Author Archives: Chompsky

The wonderful creations of sculptor Ted Lott – stripped back elements of modern architecture constructed using a bandsaw as a scaled sawmill to generate miniature pieces of wood and other proportioned raw materials which he builds into items of found and vintage furniture. These, sez he:

…point to the complex interaction of necessity, artistry, economy, function and beauty present in the original objects, while highlighting the possibilities of transformation and growth that are a requirement for the continuation and evolution of life.

Now for yeh.

colossal

Behold: the 1972 BMW 3.0 CSL Coupe. They called it ‘The Batmobile’ and you can see why.

Based on the E9 Coupe, the CSL reigned utterly supreme in its day – taking the European Touring Car Championship trophy in 1973, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1979 along with a legendary win at Le Mans in 1973.

The monstrous rear aero wing shipped in the boot for installation at the owners’ discretion as it was illegal in Germany at the time.

Up for auction next month.

uncrate

Alas, now getting shorter again.

A composite image of the time between the Winter and (nearly) Summer Solstice (December 21, 2018 to June 16, 2019) all compressed into a single point of view. To wit:

 Dubbed a solargraph, the unconventional picture was recorded with a tall, tube-shaped pinhole camera using a piece of photographic paper. Fixed to a single spot at Casarano, Italy for the entire exposure, the simple camera continuously records the Sun’s daily path as a glowing trail burned into the photosensitive paper. Breaks and gaps in the trails are caused by cloud cover. At the end of the exposure, the paper was scanned to create the digital image. Of course, starting in December the Sun trails peak lower in the sky, near the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice. The trails climb higheras the days grow longer and the June 21st summer solstice approaches.

(Image: Gianluca Belgrado)

apod

An interesting video essay by The Pop Culture Detective Agency exploring how men are routinely sexually demeaned (largely by other men) in movies and TV for the lolz.  To wit:

It’s hard to overstate just how common jokes about men being sexually assaulted are in entertainment media. Most popular comedic actors engage in this type of humour. Jokes are typically designed to demean, humiliate, control, or emasculate a male character for being the victim, or potential victim, of sexual violence.

Any excuse.

Behold M83 (no, not the French electronica project): a beautiful spiral galaxy, 12 million lights years away on the southeastern tip of the constellation of Hydra (no, not the Marvel Universe terrorist organisation). In fact, Messier 83 –  its full title – has many names. To wit:

Prominent spiral arms traced by dark dust lanes and blue star clusters lend this galaxy its popular name, The Southern Pinwheel. But reddish star forming regions that dot the sweeping arms highlighted in this sparkling colour composite also suggest another nickname, The Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. About 40,000 light-years across, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A. In fact, the core of M83 itself is bright at x-ray energies, showing a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes left from an intense burst of star formation. This sharp composite colour image also features spiky foreground Milky Way stars and distant background galaxies. The image data was taken from the Subaru Telescope, the European Southern Observatory’s Wide Field Imager camera, and the Hubble Legacy Archive.

(Image: Subaru Telescope (NAOJ), Hubble Space Telescope, European Southern Observatory, Robert Gendler)

apod