Unusual Life

A love hotel is a type of short-stay hotel found in Japan operated primarily for the purpose of allowing couples privacy. They often have different themes and we love the Chapel Christmas Love Hotel in Mie Prefecture!

Chapel Christmas Love Hotel

35 years after Elvis’ death, they still celebrate Christmas at Graceland in style.

Graceland at Christmas photo set

Separation of Church and State, originally uploaded by moe.syczlak.

Unusual and beautiful shot of the Christmas tree inside the rotunda in the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin.

Curbed has a great feature today on some unusual chapels, including the the Tiffany Chapel at the Morse Museum in Winter Park, pictured above.

My favorite chapel in Seattle is the Chapel of St. Ignatius on the campus of Seattle University. It’s beautifully designed by Steven Holl, and you can view interior photos here.

Airstream Trailer: Home on the Range, originally uploaded by Eric Curry.

This is an absolutely stunning photo taken by Eric Curry. Unfortunately, this desert landscape is no more: just a few weeks after he took the photo, the desert was bulldozed and a nasty suburb arose in its place.

Glad someone is documenting these beautiful places before they disappear.

Googie Sign, originally uploaded by arbyreed.

Awesome Googie sign in front of an abandoned motel in Orem, Utah. Love the juxtapositon of the man-made sign and the snowy mountains in the background. We’re losing so many of this cool old signage, it’s important to document what’s left, even if it’s only an old photo.

Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, known as Haas & Hahn, saw potential in places that most Brazilians view as unsightly, undesirable and terrifying. Favelas like Vila Cruzeiro and Santa Marta drip with sewage and ring with gunshots and police sirens, but Haas & Hahn wanted to give local residents a source of pride. The Favela Painting Project started with a huge mural called ‘Boy Flying a Kite’ and expanded into covering nearly every surface in Santa Marta with cheerful shades of green, blue, pink and yellow.

Slums into Rainbows

Diabetes is a group of metabolic diseases in which a person has high blood sugar, either because the body does not produce enough insulin, or because cells do not respond to the insulin that is produced.

All forms of diabetes have been treatable since insulin became available in 1921, and the new book BREAKTHROUGH: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg outlines this amazing discovery.

Breakthrough is based on the stranger-than-fiction true story of politics and personalities, and the unusual stories about diabetes just don’t go away.

What would you think of a single malt whisky made from the urine of diabetics? Creator James Gilpin doesn’t sell the stuff, but rather gives away bottles as a public health statement.

From the product page:

Sugar heavy urine excreted by diabetic patients is now being utilized for the fermentation of high-end single malt whisky for export. The Whisky market is growing faster then any other alcoholic beverage worldwide. With a prevalent genetic weakness being exposed in the northern hemisphere leading to a sharp rise in type two diabetes, economists have found a new exportable commodity to exploit and are keen to capitalize on this resource quickly.

Large amounts of sugar are excreted on a daily basis by type-two diabetic patients especially amongst the upper end of our aging population. As a result of this diabetic patients toilets often have unusual scale build up in the basin due and rapid mould growths as the sugar put into the system acts as nutrients for mould and bacteria growth. Is it plausible to suggest that we start utilizing our water purification systems in order to harvest the biological resources that our elderly already process in abundance?

And there are more unusual stories too.

The Gila monster would seem an unlikely source for a diabetes drug. But Dr. John Eng, MD, of the Bronx VA Medical Center in New York, thought otherwise. He had studied with a Nobel Prize winning mentor, Rosalyn Yalow, who had developed a technique for isolating unique animal hormones.

Expanding on her work, Eng studied guinea pigs and chinchillas. Then in the late 1980′s, he read research that found that reptile venom affected the pancreas.

Gila monster venom—found in its saliva—seemed especially potent, so he ordered some from the catalog of a Utah sepentarium. Using his new technique, he isolated a substance that stimulated the pancreas to produce insulin, the hormone that is reduced in diabetes. Eventually, he patented a synthetic version of the Gila monster compound, now known as Byetta.

Interested in the origins of synthetic insulin and want to know more of this history? Then you’ll want to get the new book BREAKTHROUGH: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg published by St. Martin’s Press.

Elizabeth Hughes was the fourteen-year-old diabetic daughter of the U.S. Secretary of State when she became one of the first recipients of an experimental drug. Weighing a mere forty-five pounds, she was barely a staring skeleton when she was taken to Toronto in 1922 to meet Frederick Banting, the extremely unlikely discoverer of insulin. Three months later she left Toronto to begin a new life, a life in which her diabetic condition remained a closely held secret for nearly sixty years.

You can meet the author of BREAKTHROUGH, Thea Cooper, Tuesday, November 16 at 7pm at Third Place Books at 17171 Bothell Way NE in Lake Forest Park and learn more about this unusual tale.

Gage Academy supporters recently took a tour of several artists homes and studios around the Seattle area in the Mighty Elvis Mobile. Hilarity ensued.

Gage Academy received a donation of $50 in gift certificates, so midway into our tour, we stopped at Dick’s Drive-in for lunch. Delicious!

We started the tour at Close Enough Engineering with Kim Hall and Steve Walker, then went on to the Paint-by-Number Salon and moved to the home and studio of Kelly Lyles, the home of Steve Bard and then ended the day at the beautiful home and studio of Ginny Ruffner.

Indooroopilly haunted house, originally uploaded by Leonard John Matthews.

This is an amazing old house, perfect for Halloween! The architecture is so interesting. I wonder what those turret rooms look like, if they’re round or more angular octagon’s on the inside. Even the rooftop looks like a witches hat!

Here’s a cool Flickr slide show of other “haunted houses” and strange and abandoned buildings around the world:

The residence is realized as a series of octagons, connected by a central living area, with a sunken conversation pit, fountain and fire ring centered under a large skylight. The present owners have an actual Sputnik spacecraft hanging under the skylight. The center of the roof is raised with a flat roof around the perimeter. The beautiful doors have Italian ashtrays as stained glass. The residence sits on a large heavily treed lot with a thirty foot by thirty foot reflecting pool, as well as a swimming pool.

Santa’s Village, originally uploaded by Frank and Candi.

Awesome photo set of abandoned amusement parks around the U.S.

Polka-dot lawn, originally uploaded by riddle.

Super fabulous painted lawn of artist Beth Thom of Austin, Texas. She has a website called http://www.polkadotlawn.com/. What a great way to deal with a dormant brown lawn in the heat of Texas.