I made this YouTube video yesterday evening after I downloaded all the photos and video I took from last weekend’s excursion to the to the Shenandoah mountains. The 25 video clips are played in sequential order, starting with me getting into my friend’s vegetable oil-powered Mercedes Benz, driving out of Washington, DC, driving through the country, seeing a spider eat a moth, lights projected on trees, a spider with eggs crawling through the grass, chasing a butterfly among lilies (probably my favorite scene), insects devouring a large dragonfly, a few clips of the band Stripmall Ballads performing, caterpillar at night, lightrope on a rock, an American Goldfinch bathing in a creek in the middle of the road, and driving back home.

All in all, I had a great time. I just wish I still wasn’t tired from hiking up and down the length of the property!

I came across these zoomorphic fantasy maps a few weeks ago and smiled. They brought back fond memories of when I was in second grade and used to draw large futuristic cities during my free time in school. I prefer to think that those sketches were the visual result of the influence that Sim City had on me back then.

These black & white bird’s eye view sketches show an elephant (above), rhinoceros (below), and sea turtle (below) all include the text of the campaign: “Our life at the cost of theirs?” The aim of this campaign is to frame the encroachment of urban life within the scope of contemporary degradation of the natural ecosystems these animals live in. By drawing these imaginative urban areas within the outlines of the endangered animals, the artists present a poignant perspective of whether our urban societies can sustain their current growth without damaging the animal’s fragile habitat.

---

Since the original images are larger than the formatting I use here, I have shrunk them down for layout purposes. By clicking on the images, you can see them in full-size.

---

CITATION
Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai, India
Executive Creative Director: Piyush Pandey
Creative Director: Sumanto Chattopadhyay
Art Directors: Mayur varma, Mandar Wairkar
Illustrators: Swapnil Nilkanth, Nishikant Palande
Copywriters: Sumanto Chattopadhyay, Karn Singh, Mandar Wairkar
[VIA Ads of the World]

---

View the other fantasy maps:

Today I am flying back to Washington, DC, so I am going to post some pictures of the birds I saw when I was in Colorado. This third and final photographic installment is the Stellar’s Jay. I saw this guy eating tourist’s food at the edge of Bear Lake. They are named after naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller and are probably one of my favorite alpine birds because of their beautiful blue feathers.

Today I am flying back to Washington, DC, so I am going to post some pictures of the birds I saw when I was in Colorado. This second photographic installment is the Hairy Woodpecker. I saw this guy from the deck of the cabin. I believe I saw this same specie about three weeks ago in Washington, DC. It was tapping on the dead tree in the backyard of the house three doors down from where I live.

Today I am flying back to Washington, DC, so I am going to post some pictures of the birds I saw when I was in Colorado. This first photographic installment is the small finch known as the Pine Siskin. I saw these tiny finches constantly feeding on the deck of the cabin. They remind me of the common sparrow, except they have little yellow fellows and a brown & white spotted breast.

When were driving into Rocky Mountain National Park I mentioned that this massive RV lot outside of Estes Park was completely empty. When we were departing the park someone spotted three elk from the road and we stopped I took these grainy 3X-12X zoom photos.

This morning I was greeted by Dorothy the neighborhood doe and her friendly herd that live near my mom’s remote property in the mountains of Colorado. The leading deer named Dorothy apparently has grown up in the area and even comes when called by her name.

Below are 9 more photos that I took when she & her herd came by the house:

Friday afternoon I went with Liz Glover to the Huffington Post’s DC office to shoot a video with Jason Linkins. When we were done filming indoors, we went outside and shot some humorous man-on-the-street interviews around the White House. On the way back to the office, I spotted the advertisement above on the side of the WMATA bus and decided take a few photos.

Now I had read about a similar public awareness campaign related to rat abatement that compared DC to an unnamed metropolis, but this graphic takes the hilarity to a new level.

1) All praise the holy rat sun! After all, 2008 is the Year of the Rat! The rat is associated with aggression, wealth, charm, and order, yet also associated with death, war, the occult, pestilence, and atrocities. The rat’s sun will set January 25th, 2009, but I suspect they’ll stick around for the Ox.

