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Fuel/Friends Springtime 2011 mix
Heather at Fuel/Friends has posted a mix of spring songs, Used Hearts/Fresh Starts. Most of the songs are on the alternative, indie, folk, pop side of the music spectrum, with the occasional deviation, and she has them ready for you to load up into your portable music device.
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Arcade Fire close out Coachella set with bouncing balls of light
Arcade Fire closed their Coachella set with the anthemic “Wake Up,” adding some crowd interaction with a couple hundred glow in the dark, multi-colored beach balls.
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Designing a challenge coin
Belly up to the bar with a number of active service members, you could easily issue a challenge, and most should be able to place a brass, bronze or silver-like coin on the table. The person who can’t show their coin buys the round of drinks. Wikipedia tells a storied origin of a downed WWI pilot, whose sole identification was his coin, which prevented him from being executed by the French. These coins carry a special source of pride among those who carry them and are collectibles, especially if you know what one is. Bud, a friend of my father’s, who served with him in Vietnam, had his Green Beret challenge coin stolen from him by a small town cop after a night in jail. My father, many years later, found someone to make a replica and gave it to Bud as a birthday present.
Later this summer, my father is going to Portland for a reunion for his unit, the Sea Cobras, an inshore undersea warfare group, stationed in Qui Nhon. He commissioned me to do the design.
Since most coins use the unit’s insignia, I started with the patch. (Of note, original, military issue patches are worth money.)
I wanted to keep the simplicity of the sea cobra, so in Illustrator, I cleaned up the lines and evened out the color. Since the coin maker was going to do the embossing, I chose a serif font and the general placement of the text, and my original design instructions were to make the entire coin red.
Working with the coin maker, my father made the final decisions, and the final coin shown below. He chose to have the embossed text stand out more, removing the outer red ring. There’s a slight raise to the outline of the cobra to give it depth, and the yellow is muted as compared to the mock up, above. The coin measures 1.5 inches in diameter and weighs a solid 4 ounces. All in all, he made a print run of 100, and I get one.
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Fade
Fade is an addicting Flash game, where you guide a llama, hurdling over cliffs and shrubbery as it picks up speed to see the world in perfect color. See, the game starts in black and white, and as the llama picks up speed, somewhere around 35mph, the world begins to turn to color. You earn points for distance traveled to spend on skill power ups to go even farther. Also, there are achievements, if you need that sort of thing to validate your gaming experience.
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SNL Celebrity Jeopardy, a history
See how SNL’s Celebrity Jeopardy evolved from a means for Norm MacDonald to act out his Burt Reynolds impression to the hilariously absurd Connery-Trebek duels. Videos included of all 14 skits.
The first Celebrity Jeopardy sketch aired on December 7, 1996 with Will Ferrell as Alex Trebek, Norm MacDonald as Burt Reynolds, Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery, and host Martin Short as Jerry Lewis. The categories weren’t as absurdly juvenile as the later sketches (“Potent Potables,†“Movies,†“U.S. History,†“Popular Musicâ€) and Hammond’s Sean Connery was cooperative and inoffensive. Norm MacDonald’s 70’s-era Burt Reynolds is the star here, and after all, MacDonald has admitted to creating the sketch simply to get his Reynolds impression on the show.
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Record player wedding invite
Graphic designer Kelli Anderson creates a wedding invitation for her friends Mike and Karen that forms a papercraft record player.
The resulting booklet is comprised of a cover, two inner pages, a letterpressed band (with instructions and a tear-off RSVP postcard), and a flexdisc on a screwpost. The recipient bends the second page of the booklet back to create a tented “arm.†With the needle placed, they then carefully spin the flexidisc at 45 RPM (ish) to hear the song.
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Graph Racers
I guess I’m a little late to this, but Graph Racers is a pretty nifty concept. Take some graph paper, make a course, get at least 2 players, each with their own colored marker and have them race around the graph paper track.
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How to steal like an artist
I nodded my head all the way through Austin Kleon’s “How to steal like an artist.”
Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of previous ideas.
If there’s one takeaway for self-described non-creative people, it is that. Synthesize, combine, mash up what you already know, and then you’ll come away with something unique.
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Review: The Script – Science & Faith
If you like The Fray, Five For Fighting, Yellow Card or any other pop-punkish band, you’ll enjoy The Script and their Science & Faith album. Simple hooks, beats and melodies work with O’Donoghue’s earnest lyrics. At times, there’s a sense of urgency (closer, Exit Wounds) or bombast (Walk Away, which features B.o.B) or contemplation (Nothing).
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An American sportswriter in India
Wright Thompson, for ESPN, tells of India, Cricket, the Cricket World Cup and how life and culture intersect.
I turn to Rahul. “Do Indians still love the actual game of cricket?”
There’s a pause.
“It’s a delicate sort of question,” he says.
Another pause.
“The thing about Indians’ love for cricket is a lot of it is having something to support India at,” he says. “A lot of it is celebrity. People in love with [team captain M.S.] Dhoni instead of the actual sport. It happens all the time. In the past five years, you find that matches not featuring India don’t draw crowds. It does seem on some level the love is not for the sport itself but for some of the things it stands for.”
Cricket is everywhere. It’s on 24/7. It’s on red carpets with Bollywood bombshells and in corporate boardrooms. But the more it is, the less it is.
“We’ve been so neutered by cricket now,” Rahul says. “There’s so much of it. It’s reached a point where you can be oblivious to it. Indian fans now just watch India.”
