Australian golf sharks?

And just when I thought that Australians couldn't get sharks involved in anything new.  Actually this started in 1996 when a nearby tidal basin flooded and left a wide variety of fish as well as several bull sharks in the lake.  It's between the 12th and 15th holes, and is marked with large signs warning people not to go in after their lost golf balls.  Bull sharks are one of a few species of sharks that can adapt to live in fresh water, and have been known to travel hundreds of miles up rivers including the Ohio and the Mississippi.

Check out a video of the lake sharks here...

This is the Carbrook Golf Course in the Brisbane area on the eastern coast of Australia.  Golfers have been known to bring red meat and chicken to feed the sharks.  This is one of many courses I'd LOVE to play, for entirely non golf-related reasons.  I'd pay my fee, walk to the lake, and sit down under a tree with a pipe, a cooler full of Fosters and a bag of chicken necks for a few hours.  Too bad it's on the other side of the friggin planet.  

One sure way to piss off your neighbors...

Unless maybe I was one of the neighbors.  This is a house built by Mexican artist, sculptor and instigator Armando Munoz Garcia.  The woman's body interior is actual living area.  I think every neighborhood should have at least a few people like this.  Why not?

This guy also created the structure that's come to be known as "La Mona" in Tijuana.

That's not just a statue, it's a house.  He lives in there.  That's probably why she has such a big ass.  I hear that's where the kitchen and bathroom are, and he sleeps in her breasts.  There's a "library" in her head.  I read a quote from him...  "Give me enough rebar and an oxyacetylene torch and I'll line the border with giant nude Amazons."  I like the way this guy thinks.

Another very cool toy we can all start saving up for...

This is called a "seabreacher".  They're designed like dolphins or sharks, and they can travel under the surface as well as above like a regular boat.  The movements they're capable of are a lot like that of a dolphin, see a video here.  See a video of seabreachers here...  They're being custom built now, but I don't imagine it'll be long before they're being mass-produced.  I read a starting price is around $65,000 for a basic model.  I'll probably be needing one for my place here in Florida, another for my winter home in Hawaii, and another for my vacation villa in The Maldives.  :D

If you want to feel really crappy about "sort of" learning a musical instrument...

Watch THIS~ Watch Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor  By the way, the big pipe in the middle they keep showing is never used... if it were, everyone in the building would vomit immediately then bleed from the eye sockets for the next three days.

Unreasonable Doubt

Ok, I wasn't looking for a first degree murder conviction, that would have been nearly impossible to prove.  Second degree would have been nice though, and if not reporting your child missing or dead for a month isn't child neglect then what is?  And while we're on the subject, I wonder what the fine is for allowing all those people to search high and low for a month for a body she dumped in the woods?  Anyway, if this bitch is ever allowed to have children or even babysit children ever again, it's a sad statement about the toilet we're creating out of a once proud and dignified society.  I fully understand that the media attention a case like this attracts is a modern version of the old fashioned mob mentality, and our "justice system" is in place to prevent innocent people from being chased down with torches and pitchforks until cornered then stoned into something resembling strawberry jam.  However, our "justice system" seems to deserve nothing less than the vengeance and wrath that it's been denying cold-blooded lying killers like this one.  Maybe we just don't have the right charges for this kind of crime.  To take your child and dump it in the woods, either simulating a murder or covering one up, requires a very long prison sentence whether the cause of death was provable or not.  Sometimes though, society takes care of little mistakes like these.  I can only hope that there's a serial killer or two out there with some flexibility in his or her schedule and then no child in this woman's future will need to take the risk of her special maternal attention.  Frankenstein's monster would tell you that the mob that chased him down was misguided in their feelings.  I have absolutely no idea what the fuck this jury was thinking or feeling.   In a case like this one, I think even an undead monster with an abnormal brain would say that sometimes the mob is right.  

Part 2

Continued from the earlier post below...

