funny

An eight-foot-tall man returned from a swim on Tuesday morning in Siesta Key, Florida and was promptly detained by authorities. The 100-pound fellow, who resembles a giant Lego figurine, is made of fiberglass. The front of his green tank top reads “No Real Than You Are,” and the back is emblazoned with the number eight and “Ego Leonard,” the name of a Dutch artist whose creations have previously washed up on beaches in England and the Netherlands. “I am glad I crossed over. Although it was a hell of a swim,” wrote the artist, replying to an e-mail from a writer for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “Nice weather here and friendly people. I think I am gonna stay here for a while. A local sheriff escorted me to my new home.” According to a press release issued by the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, “Mr. Leonard is being kept in a secure environment until his owner comes forward.” Lego is not amused. A spokeswoman for Legoland in Orlando told the Herald-Tribune that the Lego man is a counterfeit and not endorsed by Legoland. Meanwhile, the Sarasota Convention & Visitors Bureau is eager to keep him in town. “We were trying to spring him out of jail,” said Erin Duggan, communications director for the tourism bureau. “We had offered to give him a home at the visitors center, where people could come and have their pictures taken with him.”

We miss those halcyon days before the end of 2008 and the total financial collapse, back when every day you could find a story about some type of crazy architecture or museum project going up in Dubai. Remember the suspicious architect behind the Dynamic Tower? Or the plans for the iPad, the building that pre-dated Apple‘s table device by several years, and was instead a skyscraper that looked like an iPod? It was a fun time to watch the endless, silly spending. Of course, all that wild speculation ended exactly how it usually does, with a total implosion. So it’s nice, now nearly three years after that all ended, to catch a brief glimpse of those ridiculous glory days. Arabian Business reports that a Dubai architect is on the hunt for investors to help him build a Herbie theme park. After reportedly trying to get it launched Abu Dhabi and not having much luck, the architect is now trying elsewhere, hoping that he’ll find enough money to construct a multi-million dollar homage to the VW Bug star of several Disney films. Already they have a leg up on the project, having secured a number of the original cars used in the films, including the last incarnation, used in the 2005 film Herbie: Fully Loaded. The news outlet reports that “Initial designs for ‘Herbieland’ include a central building in the shape of a giant baseball, which would house a museum, workshop and cafe.” Good ol’ Dubai.

‘Tis the season for contemplating the dead walking among us and some designers and architects have likely been doing much more thinking about it than you have. The 2011 Zombie Safe House Competition has just kicked into its public voting stage. With roughly 200 entries from more than 12 countries, the project received many more entries, and, as you might expect, far more gruesome, than this year’s Barbie Dream House design contest (though, in thinking of it now, something made for both purposes totally would have been our entry for either competition). As part of the ZombCon kicking off in Seattle on Oct. 21st, the competition features a distinguished panel of judges, from best-selling author Max Brooks to the real-life architecture firms of Eskew+Dumez+Ripple and emmerymcclure architecture. Not surprising at all, many of the entries are remarkably detailed and well-thought. And failing in those criteria, they’re at least horribly bloody or wonderfully funny. We also dig the simple complexity of the RFP-esque “Program Issues to Address”:

1. How many people can you fit in your safe house?

2. How are you handling power, potable water, and waste?

3. How are you handling access to your safe house?

4. How many days do you plan to stay in your safe house, and how much food and water are you providing?

5. How will you escape in the event of a zombie intrusion?

6. How will you keep zombies out of your safe house?

As for the budget you’re allotted: “No budget restriction is applied. Your safe house is human civilization’s last hope!”

Remember back in the very early days of 2010 when Unhappy Hipsters caught the world by storm? The site, which re-purposed photographs taken for magazines like Dwell by captioning them with funny quotes about the tragic ennui suffered by wealthy modernists. Not only was the site wildly popular online, with links galore, it even made it into Psychology Today, which tried to get to the bottom of why all these modernism-loving people were just so darn sad. Now, as these things tend to happen anymore, the Tumblr site has been turned into a book, published by Chronicle and entitled It’s Lonely in the Modern World. Instead of simply going the easy route and essentially copying the site with photos and captions, co-founders Molly Jane Quinn and Jenna Talbott write pieces of advice on “how to navigate the vast array of concrete finishes and plywood grades, accessorize with children and pets, opine with authority on rooflines,” accompanying the funny captions underneath all those photos of sad modernness (here’s a scan of two pages, so you can see for yourself). Apartment Therapy has a nice, quick review of the book, which they describe as having an “extra-dry brand of design-centric humor.”

Remember those halcyon days way back in 2010 when you could go wait in an incredibly long line at the MoMA to spend a few seconds sharing a stare with Marina Abramovic as she sat and stared for her extremely popular The Artist is Present piece? If you’re hankering to return, and watching the Broad Museum get built in real time isn’t drawn out enough for you, designer and artist Pippen Barr has created the brilliant and bizarre The Artist is Present video game. Control your animated, adventure game avatar through the process of paying $25 for a ticket and then go wait in a very long line to see Abramovic. That’s it. And like the often-referenced non-game game, Penn and Teller‘s equally interesting Desert Bus, where you drove a bus through an unchanging landscape for hours but the steering had a slight pull, meaning you had to sit there and pay attention for all those hours, in Barr’s game, if you ignore your place in line, you’ll get bumped and have to start again from the back of the queue. Beside the game, Barr has a number of interesting comments about his creating the game, adding whole other layers to what first appears to just be a funny endeavor. Here’s a bit:

As happens when you make things, though, different meanings and ideas come up as you go along. On researching the show it was pretty obvious that the core mechanic of the game was about waiting – that’s pretty much what everyone focuses on when they think of the show – either waiting to see Abramovic or, in a sense, waiting with her. And that’s immediately titillating because waiting is obviously the height of poor game design according to convention. (Note that there are some great games about waiting, notably Gregory Weir’s Narthex and Increpare’s Queue). Part of my attitude to it, though, was to take it to some kind of “end game” – just waiting, so real other entertainment or chance of interaction, possibly for hours, possibly never even achieving your aim. Brutal waiting.

