Tiny Gigantic

So as the earthquake hit in China, a young couple had just finished exchanging their vows. They had just moved on to the photographs when the the ground started shaking. Oddly, the photog continued to shoot the wedding. And apparently, and happily, none of the 33 guests were injured.

Thanks to Ethan for the link.

Classic.

AND

And there’s tons more on youtube…

So I just read two books that are blowing my mind. They are by Margaret Wheatley, a systems theorist and organizational development expert. Her specialty is to learn from super complex natural systems (like the universe, and life), and to suggest how these lessons might be applied in our organizations and in our approaches to living. I’m still processing the stuff, so I won’t try to summarize it here or anything. But seriously, if you like to wonder, pick up one of these books:

Leadership and the New Science

A Simpler Way

And if anyone’s got some more of this kind of material, send it my way, please.

Lucy and Bart like to get conceptual about body stuff. Their work gives me feelings of vague uneasiness. Check this link if you want to feel uneasy too.

So my father has been working on a project called Seeing Peace: Artists Collaborate with the United Nations. The premise is this: if we cannot first envision what peace actually looks like, we will never make it so. So he’s asked artists from United Nations member nations to make art works that show what peace might actually look like, from their unique cultural perspective. Think about that for a second and ask yourself: what would peace actually look like? It’s easy to visualize war. But peace, it surprisingly tough.

A small part of the project, Peace Billboards, will be running in San Francisco from May 26th to June 22nd. 10 artists from 10 countries will be displaying their visions of peace on 10 billboards all over town. So we made a website to help spread the word. Monster thanks to the vega project for the killer flash design!

Go check it out and spread the word.

These are the Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy diagrams, painted in 1819. They’re nasty. And awesome. Cuz you mostly see very bland, very antiseptic anatomy diagrams. Not so here. Ooof.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

via worldwide wall.

So you may have noticed that there’s been much less writing and opinionating on this here inspiration feed than there used to be. There are a lot of reasons for the lull, but they’re not as remarkable as the way we reacted to it. We beat ourselves up for not doing more, started feeling like suckers and losers and impotent dullards.

That was pointless.

Now that the lull has passed, we think we learned something. We realized that we forgot to listen to an old piece of wisdom we trot out every now and again: Everything happens in seasons.

Everything—moods, business, ideas, even happiness—comes in seasons and swells. It all waxes and wanes, ebbs and flows, Jekylls and Hydes. And you can’t force it. You can’t freak out. That just makes things harder. So ride that shit out, and enjoy what the day brings you, even if it’s a little rain. Use the slow seasons to rest, to go easy on yourself. Do a project that’s just for fun, work shorter days, and give more time to your friends and family. Get drunk on a Wednesday afternoon. Fuck it. Really. Everything is just as it should be.

this is the sky bridge in langkawi, malaysia, a stunning cable-stayed bridge which actually curves around the single support column from which it’s suspended, 687 metres above sea level. completed in october 2004, the structure relies on an 87 metre high support column to hold the weight of the deck, this weight distributed through 8 load balancing cables attached to its head.

more at deputy-dog.

I love that sometimes, the lore of a city turns out to be true and that all the mystery we thought lacking in our lives becomes present again. Here’s what I mean:

The lost rivers of Manhattan are real; hundreds of streams and whole wetlands were paved over and filled so that the roots of buildings could safely grow. But whether or not you could ever fish in them – this whole thing sounds like Dr. Seuss to me – is the subject of a post on the also defunct blog, Empire Zone. There, a commenter informs us that fishing for eyeless carp in the underground cisterns of Istanbul is something of a national past-time.

Thanks to bldg blog for this one.

Sega’s new game, Condemned 2, is so dark and nasty that they built a site filled with ponies and hearts and rainbows so you can offset the evil.