Monumental Ecological Restoration and the Capitalist Stain
In what environmental groups say would be the largest ecological restoration in the country’s history, Florida has made plans to purchase U.S. Sugar Corporation, the nations largest producer of cane sugar.
The intention is to restore the Everglades by restoring the water flow from Lake Okeechobee, in the heart of the state, south of Florida Bay. The flow has been interrupted by commercial farming; the Everglades having suffered as a result. Some 68 animal and plant species are now considered at risk of extinction due to lack of fresh water and over 50 years of attempts to redirect water flow to farms and cities.
Under the terms of the tentative deal, U.S. Sugar would continue its farming and processing of cane sugar for six more years before closing the business and allowing the 187,000 acres of land to return to its natural state. Included in the purchase of the land is U.S. Sugar’s whole production facilities, including a new mill and a railroad. Florida has offered to pay U.S. Sugar $1.7 billion.
Though plans are not complete, state officials said they hope to sign a contract in September.
While the Everglades will rightly reclaim its land, the demise of U.S. Sugar Corporation will cost 1,700 people employment. But as Robert H. Buker Jr., the chief executive of U.S. Sugar said, “it’s the dollars and cents, and its the right thing to do.”
Don’t you just love how money, even in an act of good for the eco system — or rather, righting a past wrong — is the first and foremost concern and not, as Immanuel Kant would say, the act of doing good because it is your duty and that that act of good must be an end in and of itslef and not a means to an end. So 1,700 people will lose their job but, as Kant would see it, such is an accidental consequence to doing an act of good, which should be in and of itself the ends of the means. But its not. The fact remains that these people are losing their job and the Everglades are gaining back their land, but U.S. sugar isn’t giving the land back to the Everglades. It is selling the land to Florida and the douche bag capitalist above is going to bank because Florida citizens tax dollars, including the ones that will be losing their job in six years time, will be paying him for it. Such a monumental act of ecological restoration seems trite when you think about the picture as a whole instead of its pieces.
Link: NYTimes — “Florida to Buy Sugar Maker…” | U.S. Sugar Corporation
The image above is a thematic mapper image showing the Everglades, a.k.a. the “River of Grass”, contrasting sharply agsint the adjacent developed and agricultural areas. If Gilding is reading the map correctly, the brown area in top center of the image is the U.S. Sugar Corporation’s 187,000 acres and the patch of blue-green above it is Lake Okeechobee, the adjacent fresh water that has been cut off from the Everglades. Satellite image from
Corn Lane That’s Worth Its Fashion Kitsch
Who needs to eat a healthy apple when you can wear a kitsch one made of translucent, red colored, acrylic. Ok, so its not lucite, but for a mere $12 this one size fits most ring is worth the skimp. Ring sits 1″ wide and is decorated with rhinestones in the small gold-tone leaf. Ring also comes in green.
Tableau Vivant with Punch
Finlay MacKay’s early works breathe a completely new and original style that draws as much from the pop visuals of street art and comics as from the classics of British painting school. His 2008 Lavazza Calendar is but one more fabulous construction of his punchy colored classically posed photography shot in a tableau vivant style that screams to be your LSD laced eye candy.
Link: Lavazza 2008
Photoshop Need Not Apply
The most photographed building in Poland, the Crooked House [pictured] isn’t a victim of Photoshop, but is the creation of architect Szotynscy Zaleski. Inspired by the fairytale illustrations of Jan Marcin Szancer and the drawings of Swedish artist, and Soport resident, Per Dahlberg, the Crooked House is 4,000 square meters (or 13,123.36 square feet) located in the Rezydent shopping center in Sopot, Poland, a small town situated along the Baltic Coast. Its main tenant is a tavern called the Wonky Pub.
Originally a little sqaure with a music & coffee house called “Kawiaret,” construction on the Crooked House began January 2003 and finished December of that same year.
While the Crooked House was inspired by Szancer’s illustrations and Dahlberg’s drawing, architect Zaleski also modeled the building’s exterior on Monciak’s promenade style. The floors refer to cornices and floors of other neighboring buildings. And colorful stained glass entrances, stone elevation decors, and windows framed with standstone make an impression. The unusual roof is covered with sheet metal and enamel roof tiles in green, sea blue, and Parisian blue colors to create an illusion of dragon scales.
More can be read on the details that make up the Crooked House along with photos at The World According to Google.
Related: Satyry, illustrations by Jan Marcin Szancer
‘Midnight Special’
So, Gilding is getting ready for the next stage in her life–University Life. As of now the exact university has not been chosen, but research so far is putting a heavy lean towards University of Florida (Oh, how Daddy Gilding is going to have a heart attack when he finds out. Saying he’s not a Gator fan would be an understatement. We take football in the Southeast very seriously.)
