hungrybum internet

Oh, my poor neglected blog. I'm so sorry.

I spent a couple of weeks -- which, of course, were my uni term break -- being horribly ill alongside of Best Beloved who was also horribly ill. Our colds, using the same delightful germs, maybe picked up from the Folk Festival, maybe picked up from my plague-rat students, who knows, mutated in completely different directions. I spent the worst part of BB's grumpiness down in the studio trying to ignore my streaming snot, and by the time it really hit me with a cloudy head and painful throat and chest, he was back at work. Best possible outcome, really.

Then I've spent the last few days deeply immersed in the labyrinthine wastes of Wordpress, updating my work bloggy websitey thing. Why on earth? Because I have been published in The Blue Notebook (thank you Sarah) and am having an article written about me for Matrix journal, and I thought I'd better clean out my cupboards a bit, so to speak.

Of course, I've emerged from that today feeling like I've had just about enough of internet interaction, and then in the shower I realised that it's been weeks since I blogged. *sigh*. It's not you, it's me.

While I collect my thoughts, here are the cats for some light entertainment.


Boyz on da hood. They do this a lot, it's very cute.

We had Easter a week late, and thoroughly enjoyed our cheap easter eggs. Padge even laid one for us, he was so excited about all the festivities.



He especially likes the authentic 1960s mohair cardigan I bought at the festival.

We also hosted Bumblebee's 15th birthday party, which was an evening filled with exquisitely unknowingly beautiful teenagers who had intelligent airs of wisdom and the sweetest innocence. They spent most of the time playing Truth and Dare, refusing to eat BB's too-fancy homemade pizza but wolfing down sausages and bread (some things never change) and cake. The T&D was hilarious, ranging from icecubes down the pants to licking the cat (Padge didn't mind, really) and various forms of kissing. We roamed discreetly between the kitchen and the loungeroom, trying hard to keep straight faces and occasionally biting our knuckles in glee.

Pooter made friends with a balloon, although it took a little while for him to warm to the idea:







We found the balloon, days later, looking sadly neglected and small, so perhaps it wasn't a lasting thing.

All the kids young people went home flushed and happy and B's heart seemed healed (oh yes, first love broke up) and now he's got his eye (and, after yesterday's drama camp) lips on another girlie. He blushes at the mention of her name, so lovely.

Last weekend I forced myself to stick to plan and go up to the Blue Mountains to visit the Wayzgoose Press again. I'm so glad I did, they are such fun and full of good conversation about letterpress and production and libraries and design and whatever else. Plus, when I did get to bed (about 3am, they are nocturnal creatures), I slept with Dr Sista Outlaw's new kitten, Pip, on my head. Afterwards I felt strangely better, so maybe Pip has healing purrs.



He'd like to think so.

And now, if you'll excuse me, nice peoples, I'm going to go for a walk up the mountain with my boys as a nod to the public holiday we've been given. We haven't spent much time around each other lately!

Thanks but no thanks

As much as it's a thrill to be linked as Blog of Note on the Bloglines page, I'm not enjoying the sudden influx of spam commenters.

I love blogging, I love bloggers, but trolls, spammers and anyone who says 'Follow me' will be deleted from any comment stream they pollute.

You have been warned.


Genuine pedestrians, welcome. I hope you enjoy what I have to give, whatever that happens to be.

Today I am particularly enjoying the Canberra cloudlife, although I can't share because I still haven't found my camera cord (GAH). We are predicted to have thunderstorms later today and the clouds are going nuts out there. I found a cloud chart to tell me what they are all called (the most excellent one in the world, free to download, is here) but the names just don't match what goes on in my head when I look at them, so I'm not bothering to memorise them. Still, the cloud chart now lives in the loo with the Times Tables chart, so osmosis might just happen.

Remember to breathe

...and read this post. That will make you remember to laugh.

mucking aboot on the farm + hippo barfday to BB

Justin sighed. It was hard to follow your dream when all they did was mock you.

I've been having fun with my Farmville site on Facebook. There are times when you've done all your chores, and there's nothing much else to do. So I've started making little scenarios with my livestock.


Chatting around the grain silo at lunchtime, they were incredulous that Bruce had managed to get an iPad on the weekend.