Sadly, there’s no bonus level in Barr’s game where if you touch the nude people, you get in trouble with the MoMA staff.

With New York’s Fashion Week now all but a distant, glittery memory, hopefully you’ve had time to recover, either having survived being there in person or wearing your fingers to the bone as you scoured the internet for clothes to look at. Fortunately, you can relive it all with this informative and somber piece put together by the always great Put This On, who sent correspondent Dave Hill into the fray to dig out the real stories of the week that was:

In case you missed it, over the weekend, the Economist set off something of a firestorm that’s continuing to reverberate this week with their story “Great Digital Expectations,” wherein they wrote that “next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous ‘BILLY’ bookcase,” followed by their reasoning for the change: “The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome — anything, that is, except books that are actually read.” As you might expect, this provided ample fodder for too many news outlets to list to jump in with headlines about the death of the printed book. Searching for “Ikea” and “bookcase” lands you pieces like the Globe and Mail‘s “Does a Revamped IKEA Shelf Spell the End for Books?” and Time‘s “Ikea Redesigns Classic Bookshelf, Foreshadows the Demise of Books.” The only rub is that nearly all of these stories relied upon the Economist‘s opinion, not necessarily the truth of the matter. NPR spoke to an Ikea representative, hearing that while the redesign news was accurate, “the change to the bookcase was made simply to allow people to store bigger books.” Curbed got even more info from the company, hearing directly from the Billy the Bookshelf himself (itself?), reiterating that “My shelves are deeper so I can house bigger books. Deeper books.” Our favorite response (and mentioned by Billy) came from Rosie Gray at the Village Voice who wrote in reply to all the frantic waving of hands and “sky is falling” reports, “It looks more like a thing that holds books and less like a thing that is setting out to kill the publishing industry, but maybe that’s just us.” And while all of this was going on, not many outlets seemed to pick up on the bigger story, that only had the company redesigned its 30-year old staple, but had also slashed its prices on the bookcase, a sign for those, like at Bloomberg, who take seriously the “Ikea Index,” in which price changes reflect international financial health.

In case you haven’t been following the sudden rise to fame of actor/artist/student Nancy Upton‘s spoof on retailer American Apparel‘s plus-sized model contest (called “The Next Big Thing“), we highly recommend catching up quickly, as it keeps getting better. In addition to her own blog, Extra Wiggle Room, Upton herself recaps the whole experience over at The Daily Beast, wherein she details how she was put off on AA’s call for plus-sized women to send in shots of themselves for seemingly no other reason than to promote the brand, she brought in a photographer friend to shoot her gorging herself with food, all in model-like fashion-ish settings. And likely because her idea was so clever, the photographs so well done, it being the sort of thing that quickly catches fire online, and that the company opened up the contest to public voting, Upton wound up winning. The whole thing has been wonderfully fun, and now said fire has been stoked a touch, with the company’s creative director, Iris Alonzo, not only answering Upton directly in a lengthy email, but simultaneously forwarding the response to dozens of media outlets as well. While well written and occasionally apologetic, it’s sure to keep the story going at least through into the weekend. So had you not already jumped on board to the 400,000 conversations going on about the whole thing, here’s your chance to enter the fray with some new energies behind it.

Getting a graduate degree in anything is expensive, but perhaps that becomes even more daunting when you receive an MFA instead of an often potentially more lucrative degree in nearly any other field. Such is the case with recent Bard College MFA recipient David Horvitz, who has found himself with just over $58,000 to pay back in student loans. In a move nearly as old as the internet itself, he’s taken a page from the original asking-strangers-for-money success story, Karyn Bosnak and her Save Karyn blog, and has launched a project called “fifty-eight cents.” After confirming with loan administration company Sallie Mae that his repayment checks could come from anywhere, just so long as his 10-digit account number is included, he’s asking for 58-cents from anyone who will spare the spare change. It’s certainly not the most original idea (Save Karyn, after all, launched a billion copycats, as did the Million Dollar Homepage and almost every other money-making internet meme), but who knows? We wish him the best of luck, and if there’s any extra cash left over in the end, we’d love to have a chunk to pay off some of our own student loans.

Just this weekend, this writer and his wife were talking about something or another and she brought up that episode of The Simpsons where architect Frank Gehry crumples up a letter, tosses it on the ground, and upon seeing it, gets the inspiration for his next building. Turns out, not only was that funny scene on our minds this weekend but CNN‘s Fahreed Zakaria as well. The host had on Gehry and asked him about his process (or in his words: “…the strangeness comes from where?”), which inevitably led to the architect’s appearance on The Simpsons. Turns out, that scene has followed him around more that perhaps he’d like. Here’s from the transcript:

ZAKARIA: So this – the famous story that you took a piece of paper and crumpled it and looked at it and that was the Disney Hall in L.A.

GEHRY: But that’s a famous story because the Simpsons had me do that.

ZAKARIA: But in fact, it was a long, long -

GEHRY: No, no, no, no. That was just a fun – fun thing. But it has – it has haunted me. People do – who’ve seen “The Simpson’s” believe it.

A hat tip to the Observer for the link.