May the Fructose Be With You

Cake Wrecks has an absolutely amazing collection of images of Star Wars-themed cakes. These cakes go far and above just putting action figures of Hans Solo and Leia on top of a cake!

Photo: Michigan City, Indiana

Photo by Jeremiah Leif Johnson

Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages

There’s only one reason why I occasionally wish I lived in New York and not Chicago, and that’s the ability to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fantastic medieval manuscript exhibitions, which, at least from my vantage point, seem to happen rather often.

The most recent one is called Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages, and it focuses on my main love in all of art: illustrations in medieval manuscripts.

A brief summary from the link can be found below:

With strokes of genius, artists in the Middle Ages explored the medium of drawing, creating a rich panoply of works ranging from spontaneous sketches to powerful evocations of spirituality and intriguing images of science and the natural world. Opening June 2 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages is the first museum exhibition to examine in depth the achievements of the medieval draftsman. Through some 50 examples created in settings as diverse as a ninth-century monastery and the 14th-century French court, the presentation considers the aesthetics, uses, and techniques of medieval drawings, mastered by artists working centuries before the dawn of the Renaissance. Works from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum are displayed along with important loans from American and European museums, and the great national, university, and monastic libraries of Europe. Many of these manuscripts are so highly prized that they have never before been lent outside of their home countries.

Fantasy Book Review (.co.uk)

This morning I came across what may be the last word in finding the best fantasy books possible, a very comprehensive British site that’s aptly named Fantasy Book Review.

Of particular note is their listing of the best 100 fantasy books of all time, a list that’s sure to provoke some intense discussion. (The list has already won points with me for placing Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea Saga as the second best fantasy collection of all time.)
If you’re tired of scouring through Amazon pages or being disappointed by your friends’ suggestions for quality fantasy novels, this site might just be the last thing you need.

The Voynich Manuscript (XKCD)

Above is a funny comic from last week from XKCD concerning the Voynich Manuscript, which is, in fact, a real object. When I was doing some research at the Beinecke Library at Yale, it was one of the manuscripts that I most wanted to get my hands on. Unfortunately, when I arrived, someone else apparently had it.

You can read much more about the Voynich Manuscript for yourself over at Wikipedia, in what is largely an accurate article.

Creating Men of Steel the World Over

Largely by accident, I came across the Women of the DC Universe series of busts (ahem) this morning.  As I flipped through them, I couldn’t help but notice how oversexed everything with comic books seems to be these days.  When I was younger, my grandfather used to give me the old jibe about how I should be spending my time in the real world and not wasting my time on fake heroes and fake women.  Looking at this, the growing codger in me is tempted to tell the same thing to my kids.  Yeesh.

Earning the Achievements

This might be a pathetic thing to admit, but I sometimes think of things that I must do in real life along the lines of achievements in World of Warcraft.  It’s a way of motivating myself to get them done.  Indeed, sometimes this is pushed to such a nerdy limit that I wish that there were a to-do list interface (I actually use Remember the Milk) that somewhat mimicked the achievement screen in WoW.

What is a Print?

During my time working for an art gallery that partially specializes in fine art lithographic prints, I’ve noticed that many people really have no idea of what a print exactly is.  The Museum of Modern Art has prepared a special Flash exhibit that explains the concepts behind four of the most common ways of producing a fine art print, these being engravings, etchings, lithographs, and serigraphs.

Why Today’s Music Sounds Horrible

This article is really nothing new; all of us who have grown up with MP3s know that sound quality has greatly diminished since they were introduced.  I myself, I’m shamed to admit, had largely forgotten just how good a CD can sound until I was forced to get a car after our move to the Chicago suburbs.  This article is actually best for a sampling of what artists in the industry think about the change.

What frightens me is that this goes across the boards in all the arts, not just music, although I’m wondering if an exception can be made in the case of the new HD-DVD format.  Regardless, that says nothing about the quality of the actual stories that Hollywood is producing today.

Creative table of contents from Esquire

I don’t know if I’m like most people in this, but despite being a magazine editor, I almost never look at the Table of Contents when I open a magazine.  Today, however, the newest issue of Esquire opened to the contents when I flipped it open, and I couldn’t help noticing much the same layout I see all the time when I work on the magazine: They’ve made it look more or less like the InDesign page view layout. While quirky, it’s also slightly useful in that you know ahead of time how long it’s probably going to take the read something. The New Yorker could probably benefit from this!