only by wiping out traces of the past and the old could there ever be room for the new. Cities needed to be completely leveled and rebuilt. Old ideologies needed to be forgotten by killing off those who remember them. The only way to make it to Tomorrow is to annihilate Yesterday.

You may think I’m being finicky. “Futurism doesn’t mean this anymore,” you say. “Words don’t have fixed meanings.” This is true, but words can maintain their ties to the past for ages. Just imagine someone who theorizes and writes about the importance of communities. Do you really think he’d go around calling himself a “Communist”?

In other words: I’m sorry, Ray, but I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to your talk.