While I'm creating, here's a birthday appearance for Best Beloved, who turns 39 today. (He's 3.5 years younger than me -- does that make me a cougar? or just a kitty?) I thought, even though (or maybe especially since) he doesn't read my blog, I'd give you a sneak peek at him:



This is probably as close as I can get to portraying him, anyway. I thought about putting him in a shirt & tie, to denote his Servant to Teh Public status, but he does love his Cartman, and his present today from me was two very silly and quite rude tshirts, including this, which delighted him, but we both agree that it will be hard to find places in which to wear it.

I remembered to buy him a birthday cake to eat last night when we went out with mates, and I cooked him a nice breakfast this morning. Tick, tick, tick tick, most of the birthday boxes ticked. Phew!

Remember to breathe

Really.

We bought Bumblebee a laptop for his birthday, and it arrived today. He did his homework super fast on my computer while I set his up, and now he's set up a Facebook account.

It's the start of a whole new era.


Breathe

Breathe


Breathe




But I didn't shoot no comic sans

Laugh.

Gold

Goodness, I keep forgetting to blog... that's because I came back from Mackay and stopped thinking and doing, and started exploring Facebook while I lolled (in the more traditional sense) and got sucked into all kinds of silly but fun games like this:



This is a snapshot of my Farmville farm, with a little folly of boulder and daffodils on the left, plus animals and plots of rice and raspberries and sundry other things. Contrary to real-life appearances, I love gardening, but I don't have the time of energy to do it, and have always set it aside in my mind as something I will do later when I have more free time and fewer fine motor skills. So Farmville is appealing to my green yearnings and Social City is... dunno, but for now it's fun. And, as usual, I'm doing things way after everyone else has lost interest in them, which is a problem when it comes to having 'neighbours' or fellow participants...

Speaking of lovely greenery, I've been doing a fair bit of driving over the last week or so. I went to Cooma to deposit Bumblebee with Colonel and Lady Duck, and all along the drive I saw the most magnificent golden leaves on the poplar trees, glowing in the sunshine along the roadsides.



That shot (taken precariously whilst driving near Michelago) doesn't do the glory justice. I do so love Autumn.

I also, in the last week, got my first and hopefully only GOLD TOOTH. Up the back, so I don't glint alarmingly when I smile, but I flash when I yawn. Apparently as a chronic tooth-grinder, gold is safer and will last longer under the pressure. The gold crown is covering a cracked tooth, probably from said grinding, so I really should do something to relax my jaw when I'm sleeping/working, the two main trouble times. Although how to relax further when you're already asleep is beyond me, really.

I've run out of time tonight (probably because I keep checking my Scrabble/farm/city), but tomorrow I will come back and talk about Mahri Autumn, which is another thing altogether.

long fur

My goodness, I'm ever so grateful to The Paper Chipmunk for introducing this wonderful, seductive timewaster to my life. I think.

snorts du jour

Snaps to The Dangerous Kettle, who put me on to My First Dictionary and all its hilarity.

If you want a link that is just as hilarious, and even darker, try craigslaugh. But don't go there if you have a weak stomach...

the book, is thinking about it

Yes, me again. While I'm dismantling my last computer (waiting for things to copy/trash), I'm gathering my thoughts over the next few weeks for the talk I'm giving about 'The Limits of the Book' in Mackay at Focus on Books V. Bear with me: I've had the pancakes, so I'm not too tired yet, but the braincells are still a bit shattered by my early morning.



Ostensibly my paper starts as a run-down of the BSANZ conference I attended last year in Brisbane by the same name. I thought it would be useful to report that the scholars and the book artists are debating the same issues: what is a book, does it have limits, what is the future of the book, and does taking it online change everything?

At the Mackay conference, there is a space at the end of the conference where people get to stand up and do a little update about what they've been up to or what's been happening around the traps. Last conference I did one of those, and I sort of expected to be in the same timeslot, not being a major player (or so I thought) and not having a very big topic, just a conference report-back kinda-thing.

But OMFCC,* they've given me a 45-minute slot right smack in the centre of proceedings. I figure this gives me a chance to bang on a bit about books and what I think about them.

But first I have to really crystallise what I do think. Because I change my mind, quite a lot. In a nutshell, I think that books will survive anything the internet can throw at them. I think that books are physical objects that can't be taken on-line because then they become text. I think there is a substantial difference between books and information, which is what the internet presents to us. And I think that there are booky things on the internet, but we should all start working out new names for them, to be imaginative about new terms for new things. I like the way Kindle doesn't pretend to be anything but a Kindle. If it's a successful enough product, all e-readers will be called Kindles whether their genuine brand-names like it or not, and that's the way new names generate.