2) Behold the Washington Minarat! Shaped similar to a campanile, there is a curious minaret to the left of the mighty sun rat. When did the Washington Monument transform itself into a part of a mosque? Did the graphic designer purposely exclude the Washington Monument? If the designer was trying to imitate the campanile at the Basilica Of The National Shrine Of The Immaculate Conception they did a very very poor job. Maybe they were mocking the war in Iraq? The first minaret was constructed in 665 in Basra, Iraq during the reign of the Umayyad caliph Muawiyah I.

3) Height restrictions are the answer! The reality is that the skyline of Wahsington, DC is mostly uniform without any building being taller the width of the street, plus twenty feet. This means that the varied skyline in the advertisement above does not represent Washington, DC, but most likely another unnamed metropolis.

---

Not photographed bonus advertisement on the back of the bus was a parody of the Got Milk? campaign, which asked the viewer “Got Syphilis?”

---

---

Later in the evening I went to a friend’s house who happened to have a fake rat. I decided to take a photo of the pointy kitty sitting on my leg. Some day I’d love to take that fake rat and add a small remote control car to the underside of it in order to create a rat than can “run” around.

---

---

Anyways, expect the interviews we filmed to be on-line shortly and in the meantime watch out for the rats.

---

Related Animal Entries:

On Wednesday, August 27th, 2008, after the Iraq Veterans Against the War concert & march, I attended Ralph Nader’s “Open the Debates” rally at the University of Denver’s Magness Arena. At the end of rally I saw a polar bear inside the arena and decided to film this rare sighting.

Related Vimeo:

When I told my mom about going to Denver she mentioned that she & my step-father had been hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park earlier the week before and had spotted a black bear for the first time. When they were hiking down the trail they came across this black bear chowing down on termites in the trunk of the tree. They waited for awhile before the bear walked off. She sent me these two photographs for proof.

Last month I was in Rocky Mountain National Park for 24 Hours and didn’t see any large wildlife.

Related Animal Entries:

In May I received two sunflower seedlings from an exhibitor at Artomatic and I decided to plant them alongside two tomato plants in a large plastic pot on my third floor deck. After diligently feeding them about 5 quarts of water each day, they bloomed in mid-July. A few years back I harvested the seeds from a sunflower plant too prematurely and ended up with partially matured seeds that were unusable. This year I decided to not cut of the heads of the plants to ensure that the seeds would mature and could be used for next year’s planting.

Last week on Thursday, August 14, my 3rd floor deck was visited by a curious guest who announced that it was time to harvest the seeds. I had seen an American Goldfinch before, but in the 4 years years that I’ve lived in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, DC, this was my first sighting. I found that his coloring matched the sunflowers perfectly and made me wonder if the specie obtained its yellow coloring generations ago by feeding on sunflowers?

After noticing him return to the plant a second time, I decided to place a camera on a ladder, hit record, go inside, and remotely film him eating my sunflower’s seeds. It’s a no-frills video, just the wildlife of Washington, DC. At about 6:20 there is the obligatory police siren that one can never seem to escape from in this city. At about 9:15 a Mocking Bird swoops down and attacks the American Goldfinch. You can see the Mocking Bird follow the American Goldfinch in the lower corner about a second later, but the American Goldfinch returns and continues to eat for a few more minutes.

The day after recording this video I decided to cut the heads of the sunflowers and harvest the seeds, but due to the mess recently left on the deck, he’s been back with a hearty appetite and has eaten a few more of the smaller heads. No biggy. I hope he comes back next year.

---

Related Animal Entries:

The Ouroboros is a serpent or worm who eats its own tail. It has been used to represent many things over the ages, but it most generally symbolizes the ideas of cyclicality, unity, infinity, and for this short video, a Great Grey Slug.

Saturday night I was in Baltimore over at a friend’s house and we noticed some slugs crawling up the walls on her back porch. A couple hours later I found the slug on a metal spike and decided to bring it inside to make a time-lapse recording of the slug moving around. After watching the recording a few times, I noticed that it appeared that the slug was always moving in a circle.

Unlike previous short videos that I’ve made recently, I decided to add some music to give it some extra zest. I believe chose I Concerto in A minor, Op. 102 ‘Double Concerto’ – III. Vivace non Troppo performed by Isaac Stern, but I’m not 100% sure because the MP3 that I was given about a year ago did not have the proper citation.

Make sure to look closely at the hole in the side of the slug its a rather interesting breathing apparatus. Also, if you look even more closely, you’ll see my reflection in the pots & pans in the background.

