I'm drawn strongly to the idea of flash mobs (aka smart mobs), pre-arranged surreal gatherings that look spontaneous.

Turns out there will be a wacky one in Portland this Saturday. Should I watch? Should I participate? Ah, decisions, decsions. I do suspect I'll be there, in any case.

Via Strangechord.

It's been an amazing night.

I've had a blast, and I hope everyone else has as well.

SPONSORS: You make this happen. You are changing the world. Thank you.

If you need to hear from me, it will happen in a few hours.

Okay, this isn't really a museum. It's one of my favorite local galleries. The Jadestone Gallery website is actually a wonderful place to learn about Chinese art and antiquities. They've worked very hard to make it as educational as it is beautiful.

Developed by Tiverton Museum and the University of Exeter, Virtual Victorians features a gallery of objects from the museum's collection and a day-by-day account of a week in the lives of a typical working class family in 1874.

More credit where it's due: astute readers will by now have noticed lots of links from both Raw Vision Magazine and NarrowLarry's World of the Outstanding. Thanks, y'all!

Built in the early 1900s by Samuel Dinsmoor, the Garden of Eden features an 11-room "log" cabin made of limestone concrete set in a concrete sculpture garden.

Shangri-La can be found, not where you'd expect it, but in North Carolina.

"Henry L. Warren was a retired tobacco farmer who kept building this collection of 27 leprechaun-sized creations until his death at age 84 (in about 1977).

Shangri-La was conceived by Henry in 1968. The first few buildings were constructed in his side yard next to his house, and the miniature town kept growing. At the same time, he used his creative energy to incorporate 11,000 arrowheads into the walkways of his home."

Although the official website describes it simply as "a folk art environment", The Orange Show is rather more. Begun in the 1960s and opened to the public in 1979, the Show was intended by creator Jefferson Davis McKissack as an amusement park themed around healthy living, exemplified by the orange. Sadly, McKissack died soon after the Show opened, but it lives on through the efforts of The Orange Show Foundation. Their mission is to "preserve, present, promote and popularize the extraordinary artistic expressions of ordinary people"; among other things, they maintain a library and archive of folk and outsider art, and run the annual Art Car Show.

In about 1940, Edward James left England, to find himself situated in Xilitla, Mexico. There he built the startling environment known as Las Pozas.

"It is said that while bathing in the pools at Las Pozas, Edward saw a cloud of butterflies come down toward him through the canyon, their thickness momentarily cutting off the rays of the sun - Edward saw this incredible spectacle of fluttering wings as a sign that this was to be his home and thereafter set about to transform Las Pozas into his Enchanted Garden."

Explore the mysterious history of Vodoun at the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum. Explore the artifacts of the great Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau (pictured), and visit a genuine gris-gris room.

Pop Quiz! What is a Hypocaust? The answer is damned cool (or perhaps warm?), and you can find it at Romans in Sussex, a visual history of the Roman occupation of the area. Another lovely design, it's easy to explore the subject matter visually and intuitively.

I Dig Sheffield is an online archaelogy museum covering (obviously) Sheffield, England and surrounds. This well-designed site allows you to explore objects by type, and sites by clicking on a handy map. It's a very intuitive way to learn about the area and the fascinating digs going on.

The Caulder.com Museum of Strange and Higher Forms of Life is almost the equivalent of a computer clipboard. Not quite what happens to be there, but perhaps what's left over.

"It is the mission of this museum to provide patrons with unfettered access to the insanity and chaos that surrounds us. This is simply a repository for cultural detritus. Perhaps the most important criteria by which the collection is selected is an item's relationship between intent, execution, and meaning. At some point, the axes where these three factors intersected was clearly defined and appropriate, at least subjectively. When observed objectively, or at least away from the original subjectivity, the artifact's true absurdity becomes the fourth, and primary, point of intersection."

You know... I was going to say, "Well well well, look what the cat dragged in"... but then I realized... heh, the Cat did drag me in.

Can you tell I need some major amounts of coffe?? So, Cat is over at my blog for this post, and I am here. Must admit I'm quite honored that she took the time out to swap with me. Definetly made me a little bit happier in my pit of gloom.

I wish Dave was up. Would definetly keep me up talking to him and playing cards.

Top Five Reasons To Call Into Work

1. You treated Sunday night like Saturday night and got a little too drunk.
2. The sun is up, the weather is gorgeous, and the beach is calling your name!
3. You know for a fact that there is a big stack of work sitting on your desk and you do not feel like dealing with it.
4. That thing you were supposed to do Friday before you left the office? Yeah, you didn't do it and you don't want to hear about it, either.
5. Last week was a holiday, you got paid time and a half for it... Eh, stay in bed to celebrate!