I drove home, and pulled into my usual spot.  I could swear that I saw something move behind the big Cypress tree to my left... but I had been seeing so many things since I left work an hour ago that I just wrote it off to stress and a busy work week that had freaked me out.  I got my stuff gathered up and I headed upstairs.  On the stairs, everything changed.  As soon as the security door closed behind me, I heard this loud heavy breathing, like a dragon with asthma.  The lights in the stairwell began to flicker.  I hastened my walk up the stairs and set my bags down to find the keys.  I got my keys out of my pocket and just then the lights went out completely.  I fumbled with them for a moment, until I got one in the right position.  The breathing sound was getting closer, moving up the stairwell.  The key I had didn't work in the deadbolt, so I jammed it into the door handle and unlocked it.  I carefully grabbed the next key on the ring and threw the deadbolt over and swung my door inward.  I grabbed my bags and fell inside, kicking the door shut when I cleared.  I flew to my feet and turned the deadbolt, handle, and wuss-chain for the element of sound if nothing else.  Locks can be picked but breaking the chain isn't a quiet thing.  I leaned against the wall for two or three minutes, listening.  When I heard nothing for several minutes, I gathered the strength to put my groceries and other things away.  I twisted the cap off a beer and sat down at my computer desk.  I was about to drink the first deep gulps of my beer when a sound came from my balcony that chilled the blood in my veins to ice.  This had happened only three times in my life, once the first time seeing Friday The 13th part one in the theater where Jason comes out of the water at the end.  The second again, first time in the theater in Jaws where Ben Gardner's head comes out of the underwater hole in his boat, and the third was in college when my girlfriend gave me "The News."  This was the fourth time.  It sounded like an anaconda wrestling with a wild boar on my balcony.  It sounded like it was pushing at the sliding glass door, and though I knew the door was locked, I knew that kind of door could easily be pushed off its track.  I staggered across my living room and grabbed what I could from my "mostly decorative/functional by necessity" weapons wall on my way to my bedroom closet.  I had nowhere else to go.

I ran to the back of the walk-in closet and had the most absurd thought under the circumstances... does running into a walk-in closet violate some cosmic law?  I remember I laughed out loud as I was running.  Hysteria was beginning to set in. I reached the back and turned, my Gil Hibben Raptor in my right hand, my Gil Hibben Raven in my left, and my custom cut Klingon machete clenched firmly between my teeth as backup.  It was right then that I heard the sliding glass door slide slowly open.  There is no way to describe the terror I felt, our worst dreams and movies seem to pale into insignificance when a real, stark raving horror wraps itself around you and completely paralyzes you.  I felt this and was able to summon the last strength to assume a death-pounce crouch and I waited.  I waited for a half an hour, waiting to die basically, either galvanized by fear or fighting like a wild man.  I was hoping for the latter.  I know how to bleed myself, quickly and relatively painlessly, if need be.  I was considering this as an option as the time drew up around the hour mark.  I finally decided that death was something to be experienced to its fullest enjoyment, since we only get one and it's arguably the last entertainment we might ever get.  I decided to go out and meet whatever had been following me all night with blades in my hands and a primal scream in my throat.  I walked to the front of the closet and pushed the door open.  I saw nothing in the bedroom.  I walked slowly into the hallway, still nothing.  I carefully edged my eye around the corner to look into the living room.  You're not going to believe what I saw there.  Sitting there, right in the middle of my living room, drinking a beer, laughing and pointing at me, mocking me, it was the weekend!  Woohoo!  It's the WEEKEND!
:D

The evil that follows me...

The moment I left work today I felt like something was watching me.  You know that feeling, where you just know someone or something is right there, looking at you, but you can't see it.  Like being in the jungle, at any second there could be two or a thousand eyes on you.  I shrugged it off, got in my car, and drove across the street to buy some stuff I needed.  As I was walking through the parking lot, I thought I could just see, out of the corner of my eye, a shadow moving between the cars... following me.  I walked into the store and the feeling subsided.  Now it was just the drones of society looking at me, and they were benign at best, pathetic at worst.  The difference between a genius and a mindless drone is simply one of perspective.  And it was this perspective that turned me into everyone else's mindless drone, out buying some stuff.

