All Recommendations

Here's a word that needs to be used once weekly. It is lifted from the greek, and the plural is borborygmi. I do believe this will be the next confusing and degrading insult I will use when given the opportunity.

Theatre Oobleck Website
I took a year off my studies at University of Michigan in the early 1980s and became a prop artist for a small theater group called Streetlight Theater. They touted themselves as a communist theater with no director, that was dedicated to promoting various leftish social and politacal agendas.  One fine day, the whole theater troupe picked up and moved to Chicago leaving me behind to finish my degree.

The group is now known as Theatre Oobleck and has been successfully surprising, antagonizing, and inspiring the people of the Chicago area and beyond with their work. Some of their works have even been produced off Broadway and over seas.
Here's a spot from their Manifesto:

Putting the burden of innovation on the director is like putting the prime minister in charge of the revolution, for the director, insofar as he remains a director, cannot help but defend that kind of theater in which he has a place of importance, suppressing those ancient models of the theater which do not require his services.

At first, I thought this was a silly novelty, but after inspecting a little further, I see this as a fantastic creative tool for the generation of form and pattern.

My work is pretty stodgy- figurative sculpture - but I can envision this tool thoroughly entiching my conception of gesture, fabric flow, and composition. 

I can also see this tool as having fantastic power to unstall someone who has white canvas block. 

All this, not to mention that this tool is free - the code is open -  it's designed and implemented to make the world a better place. It's Mac/Windows?Linux compatible.  Take a gander: al.chemy.org

Here's an interesting article about how evolution created a nut and bolt like structure top serve as the hip of a weevil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/science/05obscrew.html

There have been numeous other studies that have found that evolution creates simple machines on both the large scale (much of our skeletal system can be models as levers and pulleys) and the tiny scale of protein molecules. Here's Dr. Trevor Lithgow's research on protein molecules (lay language)  or  Peer review.

This is great stuff. It makes science more accessible to people. It's one of the most  important callings for an artist today.

Born Una Winifred Atwell in 1910 or 1914 in Trinidad and Tobago, she showed much promise in her early years. She was challenged to perform Boogie-Woogie by American Servicemen according to the Wikipedia.

In the 1946 she was inducted in to the Royal Academy of Music, being the first woman to be awarded the highest marks for musicianship.

She developed her own style of Honky-Tonk piano, preferring her familiar slightly out-of tune upright to concert grands.

Here's an amateur video of the results of settling sediments beneath a plaza in Japan. The earthquake jarred the saturated soil beneath the plaza, which led to the cracks and water and mud rising to the surface. Two things strike me:

1. The rapidity with which the water seeps above the pavement.
2. The absolute calm of the people in the area. If the earth opened up and urped muck in NYC, nothing less than pandemonium would ensue.

It amazes me how cultural differences can affect not only the behavior of the individual, but also crowd rection in sudden and potential dangerous circumstances.

Crepuscular is not one of those words that sounds like what it is. It simply means active during twilight of dawn or dusk. Matutinal crespucular organisms are active at dawn, whereas verspertine crespucular organisms are active at dusk.

The first known use of "crepuscular" was in 1668, according to Merriam-Webster online. "Crepusculum" means twilight in Latin.