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I went to see Body Worlds 2 in Toronto yesterday. You can read about it on Wikipedia here, see lots of images of it on Google Images here. (We weren’t allowed to take pictures.)

It was a little crowded but otherwise corpse-tastic. Before I went in I was concerned I might puke, I’m not big on dead things. But once I got in there that fear faded and I was more afraid someone else would puke and that would create a puke chain reaction that would take me down with it. After a while that wore off and nothing much happened. Bodies are gross though.

I’ve put up a $100 jackpot in this Worth1000 contest for a Brad Sucks logo.

I’ve been trying to put together a semi-decent press kit forever now. I hate doing that stuff, it’s awful and I’m terrible at it.

I thought a cool logo might help, but art is hard to come by. I talked to a few people about it but after pricing it out I decided I’d give the Worth1000 community a shot. They’re enormously creative over there (check out their previous corporate contests) and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

I checked out the Christopher Pratt exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada yesterday and it was excellent. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures and the examples on the web don’t do his work any sort of justice so you’ll just have to trust me that it was great. His work is all of fairly ordinary things; buildings, streets, rooms, ships. But he uses color in such a way that elements of the paintings take on a 3D quality and seem to jump right out at you. Very cool and worth checking out if you get the chance.

The Effects of Diseases, Drugs, and Chemicals on the Creativity and Productivity of Famous Sculptors, Classic Painters, Classic Music Composers, and Authors – very interesting article.

altered books – “Cut the bindings off of books found at a used book store. Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration.” I really love these.

Crimewire is Louise W. Klinker’s proposed Limewire skin that reorganizes the P2P app into a different light. For instance instead of there being a “Library” of what you’ve downloaded, it’s called your “Criminal record”. Crimewire would track how much you owe each band and record label and you have a Justification Profile:

The last new function is the “Justification Profile”. This section is the most fictional part of CrimeWire and based upon a point system. When you input your salary, number of records in collection, amount of vinyl in collection, number of concerts you go to per year etc. it returns the amount of money it is fair for you to “steal” for per day.

I like it, it’s pretty funny. I’d also like to see aggregated stats of how much all downloads on the service are costing individual artists and labels, damage you’re doing to the economy, the amount you would be fined for the material you’ve uploaded and maybe how much you’re hurting Coldplay’s feelings.

Gallery of the Absurd – I really like this artwork inspired by celebrity gossip. [via]

Story of the Sex Pistols – a Flickr photoset of an old comic book from 1984.

The Guns N’ Roses Self-Similar Midi Synth is Guns n’ Roses songs made up of sped-up samples of entire Guns n’ Roses songs. How it works:

First, We took the recordings of several Guns N’ Roses songs, from the albums “Appetite for Destruction” (1987), “GN’R Lies” (1988), and “Use Your Illusion I and II” (1991). We sped up these recordings exponentially until the tempo of the song became a pitched frequency. This is generally in the area of 480 times faster than normal playback speed (at this speed a song that lasts 4 minutes would be over in 0.5 seconds). Then we take these short sounds use them as samples to play back midi files of various Guns N’ Roses songs. For instance, the GNR Self-Similar version of Sweet Child O’ Mine may use the entirety of November Rain as its snare drum sound and the entirety of Patience for a note in Axl’s voice. In this way, we can make Guns and Roses songs that are made up of very small Guns N’ Roses songs, which could reveal themselves under a sonic microscope, yet are too fast to hear in the actual final product.

Paradise City and Sweet Child O’ Mine are available.

Saw this 3.2 million dollar art spider in town today and snapped a picture. Gotta go back once they attach the egg sac!