Chris Jordan, a Seattle-based artist, has some amazing photography and digital artwork at his website. In his current series, "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait," Jordan takes statistics from American culture (energy usage, the environment, consumerism) and digitally parlays those stats into thought-provoking (that term's often overused, but in this case it's appropriate) works of art. The image at left is composed of 200,000 packs of cigarettes, the same number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.
Check it out — you probably won't believe what you see.
Chris Jordan, a Seattle-based artist, has some amazing photography and digital artwork at his website. In his current series, "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait," Jordan takes statistics from American culture (energy usage, the environment, consumerism) and digitally parlays those stats into thought-provoking (that term's often overused, but in this case it's appropriate) works of art. The image at left is composed of 200,000 packs of cigarettes, the same number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.
Check it out — you probably won't believe what you see.
Not that I don't want anything for Christmas, BUT...
Morgan Spurlock ("Supersize Me") has a new film out, "What Would Jesus Buy?", about Reverend Billy, a Vancouverite who preaches against consumerism on Buy Nothing Day. The antithesis to Black Friday, Buy Nothing Day has been popularized, if you will, by Adbusters. From this CNN story:
A review of "What Would Jesus Buy?" in "Christianity Today" questioned whether (Rev. Billy) Talen's act, poking fun at both religion and consumerism, went too far.
"Yes, it's condescending. Yes, it cheapens Christianity," the magazine said, before concluding: "But the whole argument of the film is that our commodity culture has already cheapened Christianity."
Something to think about.Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has taught me that patience is a virtue I'm severely in need of. I spent much of my Thanksgiving break (probably almost a full workday) trying to figure out why the heck Internet Explorer was making the sidebar menu navigation on this site and List-en up! look like crap. I had no idea how horrific and unprofessional it all looked until I test-drove the sites on my mother-in-law's computer, running IE 6.0. The sites looked wonderful (in my humble opinion) in the Firefox and Safari browsers that I'd been testing on, but for some still-unknown reason, IE piled every single part of the sidebar on top of itself like so many layers of two-week old digital lasagna, as if the navigation didn't matter at all. (I guess it didn't matter if no one was visiting the sites.) If you're reading this, though, and hadn't visited the sites until now, you won't have a clue how bad it all looked, thankfully.
Anyway, after tweaking and testing nearly everything I could think of on the sites, I decided to reinstall the display theme (K2), and voila! Everything was in its right place. So now I can sit down for some leftover pie, without worrying that millions of strangers (or none) are laughing what used to be my pile of worthless sidebar doo-doo.
(Thanks to my wife and in-laws for tolerating both my absence from cooking duties and my obsession with fixing this wonderful CSS problem.)
Mission accomplished!
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