Today I saw a Claw Plush Toy Catcher outside H&H Shmeisani. Instead of having plush toys, as the name should suggest, it had old battered Nokia phones, remote controls, and best of all, cigarette packs.

Yes, Gold Coast cigarette packs.

I wish I had my camera.

From College Humor.

My favorite two:

Check out the other five here.

My imaginary dog ate my thinking cap this weekend.

I’m in the process of getting myself a new one. Meanwhile, I’m using my airhead hat.

Now you can learn it in five minutes.

The three paragraphs that teach you everything you need to know about modern art:

Impressionism – painting outside of a studio with quick, loose brushstrokes to capture an evocative impression of their subject. Van Gogh was an Impressionist but wanted to express how he felt about what he saw so he distorted the subject. This helped to lead to Expressionism practised by artists from Edvard Munch through to Francis Bacon. The Fauves (wild beasts) expressed themselves by painting with bright colours. Jackson Pollock did it by throwing or dripping paint on a canvas. His paintings were abstract — Abstract Expressionism.

Cezanne was very important. He began as an Impressionist but then started to look at a subject from two different perspectives to represent how we see. Picasso and his friend Georges Braque were very impressed and started to paint subjects from lots of different views. This is Cubism. Marcel Duchamp was a Cubist but then changed art for ever. He said the idea is more important than the medium and refused to stick with the limited choice of canvas or stone. So he chose everyday objects and called them art because he had altered their context. This led to Conceptual Art where the idea becomes the medium.

The Dadaists were very cross. They blamed the horrors of the First World War on the Establishment’s reliance on rational and reasoned thought. They radically opposed rational thought and became nihilistic — the punk rock of modern art movements. Dada plus Sigmund Freud equals Surrealism. The Surrealists were fascinated by the unconscious mind, as that’s where they thought truth resided. Piet Mondrian thought he could paint everything he knew, felt and saw by using two lines placed at rectangles and three primary colours. This was called Neo-Plasticism and was inspired by Cubism. So was Futurism, which is Cubism with motion added. Vorticism is the same as Futurism, but British. The Minimalists might represent the real truth because they weren’t trying to represent anything. Performance Art is Dada live.

:)

That’s from Will Gompertz in the Times. (via sippey) (via Kottke)

Discard all your beliefs about rainbows being just a spectrum of light. That’s just what the world wants you to believe in a grand conspiracy.

The rainbow is actually made out of Pantone chips.

And look! Here’s the proof:

The Basheer Graphic Book agency has built a Pantone Rainbow spanning 8 meters and 5,000 colors.

Via The Cool List

According to Nike. I’m really not a very big fan of Nikes these days, as I haven’t seen in a nice pair in about a decade. But this packaging for shoes, designed by Emille Molin and made out of recycled cardboard, is really cool.

More pictures and explanation here.

What do you think? Like or not?