And now Gilding has begun the arduous process of seeking scholarship and saving money to pay for this new era of study. So be a doll and and vote for her photograph on Brickfish. No form to fill out or information to be given, just click “Vote for this entry” and all is done. The image to the left is the photograph that Gilding has submitted to the contest. When you vote for Gilding’s entry you will find a description of the meaning behind the photograph.
Gilding loves all her readers. Especially the ones who go and vote for her entry. Remember, with one click you are helping to pay for this bright young student’s education. Sappy enough for you .^_~.
Link: Brickfish
‘Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eye’
Nothing like being invited in by the beauty of this delicate ceramic sculpture only to be greeted by two fragile arms suddenly jutting out from the bed of glazed petals with their hands performing a lude chinking gesture at you. Such a poetic statement.
White Measures 2006 by ceramic artist Ann-Louise Gustavsson.
[Note: a chink is a fissure or narrow opening, such as in a wall. Famously used in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Night's Dream" , a brilliantly written, hilarious play-within-a-play, in which one rustic lover woos another through a hole in a wall: "Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall. Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eye!" At the end of the play, this affair is poked fun of in a vulgar manner, complete with lude gesture suggesting a vagina and a penis; the chink then takes on the suggestion of a "glory hole."]
Link: Ann-Louise Gustavsson
Painting in Customized Embroidery
Customize your own duvet. Sure you could learn how to sew and embroider to make your own duvet, but why go through that hassle when you could customize a duvet through inmod Design Studio. Simply choose the fabric of your choice, from cotton to silk dupioni and a few other options in between, select from one of several modern design patterns, take a peek at their recommended congifurations if you need inspiration, and then tinker away. Choose from a variety of colors for your duvet’s base and embroidery colors, and if the mood so strikes you, add a splash of that color to your virtual room just to see how great your newly created, expensive, duvet will look on your bed.
Actually, each pattern contains various levels of detail, each level available in the unique color of your choosing. The price of a custom created duvet is dependent upon the size of your particular duvet, the fabric you have it made from, and the amount of embroidery required to create it. Prices range between $125-$900.
Link: inmod Design Studio
Where Textures Take Arms Against the ‘One Big Homogeneous Suburb’
By the Dutch Design group Tjep for Droog and Barry Friedman Ltd., The Chair of Textures is Tjep’s contribution to the project Smart Deco, an architectural experiment realized for the Dutch Architectural Institute’s House of Textures.
In a world of pre-fab design, Tjep
pondered if it were possible to
detail an entire house as if it were
jewelry? Furthermore, could such
lavish design be created using
modern automated fabrication
techniques? But the goal here
wasn’t to simply create by falling
back on traditional decorative
patterns. So, Tjep created an archetypal house in four cut-through layers of different textures, from graffiti to wall paper, including bricks, tubing, carpets, etc. They then used the iconography of all these elements to build up a new layered house out of two materials: glass and metal; the metal being laser cut.
To add some drama, the designers of Tjep included personally designed elements such as a hart shaped door and graffiti found on the internet. The result was “a sense of detail, crafts, symbolic quality has made place for unappealing, deprived of meaning, depressive functionalism in which the only real dominant factor is economy and regulations”; an esthetic of which Tjep bitterly accuses of turning our urban world into “one big homogeneous suburb, on a global level.”
Pleased with their results and determined to accomplish Droog and Barry Friedman Ltd.’s goal driven experimental concept to real life product, the Chair of Textures, a build up in the same way as the House of Textures, was created. The layers of bricks, wallpaper and roof-tiles made place for upholstery, springs, feathers, and wood, but also woodworms and a lost key, and once again, to add some drama, personal designed elements were added, like a burning leg and butterflies.
All this to say, the result is simply stunning.
Link: Tjep– Furniture
The Artisan Shoemaker
The craftsmanship of these shoes by Machado are devine, and all from the inspiration of this photograph of a purple lilac. But don’t stop here with just these shoes. The artisan and his impeccable craftsmanship has so many more whimsical and fantastical shoes that span the centuries of designs of fashionable footwear and creates them with modern technologies to make them long wearing, both in terms of construction longevity and comfort. From early eighteenth century Spanish and Castilian fashion to French fashion and some fantastical combination anywhere in between that Machado’s imagination has roamed.
Link: Ecos Do Oficio
Sleepless
Once upon a time there was a blanket…
Designed by Tiago da Fonseca, one of fourteen students from the Royal College of Art’s Acclaimed Design Products department, led by Professor Ron Arad, involved in designing reactive installations and objects for Great Eastern Hotel which invite guests and visitors to take part in an experience where a hotel is more than just a place for the night.
