A Quiet Moment Amongst Friends

One Hundred Ronald McDonalds

Collection, found photographs, One hundred 120x120 pixel squares

The one hundred Ronald McDonalds that make up this collection were selected from publicly available images on the internet. Each of these images shows a professional Ronald McDonald, past or present, working somewhere in the world. 

I was inspired to put this collection together after viewing a photograph of a friend with Ronald McDonald at a charity event. It struck me that multiple, authentic Ronald McDonalds must exist at the same time. This collection attempts to show the diversity that exists within this sub-category of the professional clown world. Some of these Ronalds are old, some are young, and some might actually be ladies. These photos, taken together, also highlight the disturbing qualities inherent in every clown. Think of this collection as fragments of memory in the mind of a child. Taking your kid to McDonald's may cause serious, long-term psychological damage. 

Click here to view a full size image of the entire collection.

UPDATE: Who are your five favorite Ronalds? Post your responses in the comments. 

Dear Gif Diary, I Like You

Animated GIFs, blog, new media, 2010

David N, a friend of my friends in Portland, has created a special website that harnesses the full potential of animated GIFs and uses them to tell poignant stories about real life in America. I'm not lying at all when I say this is my new favorite website:

Dear Gif Diary

I've presented a few selections here to give you a sense of the artwork, but it doesn't do justice to the site. You should really go straight there and see the entire collection. You'll feel like you are viewing the world three-dimensionally from inside the eyeballs of another person. It's much more interesting than the office work you should be doing right now.

David is also the creator of the excellent and mysterious Dickbird.org website. I strongly encourage you to spend a lot of time there, too.

Make Your Own Low-Rent Handimals

Handimals, iPhone photos, digital paint, 250 x 350 pixels, 2009

A few weeks ago, during a quiet moment at work, I took a photo of my hand, added google-eyes, and sent it to my sister. My sister responded with her own modified hand photo, and ever since, we've been challenging each other to see who could come up with the best hand animals, or "handimals". 

Here is the entire collection. (Note: The man hands are mine and the lady hands are my sister's.)

   

   

    

   

    

   

After putting this collection together and naming it "The Handimals", I did an internet search and was disappointed to learn that there is a guy named Guido Daniele who has cornered the market on "handimals" with a bunch of fancy-ass, Las Vegas sideshow-style, painted hand animals. Apparently this guy has done ads for AT&T and is raking in the hand animal cash. Mr. Daniele needs to realize that he can't lord over this art form. Handimals are for all people and I am standing up to reclaim the name!

With that in mind, I encourage everyone to make their own handimals and send them to [email protected]. I'll add your handimals to the collection as soon as I receive them and, little by little, we will build an army of handimals that will shock the world. 

Making a handimal couldn't be easier. Here's how you do it:

1. Move your hand around until you see the faint resemblance of an animal or an animal's face.
2. Take a digital photo of your hand while you can still see the animal (Note: If you lose the animal, return to step #1).
3. Import the hand photo into a digital art program like Photoshop, MS Paint, or any iPhone art app.
4. Add google-eyes and animal features such as horns, hair, or teeth (Hint: Don't add so many features that you completely obscure the hand!).
5. Attach the finished handimal file to an e-mail and send it to all of your friends with the subject line: "See, I told you my hand looked like a [insert animal name]!".
6. [Optional] Make a t-shirt featuring your handimal and sell it on the internet:

 

UPDATE: Seth L stepped up to bat and hit a home run with a vomiting handimal: 

 

Adventure at Fort Funston

Illustrated travel log, photographs, Google images, color, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Ryan A and I decided to explore Fort Funston on the southern end of San Francisco's Ocean Beach. Neither of us had been there before and we had no clue about what we were getting into. 

Fort Funston was part of San Francisco's military coastal defense from 1900 until its decommission in 1963. Since then it's been a city park primarily used by dog walkers. Entering the park along the coast, we first noticed the massive cement remnants of the cliffside cannon turrets. The circular tracks that were used to aim the cannons had been discarded in the surf. 

From satellite you can see where the cannons used to point out at the sea. 

Farther down the beach, punks and hippies had staked out their turf. Their graffiti will let future generations know that Fort Funston is a good place to do drugs. 

Deeper into the punk and hippie zone, everything doubled in size. The cliffs rose into the sky and there were cement pipes as big as jetliners. 

We crawled into one of the pipes. 

It was like being a coal miner, but instead of coal there was spray-paint and decomposing seaweed. 

No one on the beach knew where the tunnel led. One guy said that he heard from a friend that it went straight back into the cliff to an abandoned military base. He said that vagrants live back there and spend all day and night sitting on rusty metal benches drinking beer. Another guy on the beach said it was an overflow pipe that led into the San Francisco sewer system. I don't know who to believe, but either way, it seems like a fun place to hang out. 

Here's the tunnel from above:

Past the tunnels, heading south, we began to hear the buzzing of remote controlled airplanes. Suddenly the sky was filled with toys, kites, and people in hang gliders. If we hadn't kept our eyes open, a person in a hang glider may have landed on our heads.  

You can see one of the hang gliders via satellite:

We reached the end of the beach and hiked our way up the cliff and out of the park. The cliff path was steep, too steep for dogs.  

Fort Funston was a blast. If you are looking for a city park with old military debris, graffiti, giant pipes, people on drugs, dogs off leashes, and hang gliders, then this is the place for you!

Wires and Cords in My Neighborhood

iPhone photos, 1500 x 2400 pixels, color, 2009

  

There is nothing funny about these photos. This is a serious post.

