Hangin’ Out in Dirty Bathrooms

On the way back from the coast this weekend I stopped by a mom ‘n’ pop gas station bathroom and found this fantastic illustration above the toilet urging you to help these little guys the restroom clean.

November Pumpkins, Pt. 1

I like carving pumpkins for Halloween. It’s usually a great time, although this year I skipped it. What I might find even more entertaining than carving pumpkins is walking around a couple weeks after Halloween and finding the carved pumpkins on the porches of homes that forgot to throw them out. The jack-o-lanterns get that pallid, moldy color and begin to smell and rot and collapse in on themselves and that is when they have reached their full horrific maturity.

Why I Love the Internet, Pt. 1

Over the past few years, like nearly everyone I know, I have found that the internet has become a vital resource for just about anything and everything. When I refer to “anything and everything”, I mean any random or obscure item, thought, detail, instruction, photo, or anything else that I cannot bring to mind right now. The scope of it can be nauseating, but in the good way…like a roller coaster. Personally, I don’t care for roller coasters all that much, but I’ll assume that you do.

I came to this realization of the grand scale of the information held on the internet a few years ago when I was first learning how to fix elements of my car. I tracked down the owner’s manual but it had complicated and hard-to-follow instructions for how to make the repairs. So then, out of desperation, I looked my problem up on YouTube and I found a dirty amateur mechanic making a badly-lit video in his garage of how to deal with my exact problem. This blew my mind. It was too perfect and so incredibly specific. This wasn’t some algorithm that presented me with an ad for some shoes based on the previous shoes that I bought. This was an exact solution (or at least step-by-step instructions) to a particular problem that popped up out of the swirling randomness of the universe. This is is the dizzying “grand scale of information” I was referring to, any problem I could think to search for led to someone who had already dealt with it…and filmed a video or built a website or posted a comment where they explained how you can deal with it too. I was immediately reminded of a scene from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where Bill and Ted are outside a police station trying to figure out how to free various historical figures from their jail cells and they devise the following plan…

Any problem that Bill and Ted face has already been dealt with previously by their future selves. The “future selves” in my case is the dirty mechanic in his dimly lit garage, but hopefully you get the idea.

A Bit of Bollywood on a Mud Flap

Most mornings I spend a couple of minutes wasting time at The Morning News combing through their daily collection of links. This morning I came across a link to a Flickr pool of painted mud-flaps of rickshaws & cycle carts in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. I find these hand painted portraits endlessly fascinating. They are also pretty reminiscent of the hand painted movie posters from Ghana which were circulated around the web pretty heavily over the past couple of years. These posters featured artwork that seemed to be only inspired from the movie titles alone and didn’t have much to do with the plots. Most of them didn’t, at least.

According to ghanamovieposters.com:

With the arrival of video and video cassettes during 1980s In Ghana (West Africa) a small-scale film distribution mobile Cinema was created.

This small size mobile ” Cinema ” operators were equipped with a television a Video and some times with a small portable generator and were moving from town to town from village to village operating and showing their films! (During the day inside social clubs or houses and during the night in the open air).

In order to attract more customers and in order to advertise their mission and business the need of huge posters was created and born!

Talented artists after viewing the film were creating large size posters using oil paint on canvas!

The artist had the freedom to add or change scenes seen or not seen in the film in order to make the poster more attractive!

The Nightmare on Elm Street poster (shown here as A Nightmare) is particular favorite of mine.