Love is...Bookmaking?

This Valentines Day Laura and I helped make a book for Neal to give to his girlfriend, Jenny. Its kindof a cheesy kid’s book, but it was fun, and the end product turned out quite beautiful. Neal wrote it, I illustrated it, another friend Becky (who is a fantastic artist) made the book, and Laura coordinated all of us, helped edit, and in general gave everyone a helpful set of hands. We all found the process to be quite fun and were completely in awe of Becky’s bookmaking process. There is quite a lot that goes into a book. Neal gives it to Jenny tonight with much laughing and crying forecasted.

Here is a slideshow of the pages of the book.

The Autopsy of a Piano

I heard this really cool story on NPR this morning about this team of musicians who play the piano in a very interesting way. Ten musician crowd around a piano that has been opened up and play it using strings and hammers and tongue depressors to get a full range of orchestra sounds.

Here is the NPR link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18666248

Here is a video of one of their performances:

From highways to byways, oceans to creeks

This weekend held beautiful weather for those of us in the Dallas area so Laura and I took advantage of it. On Saturday we went to the Fort Worth Japanese Gardens and on Sunday we took a walk around our apartment and found some abandoned train tracks and a water tower, which isn’t the most spectacular scenery but we had fun.

Oh, and I remembered that I told my mom that I would put up pictures of the dragon drawings that are hanging on our wall.

A Democratic Diplodocus

The following quote is from George Kennan, who served as America's ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. To preface it, he is talking about the relationship between Democracy and war.

"But I sometimes wonder whether in this respect democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin : he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath-in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such a blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat. You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could have prevented some of these situations from arising instead of proceeding from an undiscriminating indifference to a holy wrath equally undiscriminating."

-American Diplomacy, p.66

The Powers of Ten

Here is a 1977 film made by the architects Charles and Ray Eames.

Apartment and Giant Turtles

Laura and I went to the Natural History Museum in Dallas on Saturday.







I also wanted to post some pictures of our rearranged apartment for the parents.

Emo Emu