How to Make a Jam Band Out of Stuff You Have Lying Around the House

Anthropomorphic sculpture, digital photographs, 500x400 and 400x600 pixels, 2009 

My friend Amy D was bored yesterday and decided to make a jam band out of stuff she had lying around the house. You're probably thinking that making your own jam band takes days or weeks, but it doesn't. You can do it in 30 minutes! Just follow the five easy steps:

1. Grab anything you have lying around the house that has a face on it and that you can easily lift (like a stuffed animal or a cookie jar). These will be the musicians. 
2. Collect all of your real instruments (like drumsticks or a harmonica). If you don't have real instruments, make your own out of boxes, toothpaste tubes, or old cans.
3. Take each of the instruments that you've collected and tape them onto the musicians.
4. Make up a back-story about a sleazy traveling jam band in the 1970s. 
5. Sit back, have a beer, and watch your band have a fantasy jam session.

Here is Amy's band and their captivating story:

"The band was Vegetable Basics. The year was 1977."

"Raul 'The Boss' Estramado had a bad temper and a problem with authority. He also had a problem with methamphetamines. The other band members dubbed him the leader, not because of his middle-school education or because he claimed to be related to Ulysses S. Grant, but because he frightened everyone."

 

"The Albertini brothers joined Vegetable Basics straight out of an Idaho penitentiary. If there was one thing the brothers were good at, it was electric guitar and bass. If there was one thing they were bad at, it was saying no to dope and loose women."

 

"The band's distinctively heavy sound came from the keyboards and there was no better keyboard player in those days than Tommy 'One Ear' Ghiradelli. He was also the shy one of the bunch, but the other guys liked having him around because he studied chemistry in college and knew how to make his own drugs."

 

"Vegetable Basics had a mighty good run. They performed on Japanese TV and played festivals all over the world, but, like all good bands, they were eventually ripped apart in a tornado of booze, embezzlement, and venereal disease."

"The End."

Moby Dick in a Pint of Beer!

Cellphone photo, 480 x 640 pixels, 2009

My friend Jonathan H in New York just found a sperm whale in his pint of beer. He sent a photo via Twitter. 

A few years ago, back in the days before cell phone cameras, people would have dismissed claims of Moby Dick in a beer as the hallucinations of a drunk. Today we can quickly verify the miracle and rejoice!

An Evening of Fun and Friends at WE Artspace

On Sunday night, a group of friends attended the closing of the "Paint By Numbers" show at WE Artspace in Oakland. Six of the pieces from the Reimagining Sasquatch post were selected for the show. 

Jake C (creator of the Squatchia Transit Map) admired the display. 

The show featured an interactive paint-by-numbers project and works from twenty-one artists based on the theme. Here are a few examples. (I forgot to write down the name and corresponding artist for each artwork. I think the piece in the upper right was called "Wack Jackals".) 

 

The evening featured a jam session by the band CLIPD BEAKS.

 

And an electronic jam by the band Ned.

The gallery dogs had to stay outside.

Local art fans, Eric, Emina, and Kevin, gave the show a big "thumbs up"!

Thanks, WE Artspace, for including the Sasquatch faces and for putting together a cool show. 

UPDATE: If you're in the Bay Area, you should check out their upcoming opening, "How Do I Look?", on August 9th (5-8pm). 

Sotomayor Fever is Sweeping the Nation

Photograph, color film, 2009

Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor, March 19, 2009

Carl W, a regular contributor to this site, took the above photograph at a conference for lawyers at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. The conference was held a full TWO MONTHS before Obama appointed the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor to be a Supreme Court Justice. No one had a clue. Carl thought he was taking a ubiquitous snapshot of his pal, a young bankruptcy lawyer, when really he was capturing a piece of American history!

I spent the entire day listening to the judicial confirmation hearings on NPR and now my head hurts a little bit. Sotomayor was very impressive. She is an incredibly effective debater and public speaker, always calm and to the point. It's somewhat unfortunate that she is going to be confirmed easily and then sent into the musty Supreme Court Cave to spend the rest of her life in seclusion. 

You can see many more of Carl's photographs on his Flickr homepage.

UPDATE: If major news outlets are interested in purchasing this image, they should talk to Carl. 

How to Make a Potato Piñata

Piñata, paper-mâché, brown paint, 4 x 3 feet, 2009

Arts and crafts are blowing up right now! You can't go anywhere these days without stumbling in to knitting clubs, stencil parties, or people gluing googly eyes on to pieces of driftwood. To get in on the fun, Julia W and my sister, Anna U, created a potato piñata to honor the one year anniversary of Potato Champion, Portland, Oregon's premier Belgian Fry cart. (Potato Champion is owned by Mike M and a photo of the cart was recently featured in a Sunday New York Times article on Portland food culture.)

Completely by coincidence, the potato piñata design that Julia and Anna came up with is the exact same one that you would use to create a California Raisin. 

Here's how you can make your own potato piñata at home:

Step 1: Make the potato shape out of inflated balloons and cover the balloons in newspaper that has been soaked in glue. If you don't have glue, I don't know, maybe try raw eggs? (Optional: Paint it brown, attach eyes to it, and hide treasure inside.)

Step 2: Find a location where people are congregating and hang the potato piñata high in the air, but not so high that a regular-sized person can't reach it with a broom stick. 

Step 3: Destroy the piñata with a series of swift blows! (Optional: Use a blindfold and self-induced dizziness to increase the degree of difficulty.) 

There are other types of piñatas you can make, but if you haven't ever made one, I recommend starting with a potato or a raisin. 

[All photos were taken by Julia W. She also covered the event on her blog.]

UPDATE: Fun fact. My dad, John U the elder, helped build the potato cart. If you zoom in on the New York Times photo you can see the serving shelf that my father carved out of wood. That shelf is now internationally famous!: