Deep Sea Magic!

Ah, scientists. How much they add to our understanding of the universe.

Today's episode of Why the Beckstar Has a Nerd Fetish focuses on the oceans, where an attempt at making a full census of marine life by 2010 is already producing strange and awesome data.

How about, for example, the multitude of never-seen-before species found in the Antarctic, including strange jellyfish and other gelatinous organisms that thrive without light?

Or, how about the yeti crab, a new species found near Easter Island?


Hi, I am hairy and pretty.

Or the "Jurassic Shrimp", believed extinct for 50 million years, and now found near Australia?


50 million years in the making. Coming soon to a barbecue near you.

They've also found that life is thriving in some really inhospitable locales - next to extreme heat vents and in areas of the ocean that never see light. We knew this before, but the abundance of life is impressive and unexpected.

But my favourite thing in marine biology has to be the deep sea creatures. They've found hundreds of new ones in this census, and believe that the under-studied deep sea ecosystems may play a crucial role in regulating global climate. Go science!

Deep sea creatures are just so different than any form of life we see up here on the carpet. They look positively extra-terrestrial. These illustrations are of a mild sampling of the lifeforms we've already documented, and there are clearly many more. So, so, so, so awesome.






All images from this site, which is in Japanese but still really cool

Or just check out this vid. It's about 10 minutes, but trust me - it's worth it.


Absolutely fascinating BBC documentary on deep sea creatures

Federally mandated daily quota of Beckstarian content

My room - 10:47 pm:

I did a crystal meth-related project last year. While sourcing images, I found one of the most disturbing/heart-breaking photo essays I've ever seen - Children of Meth. Sadly, I was reminded of it when I looked upon my current living conditions.

Same room - 1:04 am:

For this achievement, I'd like to thank Jesus, my parents, my fabulous agent Jenny Levine, and the fantastic film Dark City.

Yes, you saw that right.

The other night, in a hungover bout of laziness, I invented this 't-shirt pillowcase' because the last clean pillowcase reeked mildly of booze. Chew on that Martha Stewart, you hapless bitch!



Bonus! Fur hat photo shoot!

Save Santa! - the Santa Liberation Front

In a last desperate act to save the planet from the clutches of global warming, the Santa Liberation Front (SLF) has been forced to exploit the most wholesome of children's icons: Jolly Nick himself.

Don't wait - start today!

"That's great Steve"

This thing is funny from first frame to last. It's a viral video about creating viral videos... don't think too hard about it, just watch.

6 of the 50 Greatest Ads of the ’80's

So Giant Magazine has put together a long shortlist of the 50 Greatest Commercials of the 1980's. Awesome.

There are quite a few to get through, so I've pulled my six particular favourites here... enjoy!


Sadly, the My Buddy campaign, as I remember it, was used mainly to tormet less popular kids. Along the lines of 'Who are you going to the dance with? Your My Buddy?'


Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Nintendo + Terrible Product Rap?


On a 'creepy scale' from 1 to 10, this ad came in at 30, raped numbers one through four, and has the rest of them chained to its radiator.


Early cell-phone ad... You've got the whole world in your hand... which can only move about three feet from your car. And costs $800. See? They've been marketing to me 1988, and I still refuse to own a cellphone. I am the last unicorn.


The joke's on you, mustache dad. I'm not totally sure why a dad that smokes pot himself would be so aggro about his child's use, but hey - it was the 80's. Things didn't make sense.


Uh... hello? Shatner plus the Wonder Computer of the 1980's. And it was only $300. Take that Hundred Dollar Laptop crew.

Am I the only one...

... who looks at these images of Pete Goldlust's carved crayons, and thinks 'man, this guy really needs to get laid.'?


Each crayon here represents, I estimate, 10 hours that would have been better spent pleasing a woman. Or man. Or whoever - hey, like Digital Underground said... dowhatchalike!


Some of his polymer clay work. These look less like turds than a lot of his other work in this media. Pretty, ethereal turds... but still...


