The adorable taro root mice bellow were created by Jimmy Zhang, a chef and produce artist in San Francisco. The image is part of The New York Times‘ slideshow Playing With Food, which also includes more images of food turned into art by James Parker, Hugh McMahon and Saxton Freymann. It’s part of the article Knife Skills: Creating Feasts for the Eyes by Kate Murphy. She presents the carved watermelon sculptures by Mr. Parker and explains the growth of those kind of creations using fruits and vegetables:

“We’re seeing more fruit and vegetable entries every year that are incredibly creative,” said Thomas Smyth, chairman of the Salon of Culinary Art, an annual competition sponsored by the Société Culinaire Philanthropique in New York. Recent eye-catchers, he said, have included melons carved to look like Fabergé eggs and lifelike cocktails made of butternut squash, carrots and papaya.

Probably part of the “guilty” of the current appetite for whimsical produce art belongs to Saxton Freymann, which published in 1997 book Play With Your Food, with pictures of brussels sprouts pigs, broccoli poodles and lemony bears. The article also presents a video with Hugh McMahon carving the portrait of James Beard in a watermelon.
Related posts:
Jeu d’oranges
Food to amuse
Maurizio Savini
Funny sausages
Cuisine Sandwich

On November 9, 2006 Jonathan Glancey started a blog at the Guardian Unlimited’s Arts blog dedicated to the Classics of everyday design. The almost weekly articles keep going updated, and now there are 40 (and counting) Classics of everyday design.

Forget about icons, design of a kind that doesn’t swank around in style magazines is all around us. Jonathan Glancey dedicates his blog to the finest examples – and he needs your help to point them out.

Among the classics listed, until now, many of them can be found on almost everywhere, and some are very British. My favourites would be: paperclip, the Swiss Army Knife, the Biro, or Bic Crystal ballpoint pen, Daleks, Lego, the Slinky and one of the greatest inventions of humanity, the anti-stressing Bubble Wrap. (Merci Bertrand!)

The idea of a robot was always fascinating to us. The literature discovered it and passed the lesson to the cinema. That’s probably one the reasons there are always new films about them. The last one released, Transformers, isn’t on my “must see” list, but many others are, like Forbidden Planet.
To homage this incredible creation of human mind in the big screen, the TIME made an especial article: 80 Years of Robots in Hollywood. The article shows ten fine examples of known films from the 1920’s to 2000’s, including Metropolis, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Blade Runner.

More posts about robots in the cinema: Robots Lists, The Top Ten Sexiest Female Robots, Kubrick 2001: The space odyssey explained and Forbidden Planet. Enjoy also to watch some remarkable, and not so much, films and animations with robots at Videos with Bibi: Supeman Fleischer’s Cartoons, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, The Day The Earth Stood Still and Ji?í Trnka short stop-motion films.

This isn’t a survival kit, and the best I can say about today is: don’t believe in anything. But wait: before you start doing that, read this post please. I selected some real articles, from real sites about April Fools’ Day. You can trust me and follow the links to the articles, or you can choose not trust me and follow them even so. I promise you will have fun whatever your choice is.
- From the Museum of Hoaxes: Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes Of All Time. The number one is The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest, about the episode of the BBC TV programme Panorama which explained how Spaghetti grows. Enjoy and read also The Origin of April Fool’s Day and Top 10 Worst April Fool’s Day Hoaxes Ever.
- The YouTube addicts can enjoy the selection at Esquire.com with April Fools! videos: The five best pranks ever filmed and posted to YouTube, selected by Daniel Murphy.
- Wired made a nice article with tips to fool your fellows: April Fool’s Pranks For Nerds. The classic screen saver of the blue screen of death is one of their suggestions.
And just to be sure that you won’t be fooled, read the Slate article The April Fools’ Day defense kit by Jack Shafer. It has few, but interesting tips about April Fool’s day techniques used by the media.

Big cats you didn’t know, from BBC News: Island leopard deemed new species. Clouded leopards found on Sumatra and Borneo represent a new species, research by genetic scientists and the conservation group WWF indicates.

Supporting evidence came from examination of fur patterns. Leopards from Borneo and Sumatra have small “clouds” with many distinct spots within them, grey and dark fur, and twin stripes along their backs.
Their mainland cousins have large cloud markings on their skin with fewer, often faint, spots within the cloud markings, and are lighter and more tawny in colour.[...]
WWF, which maintains a large conservation operation on Borneo, estimates there are between 5,000 and 11,000 clouded leopards on the island, with a further 3,000 to 7,000 on Sumatra.

The BBC has also a video of this news. More about it at Yahoo! News, with another video.

For all of you that celebrate… a happy Valentine’s Day. I won’t celebrate, but that isn’t an excuse to not blog about it – it never was. And that’s why I made a selection of links to all the romantic souls that read this blog, or that are just searching for pretty Valentine’s day images.
- A Sampler of things with happy Valentine’s day through his posts: Valentines Day Card, More Valentines Wishes, Vintage Valentines and Happy Valentines Day.
- Craftbits have a good list of Valentines Day Crafts: 20 Valentine’s cards ideas, crochet hearts, Valentines Day survival kit, jar of hugs & kisses, and much more.
- CRAFT blog has a Valentine’s Day Card Contest and Inspirational Links. If you want to join in you’ve got until this Friday at 5pm PST to get your entries in for the “Recycle Your Heart” CRAFT Valentine’s Day Card Contest. Made you craft including some sort of recycled goods in your card, and submit it at The CRAFT Pool.

