SUPER HITOPS - TOM BUCKHOLZ

Nouvelle Vague is a French band that performs bossa nova covers of punk and new wave classics. They’re currently touring the U.S. Songs and tour dates at their myspace. I’m not sure who did the original song for this one. The clip, found on youtube, is a slightly edited version of a scene from the 1964 Jean-Luc Godard film Bande à part / Band of Outsiders. The Nouvelle Vague song replaces the original audio.

It’s interesting to compare that version with the original film version of the scene, as excerpted here with English subtitles. The tone is a bit different and the scene contains moments where the music cuts out and narration about the characters comes in.

These are some new collages on book pages from flickr user xactorocker. There are a couple more, and some drawings, on his page. Oh, and he’s 7.

His father is an art director and illustrator with a portfolio at trustzabo.com. Here’s some of dad’s work;

The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9! was created by Jake Armstrong over the course of 15 months or so. Jake says in this excellent post at Cartoon Brew, that he made Alpha-9! entirely in Flash with a Cintiq (stylus and tablet), aside from initial story boards. He also cites specific Bugs Bunny references and other inspiration for the short.

I took some captures of the animation, which highlight a few of my favorite shots.



Jake’s blog is here, and includes a post showing these hand made business cards he stamped.



cartons and things

Dull Bulb & All is a clean and simple art blog heavy on large images. Very good taste, which is to say very close to my own. You tend to get around 5 or 6 pictures of work from each artist selected for a post.

Above, all from Dull Bulb & All, Katharina Trudzinski’s assemblage of painted wood, Henry Gunderson’s painting (dude is 18 years old), and Sophie Kern’s collage/drawing.

Go to the dullbulb tumblr site to see more info and work from these artists, and links to their sites. There’s also a short video interview/studio visit with Kern. Some of her drawings in the video feel and look a lot like Neckface pieces, if my memory serves me correctly. I would prefer to believe that Sophie Kern is an adorable actress hired to play a public persona, through which Neckface can experiment with new material.



Below, more featured artists from the blog.

Above, from BibliOdyssey posts:

A TIME TABLE from the book Mitchell’s New General Atlas, Containing Maps Of The Various Countries Of The World, Plans Of Cities, Etc., Embraced In Ninety-Three Quarto Maps, Forming A Series Of One Hundred and Forty-seven Maps and Plans, Together With Valuable Statistical Tables..’ by Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr, 1883, from BibliOdyssey post Victorian Infographs.

Untitled scan from the book, London Town (1883), Designed and illustrated by Thos. Crane & Ellen Houghton, from BibliOdyssey post London Town.

Pasquin’s wind card[s] on the wind trade of the year 1720, from BibliOdyssey post, The Mirror of Folly

Uncredited illustration from a Hungarian geology book, from BibliOdyssey post, Splintered Remainders

Above, assorted drawings by E. T. Reed from BibliOdyssey post, A Twist of Reed

The Wikipedia article traffic statistics site lets you enter a term, select a month and year (formatted with “200902″ representing February, 2009), and view a graph of daily wikipedia page views for that subject.

I made the above animation using the page view statistics from January, 2008, through January, 2010, for the Wikipedia page on “full moon”. Each month is a frame, with one or two removed due to incomplete data. You can see that the spiked interest (”Wikibump”) in the full moon article is at its highest each month on the days that a full moon is happening.

Perhaps page views are lower for a full moon in a certain month because it was cloudy that night and fewer people noticed. Or higher the next month because the moon was full on Friday the 13th.

This graph for December 2009 is my favorite, and reflects the fact that we had 2 full moons in the month (on the 2nd and the 31st). If a month gives us two full moons, the second is known as a “blue moon”.

The page views for “blue moon” on Wikipedia rise from an average of three or four thousand throughout the greater portions of December ‘09 and January ‘10, with a peak of 181,200 the night of the blue moon — also the last night of the decade, New Year’s Eve.





Page views for each day of the selected month are listed at the tops of the bars. Unfortunately, relative bar height is not consistent across months, as seen in the changing notation on the far right edge of the graphs.

I found out about the Wikipedia article traffic statistics page from boingboing.net’s post, Wikibumps, in which guest blogger Andrea James investigates the site and catalogs a bunch of interesting examples of media events and current events sparking traffic jumps on certain Wiki pages.

On her above side-by-side comparison, Andrea writes, In some cases, the article achieves stasis at a higher level than it had before the wikibump. For instance, Kanye “Imma Let You Finish” West’s bump was 300,000. Taylor Swift’s was 250,000, but Taylor probably came out ahead, as she achieved stasis at more than twice Kanye’s views in December, the last full month of reporting.