Monday, August 20 2001

N.Y. Times : Art on City Streets Till the Cows Come Home

"We're the largest producer of public art in the world. There are a lot of copycats and a lot of different forms out there, but the cow has the absolute perfect size and dimensions. It's also probably the only animal in the world that is universally known and liked. If you're talking about fish, we don't have any connection with them except that we eat them." Or, in the immortal words of the Kurt, It's okay to eat fish / Because they don't have any feelings. It is interesting that no mention was made of a similar project in Toronto, a couple of years ago, involving moose. This is probably because there is hardly a single statue anywhere in the city whose antlers haven't been removed. It reminds me of the story of Alcibiades who is said to have, on the night before the Athenians were to set off for battle, roamed the streets of the city knocking all the penises off the statues of Hermes that graced many a front lawn. Speaking of Kurt, I went to visit the Museum School in Boston -- that's a rhinocerous outside not a cow or defaced moose -- shortly after [his] suicide. I was sitting in the lobby area having some lunch when I noticed the hand-painted paper banners hanging from the exposed staircases. They were almost poetic in their simplicity. Kurt, they called out. Kurt. I haven't been back since. In the end, though, the most telling thing about the Times article is that the author negledted any mention of Joe Fafard's bronze cows, resting next to the obligatory big-city Mies van der Rohe towers in the heart of Toronto's financial district. I'm going to assume that this was because they did not fit in to the blueberry bagel flavoured world-view of subsequent animal projects. see also Moose Truth - Toronto's Moose Conspiracy

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In case you thought the Dock, in MacOS X, was little more

than a flight of fancy on the part of a few engineers at Apple, witness the fisheye menu.

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Walt A. Boring : phpHtmllib

"is a set of PHP classes and library functions to help facilitate building, debugging, and rendering of HTML and XHTML. It provides a mechanism to output perfectly indented/readable HTML/XHTML source, and a programmatic API to generating HTML/XHTML on the fly." I haven't tried to code anything with this yet but, based on the docs, it's got the nicest interface of any PHP based HTML writer I've seen to date.

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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is tattoo

| source : web1913 | Tattoo \Tat*too"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Tattooed}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Tattooing}.] [Of Polynesian origin; cf. New Zealand ta to tattoo, tatu puncturation (in Otaheite).] To color, as the flesh, by pricking in coloring matter, so as to form marks or figures which can not be washed out. | source : web1913 | Tattoo \Tat*too"\, n.; pl. {Tattoos}. An indelible mark or figure made by puncturing the skin and introducing some pigment into the punctures; -- a mode of ornamentation practiced by various barbarous races, both in ancient and modern times, and also by some among civilized nations, especially by sailors. | source : web1913 | Tattoo \Tat*too"\, n. [Earlier taptoo, D. taptoe; tap a tap, faucet + toe to, shut (i. e., the taps, or drinking houses, shut from the soldiers).] (Mil.) A beat of drum, or sound of a trumpet or bugle, at night, giving notice to soldiers to retreat, or to repair to their quarters in garrison, or to their tents in camp. {The Devil's tattoo}. See under {Devil}. | source : wn | tattoo n 1: a drumbeat of bugle call that signals the military to return to their quarters 2: a design on the skin made by tattooing 3: the practice of making a design on the skin by pricking and staining v : stain (skin) with indelible color

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