I found myself in the electronics department on my way to checkout, as I needed a phone card to add minutes to my cell.  I wasn't looking forward to that, though, the last three times I had tried to add minutes from a prepaid card failed and I was forced to spend around an hour and a half each time on the phone with some guy in Pakistan to get it worked out.  I was beginning to believe that for every minute I wanted on my cell, I had to spend one minute on hold while my friend Ranjeek entered more information, thank you sir, please hold...  As I was walking out of the electronics area, I saw that I was going to pass by the customer service counter.  An overwhelming rage overtook me at that moment, and I felt like I was watching myself from a third person point of view.  I felt the "watched" sensation that I had experienced outside again, full force.  Only this time, it was me watching.  I walked up to the clerk at the customer service counter, carefully placed my phone card on the counter, turned it around so it faced the him, and slid it forward.  Like a striking snake, I grabbed him by the collar with my left hand and slapped him in the side of the head twice with the package of thick-sliced bacon I had been holding behind my back in my right and screamed "Is this going to work, you filthy swine?"  He tried to lurch backward but I had him, and he fell sideways trying to tear my grip loose.  "Swine!  You mother-raping bastard, do you know someone named Ranjeek?  Answer me!"  I raised the bacon again, and stared deeply into the terrified clerk's soul.  It was actually the quiet that warned me that I was drawing a crowd.  The sight of a man being publicly beaten with bacon is something that many people simply cannot handle.  I lifted the clerk up off his knees from his attempts to grovel out of my grasp and brought him up to meet me, eyeball to eyeball.  "If this doesn't work, I'll be back."  "Wh-why w-wouldn't it work, sir?"  The clerk seemed genuinely confused, so I thought I should take a more reasonable track with him.  "Do you want me to go through that, right here in front of the Tracfone aisle, in front of all these people?"  I screamed... raising the bacon again.  He said nothing.  I let him go and he slumped to the floor, frozen in terror.  I held his petrified gaze as I pushed my cart through the rabble of onlookers I had attracted.  I could tell that he'd never be the same.  There was something in his eyes that said he'd been changed forever, and he'd never enjoy bacon ever again.

To be continued...

It wasn't easy... continued

Continued from earlier...

No, it didn't look like Dr. Zoidberg, but that's an awesome painting.  Not one of mine, unfortunately.

The first thing I had to do was stop the alarms beeping... and as I hit both the radar and sonar switches, I saw a gigantic tentacle fall right in front of me.  It was so close, I knew I had only one chance.  I saw that the tentacle had too much downward momentum, I knew that extending the sub-surface fins and diving under wasn't an option, so I did the exact opposite.  I pushed the throttle forward to full, and I was pushed back in my chair as the triple engines raged to their maximum thrust.  The bow raised up as I went from a hard left at 60 knots to  a straight run at 120.  The bow hit the top of the partially submerged tentacle, and I went airborne.  I knew this was my chance to get the best shot possible on most of the creature, so I grabbed the weapons joystick and jabbed the reverse angle button on the viewer.  I quickly targeted about half a dozen flailing tentacles, and just on chance, I sent another three missiles toward what I estimated as the center of the whole mess.  I closed my finger around the "fire" trigger and two seconds later the boat hit the water.

I saw a blinding flash in the viewer and a split second later it surrounded the ship, lighting up the ocean like daylight for a half mile in every direction.  The boat bounced across the water twice like a flat stone on a lake, then grabbed hold of the water and shot forward fully powered again.  I glanced between the rear viewer and the sonar for a minute, and breathed a sigh of relief as I saw several separate blips fading away behind me on the sonar.  The big blip kept moving though... I could tell it was still alive.  

I had made it, survived The Kraken.  We had survived it before, aboard The Abyss... but we were a crew of many on a large ship then.  I knew it was rare to see it twice, but since it was in the area I felt bad that I couldn't warn the skeleton crew left aboard my old ship.  I don't know what's worse, The Kraken or those Nazi Pests, but I hope they survive both.  I know we'll meet again somewhere, some day.  Maybe Singapore, maybe The Maldives.  Who knows?  It's a big ocean... 

It wasn't easy...

Right after I jumped from "The Plank" to the hull of my boat, (almost exactly like Earthrace, only a dazzling blue and green paint job) I felt a remarkable sense of calm come over me.  There's a reason the word "freedom" begins with the word "free".  Freedom doesn't mean do whatever you want, of course, but any restrictions on freedom should be reasonable and not end up costing any sane person a large part of their sanity.  When freedom ends up costing too much it becomes costdom, and there's no room for costdom on this planet.  Wow, I just saw Carrie Fisher on a weight loss commercial.  Imagine that, Princess Leia turned into Jabba The Hutt.  Looks like she's making a solid effort at reversing the damage. 

