Had a long day which I will blog about tomorrow (don’t worry, it’s all good stuff!), but today I am tres fatigue and so I have nothing more to offer all you wonderful reading people other than some fun stuff culled from my Twitter feed et al, accompanied, as always, by my sparkling and highly listenable commentary.

Note : these are not foobles. Those are on Sunday. The very idea.

First up, a piece about one of my favorite artists in the world, Theo Jansen, and his simply mesmerizing quasi-living creations.

Ignore the Wallace and Gromit angle (the show sucks, seriously) and the rather fatuous tone of the voiceover, and just listen to the man describe his process and look upon his amazingly haunting and beautiful strandebeests.

It’s like he is creating life, inventing it even, though art and nature and simple mechanisms instead of via biology. With every generation, his pieces become more efficient, more elaborate, more elegant, and more eerily lifelike.

A lot of people find them creepy or even downright disturbing, and I totally understand that. In fact, I can’t say I disagree. They are definitely alien and crypto-living and yet somehow very wrong in a way we might not even have the words to describe.

But to me, there is also something achingly, chillingly, thrillingly beautiful about them. Every time I watch the video, I get this strong urge to just follow them down the beach. Maybe some bizarre, alien part of me wants to join their herd. I don’t know.

Of course, part of the problem with truly modern art like this is that you can’t exactly buy it and stick it on your mantelpiece. Even if I was rich enough to pay this guy to build me my own set of “beests”, I would have to buy my own beach to keep them on.

And I would so want to just set them free and see them head for the horizon, and liberty.

Keeping with the weirdo avante garde art scene, we have a fun little social experiment called iPsd Head Girl.

A simply idea. Take four iPads, arrange them so they form a topless and bottomless box, and arrange it so web cameras both relay an image of the face of the person inside to the appropriate iPad face, but relay a picture of the outside world into a possible fifth iPad inside the box so the person inside can see around and navigate the world.

I thought people’s reactions were pretty tame overall. I love how so many people immediately waggled a hand in front of her “face”, though. I love those basic human curiosity and investigation responses. Like poking something with a stick. That is a very smart way for a cautious but curious tool-user to explore the unexplained.

After all, why touch it with your hand and get close to it when the stick will do it for you? Safe monkeys are smart monkeys.

I would have had to try to talk to her. I doubt they programmed it for that, but I think they would have been pleased by the attempt to up the interactivity of their little art projecy experiment.

But enough poetic musings of the eternally lost. Time for a change.

And now, for something completely different. It’s…

Every Michael Bay movie in sixty seconds!

Another decent comedy joint from the folks at College Humour, who would like to remind you that it’s not unfunny just because stoners laugh at it.

I am paraphrasing, of course.

Someone in the comments on this blog entry rather accurately snarked “wait a minute, someone actually made fun of michael bay? good. that guys gotten a free pass for too long! it’s about time someone had the stones to call him out!”

Fsir enough. Making fun of a overgrown fourteen year old like Bay is like shooting fish in a barrel, and by this point, there’s no fish left, and not much barrel either.

It’s natural for people with taste to want to rage against bad art that is a financial success. We all wish the rewards and the artistic merit were always perfectly proportional. But it’s always futile as well, and you just end up wallowing in your own bilious fumes while the crap merchants hyuck all the way to the bank.

And then buy it.

There is always bad art that succeeds. Just ignore it and concentrate on the good art, and help it succeed if you can. The other cannot be defeated and can only bring you down.