A very cool Flash animation loop that lets the viewer travel right through the picture to reveal another one nested inside, and so on, and so on.....

This month the worlds highest and longest road bridge was completed and opened to traffic. The Millau Viaduct in Southern France, 1.5 miles (2.4km) long, and 1,125 ft above the River Tarn.

An amazing structure visually, and for its technical achievements, it looks like driving through the clouds.

link to images... link to story... link to bridge trivia

Tonight is Christmas Eve and Santa won't be the only flying object that gets attention. The Cassini spacecraft that has been traveling around the Saturn system for the last couple of months is due to release the Huygens probe tonight for a descent to the surface of the moon Titan.

Due to arrive on Jan 14, the probe will send back information as it coasts on it's trajectory, and will continue to relay what it finds back to us, for however long it may last on the surface.

link to JPL mission homepage

the fantastic array of the pipe organ at the Walt Disney concert Hall, ranging from the size of a pencil to a telephone pole.

Designed by Frank Gehry, and made from many materials--Norwegian pine, Douglas fir, porcelain, ebony...

link to images link to specs

With this camera carried aloft by a series of kites high above the city of San Fransico, George R Lawrence photographed the ruins left by the great fire that ravaged the city in 1906.

With a curved plate the angle covered was 130 degress and the resulting prints are fort-seven by nineteen inches.

link

designs for entertainment, products, toys, transportation and creatures.

Scott Robertson and Neville Page

The Cartoonist is a site where i have found a lot of connections to interesting online galleries and portfolios of various artists, painters, illustrators and poster art.

Peter de Seve has illustrations in The New Yorker, editorials and other magazines and his selections on his site are fantastic.

Inspired by comic books, science fiction, fantasy and current events, they range from creepy to humorous.

link

Keith Weesner has a great online gallery of illustrations....

Vintage cars and bikes, accompanied by vintage pin-up girls.

'embrace your computer problems' with Errorwear ....geeky tee-shirts labelled with familiar pc error screens.

just in case anyone was wondering...

Some of the images i have used in decorating this site are based on this guitar. The 1927 National 'Tricone' Triple- resonator acoustic. With a metal body and three aluminum resonator cones, a favorite of country and blues players. Production ended in 1943. Unfortunately, I don't have one of these in my collection.

a gallery by Michael Paulus called 'Skeletal Systems'......

"Animation was the format of choice for children's television in the 1960s, a decade in which children's programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities.I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass."

here is Marvin, but i don't see the Alluvian 5000 Rain-Specifying Space Modulator......

from the US National Library of Medicine- a collection of anatomical representations in images ranging from cave drawings to engravings to surrealism.

"The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious, fearful, amazing. In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation, fantasy, and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century-and the cascade of print technologies that followed-helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque - a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self."

with the Art.Com Art Pad , create your masterpiece, frame it and hang it in a gallery next to other great Masters.....lots of fun to try.

My own creation can be found here....ha ha ha ha ha

that's a guy hanging on below that bouquet of balloons.It's called Cluster Ballooning, looks like a lot of fun, but how do you steer them.....?

From John Ninomiya, and the 'Cluster Balloon Flight Page'......."With half a dozen pilots worldwide, cluster ballooning remains something between an extreme sport and a personal eccentricity, for the moment. At present, I'm the only regularly active cluster balloonist in North America, and to my knowledge, have completed more cluster flights than anyone in the world. There are two cluster balloon pilots in the UK, and another three or four people who have made single flights."

'Exotic Guitars' has a few variations on the six-string.....this one is the Egyptian Fantasy.

'......Exotic Guitars are more than works of Art, they incorporate advanced instrument construction techniques for the ultimate results in sound and playability. The instruments that you are seeing were constructed using classical instrument building techniques - and are elaborate sculptures - they are not merely airbrushed paintings on the same old guitars.'

a nice collection showcasing the Corgi Toys lineup, first introduced in 1956.

Models in good condition and with the original box can be worth a lot of $. They're all here....the Batmobile, Jaguars, Mustangs, Corvettes, Austins, and my favorite, the Saint's Volvo.

link