Unusual Life

YES WE CARVE
Pumpkins for Obama. A collection of Americans (and beyond) showing Obama support in a fun, positive, October appropriate way. Download, carve & share YOUR Barack O’Lantern at www.YesWeCarve.com

…And on a possibly related note, Marlow and I are officially opening our Official Bad Art Museum of Art ( or O.B.A.M.A. ) on Saturday, November 15th. Have Fun, Be There! Details here. -JoDavid

• Architect Liz Diller shares her firm DS+R’s more unusual work, including the Blur Building, whose walls are made of fog, and the revamped Alice Tully Hall, which is wrapped in glowing wooden skin.

• Get fit, bitches !!!

Neighbors upset over hot pink house

The Klein Bottle House is located in Rye, Australia and designed by Rob McBride. the unusual home design was inspired by its namesake: the klein bottle. this 19th century invention is used to describe a form which has no distinguishable inside or outside. the architects also wanted to move away from the paradigm of designing buildings based on orthogonal methods and instead imbrace the complexity inhernt with computer aided design (cad). while the desigm imbraced mathematics and digital design it also references
the vernacular australian cement sheet beach house. the house recently won the Harold Desbrowe-Annear award in architecture. it is made from concrete sheets and black metal, which are both folded and twisted
to create the multitude of angles.

According to the UK Sun, a couple hope to make £500,000 selling their mobile home — as it’s covered in art by Banksy.

Nathan Welland, 37, and Maeve Neal, 34, met Banksy through pals ten years ago when he was an unknown street artist.

He used their trailer to paint a 30ft by 7ft mural of commandos with a stereo and scenes including a monkey playing drums.

Banksy’s fans now include stars like Brad Pitt, so the couple and their four kids, of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, are auctioning their two-bed trailer to buy a bigger home.

Last year a Banksy painting sold for £288,000, and art dealer William Burroughs said: “The pieces are unique, and the big picture could make a record price.”

Aren’t you glad these people aren’t your neighbors?

Subterranea Britannica is an organization with a website that features all sorts of underground man-made structures and places. There is information about 100′s of underground railways, postoffices, caves, bunkers, stations, tunnels. It has an especially interesting photo tour of Chernobyl, but this one is real (remember Chernobyl motorcycle girl? Not a hoax exactly, but a sort of fanciful photo tour.)

Official tours are available of the area, and these tours are in closed cars with a geiger counter, to make sure visitors aren’t exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity. The site has an incredible photo tour, including photos of the town before the accident.

Via Boing Boing

From Wired:

Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker’s library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer … is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.)

No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you—a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time, your mind is stretched like hot taffy.

Scary video of guys hurling themselves off of a mountain.

Mountain Wingsuit