I love calling into work. Too bad I have some stupid 'work ethic' thing that holds me responsible for the things that I do, and whenever I do want to call in, I just don't have the guts to do it because I know it's not for a vaild reason.

Nek Chand worked for eighteen years on his Rock Garden, a 40-acre sculpture park in Chandigarh. Initial conflict with city officials forced him to work in secret for many years, but the Garden is now a celebrated city attraction and has been open to the public since 1976.

The "House of the Flower" was built by Gabriel Joaquim dos Santos in Rio de Janiero between 1912 and his death in 1985. Gabriel used household refuse and discarded construction materials to create a masterpiece which was thoroughly restored in 2000-2001 and is now open to the public.

Take your pick from "soft" or explicit art, in galleries by artist name or category - white, wet, bdsm and more at the Gay Art Museum. Props to Brad.

Filippo's sculptures are not exactly enchanting, being mostly faces and mostly unsmiling. Solitary and poor all his life, he seems to have expressed his loneliness in wood and stone.

Niki de Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden in Tuscany is a brilliantly colored collection of buildings and sculpture designed to reflect the qualities of the 22 cards of the major arcana. Born in France, Niki spent much of her life as a sort of artistic ambassador between Europe and the USA, and now lives and works in California. Work on the Tarot Garden started in 1979, and the public opening was in 1998.

Built during the Great Depression, the Palace of Depression in Vineland, NJ, was intended as an antidote, a way to show "how a man and wife could rise above" the social climate of the times. George Daynor and his wife Florence lived in a car and hunted local wildlife for food for three years while they drained the swamp on which they built their Palace out of mud and junk. Daynor conducted guided tours for thirty years. In a sad echo of the last entry, Daynor died penniless in 1964 and his Palace was destroyed by fire soon after.

In Queens, New York, Clarence Schmidt made a mansion of a small house, and covered covered it in aluminum foil. The House of Mirrors was destroyed by the very tar Schmidt used to secure the foil--a fire razed the structure in 1968. Undeterred, he began another building on the property the next year. When the second house was also destroyed by fire, Schmidt turned to sleeping in doorways, eventually being placed in a nursing home.

Utah is the home to a garden of rough, imposing structures known as the Gilgal Gardens.

"The garden is the creation of LDS bishop Thomas Child, a stonemason and sculptor Maurice Brooks, who filled the garden with an eclectic group of sculptures and stoneworks, many of which reflect LDS themes."

The tinkling sound of aluminum diadems rustling in the wind greets visitors at the Beer Can House in Houston, Texas. The creation of John Milkovisch in his retirement, the site took 18 years and 39,000 beer cans. The grounds are sprinkled with a variety of props, and nearly every surface is decorated with the festive cans.

zy'-mo-glyph'-ic, adj. [Gr. zyme leaven + Gr. glyphe carving] Of, or pertaining to, images of fermentation, specifically the solid residue of creative fermentation on natural objects. The Zymoglyphic Museum includes some delicate and astonishing artwork made from bits of organic material. The museum includes the work of Frederik Ruysch, famous for making dioramas of foetal skeletons.

A bit of fun! I dedicate this post to Twodolla, who is mad about the loos. Enter The Toilet Museum, started by a couple of guys posting toilet pictures in their bathroom. Here you'll see art, ads, pics, anything to do with that indispensible porcelain god.

Most of the art I am featuring in this year's entries is what is usually called "outsider art", a genre classification that seems to have developed out of the concept of Art Brut, a term coined by French artist and collector Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet was profoundly affected by the works collected by psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, who in turn was influenced by the history of art by psychiatric patients and especially the work of Walter Morgenthaler on his patient Adolf Wölfli. Dubuffet's collection of what he called "raw art" was eventually given a home by the city of Lausanne; the Collection de l’Art Brut now forms the primary definition of Art Brut. Curator Michel Thevoz has said:

"Art Brut... consists of works produced by people who for various reasons have not been culturally indocrinated or socially conditioned. They are all kinds of dwellers on the fringes of society. Working outside fine art "system" (schools, galleries, museums and so on), these people have produced, from the depths of their own personalities and for themselves and no one else, works of outstanding originality in concept, subject and techniques. They are works which owe nothing to tradition or fashion."

The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD, "seeks to build upon the ancient Native American Vision Quest, and other similar self-revelatory journeys undertaken by visionaries" and features exhibitions of visionary (folk, outsider, undisciplined, call it what you will) art with themes including addictions, war & peace, angels & aliens, love and the apocalypse.