- Google’s Valentine’s day logo of this year looks yummy – Official Google Blog explains the logo. Melted chocolate just could be better with ice-cream! Anyway, the previous Valentine’s Google logos: 2005, 2004, 2003, 2001 – and a Heart, 2000 – and that Heart.
- Love in the stacks is a nice post of the blog of the Digital Library Services from The University of Iowa Libraries pointing to highlights of their Valentine’s day collection.
- Many Faces of Valentine’s Day: Love and romance through the ages, presented by the Virtual Museum of Canada. An excellent on-line exhibition with many images of vintage Valentine’s cards, images and ephemera.
- Send some love with fd’s Flickr Toys, creating a a customized Valentine’s day card from you to your contacts. I did one for the last valentine’s day.
- The Firefox’s maniacs have a very coloured card full of hearts to send from Spread Firefox.

- The Woodland Park Zoo offers four Valentine’s Day Greeting E-Card with pretty pictures of animals.
- WikiHow explains How to Make Valentine’s Day More Meaningful and How to French Kiss. What? Who needs to learn how to kiss? Eleven-year-old teenagers?
- Will it Blend? shows what you can do with annoying Valentine gift. Actually they said to not try this at home: too bad.
- YouTube also celebrates the Valentine’s day with Dump Cupid video cards. Strange stuff.
And to those are so lovely as I am, a nice Wikipedia article about St. Valentine’s Day massacre.

More about Valentine’s day: Flying Pig, Zombie Valentine, Recipes to Valentines’ Day, The Comic Valentine of mid-Victorian England, How-to Fold Paper Roses, A Flowering of Affection, For your Valentines’ day, Valentines Book of Styles: a better use for furniture and Valentine’s Day.

Popular Science article: The Scariest Ideas in Science by Laura Allen. Undead viruses! Killer foxes! Soldiers who never sleep! This is no horror movie – it’s today’s scientists at their most daring

Maybe we saw The Andromeda Strain a few too many times in our formative years, but we can’t help shivering when we hear about microbiologists reanimating long-dormant lethal viruses. And those biologists working to make human limbs grow back: Haven’t we seen that film? Don’t the guys in lab coats all die in the first reel? They may sound cinematic, but the incredible research projects on the following pages are not imaginary. They’re real, funded ventures by respected scientists. They have perfectly rational goals. They also happen to creep us out.

The amusing text lists 6 scariest ideas: Reanimated Infection, The 22-Hour Workday, Merciless Robot Soldiers, Planetary Solar Shield, The Ultimate Vicious Carnivore and Grow New Appendages. Good article with great illustrations inspired in vintage horror and sci-fi B-films, created by Michael Koelsch.

Good news for me: Bilingualism delays onset of dementia.

People who are fully bilingual and speak both languages every day for most of their lives can delay the onset of dementia by up to four years compared with those who only know one language, Canadian scientists said on Friday.
Researchers said the extra effort involved in using more than one language appeared to boost blood supply to the brain and ensure nerve connections remained healthy – two factors thought to help fight off dementia.
[...]
Bialystok stressed that bilingualism helped delay the start of dementia rather than preventing it altogether.
Psychologist Fergus Craik, another member of the team, said the data showed that being fully bilingual had “a huge protective effect” against the onset of dementia but he added that the study was still a preliminary finding. The team plans more research into the beneficial side effects of bilingualism.

That sounds like an incentive to make more people learn other languages and use them frequently.

The 10 Gadgets That Changed the World is a Wired article that talks of some models of gadgets that we loved (or loved): TV, telephone, mobile, camera, microwave, videocassette recorder, video computer system, walkman, computer and a movie camera.
I would have chose other models for camera and telephone, but their choice for a 8-mm movie camera was right on the mark for me. Actually, thanks to the 8mm models and the Super 8mm the number of documentaries increase a lot at the 1960’s and 1970’s, specially the ethnographic area.
And you, do you think they should have chosen other gadgets? I’m just curious about it.

Time presents its 2006 selection of the 50 Coolest Websites. The sites were divided in 7 areas, however my interest went only to Entertainment, Arts and Media session. As usually I don’t agree with most of their choices, except Drawn, their best choice in my humble opinion. Other good choice was Pandora, which one my boyfriend loves. I prefer Last.fm just because I don’t like to open one more tab and it’s easier use the Last.fm software.
I must say one more thing about the sites listed there: YouTube. If you just go watch funny videos there it’s great, if you have an account and just upload you home-made videos, it rocks, but if you are a hard user, if you upload videos in public domain it sucks.
Well, I could give more examples of angry users that had problems with You Tube and no answers. First example: me. They deleted my first account, ok I survive. But now I stopped to upload videos in the new account, because they made 2 mistakes and didn’t corrected them. The first one was say that two videos that were in public domain weren’t. They said sorry and that they weren’t put the videos back. They didn’t do. Second: more two videos wrongly accuse that aren’t be in public domain, that someone flagged. Curiously in all the other places that I search, including databases of films in public domain, they were in public domain, so I sent one more email. No answers. More two emails: no answers.
So, after those emails, no answers and with the threat of have my account suspended in case that I upload more “copyrighted material”, what I didn’t do in both cases, I stopped to add any material there. And I’m not the only one which had a problem with them and I won’t be the last one. Am I look furious? It’s because I’m.
There were other cases, like the posts of Cartoon Brew, The Shelf and Llámame Lola. Here is my advice: do you just want to watch cool stuff? Fine, use YouTube, or any other site of video storage. Do you want to upload a video? Use Google Video, Dailymotion, Veoh or any other, but don’t use YouTube. That’s all I have to say, sorry for the relief.
Back to the TIME site, read also 25 Sites We Can’t Live Without, a cool article with good tips of sites, specially if you are American.