I was just reading an article from The Times Online about the (yawn) Death of Books, and pondering my favourite thought, which is: when peak oil runs out, if we haven't got our shit together with alternative energies, the internet really will be only for those who Have. If books are dead, and information is only accessible online, then we really will have Haves and Have-nots, everywhere. This is my post-apocalyptic extension of 'how does the information contained in books survive the constant shifting of software that leaves much behind and only translates what is deemed relevant?'. As someone who has worked in desktop publishing pretty much from the moment it went onto computers (I just felt a grey hair go PING), I have witnessed many incarnations of books fall by the wayside, trapped on disks, drives, sticks, all holding files that are now impenetrable. One particular project I'm still involved with (on a very sideline level) has spent the last 20 years (PING) trying to perfect a way to strip down their carefully researched and formatted scholarly editions into some holy grail of simple code that can coast along the surface of a very rough software (and hardware) ocean. I don't know how successful they've been, but it's been a long journey in a very leaky boat.

I do think about this stuff a lot; I have a recurrent daydream/nightmare (depending how busy I am) where the internet crashes and people come knocking at my studio door wanting me to handset and print the newspaper for them (PING).

I'm a big believer of books as physical objects: I have a very broad concept of what can be a book, from sculptural objects to conceptual ideas of bookiness... I can see that the computer can conceptually 'be' a book, but I'm starting to be a firm believer in the internet being a provider of information rather than a holder of books.

I also think, and I'm hoping this will go down well at a conference of artist's book makers, that we are really well placed in time to be working with books. Now that books have pretty much ceased to be the dominant provider of information and moved into a more specialised sector of the market (I really doubt that pulp novels will ever stop being made, unless people come up with a e-reader that can cope with steam and sand), there is no better time to be pushing it as a symbol, even a relic, of a time that people are or will be highly nostalgic about. Making beautiful books -- or making undervalued books valuable again by altering or reworking them -- will ensure that the physicality of books survives and is nurtured.

Any thoughts? Remember that this is me thinking aloud and completely unstructured; I'm very happy to be slapped down on any points or pulled up to the mark regarding generalisations or research. Any pointers as to places I should be looking at will be appreciated and fully acknowledged in my paper.





*Ceiling Cat being the main deity in this household, with a small subsection being a Jedi follower. I was once married to someone from the Bureau of Stats. I take the Census seriously.

Quizzical

Go on -- what type are you? Find out.

I'm Perpetua Titling Light, which is quite nice, really.

(Highly amused by the hand model in the background.)

Cinematic LOLcattery

With big snaps to For Battle, who between them have many fingers on many pulses, and also many things without pulses, may I please recommend to you

Pop Suede, and especially their post of a LOLcat version of Twilight: New Moon.

Now I don't have to see the movie. Or, I think, read the book. They also did a LOLcat version of the first Twilight movie. And Sex and the City: the movie.

I'm just waiting for LOLcat crib texts for the HSC and other important exams. These cats are defining our times, and I'm loving the ride.

dotty points

Sorry, still feeling flat. And somehow quite disconnected from things. Still, there have been some light moments over the last week:

-- assessing lots of TAFE students as a guest panel member, which felt like being on a panel for some kind of talent show. Byrd was also a panelist, and I discovered how Bad Cop he really can be, which was fun.

-- I had a surprise run-in with a mermaid! We literally bumped into each other in the halls of my art skool, and she recognised me from the various silly photos I've mounted over the years. We made time to stop and have a beverage together on the weekend, among decorative wombat tiles and trees, and it was lovely.



-- Bumblebee and I had a visit from Colonel and Lady Duck today. Colonel Duck has decided to stage an Intervention on our badly neglected garden, and came up to make some plans about how to proceed. He gave Bumblebee one last chance (after nagging him for ages) to write a Christmas Present Suggestion List before he committed to buying him singlets and undies, so B sat down and wrote a very Star-Wars-heavy list, with one last thing at the very end: he wanted a (sic) BADMITTEN SET.

All I could think of was a set of mittens knitted in the shape of devil's horn hands, so:



I had to make that image, THERE'S NOTHING LIKE THEM ON THE INTERWEBS. Come on peoples, especially etsy peoples who can KNIT. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before????!!!

-- It was the cats' collective birthday last friday. I gave them a huge plate of raw whiting. They were very happy. They turned five.

-- Best Beloved has a new job. With a new title. It's quite an impressive title, but I'm not allowed to tell you it. The acronym, however, is DISS {see, I'm even getting my jokes wrong] DISMISS. That's something to laugh about, isn't it?

I'm quite enjoying watching the Liberal Party turn themselves in knots. That's another thing to laugh about...

Hmm. I'm trying to laugh more. I'll get there.

snortle

Ceiling Cat, bless the interwebs and the nice people I know on it.

Harry sent me this site:

Unless by “attention to detail” you mean spelling.

Regretsy.

Hours of fun and grimacing for everyone, whether you like handmade things or you don't.

Harry is one of the reasons I can spend so much time in my studio. Best Beloved is away for a few days, and Bumblebee spend the whole day yesterday painting Harry's Warhammer figures and working out some elaborate battle scene involving Beastmen, Space Marines, Bionicles and Lego Star Wars. There's also a boss Warhammer dude with a real crab-claw arm (found the last time we went to the beach). It is fantabulous. So thanks a squillion, Harry.

housekeeping

I hate hot weather. It's always astounding to me how Canberra has long glorious cold crispy winters, sneaks in a few weeks of perfect spring where the evenings are chilly and the days are warm, and then it just thrusts HOT and DRY onto us abruptly. Last week I was wondering whether to leave a jumper or two out in my wardrobe, and yesterday I pulled out all my extreme (hot) weather gear. It's rude. It's horrible, and I wish I lived in Alaska or Nimmitabel* or something.

Hot weather makes me cranky and my skin breaks out. I look like an adolescent at the moment with my spotty t-zone, which is ridiculous with my greying hair and bingo-wings.**

My studio is lovely and cool, but I'm on a weird schedule at the moment where I have to dip in & out of art skool to assess people, and so I never get a clear run at studio time. So I've been writing & thinking & drawing, which is not too bad.

BB still has a sore bottom (have I mentioned it before now?). Caused by riding his bike too hard, it has progressed through many stages of hypochondria from cancer to boils and other alarming things and his hobbling varies depending upon who is watching. He's getting an ultrasound today, so hopefully we'll get to the bottom of it (groan). I can't tell you anything else about it, the details are too revolting and TMI would damage your relationship with me.

Bumblebee is spotty too, increasing in hormones daily, and gaining height rapidly. He's almost grown out of my shoe size, but I don't want my riding boots back because he's trashed them completely. I noticed the other day that his voice has deepened but not breaking yet, so he'll have a very deep voice eventually. He's going through an 80s music phase sparked off by me giving him one of my albums to play after he saw the (new) movie of Fame; I'm trying to steer him into the more electronic side of things, but he loves the cheesy songs, and my ears have started bleeding from all the earworms I carry around all the rest of the day.

The cats are miserable in the heat. I've been planting catmint in weird places around the garden to surprise them, but they're too hot to wander, just lie around the house all day in the cool, stretched to full length on the floorboards. Occasionally I'll step over Padge in the hallway (he can't stretch full out there unless he's diagonal, he's longer than the width of the corridor) and he'll catch my leg with a desultory claw as if to remind me that he would like some food or water please, like some fat English tourist on a Spanish beach.


Padge in my office filling up available floor space. he's not stretched to capacity, and my feet (size nine and a half) are a good size indicator.

Blogosphere as I know it is going through another big purge -- lots of interesting people giving up their blogs, like Alan Loney & Betty Slocombe. Others are starting new ones. It's a dynamic thing, isn't it? I guess I'll just keep on keeping on... that's the beauty of keeping the aim of the blog really broad :)

Happy happy happy that Amanita Design has released a new game: Machinarium. I've downloaded the full version but haven't had a chance to play it yet. I love Samarost and their other games -- good for both adults and kids, with their beauty and reliance upon logical yet dreamy thinking.

And another thing I've been wondering lately... (damn earworms) call me crazy and call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but I'm wondering if my trouble with online Scrabble ISN'T just my crappy connection and the fact that the rest of the virtuniverse is trying to play, but the fact that I have requested that all my playing details aren't broadcast to all of my facebook friends etc. As soon as I vetoed all the notifications and crowings and general annoyances, the software became extremely recalcitrant. Makes me cranky in a very GenX kinda way.

Sigh. I guess I have to go out and brave the heat of the day. I hope you're sitting somewhere cool, maybe even downright frosty.








*not as silly as it sounds. Nimmitabel, between Cooma and Bemboka, is the highest settlement in Australia and even in summer they have to wear a light cardigan in the afternoon. My grandmother was born there. I would be living there now if BB could drag himself away from his career.

