Yikes!
bioephemera | October 21, 2009
According to reader Milde, L.A. Burdick's is a "serious chocolate experience." Little did I know she was right - this place even has coffin-shaped chocolate boxes for Halloween. And little chocolate ghosts. Adorable!
Of course, if you really want to impress a Goth girl, there's always Valerie Confections' Mori Ex Cacao gift set. . . or a 1-lb chocolate heart at Pushing Daisies. But personally, I'm going to get me some cute little ghosts.
bioephemera | October 18, 2009
Via Inventorspot: Hello Kitty goes anatomical, and we discover she even has bows on her guts. Yikes!
But seriously - the second, faux-ivory Hello Kitty looks a little familiar. According to Inventorspot,
you can choose from regular style or an interesting antiqued version with a finish resembling aged ivory. This style is meant to look like a netsuke; a polished and sculpted toggle worn by Japanese citizens and samurai on their kimono sashes from the 17th century on - robes have no pockets, y'see.
A netsuke? Sure. But to me, ivory + anatomy = anatomical teaching models like these. (see also…
bioephemera | October 9, 2009One of the arguments I generally make about Web 2.0 is that, if you are an organization who happens to screw up, you should apologize and move on. Don't try to cover your tracks or shut your critics up - you'll just invite mockery and even more attention than you did before.
Unfortunately, Ralph Lauren apparently doesn't agree with that strategy. They've demanded that Photoshop Disasters and Boing Boing take down images of a Ralph Lauren ad that was so badly photoshopped, many thought it was satire.
The ad depicted a model who was so grotesquely emaciated and doll-like (her head was bigger…
bioephemera | October 3, 2009I'm guessing this type of behavior is why this breed of bird is so rare:
Thank 3QD for the laugh. ;)
bioephemera | October 1, 2009Okay, everyone, here is something intriguing. The following video is amateurish, bizarre, has terrible production values, and appears to be the work of either a master performance artist or someone who lacks any self-consciousness whatsoever (shades of Little Edie Bouvier Beale).
But, if you start the video, then click over to some other window (go check your Gmail) and just listen to the audio without video, you're suddenly listening to a dusty, scratchy gramophone record that documents a forgotten, eccentric self-taught Appalachian folk musician from the turn of the century. Or something…
bioephemera | October 1, 2009
A gift idea for the person who already has everything: spider silk couture! (Or the closest thing to it). It took one million spiders to produce the silk for this textile from Madagascar (although the wild spiders were released after their silk was extracted, so some of them may have been repeat donors.) The video is absolutely fascinating:
The silk is naturally golden and undyed. Each individual thread in the cloth was made by twisting 96 to 960 individual spider silk filaments together. I would love to touch it - I can't really imagine what it must be like, can you?
Via Wouldn't You Like…
bioephemera | September 30, 2009
What You're Made Of (ABS)Jason Freeny, 2009
Anatomy teachers: this would be an awesome quiz for your students, wouldn't it? :)
Jason Freeny is the digital artist behind Balloon Animal anatomy, Gummi Bear anatomy, and the dissected Gingerbread Man. Visit his site to see more! Via SheWalksSoftly.
bioephemera | September 25, 2009
Artist Liz Hickok makes your Friday complete with a Jell-O San Francisco, from this jiggly Palace of Fine Arts to a melting Marina. Melding the blurry, children's book perspective of tilt-shift photography with the saturated, translucent colors that define the California dream, Hickok has hit on something remarkably luscious (and fruit-flavored).
Hickok says,
I create glowing, jellied scale models of urban sites, transforming ordinary physical surroundings into something unexpected and ephemeral. Lit from below, the molded shapes of the city blur into a jewel-like mosaic of luminous…
bioephemera | September 22, 2009Consumerist.com is concerned about these Singaporean Play-Doh ads:
Ummm, well, hmmm. That's kind of creepy, isn't it?
According to the Consumerist,
These Play Doh ads from Singapore don't seem to be aimed at kids. Then again, the message "safe no matter what you make" seems to be aimed directly at parents of kids who play with Play Doh, which leads us back to our initial thought, which is wtf kind of kid requiring parental supervision is shaping eerily realistic looking bottles of pills and razor blades for fun?
The Consumerist's source, UglyDoggy, has the other ads in the series -…
bioephemera | September 19, 2009
This toddler t-shirt from Twisted Twee comes in sizes up to 4 years, and is inspired by "just a few of the items my young daughter Betty consumed in her first year." The buttons I understand, but the toy soldier? And what is the toy soldier doing to that cow?
Remember, parents: B is for baby, barium swallow and bougienage!
Check out their "ride-a-dad" set, too. Cute!
bioephemera | September 12, 2009According to Reuters, Gunther von Hagens of Body Worlds fame is going to create an entire exhibit showing plastinated cadavers in sexual poses. He already includes two "copulating cadavers" in his current show:
German politicians called the current "Cycle of Life" show charting conception to old age "revolting" and "unacceptable" when it showed in Berlin earlier this year because it included copulating cadavers.The way a plastinate is exhibited can vary from country to country to reflect local sensibilities. A vote of local employees decided that one of the copulating female cadavers should…
bioephemera | September 9, 2009I previously blogged about Jennifer Angus' insect installation, Insecta Fantasia, in the Newark Museum's Victorian Ballantine House. For those of you who couldn't make it to the show this YouTube video is a wonderful tour.
Note the layered interplay of 2D wallpaper patterns with 3D insects - some of which have lasercut words and patterns cut into their carapaces - and the insect-populated dollhouses. An insect house within an insect house - it's the kind of intimate yet fantastic inner world created by the best children's books. I'm thrilled that this video lets everyone experience it.…
bioephemera | September 8, 2009
The Haunted Vagina is just one of the titles featured in Abebooks' Weird Book Room, where you can find such treasures as Bombproof Your Horse, Is Your Dog Gay, The Thermodynamics of Pizza, Do-it-Yourself Coffins for Pets and People, and People Who Don't Know They're Dead.
The funniest thing about many of these books may be the title - my mom owned a copy of The Great Pantyhose Crafts Book, and it was actually kind of useful. Anyway, you can find reviews of many of these books on both Abebooks and Amazon. It turns out a lot of people have actually tried the instructions in Do-It-Yourself…
bioephemera | September 4, 2009
This enraged, possibly rabid, antlered and befanged squirrel (?) encapsulates the spirit of my week so well, I just had to share. TGIF, friends.
Via Crappy Taxidermy, of course.
bioephemera | August 28, 2009
Blue Barnhouse Letterpress is simply awesome. I was idly coveting these classy anatomical heart thank-you cards when I discovered they actually have a special card FOR COLONOSCOPIES:
No, not even letterpress can make these brutal (and hopefully fictitious) colonoscopy implements "classy." But that's not stopping me from blogging it.
bioephemera | August 15, 2009
Photographer: Rudy Huhold
Agency: Artplan
Apparently package delivery service Sedex Express is quite similar to. . . your brain on drugs. Hmmmm.
Via fubiz
bioephemera | July 20, 2009
Reader Mike sent me the link to this Coke commercial a while ago. I love the exasperated brain pulling himself around - he's like a mob boss driven crazy by his stupid henchmen. Their other ads aren't quite as funny, because they make you overthink the situation (if the eyeball can't drink Coke because it has no mouth, how is it talking?)
bioephemera | July 18, 2009Or is it Arma-goo-ddon?
For some reason, balls of unidentified biological goo have started showing up in the news. First we had the mysterious North Carolina sewer blob. It turned out that was just a colony of tubifex worms - yes, the same kind you feed your fish. But now we have a giant oceanic Alaskan goo ball:
"It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it," Brower said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers -- to the borough's wildlife department."It kind of has…
bioephemera | July 17, 2009
Alstroemeria, sp.
Robert Buelteman
One of my favorite short stories is Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter, in which an eccentric, Frankensteinian botanist breeds increasingly beautiful, increasingly deadly flowers. These images from Robert Buelteman remind me of Rappaccini's garden. His creative process sure sounds like something Dr. Frankenstein might have employed:
Buelteman hits everything with an electric pulse and the electrons do a dance as they leap from the sheet metal, through the silicone and the plant (and hopefully not through him), while heading back out the jumper cables. In…
bioephemera | July 15, 2009
. . .Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. According to editor Jason Rekulak,
I know there are a lot of vampire fans, but the genre feels exhausted to me. Whereas Sea Monsters allowed us to draw inspiration from so many rich and diverse sources--most obviously Jules Verne novels and Celtic mythology, but also Jaws, Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean, even SpongeBob Squarepants! I think Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fans are counting on us to deliver something original, and I don't think they will be disappointed."
Hey! He didn't mention Cthulhu. But check it out - there is a quantitative…