Unusual Life

James May, with the help of 1,000 volunteers built a two-story Lego house using 3.3 million Lego bricks. The kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom were all furnished with Legos, down to the last detail, even a “stained glass” window. The home needed to be moved and May was willing to give it away free, but he ran out of time and it was destroyed yesterday.

Link of 13 photos originally posted in the Telegraph, and more information posted in the San Francisco Chronicle.
A big tip-o-th-hat to Ken Duffy for the heads-up on the Lego house.

We’ve featured the Walker Rock Garden in Seattle here before on Unusual Life. Here’s a jodavideo taken recently when we revisited there.

Read more about the Walker Rock Garden here.

Walker Rock Garden in West Seattle

Though we’ve previously featured Steve’s Strange House on Unusual Life, I wanted to add this post including some recent videos I’ve captured at the home of Steve Bard so you can see for yourself how things are progressing there. Thank you Steve for the gracious tour of your home. – jodavid
( …and lots more videos right this way…)

…and lots more videos right this way…

Summer in the city is sizzling hot and urban hipsters constantly need to come up with new ideas to entertain their creative urges. This brilliant new idea is the latest way to beat the city heat and throw a party on these hot summer nights.

Check out the great New York Times article, and slideshow by Yana Paskova

More great pictures and an explanation of how MacroSea, a team of urban planning visionaries, has been staging “guerilla pool parties” inside retrofitted dumpsters.

…And here in ReadyMade.

Unusual Life needs to share this gift with you and asks that you share it with those you love. PLEASE PLEASE watch this most astonishing video that has been released free on the internet today, World Environment Day. Find time to watch this 93 minute documentary, preferably by linking to the HD and view full screen. Please share the love.

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!

Here’s a very red room we stayed in last August at The Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, California. They named it the Tack Room. I had red leather wall covering, red leather bedspreads, red stained wood walls, pink marble pedestal sinks, and lots more red stuff.
I wonder who’s staying there this Valentines Day?

See our full set of photos from the extraordinary Madonna Inn

The Madonna Inn has 109 unique theme rooms where you can stay, as well as multiple odd over-the-top dining environments. You can/should see photos of all 109 rooms here.

Click "Tour Our Rooms Online" at the top right, and then the "Next " button under the photos to tour through each room.

• Our friend David Gedye, who is always leading projects he cooks up with mind blowing results, just sent us an email for his newest project, a collaboration with CNN and Photosynth for an ambitious presidential inauguration project. He writes:

You’ll be interested to know that I’m on my way to Washington DC to help CNN with an ambitious presidential inauguration project that we cooked up a month ago.

The idea is to use Photosynth (the 3D photo technology I’ve been working on for the last few years) to capture the exact moment when the President-Elect becomes the President. We are using about 10 CNN photographers and thousands of people in the crowd, who are being asked to send us their photo of “the moment”.

If all goes well there will be a “synth” on the CNN website a few hours after the inauguration, and if it’s great, they will show it on their big Magic Wall on their TV broadcast sometime during the afternoon or evening of inauguration day. CNN is promoting the project on air already, so if you tune in today you’ll see graphics for “The Moment”, and Photosynth being demonstrated by Tom Foreman.

Exciting stuff! You can see how CNN is promoting it at http://cnn.com/themoment

• You may remember the post that I wrote for UnusualLife.com with the video embedded of the Synth that David Gedye did of our living room for the Photosynth release Demo/How-To video last August. Here is a link to the article with the video.

Yes, at Unusual Life, we love our Legos too ! Legobama? http://sfweekly.com/slideshow/view/222857/1

• HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009 !!! •

• Earlier today we did this in Seattle…

• Bad Wig and Ugly Tracksuit Walk around Greenlake on Thursday, January 1st. This is a yearly New Years Day tradition. We meet at Noon on New Years Day at the Kiddy Pool to walk around the lake, every year, so if you missed it, be there on New Years Day 2010.

What a great way to get the New Year off on the right foot.

Luckily, wigs do offer some insulation from hangovers and there’s no need to fret about bad bed-head.

Rain-or-shine, umbrella’s & kids ok. Meet at the Kiddy Pool on the North end of the Lake at noon. I’m pretty sure we’ll all be pretty easy to spot.

• See lots more photos and a video here.

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 !!!

Is Apple the Newman of Microsoft ?

Well, Microsoft has released two milestone announcements today.

The first, which most readers may be aware of with today’s media coverage, is that Microsoft has negotiated a $10 million dollar deal with Jerry Seinfeld, who will appear as a key celebrity pitchman in ads along with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, in an effort to invigorate it’s image in the ongoing Apple Inc. young hip dude versus the Microsoft Corp. stodgy old-fart guy.

This new $300 million ad campaign, one of the largest in Microsoft’s history, and pitting it against Apple will no doubt insure minimal market “shrinkage” for a company which identifies itself only as Microsoft.

We here at Unusual Life are devout lifetime fans of Jerry, attend his sold-out shows at the Paramount, and watch Seinfeld reruns incessantly, so we salute you Bill for crashing at Jerry’s place or whatever you’re going to do in the ads. This sounds like great fun and I want to sit in on those ad brainstorming meetings.

As much as this excites us however, The second bit of news Microsoft announced today is the release of the much anticipated Photosynth online software.

Photosynth is an amazing new way to share and experience photography in a 3D environment.

Our introduction to Photosynth here at Unusual Life happened a couple of months ago when we were contacted by our pal Janet Galore, asking if Microsoft Live Labs could film at our home for a new top secret software project called Photosynth to be released soon.

Apparently, for their Photosynth “How To” software release video they were looking for an interesting home with some cool art, and the right amount of synthy quality…?

Of course!, we replied, and the film crew with talent Laura Foy arrived two days later for the shoot, which was lots of fun. I immediately began researching Photosynth, and realized that in the near future I would have a new tool that would fundamentally change the way that I thought about taking photos in a most profound way. At the shoot, my initial conversation with David Gedye set my mind spinning with creative possibilities and practical applications of synthing photos together in 3D environments: online virtual galleries, travel, real estate, anything to do with sharing visual information.

Like the best of any viewer created online community, it opens the doors to a whole new experience in open community visualization and interactive possibilities.

And guess what?

You can create your own synth – fast, easy, and free.

Here’s the Photosynth release video, featuring our living room. Here is a Flickr Set of the Photosynth shoot at our place, and the actual Synth that was created of our “92% Synthy” home by Photosynth group manager, David Gedye.

MoMA's Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

Jon Ronson’s fascinating film about his experiences and discoveries documenting the thousands of boxes of Stanley Kubrick’s estate. This is a 50 minute documentary, so click on the full screen button under the video and enjoy it when you find the time.