Month: July 2005

Image Savant is a fine art studio located in Hollywood, California, owned and operated by me, Richard “dr.” Baily. My primary focus is digital fx animation, but occasionally I compose music, paint, and write.

SPORE is an ongoing software/aesthetic development project that has grown out of a proprietary ultra-high speed particle renderer which runs on Irix, Linux, and OSX. All the images on page 1 and 2 are stills from animations, and some of these stills are constructed with over 1 billion particles.

I put a few of these on my desktop.

Brothers Fred S. and August Duesenberg (1876-1932 and 1879-1955, respectively), were German-born mechanical masterminds raised in Rockford, Iowa, in a large immigrant family. They taught themselves the principles of transportation engineering and designed and built their first car, the Marvel, in Des Moines in about 1904. The brothers then went to Indianapolis, where the Dusenburg Automobile and Motors Company was established in 1920. The custom-built Dusenburg was considered the finest car in the world. It was also the most expensive luxury automobile in the world, sold only to the very affluent.

If you have a job where you deal with customers all day, you can play Hipster Bingo to break the monotony.

Not sure what a hipster is? Check out the Hipster Handbook.

If you don’t get a lot of hipsters at your business establishment, you can make your own bingo cards with custom squares. A body odor square? Don’t tell me it can’t happen. Drunk? Really big eyeglasses? The possibilities are endless. It’s also possible, or even likely, that you’ll get fired if you get caught doing this.

If you have an office job, you can play BS Bingo at meetings.

The National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The museum/library attracts 20,000 � 30,000 visitors and program participants each year, from all 50 states and many other countries.

The first Bohemians to Cedar Rapids arrived between 1852 and 1853. They settled in the current downtown area of Cedar Rapids, where everyone else was living. One of the first Czech organizations established was Sokol (est. 1873). The current building was built in 1908. Immigration was rather slow until 1871 when T. M. Sinclair built a meat packinghouse in Cedar Rapids. ~

Bohemian immigration to Cedar Rapids increased due to employment opportunities at the packinghouse. Sinclair, an Irish immigrant himself, was not afraid to hire immigrant labor, knew the Bohemians were well educated and hard workers, and they arrived with the skills necessary to help his packinghouse become a successful meatpacking plants. As a result, Bohemian immigrants arrived, confident they would find stable employment, and Sinclair�s meat packinghouse went on to become one of the most successful plants in the world.

There’s a BIG list of Czech Links where I found this chronology of Czechs in America, and the Bily Clock Museum and Antonin Dvorak Exhibit in Spillville, Iowa.

The Goodguys Rod & Custom Association, founded by President Gary Meadors in 1983, is the nation’s leader in producing and promoting exciting automotive enthusiast events. As an Association, Goodguys offers a fraternity � a fellowship of hot rod enthusiasts featuring over 70,000 members worldwide. As an automotive event promoter, Goodguys offers 22 annual events across the country from New York to Florida, from San Diego to Seattle and all points in between.

I went to the Goodguys car show in Des Moines two weeks ago, but I didn’t download the pictures until today.

Check the schedule. They could be showing up near you.

There’s a whole web site dedicated to a single baseball player and his approaching major league record.

Dedicated to Craig Biggio and his (probably unintentional) Quest to break the all time major league career record for getting hit by pitches.

Flipbook! is an interactive Flash application that allows people to draw simple animations, save them to a gallery and share them with other people via e-mail.

BoingBoing found a reading of a Rocky and Bullwinkle script by the original voice actors.

In 1982 UCLA hosted a Jay Ward film festival. The highlight of the festival was a reading of a script by the original voice actors, including June Foray (Rocky, Natasha, and most of the other female characters) and Bill Scott (Bullwinkle).~

Chuck Jones once said: “June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc was the male June Foray.”

The whole thing takes about an hour, with roughly nine minutes of introductions.

PixelRoller is a paint roller that paints pixels, designed as a rapid response printing tool specifically to print digital information such as imagery or text onto a great range of surfaces. The content is applied in continuous strokes by the user. PixelRoller can be seen as a handheld “printer”, based around the ergonomics of a paintroller, that lets you create the images by your own hand.

Now you can put a nice Coolidge on your garage door.