Old Movie Titles

"Them!" (1954) Gordon Douglas
Artist Lou Brooks has selected some nice old stills of Hollywood movie titles and blogged about them on his blog.
More of them at: The Movie Titles Stills Collection

Old Lady Lent

My friend Valerie (who lives in Barcelona) sent me these interesting images, along with this explanation: '"La Vella Quaresma" (Old Lady Lent) is a Catalan tradition. During Carnival week she fights with the King of Carnival (Carnestoltes) and finally wins, so his rule of feasting, and wild celebrations is over and is replaced by order, fasting and calm. She carries two salt codfish and is in charge of making sure children eat fish not meat during the seven weeks of Lent. She has seven legs, one for each week. The tradition was to hang her picture in the house with a sweet attached to each leg, at the end of each week the children pulled off a sweet (and a leg). On the Island of Mallorca, (top illustration) they used to saw an effigy of her in half in a public square midway through Lent and children were threatened that the Sawed Lady would come to take them away if they ate meat!'

The Art of Amy Crehore

Matthew J Richards Plays His Banjo Ukes

I love this little video where Matthew compares the sounds of 4 different vintage banjo ukes in his collection. Such a lovely instrument! Thanks Matthew!

Very Old Game Boards

These game boards are from the early to mid 1800's. The swans and elephant are hand-colored etchings mounted on linen and the game-board showing a mine w/tunnels is a lithograph. Beautiful graphics, don't you think?

Follow this link for explanations and examples of even more games dating as early as 1588-BibliOdyssey.

Except where noted, all these board game prints were sourced from the British Museum Prints Database .

The Art of Amy Crehore

The Bouncing Jug

Jaques Tati - Clip from the film Mon Oncle (1958) -"The struggle of a simple man with a highly modern kitchen and a bouncing jug"... thanks Callash

Happy Valentine's Day 2010

Happy Valentine's Day 2010
Originally uploaded by stevechasmar

Paper moons
on flickr -collection of
Steve Chasmar

Mark Frauenfelder reports from TED Conference

Ukulele Virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro got a standing ovation for his performance at TED yesterday. Mark Frauenfelder of BOINGBOING lists these quotes from the musician: "The ukulele is underdog of all instruments." "If everyone played ukulele, the world would be a better place." "What the world needs now is more ukulele." "Ukulele is the instrument of peace."
Mark says, "One of my favorite presentations of the day was by Dr. William Li, a cancer researcher from the Angiogenesis Foundation. The good news, Li says, is that 'we can eat to starve cancer.' Lots of foods contain naturally occuring inhibitors of angiogenesis, and many are even better than drugs for blocking angiogenesis (see image above)."

Read more at BOINGBOING , plus Mark will do an interview with Jake Shimabukuro soon.

Also, here is the TED conference LINK . I am following TED NEWS on twitter.

I'm looking forward to designer/illustrator Marian Bantjes speaking at TED on Friday from 2:15-4 pm. She was included in "The Scarlet Lettering", a letterpress project from the Cloudy Collection. There are still prints available if you follow the link. You may remember that my art was part of the very first Cloudy Collection card set (monkey image)!

The Art of Amy Crehore