For those of us with a love of pareidolia, a cool short film called The Lost Tribes of New York City by London Squared Productions.
(via Laughing Squid)
pareidolia
Shock-headed magnetism
This is what I was imagining when I saw Amy’s post about Al Gore Rhythms, and the accompanying image of iron filings! My pareidolia inclinations are compulsive. I hadn’t made the direct connection between what I was wanting to see, and Woolly Willy, but surely it was just below there in the subconscious from my childhood, ready to be stirred by Amy’s joining of the dots! I guess etch-a-sketch and magnadoodle are more modern versions of the iron filing toys, but neither they nor the online Woolly Willy have quite the same wild and random results that make the real visible filings so satisfying.
It made me think about another toy from my childhood, often just a party favour. It was a small chain anchored in two places on a card. The chain had enough play in it to fall loosely between the two, making shapes that you could imagine were funny face profiles. When I was a kid I would play with the chain that anchored pens to the counter at the bank in the same way. Strange to remember when one darkened the doors of the bank regularly, and all the time we spent queuing there with passbooks! As Amy says, it sounds so ancient because it is!
These would be good things for me to include in my other blog Monkey see monkey do, which I have also just moved over to WordPress, and want to start up again (miss that monkey – she is coming!) It’s charter is How to slice a banana inside its skin and other tricks, games, idle pursuits, and things to make and do.
Goodbye blue cable network, welcome wrlssgrrl
I’ve been offline for a few days, the upshot being our house is now on a wireless network. Of course, there is still an orange and black tangle behind the tele where everything comes into the house to the set-top box. Funny to think that when we had the cable network put in seven years ago when we extended our house, it was the latest and best option. The blue cable has been great, but the wireless network is cool.
Wrlssgrrl looks like a friendly soul, don’t you think?:
I have lots of online catch-up reading to do now, but today I have to make a small and simple 1960’s liner.
Backyard creatures
Yesterday morning I looked out to find 18 king parrots in my garden! There were also a trio of young crimson rosellas, and a pair of eastern rosellas. At first they were in a tree, looking like bright red decorations. This is a king and an eastern (smaller):
Today there was a strange animal nosing around in all the twigs and leaves the parrots had nibbled off and dropped on the ground. Can you see it’s back legs and long tail?
A wider view:
Yeah, just the plumber’s electric eel. I was interested to see that he kept the eel rolled up in a car tyre. I meant to ask him if that was just his particular invention, or one most plumbers have taken to. It’s a great idea.