From a 2005 collaboration with artist Julie Hughes, entitled Turned Out and Doubled Over

Virgin Mobile - Yours to Keep

Say what you will about animated universe ads, but throw in a catchy song, polka-dot elephants and a trippy flower explosion, and they're pretty watchable.

These are, I believe, the Christmas 2006 campaign for Virgin Mobile that ran in Canada. The song - Yours to Keep - is by Teddybears, and it features Neneh Cherry (seriously, remember her?) on vocals.


Take that GloboChem! Hey... isn't that from Mr. Show?


The last scene is for sure I would have been doing if I'd worked at Enron.

I was about to be a complete bore, and mention the contradiction between the pro-environment subtext in these ads and the environmental impact of the cell phones they promote.

But after checking the brand-spanking new Greenpeace Electronics Guide, I see that several companies are trying to make them more earth-friendly. Motorola in particular gets the "Most Improved Camper" award, moving up the list from a 1.7 rating to a 6 in the last three months.

Maybe I can justify that Gold RAZR I'm coveting...

Detroit = Destination for Art?

Now I'm not really an architecture nerd or anything, but as someone who's seen her share of urban centres, I knows what I likes and I likes the new Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, which opened in October.

As much as I can appreciate the bright, shiny, modernist building designs that seem to be the standard way to revitalize urban areas, I think there is something truly visionary in Andrew Zago's experimental approach to the museum's design. As he explains,

I didn’t want to romanticize it but the city had a depth of character, a real substance and integrity. And while you want to do away with the problems, you don’t want to lose that quality.

It really, really works.

The space is a converted car dealership, and the design incorporates all the grit and decay of the space into its aesthetic. Kudoes to you Andrew Zago, kudos to you.


Barry McGee, graffiti art darling, did a graffiti installation across the outside.


Not only that, but supposedly this little dude is one of McGee's mechanical mannequins. I repeat: mechanical mannequin. I know. Awesome.


Architect Andrew Zago.


Nari Ward's White Flight Tea Bar 2006, currently on display.


Christopher Fachini with his sound installation called The Rock Box Sound System plays the Mental Machine

More about the museum in a NY Times architecture review, or you can just go visit it.

I mean seriously what else are you going to do in Detroit???

Ancient Computers are Awesome!

In what seems like the ultimate in fantastic invention is the true story of the Antikythera mechanism, a 2,000 year old Greek astronomical computer capable of computing the position of the sun and moon, and possibly planets, and predicting eclipses.

No earlier geared mechanism of any sort has ever been found. Nothing close to its technological sophistication appears again for well over a millennium, when astronomical clocks appear in medieval Europe. It stands as a strange exception, stripped of context, of ancestry, of descendants. [2]


Clockwise from top left - one part of the ruin as discovered; rendering of assembled mechanism; x-ray of one piece - hot gears!; 3D rendering of gear system.

Discovered in 1902, in the remains of a Roman shipwreck, the mechanism is potentially one of several, as mentioned by Cicero:

"And when Gallus moved the globe, it was actually true that the moon was always as many turns behind the sun on the bronze contrivance as would agree with the number of days it was behind in the sky. Thus the same eclipse of the sun happened on the globe as would actually happen"

Archeoastronomy is so, so, so very cool. Read more in the Nature magazine feature.

In a similar theme, check out The Book of Ingenious Devices: Kitáb al-Hiyal. By The Banú (sons of) Músà bin ShákirKitáb al-Hiyal: The Book of Ingenious Devices, an illustrated book of mechanical devices and automata, published in 850 by three Persian brothers. It contains the first mention of a robot.

Stupidly, I mixed up the book above - published in 850 and selling for around $300, with a similarly titled book published in the 1200's and retailing for around $60. So... if anyone wants to borrow this second book, let me know in 10 - 14 business days.

Non-newtonian fluids!

So when you were younger, did you ever play with a non-Newtonian fluid?

I remember our enrichment teacher having us make 'magic mud', which was a mixture of cornstarch, water and food colouring. What was really cool, is that it hardened into a thick solid when you squeezed it, but relaxed into a fluid when the pressure was off.

Yup, that's a non-Newtonian fluid for you - something that changes hardness in relation to pressure. Now imagine filling whole pool with a non-Newtonian fluid. You can run right across the surface, but if you stop for even a moment you sink right in. This video, showing just that, is pretty f'ing cool.



Cool practical applications include the material d30, used in the suits worn by Canadian and American alpine skiiers in this past Olympic games. It is totally flexible, but hardens into armour upon impact, protecting these guys like only a futuristic mind-blowing fabric can.

On another note, could non-Newtonian fluid technology be behind the remarkable properties exhibited by the T1000?


If only John Connor had known...

Vik Muniz. Of medium and message...

While we were in Seattle, KT and I were able to catch a fantastic retrospective of an artist I've been meaning to blog about for a while - Vik Muniz - at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Vik Muniz was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1961. Muniz started out as a sculptor, but successively became more interested in photographs of his sculptures than in the sculptures themselves.

So he basically creates images using highly perishable or unstable media, and photographs them. A direct descendant from Warhol, his interests in mass production and popular culture drive the subjects of his work - largely reproductions of famous images or artworks. His technical execution is amazing, and the relationship between medium and subject are insightful and clever.

Enough gush - just check some of it out:


Some guy checking out Portrait of Alice Liddell, after Lewis Carroll [Alice in Wonderland], which is made completely from toys and candy.


Saturn, after Goya, contrasted with Goya's original work.


A shot from one of my favourite series - Pictures of Clouds


Double Mona Lisa, after Warhol, done in peanut butter and jelly.


Part of the Sugar Children series, reproductions in sugar of photographs taken of the children of sugar plantation workers in St. Kitts.

This whole 'Look at me! I'm drawing with peanut butter!' thing could come off as contrived, but Muniz is really insightful and painstaking in his execution, which keeps the dialogue at a higher level.

His work reminds me of a passage in a book I am reading (and looooving) right now - Ghostwritten by David Mitchell:

The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, it turns ever more perfect. And when it's perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits the ground it gets all mushed up. So it's only absolutely perfect when it's falling through the air, this way and that, for the briefest time...'

I guess what I'm suggesting is that Muniz would agree, and that he works to create and then capture these brief moments of constructed perfection. The show's on until January 14th. If you're in Seattle over the next month or so, try to check it out.

Tom Waits on hip hop...

Hip-hop is still kind of the Old West. It's a reasonably unsettled territory and truly the cutting edge of blues. They're still trying to put hot sauce in a milkshake. No one is going to pull you over and give you a ticket for it because it's still defining itself.

From an interview with the Chicago Tribune

Blood, sweat and tears...

... at the 2006 Seattle Marathon. Oh yeah - and booze. Lots and lots of booze.

Let's let the photos do the talking, aiight?


Yup, that's what running twenty-six miles'll do to you. Also crazy gross - the guys with bleeding nipples. Uh... ewwww.


Two of the most hardcore people of all time. Seriously - these two are my heroes.


Hey! It's the Beckstar, rounding out the contrived post title during a ridiculously hung over viewing of Prime on the hotel TV Monday morning.

And the debauchery continued all weekend. Some of the most delightful memories weren't caught on tape... a fact for which my blood-relation readership will be grateful I'm sure.


As if! The Marriott supplies this enlightened text along with the bible and book of mormon.



Round one: Post-race mimosas and bloody marys in the hotel bar.



Round two: A celebratory bottle of Cristalina up in the room.



Round three and four: free-pour highballs and tequila shots in the red-lit Mexican bar.



Round five: te-quila! Shots with strangers are always fun.



Round therve... Seriously. No SERIOUSLY. I love that hat on you soooo much. Shut up! For se-rious!



And here we are at the Drunk Girls in a Gay Bar series. Make sure you click the link - it's a photo essay unto itself.



By the way, it snowed.



And to me the drive home, although long and hungover, was absolutely majestic.