A Slice o' Maine Life: Husseys, Guns, Wedding Gowns, and Cold Beer!

My parents were traveling around Windsor, Maine today and captured what has to be the very best store sign EVAR! (And it *is* serious...) What a kick!! Enjoy!!!

Venice: A Blue Marvel?

A week ago, I stayed overnight at the Weston in South Boston, where for the wakeup service your tv would turn itself on to the BlueMarvel channel. I wound up waking up to these sights and sounds of dawn at a basalt beach in Maui!



The whole channel's like that... According to the Maine-based company,

The best way to experience nature is simple. Go outside. For those who cannot, BlueMarvel presents an alternative. This is nature's events at nature's pace, bears on bear time, and the passage of the sun according to its own rhythm.

BlueMarvel pioneered a format we like to call "Experiential HDTV", whereby the viewer is allowed to slow down and develop a deeper relationship with the content, as if it were an open picture window in their home, hotel room or place of business. Our inventory of experiences include sunrises, sunsets, storms, distinct animal behaviors and migrations from stunning and evocative landscapes of our planet, all with crisply recorded natural sound.

Needless to say, their soothing video tour through Venice caught my eye... but not my ear! Natural sound, my foot! While people were shown in some of the shots, you never heard a soul. Not to mention there was no sound from the motorboat (the bow of which you constantly see in the video) taking them around... and last but not least when they finally passed a vaporetto on the Grand Canal, the noise it made was just sort of a generic machine sound, but not the loud characteristic churning, almost grinding sound all Venetians know too well. That's when I realized... they were using SOUND EFFECTS!!

So, not only is it a packaged, technological substitute for the real life of the outdoors (which I can't help but think really tells a lot about our twenty-first century society) but they're even faking parts to make it seem more tranquil than the real world actually is!

Still, I have to admit that they've actually succeeded, and it is pleasant viewing. So, here for your viewing pleasure are a couple of BlueMarvel clips not included on their video website. Enjoy!!

Maine Lighthouse:

Maine Lighthouse - by BlueMarvel -

Elephant Seals at Sunrise:

Elephant Seals at Sunrise - BlueMarvel.com -

Twitter me bad?

A great debate in the media this past week... Print media really seems to want to demonize microblogging!

"Twitter causes immorality nonsense deftly dispatched by bloggers. Most mainstream press lost the plot although Time did a good job and Wired Science were keeping it real."

(via Mindhacks)

VIDEO O' THE DAY: Rube Goldberg vs. the Cadbury Creme Egg!

As they said on the site, "This has to be the most impressive Rube Goldberg contraption I’ve ever seen." (And with cheap household materials, too...) My words can't possibly do it justice. Watch it and enjoy!!

Things to Do with a Cadbury Cream Egg - watch more funny videos

(Thanks to @jackiegerstein for the heads-up!!)

Cooking Tips

What's Twitter Good For? Lots of things, even the NY Times says!

To wit, here are some cooking tips that caught my eye while following @foodimentary (who is apparently somebody who's quit their day job to become a fulltime Twitterer, although I have to admit that I have no idea exactly how that would work...)

Anyway, hope they're also useful/interesting to you! Enjoy!!

1. Tip for Wilted vegetables: Soak wilted veggies in 2 cups water, one tablespoon vinegar to help bring them back to life. @Vegimentary!3:38 PM Mar 18th
   
   
2. Hint for Spaghetti Sauce: Add a small pinch of bicarbonate of soda to your spaghetti sauce to lower acid taste from tomatoes.12:33 PM Mar 18th
   
   
3. While cooking smelly foods, soak a cloth towel & let it dry in the cooking area. It will absorb the smell, keeping the room fresh!4:25 PM Mar 16th
   


4. While frying Onions, add a little milk - this will help retain a rich color & prevent them from burning6:30 PM Mar 22nd


5. If you accidentally burn gravy, just pour it into a clean pan & continue cooking. Add some sugar to cancel out the burned taste.3:23 PM Mar 21st

Twitter!

Twitter is a great microblogging service which allows you to post updates, thoughts, links, etc. in less than 140 characters. It's great for posting interesting yet fleeting and still half-baked ideas, of which - you can readily see - I have many more than the fully-baked ones! ☺ Anyway, if you'd care to follow my posts, I'm at @misciel! You can also follow my posts in the sidebar at right.