Related Vimeo Entries:

To celebrate the new procedure I decided to get around to editing the Library of Congress‘ copy of Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s Nova totius terrarum orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula, which was published in Amsterdam in 1606. I removed the original map from the center and kept the decorative border similar to Nova et Accvratissima Totivs Terrarvm Orbis Tabvla, A New Map of the Terraqueous Globe : according to the the Ancient discoveries and most general Divisions of Geospatial Art, America as a Cloverleaf, and A New And Accurate Map of the World by John Speed. However, unlike the previous antique map mash-ups, which usually feature the earth laid out in two hemispheres, this map uses a rectangular space (Mercator?). The beauty of this open layout is that I can place any of my previously made maps inside of this 402-year-old template.

A common naming practice I’ve noticed in old map is the use of “New & Accurate” and since I like to play around with words, I changed Accurate to Arabesque to create a visual pun. The source map was about 6,500 pixels wide, I underlaid a rotated 9,000 x 6,000 copy of Hirshhorn Quilt to fit perfectly in the center of the new map. I think it would be fun to actually hand-color the engravings on this map to match other copies of this map which have the various figures colored in. The LOC’s copy is uncolored which means that its actually easier to add color to it than if it were already colored because pigment matching is not needed.

---

---

Across the top (left to right) you have the planet gods:

• Luna guiding ships at night
• Mercury holding his Caduceus
• Venus with Cupid
• Sol riding a Quadriga
• Mars being lead by the dogs of war Phobos (Panic) and Deimos (Dread).
• Jupiter with lightening bolts in his hands
• Saturn holding a scythe

Drawn within each of these engravings are the signs of the Zodiac that the planets rule:

• Moon rules Cancer
• Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo
• Venus rules Libra and Taurus
• The Sun rules Leo
• Mars rules Aries and Scorpio
• Jupiter rules Sagittarius and Piscies
• Saturn rules Aquarius and Capricorn

Below I dissect the rest of the border of the map:

Remedia Amoris (Love’s Remedy or The Cure for Love) is a 814 line poem in Latin by the Roman poet Ovid written around 5 BC. The aim of the poem is to teach young men how they can avoid idealizing the women they love and to give assistance if love brings despair and misfortune.

I discovered this poem when I was researching antique stained glass sundials and I came to the initial conclusion that Ovid’s prose is visually interpreted on Blaeu’s world map from the mid-1600s (detail above). Late last night I found both the latin and translated version of the poem, so I decided to do something I wish there was more of on the internet: a side by side layout which shows the original Latin on the left and the translated English on the right.

To add a unique visual element to the poem, I made the line number (which came from the Latin text) the color of the English translation. This involved quite a bit of manual coding, but I think it makes the latin / english comparison easier and slightly more visually engaging. By using red & white type face and numerical indention, the layout looks like a creve coeur or broken heart when scrolling. I bolded one section for emphasis related it’s discovery [hint: around line #185].

There are a few translation discrepancies that I’ve found thus far and there are many others which come across slightly convoluted and require more inquiry, but overall the poem is quite interesting. It includes topics like tree grafting (Genetic Engineering Version 1.0), having multiple lovers, travelling, and what to do and not to do when getting over a relationship. It’s interesting how much things have changed in the last 2,000 years, and as cliche as it may sound, how much our emotions have stayed the same. We all face the same relationship troubles and like Ovid, there will always be people telling you how to deal with them.

---

---

If you’ve got about 45 minutes to spare, here is Ovid’s Remedia Amoris / The Cure For Love:
(You might need to widen your browser window to view the on-line polyglot correctly — it was originally design for a previous layout on this website. Drag the lower right hand corner to make the screen wider.)

Or maybe just a cute dog.

French creative agency, Callegari Berville Grey, took a popular viral video of African water buffaloes valiantly defending a newborn calf from lions & a crocodile and anthropomorphically reassigned the roles of nature to that of an idea in our modern workplace.

The final and overarching message is that we should all struggle for our ideas- whatever they are. Like a raisin in the sun whose seeds have found their way to moist soil, ideas and their subsequent dissemination face many perils along the way from conception to execution.

Related YouTube Entries:

I’ve had a few friends and strangers comment that they loved the story, but they didn’t understand what the name “Here be dragons” meant. Unless you know a little bit about cartographic history, it could mean a lot of things….