**I realised when I talked about the chook-raffle recently that I need to have a glossary sometimes. Bingo-wings are large flabby under-upper-arm bits that wobble when you move your arm. Sometimes they're called 'bye-byes' because they keep waving after you stop. Any other good names for them? Share.

silly me

Never, ever say it out loud. It's asking for trouble.

Just the other day I was saying to BB how lucky I was that I hadn't been ill for much of the year.

This was me at 9.30 this morning:


And this was me by mid-afternoon:


(courtesy of this place; I didn't really want to show you a photo of my rapid descent!)

It's a cold. Or flu. I can never tell the difference. I think I got it from Jethro on the weekend -- and I tell you Zoe, if this is how he felt, no wonder he moaned all night! I'm so ready to crawl into bed.

I did manage to get to Studio Duck to meet up with Lucas from Big Fag Press and his good lady, and I'm so glad I did. They are very enthusiastic people, and by the end of the visit we were making plans for an Australian printers' wayzgoose some time -- maybe next year? Fun!

But... now I'm home, and the screen is starting to hurt my eyes, so I will drag myself off to bed. My sinuses feel like they're about to explode, and my head is throbbing. I think the pills I took at lunchtime to get me through the day are wearing off. Ciao.

let's play with fonts

Arial and Helvetica... do you know the difference?

Test your skillz...

When I first took that test, I was a cocky little thing, and shocked myself by getting only 10/20. Then I actually read the article about the differences between the two fonts (you can find it all here on Ironic Sans), and was surprised, in a number of ways. Now I don't think I'll ever use Arial again.

Then I took the test again and got 19/20. There's one that is really, really hard.

I love typography quizzes. I'm not obsessive about fonts, that's probably a flaw in the design part of my brain, but I know enough to get by, and rely on intuition rather than historical facts and cool brands (a bit like my cooking/clothes buying). Still, it's always fun to do type quizzes. Another good one is called the rather difficult font game. And one of my all-time fav bloggers (because he writes about sexy things like tools and books and other great stuff with a sense of fun seriousness) found one recently called cheese or font. Fun!

Cheesy pooofs

Late last night I needed a break from interminable photo resizings and lists of ex-military types (long story), and did a touch of internut cruising. Writing about my timid web trolling is like reading a children's story: I went walking... ...and what did I see? It's nowhere in the league of the wonderful Ample Sanity or BibliOdyssey.

Still, when I find things that belong together, they're worth mentioning. I laughed like a drain at Whatladder's trolling, and then I stumbled across this:



Which is just so apposite. It starts slowly: hang in there, it's worth it, especially if you thought Jah Jah Binks was an outrageous waste of time and money, as I do. You can fast-forward, I think the fun starts at about 1:25. (I was a bit shocked when Bumblebee laughed and then said 'that music is so funny, where does it come from?', and then I was thankful that he's never watched Benny Hill.)

And finally:



OK, back to work. I have to move plinths today. And keep resizing photos. *sigh*

Shelving ideas

Putting together my exhibition, one of the serendipitous things that helped it was that the exhibitor before me, Nick Stranks, had built a long mantlepiece-type bookshelf right around three of the gallery walls. I checked with him that the shelving was a prop, not an integral part of his concept, and then asked him if I could use it as well. He had no problem with this, since it deferred the taking-down of the shelf, and he'd also get someone to help him do it. Win win, as they say.

I went back to my studio, all excited, and fretted over what to do with the shelf, which turned out to be very long indeed.

I ended up using one side to hold my collection of flotsam and jetsam (vintage books made into blank books and boxes), and the other side to hold a number of my 'souvenir' working books (I dubbed them Re-collections), and then for the central sweep of shelf I created a small series called 'Night Ladders' that depended upon the shelves for their display.


This one you've already seen, it's called Night Ladders: After. It is a concertina papercut that can fold back into the vintage book cover. The book is called 'After Suicide'. I've been carting the book around for ages now, but the inside was quite dry and boring, so I gutted the cover a few years ago and had been toying with the idea of just using the cover as an altered book in itself, showing how gutted and empty the aftermath of suicide can be for the survivors. But I like this better. There's darkness, growth and change in it. Works for me.




Next along the shelf is Night Ladders: Escape. It hovers on the wall above the shelf, and the ladder goes completely down to the end of the shelf, sitting just shy of the floor. This is the only one of the four that doesn't fold up into itself. Instead, once the book comes off the wall, it can close up, and the ladder wraps around it, so it's still a book object, but a bit more sculptural. Everyone loves the ladder, and I'm glad, because it took a long time to make! I love it too.