La Maison Picassiette is not far from the center of Chartres, where Raymond Isidore worked as a graveyard sweeper. Isidore never considered himself an artist, but with 30 years and 15 tons of broken glass and crockery, he transformed his home and garden into a rich collection of mosaics which now attracts over 30000 visitors a year.

Speak French? Good, because we're going to Le Musee Incroyable in Quebec, housing the art of Norman Toupin. Norman has spent his life creating sculpture from scrap materials. Whimsical and expressive, the figures are often clearly personal. Okay, if you insist, here's Google's translation.

Built by a retired fisherman in the early 1980's,the Bottle Houses of Cap-Egmont on Prince Edward Island are just that: a house, bar and chapel built from cement and around 30000 discarded bottles.

Here are some more bottle structures, built this time in California by Tressa Prisbey between 1956 (when she was 60!) and 1981. "Grandma" Prisbey built a whole Bottle Village out of mortar, bottles and found objects: some 13 buildings and more than 20 sculptures. The village was damaged by an earthquake in 1994, and help is being sought for the rebuilding effort.

A quick interlude to give credit where credit is due:

While I'm getting these links from all over, I'm swiping many of them from two sources.

Jane's Addictions is a fantastic resource for Art Brut, of which I am an avid fan. My dream vacation is an Art Brut tour across the country, from Oregon's Peterson Rock Gardens to Florida's Coral Castle.

Next, Metafilter. I've been trawling through the archives for cool stuff, like Mini MOMA, posted below. Incidentally, MeFi has a thread on the current Blogathon up now.

Okay, this isn't entirely on theme, but it is cute. A pixellated Mini Museum of Modern Art, you can see the works of Jasper Johns and Henri Matisse, all put through the shrinkalator.

I have got to see this place in real life. Dr. Evermore's Scrap Metal Park is acres of parkland filled with hundreds of wild sculptures. Sweeping, sharpened beaks and feathers, lines of wacky figures like warriors, and gigantic cello-bird hybrids look nearly alive. The park also contains the world's largest scrap metal sculpture, the Forevertron machine--rising six stories high.

In Ballarat, Australia, is the home of James Warwick, a chimney maker and bricklayer. More than 140 years ago, James decorated his house with stones, ceramic, tiles, figures--whatever he could find. The result is the Old Curiosity Shop. Warwick's labor spanned 40 years, and still stands today.

From the mind of Helen Martins and the hands of Koos Malgas comes The Owl House, located in Nieu-Bethesda, South Africa. Over a period of about a dozen years, they created an environment filled with graceful sculpture, an antidote to Martin's "gray life", when she found herself alone after the death of her parents. Inspired by religious and poetic literature, the Camel Yard is especially alive with evocative figures.

Nukain Mabusa, of Barberton, South Africa, made his home and environment a work of art. Using local materials, he painted his home and many of the surrounding rocks, creating a Rock Garden of remarkable beauty. Mabusa died in 1981, and the site has fallen prey to the elements; however, a restoration project is underway.

If you are visiting Sussex County, New Jersey, don't miss a visit to Ricky Boscarino's amazing artistic vision: Luna Parc. Indoors and outdoors, from the bathroom to the chapel, the eye is treated to a visual riot of color, texture, and meaning. And I think I want a horseshoe crab pin.

In West Bend, Iowa, you'll find the Grotto of the Redemption, built over the course of 42 years by Father Paul Dobberstein. Dobberstein built the grotto in thanks to the Virgin Mary for saving him from pneumonia.

"Visitors are dwarfed by encrusted towers and junk glass tapestries. The Grotto of the Redemption is large when compared to other rocky American religious shrines -- and Wisconsin's Dickeyville Grotto or Alabama's Ave Maria Grotto are considerably less be-gemmed. Each new shiny pearl and chunk of pink quartz reaffirmed Dobberstein's devotion to the Mother of Christ, and her mysterious grotto plan."

With an extensive series of online exhibitions and collections, the California Museum of Photography is a place to waste hours. Each collection is designed separately, making the site a showcase of the web designer's art as well.

Yes, it's a stereotype that Russians drink. But did you know there was a major anti-drinking campaign? Yuri Matrosovich's Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters illustrates the artwork behind the campaign. Not much detail, but some great images.

No art tour would be complete without mentioning the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the first and best online museums, you can view more than 3,500 pieces in their collection online. Especially fun is the Costume Museum, with historical fashions from around the world.

I'm a huge fan of Chinese art. Every time I drop by a gallery, I find some new subset of art that has its own traditions, history, and variations. Things I would never imagine existed. That's why I love the National Palace Museum, where I can surf exhibits like the the Ancient Medicinal Classics in Life is Worth More Than Gold.

Browse the natural history of Australia at Museum Victoria. Okay, it isn't really art, but who can turn down frogs? Not me, I tells ya.

