Author Archives: Chompsky

Behold: the Shelby Cobra CSX-4000 – one of a series of Shelby-produced ‘continuation’ vehicles made two decades after the original Cobra production run. This vehicle is  essentially a 1965 Cobra 427 S/C fitted with a body comprising seventeen seamlessly joined handmade copper panels set off with a pair of rough brushed Le Mans stripes.

And it’s not just for looking at either. Under the hood lurks a 550bhp V8 engine with enough power to reach 100km/h in under 4 seconds.

Bidding starts at €400,000.

hiconsumption

Behold: Tom Cruise’s estate at Telluride in Colorado – a custom-made 10,000 square foot (930m³) native stone and cedar house with a separate 3-bed guest lodge tucked into a grove of aspen trees at the base of the Rocky Mountains.

Bought in 1994 (the year ‘Interview With The Vampire’ was released) the house is surrounded by a 320 acre estate with dirt-bike and snowmobile tracks, a sports court, helipad and a network of hiking and snowshoeing trails. 

Yours for about €33.2 million.

uncrate

‘I Hope’ (2021) by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota: 10,000 letters suspended by red threads in the nave of Berlin’s König Galerie.

The letters are notes from people all over the world sharing their dreams for the future after a year in lockdown. Two wire boats appear to float upward at their centre, evoking a sense of travel into some unknown, hopefully better future..

You may recall the artist’s 2015 project that made similar metaphoric use of housekeys.

colossal

Behold: a spectacular and unusual multicoloured, banded aurora. To wit:

In mid-March of 2015, an energetic Coronal Mass Ejection directed toward a clear magnetic channel to Earth led to one of the more intense geomagnetic storms of recent years. A visual result was wide spread auroras being seen over many countries near Earth’s magnetic poles. Captured over Kiruna, Sweden, the image features an unusually straight auroral curtain with the green colour emitted low in the Earth’s atmosphere, and red many kilometres higher up. It is unclear where the rare purple aurora originates, but it might involve an unusual blue aurora at an even lower altitude than the green, seen superposed with a much higher red. Now past Solar Minimum, colourful nights of auroras over Earth are likely to increase.

(Image: Mia Stålnacke)

apod