v.. To move a tall, flat bottomed object (such as a bookshelf) by swiveling it alternatively on its corners in a "walking" fashion. [After the book by Thor Heyerdahl theorizing the statues of Easter Island were moved in this fashion.] source: LangMaker.com. Aku Aku also has another meaning: a spiritual guide.
There's a little dive pub (turns out actually not a dive anymore) I'd been meaning to go to for years, and finally stopped by a couple of weeks back. I love checking out the old San Francisco spots that persist through the decades and ha...
Like Mad Max rising from within the desert floor, a bit of the old San Francisco arts scene appeared unexpectedly the past week when I found an old forgotten camcorder tape in a box. It contained 33 minutes of an June 2001 evening at the Ace Auto Dismantling aka Ace Junkyard featuring, among other entertainments, Survival Research Labs and the debut of their new pitching machine which fired two by four studs at 200 mph. I edited it down to about 10 minutes which you can watch below. It really brings me back to what it felt like to be in San Francisco in that glorious time between the dot com booms.
The full footage has been donated to the Ace Junkyard documentary in the works called Ace in the Hole. I highly recommend clicking that link and watching the 10 minute trailer for it! Hopefully it get completed some day, because it really was a special place in San Francisco arts history.
BTW another performance featured briefly in my found tape was Attaboy and Burke, mainstays on the local scene at that time. Attaboy pointed me at this other music video they made also featuring some footage from that show:
A final recommendation is to subscribe to Attaboy's current project Hi Fructose Magazine, both their print edition and a great instagram account @hifructosemag.
Well I finally found something worthy enough to bring this blog out of its 7 year hiatus.
YOU GUYS, DID YOU KNOW SHARKS GET GOOGLY EYED WHEN YOU PET THEM?
This is a GIF-grab from S02E04 of Tales by Light on Netflix. This episode is part of a two part series where the Bay Area's own Eric Cheng sidles up to a couple of fearsome animals and show they are beautiful in their environment. E03 was about anacondas.
We only watched these two eps, as we're fans of Eric after we bought one of his earlier prints in 2006 of a baby sea turtle that we named Charles. Ever since, Charles has adorned our children's wall. So Eric is like family to us, in a wholesome creepy stalker sort of way.
I recommend both episodes, but the segment where Eric and crew are all like WHO'S A GOOD SHARK? YOU ARE! YOU'RE A GOOD SHARK! is the best part.
Chicken John, the tortured and sometimes torturing soul of San Francisco's innovative art scene, last year started the brilliant Camp Tipsy event. Camp Tipsy is a week+ long camping trip on a lake a little north of Sacramento that's all about building crazy, clever, lousy boats. In Chicken's words:
Boats are judged not only on lack of engineering but also on crummy implimentation. The coveted “last place” award for least effort is the category to watch out for. The idea of Camp Tipsy is to have fun and build boats. Build ‘em outa nothing at all. It’s an excercize in a catyclismic future that Kevin Cosner portrayed so poorly.
We had a great time even though we didn't build a boat, but I started idly thinking about what I wanted to build for this year soon after. My first thought was a floating human canon, so you could do canonballs into the lake with style. I have no idea how those things actually work though, and I suspect I shouldn't actually try to build one. Then I thought how about a floating catapult? That seemed doable, but too complicated. In the end I scaled it back to a swingset mounted on pontoons, so you can jump into the water. So that's the plan.
Abstract:
A backyard-style swing set (with a slide and maybe two swings) mounted on two long pontoons with an additional beam or two across the middle for lateral support (also serves as a platform to help get into the swing seats). The pontoons will be wooden enclosures filled with empty containers or foam or whatever can be found.
Concept rendition:
Considerations:
The whole thing might flip over. Such is life. If that seems likely to happen I guess I'll just try to make the pontoons longer on site.
Not sure where to mount the slide. Maybe make one pontoon bigger, or extend it for some support. I'm sure some lousy solution will present itself.
I'd been thinking that it would be nice if the energy produced by swinging was mechanically converted to drive a propellor, but I have doubts that 1) I could pull off implementing such a system and 2) it would provide enough thrust. So there's no plan for propulsion yet, I'll just tow it out with another boat or get a trawler motor which probably will not work either. I'd love to rig a sail, but I think that would be a disaster as well.
I have an alternative concept that would make it so that if the whole thing tipped over due to swinging, it would just land on another set of floats so you could keep on swinging, but the one depicted above is probably good enough and easier to build:
On Wednesday night I went to a class on Flame Effects at Langton Labs (billed as Learn 100% of the technical skills you need to make 80% of the fire art you see at Burning Man) so now I'm thinking it should have propane flame effects as well, but that might have to wait for the next event. Besides, we're totally going to win without going that far.
I'm not really sure wha the deal is with these pictures my brother Marcus just sent me of himself and his girlfriend, but they're too cool not to share.
But Home Depot had one of those videos running next to the set-up, which showed clogged sink after clogged sink giving up its precious bolus of greasy hair to the explosive force of a CO2 cartridge unleashing its entire payload at once. Watching the guy on the demo using the device, with its rifle-like kickback and puff of condensed carbon dioxide gas, mesmerized me. The next thing I knew, I was racing home with my new KleerDrain.
I could hardly wait to use it on a slow-draining sink in the bathroom. I duct taped the overflow drain on the sink, and inserted a CO2 cartridge into the Kleer Drain. I screwed on the rubber cone and then pressed it into the drain opening.
WHAM!
Asian (maybe just Japanese?) girls are using a poking tool and glue to alter the shape of their eyelids in order to achieve a "double lid" effect. Apprently a double lid is considered more attractive.