Is art the sole purview of humans? The Museum of Non Primate Art say NO! Dance and paint with your cat, learn to recognize the unique "signatures" of bird art, and more.

I imagine most of the people reading this are used to drab old manhole covers. Maybe a grid. A nice flower, if you're lucky. In Japan, the manhole cover is an art. Browse a number of different themes at the Japanese Manhole Art Museum, and then write your city council.

Nikolai Syadristy is a artist of unusual skill--especially considering his works are all but microscopic. At the Nikolai Syadristy Micro Art Gallery, you can browse through musical scores smaller than a rice grain and portraits carved from cherry stones. One phrase you'll see a lot: "size has been enlarged."

LSD: It's not just for hippies anymore! Peruse the world of fantastic blotter art at the Erowid LSD Vault. From Daffy to Darth, not to mention the beautiful Alex Gray pictured here, there's something to tempt most tastes, as long as you don't taste.

The American Museum of Photography currently has a favorite: ghost pics from the spiritualist era. Peruse the ectoplasm and and semi-transparent forms of a less skeptical time.

The Ho-AM Art Museum, about one hour south of Seoul, Korea, was seeded with the collection of Lee Byung-Chull, once chairman of the Samsung Group. It is the largest privately-owned museum in Korea. This beautifully-made site includes a number of easy to browse collections demonstrating the rich artistic heritage of the Korean people.

Ladles and germs, welcome to the 2003 Blogathon.

Just wanted to take a breather and put in a pre-Blogathon post.

I'm tired. I've had little sleep lately, but I definitely have to crash early tonight, no matter how much there is to do.

So far, this has been the most remarkable year yet. We've had more toys to work with (thanks, Rob!), and still have a long wishlist for next year.

I think this is the strangest thing: I'm anxious to start on next year. Usually, I'm burned out by this point; thinking I'll never touch a keyboard again after the event is over. No such thing this year. I have plans, many and nefarious.

The press coverage this year has pleased and amazed me, yet I don't think it's quite sunk in. I know there will be a few people seeing this post because of those news articles. To you I say: "Hello! Sorry for the mess. Can I get you something to drink?"

I will now go into pre-thon hibernation mode. See you at 6am tomorrow.

We're just testing, so don't get your hopes up for the ring above.

Addendum: It's a real ring now!

Me: *yawn*

Jack: Jeeze, stop that! Now that Bill's back, you stay up all night, BLOGGING. Having people over BLOGGING until all hours of the morning...

Patrick: Those damned kids and their blogging!

Robert: It's not the loud music I can't stand, it's the constant clicking...

Jack: All night long with the pizza delivery. All we hear is "Slide it under the door! Slide it under the door!"

Me: I'm so blogging this.

Most mornings at my bus stop, there is a conservatively dressed man with a shaved head. Slim, mid-forties, he seems on appearance to be the type of person who would make an interesting dinner companion. Just your basic good vibe.

Today, I noticed those same clothes out of the corner of my eye, and almost didn't look up. I got a surprise when I did. Handsome, shaved head, same clothes, same build, same vibe--and about twenty years old. Moreover, the young man had a subtle look of wonderment on his face for the whole busride. Then he got off at the same stop as his older doppleganger.

Okay, it's probably father and son. But the first thing I thought, with my wiggy brain, was that the older man had found a way to rejuvenate himself, or some magical being gave him back the body of his youth, or maybe he switched brains with his son.

The world in my head has so many more possibilities.

I just got the call.

Bill has a visa good for two years, by which time he'll have a green card and be on the way to US citizenship. He'll be home on Wednesday.

Apparently, the interview at the Consulate is just a simple formality. Because of the cryptic nature of the written communication, and the complete lack of any other communication, we were needlessly put through the ringer. Ah well. This part is over, and I'm glad.

Excuse me while I go collapse in a relieved heap.

Introducing catconnor.com.

A friend called it a "pertal", for PERsonal porTAL. I like it. To me, it's something to put on my business cards that looks a little more professional than frykitty.

The pic is one of Bill's. It's just a simple little page, but I like it.

Every year this happens. I want to send something to my brother, and I have no idea where he is.

For a couple years, he's protested that he's in the same place he was last year--but when the guy has moved around nearly every year I've been alive, well, you just don't trust your address book.

I know that he stops by here from time to time. It's my hope that, today being his birthday, he'll be thinking of his family and will come say hello.

So, to that end, here's a note to my dear, wonderful brother:

IF YOU SEND ME YOUR MAILING ADDRESS, I WILL SEND YOU BIRTHDAY GIFTS!

Also, happy birthday. You're in my thoughts.