This morning I found a good explaination from the MapHist website:

How and when did the notion that old maps commonly bore the phrase “here be dragons” become established in popular belief? Did a Shakespeare or a Byron put it into circulation? It must at least pre-date the publication of Dorothy L. Sayers’ short story “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head” in Lord Peter Views the Body (London: Gollancz, 1928), in which a character refers to having seen “hic dracones” on an old map [spotted by both Andrew S. Cook and Benjamin Darius Weiss]. Does it pre-date the publication of the text of the LenoxGlobe in 1879? Why dragons, and not one of the other terrifying creatures depicted on old maps? We don’t know.

According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, “The animal called a dragon is a winged crocodile with a serpent’s tail; whence the words serpent and dragon are sometimes interchangeable.” Furthermore, says Brewer, the word “dragon” was used “by ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages as the symbol of sin in general and paganism in particular. The metaphor is derived from Rev. xii. 9, where Satan is termed ‘the great dragon’.” In this sense, a picture of a dragon on an old map is analogous to a modern map which shows Commonwealth countries in pink, not to a vignette of the Official State Bird, or the notation “unsurveyed area”. As M. Hoogvliet pointed out to MapHist, “The dragon (draco) is a sub-species of the serpents (cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae XII,4,4: “Draco maior cunctorum serpentium …”); most medieval maps have serpents in southern Africa (i.e. southernmost part of habitable world), which derives from Classical Roman authors, e.g. Pliny the Elder and Soninus.”

Read the rest here. Or to summarize, “Here Be Dragons” / “Hic sunt dracones” was placed at the edges of maps showing the edge of the known world. However, I am told there aren’t any maps that actually use the exact text and I have not seen a map with that text on it.

My favorite culture jammer / art terrorist / meme warrior, Banksy had an exhibit in LA this weekend. I posted the info about it last Friday night on MySpace. Since then there has been AP, UPI, and Reuters news releases which resulted in over 370 news stories about his exhbit.

Of note is how the artist is covered in the press. CNN literally attacks the messenger (the elephant) instead of addressing it’s message (poverty, social justice, etc.), while Al-Jazeera using the Reuters report treats the exhibit in a more balanced tone. Few of the articles even reference this similar stunt where he painted farm animals (see below)).

I am exhbiting my maps at this:

I arrived this morning at train station in Ann Arbor…

Ride Recap–

I enjoyed the train ride from DC to Toledo, OH and the bus trip from Toledo to Ann Arbor by way of Detroit and Dearborn.

When I boarded in DC, I found that there were no window seats left, so I made my way back up the isle and plopped down in a seat next to a person who was not currently seated. When the person got back, I realized I sat next to one of the more beautiful & entertaining women on the train. We ended up chattin for most the train ride and it made the time fly by. She & I went to the cafe car and proceded to get somewhat drunk together. She turned out to be a woman named Jenn from somewhere in rural Ohio who was living in NYC studying television & acting. She was also probably the most “pop-culture” I’ve ever seen one person be. This is not a bad thing perse, but rather it showed me how vastly different we were. To explain this labeling, I have mention that she has a dog named “Paris Brittney,” and throughout the trip she & I periodically listened to her iPod- which was loaded with Brittney Spears, Good Charolette, and other boy & girl bands. It was sorta surreal, like I was sitting next to someone who just walked out of the MTV studios. Regardless, she was cool and I had a blast sharing that portion of the train ride with her.

After she got off, my drunk ass passed out- waking up about 30 seconds before the train was about to start moving toward Chicago– I was in Toledo and overslept through the 10 minutes of deboarding time I was supposed to use! I hurried up and got off the train in time to see it start to chug away from me.

With the close call out of the way, the bus trip from Toledo to Ann Arbor was quite decent. As we travelled north on highway 75 towards Detroit, off in the distance I could see the twin towers of the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power Plant. Its been a long time since I’ve seen a nuclear power plant and I must say it was eerie. It’s like there is a controlled nuclear reaction taking place less than a mile away from me that could go horribly wrong at any second….

About an hour an half later I arrived in Ann Arbor and was picked up my sister and taken to her spacious apartment about 3 minutes away. My other sister arrived before I did and is asleep in the other room, and this evening my mom, her fiance, and her fiance’s son should arrive. It should be a fun Thanksgiving and I feel blessed that I was able to get here without any problems.