I experimented with automatically posting my twitters to the blog, and it didn't work very well, but I'll get back to real blog posting as soon as I can.

Thanks!
Michelle

Scenes from Today's "Maine Maple Sunday"

"Maine Maple Sunday" happens every year about this time, when maple syrup producers all over the state open their doors to visitors so they can see (and taste!) the wonderful alchemy which turns 50 gallons of watery sap into just one gallon of gorgeously golden maple syrup!

Today, my hubby and I hit the road and went to about half a dozen sugar shacks in western Cumberland County, enjoying the heavenly, sweetly humid aroma of the saphouse and sampling goodies like homemade vanilla ice cream with fresh hot syrup, homemade doughnuts with fresh hot syrup, maple baked beans, maple snow toffee, freshly baked bread with maple butter, maple-glazed roasted nuts, and more! What a great day!!

Anyway, here are some random shots of the fun... Enjoy, and you oughta plan to join us in Maine for all the sweet maple-y goodness next year!

The Mona Lisa painted entirely by sheep (and more!)

After having seen this video link for the hundredupteenth time, I finally clicked on it, and now I understand exactly why it's gone viral. It is pretty amazing! Enjoy!!

Surreal art and the blog

I used to rely on the blog to share fun links, but now I find it better doing that more on Twitter. When I have time, I use *Michelle's Mental Clutter* for longer essays. In the meantime, I thought I'd begin to catalog some great art pieces that I encounter through Google Reader that are worth far more than just an http address! To start off... (from left to right)

Erik Johannson (from Brainpickings)

Desiree Palmen (from PicoCool)

»Under Discussion«, 2005 by Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (via VVORK)

»Undecidability Meme Diffusion«, 2007 by Sam Basu (via VVORK)

Weird History: "Vampire" Discovered in Venetian Plague Grave?!

I've never, ever heard of anything like this, and I can't wait to learn more!

"A SKELETON exhumed from a grave in Venice is being claimed as the first known example of the 'vampires' widely referred to in contemporary documents.

Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy found the skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth while excavating mass graves of plague victims from the Middle Ages on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island in Venice."

More here...

(Incidentally, Venice essentially invented quarantine, and the Lazzaretto Nuovo was the quarantine holding island for potentially-exposed people who were not yet symptomatic of plague. More info on the 1575 epidemic previously on MMC.)

Shields & Brooks on the NSOTU

My favorite part of watching the American news is always the commentary of Mark Shields and David Brooks... One's a little bit country and the other's a little bit rock & roll, and they frequently don't agree, but both are intelligent men whose opinions I respect tremendously.

To wit, their assessments of Obama's Non-"State of the Union" Address yesterday and the GOP response... Enjoy!

Carnival in Venice

I've written, usually not very positively, about the Venetian Carnivale before. Imagine 80,000 tourists crammed into Piazza San Marco for the opening of Carnival, in a city which has a rather elderly population now of about 65,000... and you'll understand why it can all be a bit traumatic for the residents!

Nevertheless, Carnival's ongoing blog coverage from Venice Daily Photo made me want to go back through my old archives and pull out the pictures of the first Venetian Carnival I ever attended, exactly 15 years ago this season.

They're taken from my travel diary of that year, that anno mirabilis, the first time I had ever left the country and the first time I came to Venice. I hope you get to enjoy vicariously even a small part of the wonder and the spectacle even now, a decade and a half later, that I experienced at the time...

Friendly Monsters in Vintage Family Photos

What a charming idea, and a hoot to boot!

Vintage photographs improved with monsters by Relleno De Mono.

(via bad banana blog)

UPDATED: Fortune Cookies

I'm one of those people who fondly collected the best fortunes from fortune cookies in my wallet, with the whimsical idea that the ones kept in the wallet are the ones that will (or the ones I'd like to see) come true.

But in a slim wallet there's no longer any room for the fortunes... I figure immortalizing them digitally would be the next best thing. Hence my small homage to this terse but artistic literary form!

UPDATED (7/27/2010): I now twitter my worthwhile fortune-cookie fortunes instead of pocketing them!

Michelangelo's Amphibians

Clipped this out of some mag years ago... I guess Ribit Productions has since done lots of different takes on froggilicious fine art. In the meantime, enjoy all the Michelangelo froggy goodness here!