File under bizarre. We went to Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Museum on March 22 (traveling for Easter weekend). On the top floor is the Unmuseum, a child themed, interactive display to entertain the kiddies (and the very young at heart, which happened to include our entire party).

The gem of the Unmuseum was Speed’s Place, a video art installation featuring a small room with an old movie projector and a bunch of antiques scattered about to create the feeling of some old timer’s work room (created by Michael C. McMillen). The projector played a fascinating video loop, but seemed odd installed in the kid’s floor of a museum. The video featured footage from World War II, old movie clips, skulls, distorted, horrifying faces and short, enigmatic quotes between scenes.

Speed’s Place (pic by thetheorist).

One asked:

“Why does the working man die for corporate gain?” Ed Note – That isn’t a perfect quote, it went by before I could write it down and didn’t repeat again while I was sitting there watching it.

A trailer for the installation at lalouver.com, had this saying between scenes:

“I dreamed I had a three-way in Cincinnati.”

The entire installation was more horror movie than museum. The charm of the piece, for me, was finding such a dark and surreal piece of art on the kid’s floor of a museum. It was like finding a secret room in a strange house (which is how it was designed to feel). I wondered if the museum folk just couldn’t figure out where else to put it.

I just can’t imagine the logic behind the placement of this piece. Hmmm, let’s see:

Images of the dead, check.
Anti-capitalism messages, check.
Creepy images of distored faces and insects, check.
Sexual innuendos, check.

Let’s put it in the kid’s museum!

Most kids (especially the smaller ones) would probably wander straight out of this room after glancing at the projector and the junk, while only somebody obsessed with the bizarre would actually sit down and be captivated by it. It strikes me as a piece just waiting for controversy when some prude discovers some of its more disturbing elements and throws a hissy-fit to museum management. Maybe that’s why I like it so much. It appeals to my naturally subversive nature.

This is completely off-topic, but as a loyal Jayhawk I have to point it out. Patrick over at Fortuna Faveat has posted that the CBS Sports Store is selling North Carolina 2008 Men’s Basketball Championship shirts (I’m sure this link will go dead soon) before this weekend’s Final Four games have even been played. Thanks for the vote of confidence CBS!

The pic above is of a second NC championship shirt that even shows the bracket on the back.

Saturday night, we all headed out to Henry’s Coffee Shop at 8th and New Hampshire here in Lawrence to see Brandon Parkinson’s first public exhibition of his artwork. Brandon is a very old friend. He works in a huge variety of formats, so you can’t really peg him as any particular type of artist. My poor words can’t begin to describe his work, so I’ve included some pics of the pieces I particularly liked. His work will be on display all month (March 2008), so I highly suggest if you’re a local to head over to Henry’s and see it in person. Otherwise, click here to check out his work online (more pics here after the jump).

The Tower II by Brandon Parkinson.

Thought by Brandon Parkinson.

Genius by Brandon Parkinson.

Drunk Driver by Brandon Parkinson.

I got my eyes checked today after not having seen an optometrist for four or five years. I had the full battery of tests run, including the one where the doc dilates your eyes to stare into your brain. It pretty much forced me to take the afternoon off work as looking at my monitor made my eyes go cross-eyed and my head throb.

On the way home, I spotted a chiropractic shop I had never noticed before, “The Chiropractic Experience.” It made me wonder if any other medical-type professions would ever use a name like that. I can’t imagine booking an appointment at “The Ophthalmologic Experience” to get my eyes checked.

Come, Experience Orthodontistry!

Honey, “The Proctology Experience” called and said they had an opening.

Okay, we’ll quit there.

Jonathan Coulton rocks. Period. This is a fact, not an exclamatory statement. No exclamation point needed. Coulton did the closing credits song for Portal, which might be the best video game song ever. He did some guest bits on the show with zefrank. You should check him out at his site. I won’t even seriously try to describe his stuff, just think of a singer/ songwriter/ guitar player who has some serious geek/nerd cred. You can download a bunch of his music for free if you want to listen before you buy. You must listen to Re: Your Brains.

Anyway, the point of this post is while bumping around on his site today, I noticed he uses Eventful to track interest in cities he might play. So you should totally click the above widget and demand that Mr. Coulton travel to Lawrence (or Kansas City) to play a gig. I want to see him live, and so do you. Even if you don’t know it yet.

While surfing for something completely different, I ran across MIT’s Scratch program yesterday.

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

It uses a graphical interface to string together common programming scripts. The littletheorist keeps talking about becoming a game designer when she grows up, so this looks like an amazing tool to let her develop some simple games now and learn the logic behind programming. I played around with it for most of last night so that I can help her learn how to use it. I built a simple, graphical eBay fee calculator. I still want to touch it up some, but I’ll post it once it’s done.

The site has thousands of user created programs and animations. An archery shooter is one of the best examples of how good a game can look with Scratch. Anyone who is interested in programming or game design needs to check this out.

So I’m in full political junkie mode, watching the live stream from CNN while surfing the web looking for more SupTu (that’s how the cool kids say it) info.

The colors on CNN’s Republican Super Tuesday map floored me:

• McCain: Republican Red, the color of a patriot’s blood
• Huckabee: Pinkish (or coral as CNN called it), the kind of color you deck the guest bathroom out in, not what comes to mind when one names “Presidential colors”
• Romney: Sh*t brown. Sure, CNN called it bronze, but we can all see who they’re taking a dump on

Glad I got a screen shot of this one, as I couldn’t find the same map on their site.

[Update: So the ladytheorist tells me that I'm color blind and that Romney's color is in fact "Rusty Red." Still not a presidential color. What does everyone else think?]

[Update numero dos: The Daily Show ran a bit mocking all of the map colors the TV news channels used to identify SupTu candidates. I feel vindicated now. They don't have an embed code for the color map bit, but you can check out the intro after the jump or head over to thedailyshow.com.]

Lord, that’s an obnoxious headline. Someone stop me. The alternate headline for this was, “Slinging mud in Kansas politics.” Weather forecast: wet, white and disgusting. Quite a few people had problems getting out of the fairgrounds after the caucus.

Anyway, so I did go out and caucus tonight. After twelve years of being a proud independent, I registered as a Democrat just to see how a caucus worked. Quite shocking that 2,218 souls from my district braved disgusting weather to go out and support their candidates. My district heavily favored Barack. Make sure to check out the full results for Lawrence and Kansas.

Not a lot of mutual love between the Hillary and Barack camps. Technically Kucinich and Edwards were still on the ticket here. When their representatives gave speeches, pretty much everyone cheered and clapped, same with Barack’s rep. When it came time for Hillary’s rep though, the only sounds of support came from her camp (mostly grumbles uttered under breath around me while her rep spoke).

I’m glad I went out, though at the end of it I feel more like I attended a social event rather than took part in some historic process. Maybe that’s good though. Normally, I hurry about my daily routine and sandwich voting in between other responsibilities. This was a relaxed, thoughtful process that engaged and connected people. I ran into some people I knew (oddly all former or current journalists), talked with some random strangers and had a little mini-adventure. Regardless of who I end up voting for, I’m definitely pro-caucus now.

The line of cars I followed to escape the Douglas County Fairgrounds got lost, meandered through some trees and eventually exited through some driveway. I think it was the maintenance shed, I really hope we didn’t end up wandering through some poor sap’s yard.

I’ve got the next piece of analysis on eBay’s changes done, but it’s pretty boring. Going to try to liven it up some and get it up tomorrow.