The Bedtime Stories blanket quite literally wraps you up in a book. Each page turned adds another layer of linen, making you warmer or cooler by choice, and carrying you away into the world of sleepy story-filled dreams as you read the traditional bedtime story contained within the comfy ‘pages’.
Link: Platform10
A Girl and Her Penis…er, Purse
“privileges…and exemptions from so many of the importunities of life…[because they] regard themselves as having been damaged in infancy, as having been undeservedly cut short of something and unfairly treated; and [furthermore] the embitterment of so many daughters against their mother derives, ultimately, from the reproach against her of having brought them into the world as women instead of as men.” ~Sigmund Freud
Well, that’s one way of describing penis envy. Gilding’s reason for penis envy: it’s so much easier to accomplish an afternoon pick-me-up, well deserved for all my labor thus far, masturbatory orgasm at work when you have a dangly parts than it is when your button is stashed in your coin-purse.
Oh, speaking of purses, Freud further interpreted the purse as the symbolic representation of female anatomy, specifically the vagina, and as the representation of what women want–the penis they lack. Given to this explanation, Kate Moss’s purse speaks volumes.
It is a great purse, though.
From the Psychoanalysis and Women, Vol. 32 of the Annual of Psychoanalysis, page 171
Pebbles of Imagination
Facteur Ferdinand Cheval, an “uneducated, unskilled mailman who was moved to build the palace of his childhood imagination after stumbling across one beautiful stone in the road,” built his perfect palace in Hauterives, Southern France. “From that moment,” he said in a letter dated 1897, “I did not sleep day or night.”
Beginning in 1879 and finished in 1912, Palais took over 10,000 days, 93,000 hours, and in the end a total of 33 years to construct. Its design was inspired by various sources including the Bible, Neuschwanstein (a Hindu sanctuary), and a sandcastle.
Mailman by day and crazed architect by night, driven to build Palais by one pretty pebble and a child’s imagination.
Link: sadtomato
Via: Curious Expeditions
Mission: Interior Steampunk
While Datamancer is ‘retrocentrically’ creating a false history for the modern computer in a paraphernalic technofetishism better known as “Steampunk”, Because We Can is reviving the Steampunk with Office Interiors and Desks.
Given the mission “Make our office really cool” by Three Rings Design, Inc., developers of persistent world online games, Because We Can went balls to the walls to get ‘mission accomplished’.
Working with a 3,000 sqft office space,
Because We Can filled the space with individually customized desks, created several work areas with complex screens which relate to the areas it separates, included a pool table with custom created chandelier from off-the-shelf parts to keep costs down and a wall-sized “world domination” map, a video game room with giant squid pillows, a bar with built-in kegorator, and a secret door (Hint: its the moving bookcase) to the Captain’s Lounge.
There are many more details to the construction of this office interior located on Because We Can’s website. Oh, plus boukou pictures.
Link: Because We Can | Because We Can Blog
While the American Government is Slacking…
Built between 1973-1985, these incredible structures [ verticle buildings in center of image ], known as Alt-Erlaa, are the work of architect Dr. Harry Glück. Alt-Erlaa is a 27-story complex that accommodates aproximately 10,000 low-income residents amongst a lush surrounding of greenery. Located in Vienna, Austria, this government funded complex includes in its amenities indoor and roof-top swimming pools, fitness rooms, solariums, saunas, tennis courts, schools, playgrounds, 2 medical centers, a church, a shopping mall, restaurants, and 3,400 underground parking spaces and a metro station. The complex even runs its own television station.
The Austrians apparently believe that for any housing project to succeed in the long-term, a stron community bond is essential.
Now, explain to Gilding why Austria can do this and America can’t!
Here are a few Links of interest:
- The complex’s official website: Alt-Erlaa
- Offical website of Dr. Harry Glück
- For an interview with Dr. Glück about Alt-Erlaa: Wiener Zeitung
- Wikipedia information on Alt-Erlaa
- More images of Alt-Erlaa available at deputydog
Via: deputydog
Father’s Day Doctor Who Style
First broadcast on May 14, 2005, the episode Father’s Day marks the first appearance of Rose Tyler’s father, Pete Tyler, in the television series Doctor Who. Played by Shaun Dingwell, Pete Tyler would later reprise his role in the 2006 series as Pete from a parallel universe.
In this episode the Ninth Doctor brings rose to 1987 to witness her father’s death, but when she prevents his death from happening, the monsterous Reapers are unleashed upon the Earth, leaving the Doctor utterly powerless.
But no worries. No Fathers had to die nor Reapers had to be unleashed on the actual Father’s Day in 2004 as the episode aired one month and five days earlier.
Link: Wikipedia–Father’s Day
