Keep your enemies close ...

From Home Truths, a series of retro-inspired posters by Sam Bevington.

An elephant never forgets

(Image by Express Monorail on Flickr.)

In honor of Elephant Appreciation Day, I suggest donating to the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, where I volunteered for a week during college (and where I happened upon an honest-to-goodness elephant rollerskate: the truth is stranger than fiction).

When dead-tree publishing dies ...

What will awesome artists like Megan Coyle, who composes her images using select strips from the pages of magazines, do? Neatorama featured her work today.

(Pictured: "Commuters," Megan Coyle, collage artist. "Collage Scapes is at the East Alcove Gallery in Bethesda, Maryland, until November 5, 2010.)

Art and urbanity

Cast your vote in the urbancanvas design competition; make NYC (more) beautiful. About the program:

The urbancanvas design competition is a unique opportunity to challenge professional artists and designers to create printed artwork for temporary protective structures at construction sites that will beautify New York City's streetscape and promote maintenance of these structures. The competition seeks complementary designs for different types of temporary protective structures located on City-owned property: construction fences, sidewalk sheds, supported scaffolds and cocoon systems.

Our animal overlords

Above: "Chill at 5:25" by Shuichi Nakano, part of the "Searching for Paradise" series. Disorienting, fanciful, right up my alley. Pink Tentacle features more: monkeys, giraffes, hippopotamuses, oh my!

Camel in a sinkhole

Weird news of the day, from my own backyard! Oregonlive.com reports:

Moses, a 1,200- to 1,500-pound Bactrian camel (that's the two-hump kind) got himself stuck in a sinkhole on his owners' rural Oregon City property late Tuesday night. Mike and Kim Dilworth, who've owned Moses since he was just weeks old, could see only the animal's head sticking out of the mud.

They tried pulling him out on their own, using a 4-wheel drive Kawasaki Mule but Moses didn't budge. His long, skinny legs were deep in the mud. Normally a mellow camel, Moses loud bellowing could be heard across the Dilworth's property.

About 9:45 p.m., the couple called 9-1-1 to ask for help. Soon, seven firefighters with Clackamas County Fire District No. 1 descended on the 10-acre property, where the family also tends a small herd of goats, sheep, chickens and a pot-bellied pig named Sonny.

Photography of Afghanistan

Not images from the war. Just images of everyday life in Afghanistan. By Jan Chipchase. I like the man selling boomboxes, a man loading grain in Mazar-e-Sharif, and this customized gun butt.

No longer in arrears!

I've finally (finally!) updated my billing information and retrieved all my valuable information (or, umm, outdated clips) from Squarespace. And I will do my best to post here more diligently, highlighting things that delight me, amaze me, disgust me.

Vintage fam

My brother, my mom, and my dad, in full early 80s glory.

From the attic

I have no idea who these people are or what their stories are (well, except for the people at top left, my great-grandparents), but they were squirreled away in our attic. I love imagining how we're all connected...