Earth forming underwater

A mind-blowing, rare video of pillow lava and earth forming underwater in Kilauea, Hawaii:

Wild Geese

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
(one of my favorites of her beautiful poetry)

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Roland Kirk got soul! sweet and misty

Live in Montreux, 1972

Blind to their own beauty

Peep the toxic nudibranchs (the naughty sounding official term for these soft, outer-worldly colored, hermaphroditic sea slugs!). They produce a truly brilliant defense. With more than 3,000 species painting nearly all depths of salt water, their unique anatomy allows them to easily exercise some cryptic behavior and camo into textures and colors of surrounding sea plants. Others don't mind shining and instead utilize their vivid coloring to show predators they are oh so poisonious thangs. Too bad we don't have the same defensive mechanisms. For me, unfortunately, it's called riding the mood swing. They are even "blind to their own beauty" with "their tiny eyes discerning little more than light and dark. Instead the animals smell, taste, and feel their world using head-mounted sensory." Here's something we don't get to appreciate everyday -- this stunning National Geographic photo/video gallery on these bad ass sea creatures.

It's no surprise either that the seriously prolific artist and naturalist (among other things) Ernst Haeckel tried to capture these beauties in his Artforms in Nature studies. If you don't know Haeckel, be prepared to have your mind officially blown. His jellyfish and coral renderings are my favorite!

Kind of Blue...and bliss.

Holy moly. My dream skateboards have arrived!! Check out these masterpiece decks by SF based skate company Western Edition. This Miles '59 quintet arrangement of decks celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Miles Davis' seminal work: Kind of Blue -- greatest album ever. period. I'd have to admire these on my walls. It'd be blasphemy to have 'em hit pavement.
Thank you, Miles!!!

via Vinyl Meltdown

"Nature that Imagines"

via Art MoCo:

Gary Brewer combines a classic sensibility with so-called eccentric impulses to create lush, detailed paintings of botany that evoke the world of science fiction, many leagues under the sea. Orchids and anemones play an important role in Brewer's latest series of work, A Seductive Nature, along with lichens, sponges and corals. The artist uses drawings, models, photos and maquettes to explore potential, and the results are a blend of observation and invention.

I wish I was still in the Bay for what I'm sure will be a mind-blowing art show by Gary Brewer. His Orchid series is my favorite. How cool is this quasi-Orchid, quasi-Kelp sea creature?!

I'll end on a beautiful quote from John Laroche (played by Chris Cooper) in Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation:

Point is, what's so wonderful is that every one of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. There's a certain orchid that looks exactly like a certain insect so the insect is drawn to this flower, its double, its soul mate, and wants nothing more than to make love to it. And after the insect flies off, spots another soul-mate flower and makes love to it, thus pollinating it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. I mean, how could they know that because of their little dance the world lives? But it does. By simply doing what they're designed to do, something large and magnificent happens. In this sense they show us how to live - how the only barometer you have is your heart. How, when you spot your flower, you can't let anything get in your way.

Kudos to Jon Stewart!

via The Big Picture.

Stewart is one of the best and most honest journalists (an oxymoron these days) we've got!

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Check out other uncensored clips of Jon Stewart demolishing Jim Cramer and schooling America at AlterNet.org.

Visual Treats: My Favorite Food Blog

Every foodie's dream web site: Food Gawker -- an inspiring delicatible gallery where aggregate food bloggers showcase their goods and recipes. Time to feast the eyes and feed the tummy...oh yeaaa.

And if that doesn't do it for ya, maybe the Italian "Let's Pizza" vending machine will. It whips up "flour, water, tomato sauce and fresh ingredients into hot pizza in a few minutes for a price as low as $4.50."

Passionate Virtuosity

"My feeling about technique in art," John Barth told an interviewer in 1968, "is that it has about the same value as technique in love-making. That is to say, on the one hand, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and, on the other hand, so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate
virtuosity."

- Charles Harris, "Reading John Barth"

via Rob Brezny's Astrology Newsletter

Twit Universe: To Infinity and Beyond!

This social satire sparked a lot of questions. With the advent of online social networking, are we living from the inside-out or the outside-in, now? How do we give our lives meaning and identity, online? Do we trivialize? Do we constantly seek the approval networks? Do we inflate our sense of self-importance? Or do we simply love sharing more? Have we traded human-to-human relationship building for online, speedy interactions? Are we actually moving forward? But, have we also exchanged monologue for dialogue -- saying goodbye to a pyramid of top-down authority communication and hello to honest conversations between people all over the world?...Or just the privileged, with computers, internet know-how and access, without a great firewall? Sometimes, to quote Pablo Picasso, "computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

Here's Bill Maher this week on our mind-boggling obsessions with twitter, useless iphone aps ("pull my finger", no joke) and even those damn snuggies:


A hilarious addendum via current TV from Super News! on Twitter.

Nature Rocks!

Remarkable MOOG sounds from seals! This video clip from Warner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World" is amazing.