Anyway, I digress.  the sun was setting as I roared off into the expanse of the seemingly boundless Pacific  ocean, waving that special finger at the evil Nazi Pests, (as they'll be referred to any time the unlikely event arises where I MUST refer to them).   I set the boat on auto cruise, and went up on deck for a cold beer and a shmoke.  I knew I'd see my friends aboard The Abyss again, but I felt kind of sad as I watched the ship get smaller and smaller behind me.  When it finally disappeared over the horizon, I went back inside and cooked a nice big bacon cheeseburger.  I throttled back to half so I'd run the shipping lanes in the daytime, and set the volume on the radar to maximum then I reclined the Captain's chair waaaaay back, and dozed off. 

I woke up to a sound I hadn't expected... and as my brain cleared, I recognized the alarm I was hearing not as the radar, but the sonar.  I also realized that based on the pitch, it was something massive, larger even than blue whales which I had passed close by before.  Then another alarm filled the cockpit... this time, the radar!  I flipped on the external floodlights and swerved the boat hard over to avoid whatever was directly in front of me.  I saw a huge towering column of writhing flesh, easily ten feet in diameter, and as I passed by, I saw the suckers... as big as sewer hole covers!  It was the Kraken!  Aaaaahhhhhhh!

To be continued...

They know who they are...

No, it's nobody I know.  It's a giant corporation.  A giant, douche sucking corporation.  A giant money-grubbing Nazi goose-stepping corporation.  A CENSOR anything that isn't appropriate for a 16 year old (sorry got my sarcasm reversed there briefly...) corporation.  I'M  BAAAAAAAAAACKKK!!!!!!   :D

Attempt no landings there...

I was in a hurry this morning and didn't catch this one at a good angle for cropping.  I started this painting about 6 years ago... about time I finished, eh?  Mount Zeus there on the left of course.  What's it made of?  Hmmm... has a mountain ever been a girl's best friend?  HAH!  I'm trying to process and be rid of a lot of unfinished stuff hanging around my place.  The orange background on the woman's back piece is still as wet as the day I painted it.  Bummer.  No biggie, stuff like that tends to be wet for a while then dries all of a sudden.

I found a funny item to go along with this post... enjoy.  About the lamest "action figure" I've ever seen, yet somehow I feel I would buy one if I had extra cash.

A nice relaxing Saturday

Hanging out today working on a nice painting, watching Lord of the Rings and having a few beers.  I'll post again later with an updated shot.  Hope everyone's having a great weekend! 

About 3/4 of the way done at this point... I still need to finish the jeans, and add the tattoo that's not even sketched into the piece yet.  I wanted to see where the light looked best when I painted the back right side of her body.  I'm borrowing an idea from my ultimate mentor, Boris Vallejo, the tattoo will be half tattoo and half 3-D, a dragon or some other kind of cool lizard coming up out of her skin.   Right there between her right hip and shoulder area.  Also some sweat droplets... I wanted to experiment with droplets in a painting and this seemed like a good time.  The picture I based this painting on had sweat drops and rivulets on her back so I'll hopefully make the best of that look.  I spent all damn day on it today, hopefully I can get at least the jeans done tomorrow.  I'll probably have to wait till the skin is dry to do the tattoo.  Oil paint is a pain sometimes when you want to keep going, but sometimes a blessing when you need to take a break from a piece.

Busy with art these days...

Here's the one I told some of you about, clearly inspired by one of my favorite artists Roger Dean.  The camera distorts slightly so it curved the horizon.  Kind of busy now so I'll come back later.  :D  Click to enlarge by the way...

Ok, so I wasn't around for a while to fill up space with weird news and complaining, probably because I haven't been reading much news lately or even surfing the web for interesting gadgets etc.  I did see a headline today about a law against farting in public, maybe I'll read that later and get something going.

Lately I've been spending a lot more time drawing and painting, out of necessity these days.  The economy is still keeping work slow and bills need to be paid regardless.  I'm doing stuff that takes less time and can be sold for less.  The art world is a tough thing to get a handle on.  Some dumbass throws a few handfuls of paint at a canvas and a museum is more than happy to display it, and it sells for a hundred grand.  Let someone with some talent and technical skill actually put some thought into a piece and somehow it seems impossible to get a couple hundred.  Until one gets one's name known, of course, then you can wipe your ass on a canvas and the world pulls out its wallet.   I have an interesting opportunity now, since our gallery handles the yearly poster for the SunFest festival in West Palm Beach each May.  The SunFest committee typically decides on an average tropical scene that's made into a poster and sold framed and unframed, signed & numbered and plain. This year I'm trying to get a piece done for their consideration, but it might be tight time-wise.  If I don't get it done in time hopefully I'll get it in for next year.  I have a great idea and it's probably going to be a perfect scene if it comes out like I'm planning.  Since I'm painting it specifically for SunFest, it'll have all the elements that lend themselves to a successful image instead of just a few that a previously made one would.  I'm treating it as an assignment in an art class.  I'll post it when it's done.

I'll be back around in a few days with a nice post about some cool gizmo and a quirk of society that's recently pissed me off, I promise.  And don't expect anything about the Super Bowl.  I think Christina Aguillera has probably been blogged to death over what she did, and the reading of the Declaration of Independence before a sports event hopefully doesn't need any input from me beyond labeling the Americana-bloated pregame show as no more significant than the role of a porn fluffer.  A porn fluffer that bears a sickening resemblance to your high school civics teacher.

So much for the fucking "New Year"...

And so much for hoping that one day the rising tide of malignant humanity might finally show even the slightest signs of receding.  Every year that's gone by for the past ten or so years I've watched and cringed, and I've put more and more distance between myself and anyone or anything that I didn't absolutely have to interact with.  Friends aside, the image I have of this country in general is worse than any festering zombie movie you can name.  The torrential shitrain that's flooding the streets and stores and entertainment is costing this country any sense of dignity and respect it may have once had.  I swear if I ever were to travel anywhere else on the planet I will deny to the death that I'm an American, and although I've never lamented not being rich, the ONE thing I would do if I did have the money would be to move the fuck OUT. 

There was a time, long ago, when Americans actually had simple common decency toward each other.  Now, you need to understand, there's no one thing that has me on this particular rant.  I wasn't cut off on my mile and a half commute home tonight, and no 150 year old mummified carcass suddenly stopped dead in the road with its mouth hanging open trying to remember what it's doing behind the wheel of a 2 ton vehicle.  I stopped at no store to witness the obscenely obese in skin tight clothing waddling along with a shopping cart full of pizza and ice cream, babbling at its six children in Spanish, and for the moment the trojans that have been plaguing me are quiet.  It's also not the firefox bullshit that loads all these "fun" things I simply MUST have, automatically, every once in a while, like it did today, installing crap I don't want and didn't ask for, resetting my home page of its own volition, wasting almost a half hour of my time. (yeah this old comp I've been using is so slow it takes that long to remove it all).  It's not the goddamn helicopter that's been circling my neighborhood for almost an hour sending a shock of static through my T.V. every 27 seconds.  It's not the fact that here, right in the middle of the most populated area of south Florida, I can't get a radio station that I can tolerate to come in at work without static.  It's not the dumbass who walks his dog/dinosaur behind the gallery and leaves a gigantic pile of shit right directly outside our back door,  It's not the fact that the $8.88 shoe store at the end of our plaza attracts creatures who are more animal than human, who can more accurately be called an infestation than a customer base, who stuff their cars with as many individuals as they can, buy their cheap ass shoes, then leave the bags, boxes, wrappings, and receipts in the parking lot when they leave to slither back to the slums they've created through just such behavior.  It's not the fact that nine out of ten ads I hear on either the radio or the T.V. involve some sort of deception, because it fucking WORKS!  Stupid people don't think, and people who don't think don't hear the deception.  It only makes things worse that about half the advertisements I see or hear have something to do with vanity (a complete waste these days, considering) or sexual dysfunction.  So, it's none of those things, or any of the dozens more that don't happen to be up front in my head right now and I'll be damned if I'll try to bring them there, but it's SOMETHING.

So 2011 isn't starting out so well, at least not here in sunny south Florida.  Simple human consideration is long dead and clearly the population increase of 27 million in the past decade isn't an uplifting figure.  In 10-20 years, we're going to be interacting directly with these people, and considering the stench out there right now, we're all in for some unpleasant surprises in the coming years.  Here in the U.S.A. the term "Happy New Year" is a fucking JOKE.  Selah.