I still can't work out which way the escape goes, into or out of the book. I guess that's why I like it so much. The title on the book cover is Escapes and Adventures. I like to make the cover titles a part of the work, because that's what catapults me into the work in the first place.




Next one along the shelf is Night Ladders: Grim. All the printed papers used in these books come from a huge project I helped with earlier in the year, producing a couple of editions of artists' books for light-trap Press. One book was called Twelve Labours (about Herakles), and the backing sheets for that were used in After and Escape. The other book was called The Night Ladder, and this one is what the title of my series comes from. Both books used poems by Angela Gardner, and TNL was mostly reinterpretations of fairytales, plus a new poem from which the title was derived.

Grim has used the backing sheets from TNL, and especially a poem from it called 'Bluebeard'. It's another concertina book, this time using a vintage copy of Grimm's fairy tales. Yes, I know Bluebeard isn't by Grimm, it's by Perrault, but I had Grimm on hand, and once you lose an em, it all works beautifully. It's my hand, my wedding ring. And it looks very creepy when you stand in front of it, so droopy and extended. The book cover is the same blood-red as the hand.



The last one starts on the shelf and then extends diagonally upwards to the top of the wall (Megalo has short internal gallery walls, because it's a constructed space inside a large atrium). As you can see, I wanted the four pieces to really USE the space of the shelving. One thing I like about them as a group is that they'd be very hard to show in a normal glassed plinth or even cabinet. Anyhoo, this is Night Ladders: Vision, with the text of the poem 'The Night Ladder' visible at the start and end of the upward climb. This was Angela's love poem to her partner; this series is my 'like' poem to Angela. I do like her work, a lot. The book cover is 'Night Vision' by Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. I like to think he'd have liked this book too.

When I say 'printed papers', I mean that when you print pages using letterpress and a cylinder proofing press, you use other pieces of paper to 'pack' the cylinder. Some of them are wrapped around the cylinder with a lightly oiled paper on top, and this is the tympan packing. Other pieces sit under the main piece of paper, to provide more pressure as you work with the type or plate. When you've finished, there is usually a quantity of paper that bears the embossed impression of the text/image you've been printing. Sometimes the embossing is so lovely, I keep the paper as-is. Most times, though, when I've finished printing, I'll run the packing through my rollers to remove most of the ink before rolling up my sleeves to clean the press. These over-printed packing sheets are what has been used in this series and many other of my pieces. I love the random marks, the variations in tone, and the echoed text that re-invigorates all the enthusiasm I had at the start of a long project that I'd lost through endless hours of press-setting and paper-shifting.

Anyway, what started me writing this post was a link sent to me on one of my various list-servers. It's a fabulous collection of imaginative bookshelves. I know you all love books, otherwise you wouldn't be reading me, so I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

I had the chance today to meet up with Betty today to have a look at the show and my studio and have coffee and talk about places and movies and children etc. It was delightful, and I'm starting to get used to having time to do such things again. O joy, Spring is springing, and there's time. Except I'm meant to be at a meeting in 15 minutes, and I'm late. Poo.

touched ups for everyone!

Last night after I mounted my solo show post, I hyperventilated a little bit and decided to cruise my blogroll in search of some diversion. I usually only glance sideways at Photoshop Disasters, since the quality of posting is quite uneven, but this time I struck gold... and leapt across to the source site to have a really good look.

If you have a pre-teen or teenage son or daughter (or anyone in your life who believes that women should look like models), this site is essential viewing. I cannot stress this enough.

It is a portfolio of images that helpfully showcases before and after with a roll of the mouse, and while some of the transformations are simple (wrinkles and skin smoothed out, curves reduced or enhanced), some of them are absolutely gobsmacking. It's an easy way to lose half an hour, and, if you have any feminist leanings, to raise your blood-pressure a bit.

These are some of my favorites:
-- woman with/without remote, and swivelling head!
-- Bikini girl, who was very nice to start with, but has been given extra butt and less waist, along with a new improved face.
-- Girl with a sad hairline suddenly has a perfect hairline! And really weird eyes, worthy of a video game.

Ribs are out, so are flat hair and low boobs. And if you don't want to expose your breasts, no worries, they can just do it for you anyway.

GAH!

brass monkeys

Found on a bookbinding supplies website, in their listing of brass lettering fonts:



So what is 'normal' these days?