Captain Fantastic

It’s spectacular how every day is just another annual fancy dress party for Sir Elton John.

Elton John was in the middle of his annual “White Tie and Tiara Ball” when he was rocked by the news of Michael Jackson’s death.

Image courtesy MusicTimes.

Thanks

Yes.

Flawless moonwalk at 3:46. FLAWLESS, ladies.

Indeed a long day

From The Mixed-Up Emails of Governor M. Sanford:

It was indeed a long day. I am most jealous of your salad under the palm tree.

Big fun

Now available at Target:

More designs including an X-wing fighter and some kind of floatable R2D2 with cupholders at StarWars.com

Jordan totally hooked me onto GreatBigStuff.com this week. She was looking for a computer key-shaped stool that had the word “Sit” on it. They had one!

The big cob of corn on that site is particularly amusing.

I did not know

I just walked into the bathroom and caught my cat trying to drink out of the toilet. He got scared. I was surprised. In the long run, I think our relationship will be much stronger because of it.

Modern art noted

Tyler Green from Modern Art Notes, the Art Journal’s modern and contemporary art blog, twittered his tour of the Wadsworth Atheneum today.

Here are just a few notable entries from his Twitter feed, posted in the chronological order that I read them:

In the Ballet Russes exhib: 1926 Miro Dream Painting is mega-treat, complete with vagina? May beonline…From just before recent MoMA show.

That Miro is in Wadsworth collex btw, a 1933 purchase!

1935 Mondrian may be my new fave. There’s a false symmetry that pulls the eye through the painting and the white fights the blue

BTW, Wadsworth: you’ve so overlit the Euro-modern gallery that the paintings are hard to see. Fix in next 5 mins? K thx.

Hartley here a ‘best of’. Calder too.

Following Shaq

My feelings about Twitter swing from wildly positive to negative every other day, but I absolutely adore reading Shaquille O’Neal’s tweets. I don’t know if it’s his unique shorthand, his positive outlook or his sense of humor–but, he’s really awesome.

Daily Fill has collected 20 of his tweets and reimagined them as “motivational” posters. One of my faves:

Bonus love for his inventory of Q’s and glowering stare in the ESPN Scrabble commercial:

Just don’t fuck with Mercury

So, now there’s this info via AHN:

French researchers studying the solar system’s future using computer simulation saw a potential disruption of Mercury’s orbit that may lead to a collision between Earth and Venus billions of years from now.

The result of the study by Jacques Laskar and Mickael Gastineau of the Paris Observatory is published in the Thursday issue of the journal Nature.

The computer simulation involving 2,501 scenarios of planetary orbits led to a large disruption of Mercury’s orbit which in turn disrupted the orbits of the three other terrestrial planets, Venus, Earth and Mars.

At that point, the Earth probably won’t be habitable anyway which is sad too!

Maybe humanity will move underground. Would that even work? No. Maybe we’ll be in space. Yes, we’ll definitely have be in space! And very far away from Earth or else we’re going to get dropped like third period space French.

At least we know how it will all (maybe) end. Let’s hope for some fantastically schlocky sci-fi movies and video games based on this theory before it’s proven wrong.

Note: Above picture is a random image courtesy of this fine site and is meant as a dramatization by the author to depict the dire situation speculated above. I don’t actually think it would really play out like that.

Mike Bouchet at the Biennale 2009

Here’s a link to a must-see video from this year’s Venice Biennale featuring a work by the awesome artist (and good person) Mike Bouchet and his attempt to float a bit of Americana through the Old World. I can’t embed it and it’s only 2 minutes long, so give it a watch until the end because it’s really great and funny too. And a bit sad. And maybe completely (intentionally?) symbolic of the actual real estate market right now.

That Sinking Feeling

Inside a super cell tornado

Mike Bettes of The Weather Channel’s Vortex2 team captured awesome footage shot inside a forming tornado in Goshen County, WY. I’m a sucker for tornado videos and this is pretty outstanding–I’ve never seen anything like it: