In the 17th century a German Jesuit scholar called Athanasius Kircher made a Cat Piano. The invention was described in the book Musurgia Universalis published in two volumes in Rome in 1650.

In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.

What about giving to him the same treatment that he gave to the cats, only using another appendage of his body, since he didn't have a tail? (via wmmna)

Posted by Bibi at 05:33 AM in Cats, History, Music, Weird, Weird | Comments (12) | ||

I'm not a dog person and I'm not a fan of sushi too, but I like cute stuff and plush stuffed toys. So let me introduce you the Sushi Pups.

Sushi Pups is a new line of sushi-shaped dog toys inspired by love for our pups and yummy sushi! We know your dogs will drool over these plush tuna, salmon, uni, and tuna bone maki. Now all you sushi-lovers can treat your pups to these toys too!

The toys came in four options: Bone Maki, Uni, Salmon and Tuna. They are selling individual toys, 2-piece and 4-piece combos. If you aren't sure if your dogs are going to like them, take a look at their gallery of images at Flickr. I would like to find them in small versions for cats. (weirdly found at del.icio.us/cats)

Posted by Bibi at 05:02 AM in Animals, Toys | Comments (2) ||

Jeu d'oranges - concours de scan de pelures d'orange. This French site is/has a contest of images made with orange (or grapefruit, or tangerine, etc.) peel. Among the rules there are: use the biggest part of the orange surface; small images aren't allowed; it has to be seamless. They have tips and ideas to cut the orange and recipes to use your orange after. The "animaux" gallery has adorable creations. And don't forget to vote for your favourite image. (via NicoSite)

PS.: following the suggestion... Sunday orange peel cat blogging. Voilà!

Posted by Bibi at 04:01 AM in Art, Food, Food | ||

I made a bet with another blogger that I could find an interesting link about Las Vegas. Since I don't like to lose bets, I decided to post some Las Vegas links that I liked to make sure I win.

- Cassidy Frames has a small gallery with 10 vintage Las Vegas promotional shots from the archives of "Fabulous Las Vegas" magazine, from 1960's and the beginning of 1970's. Visit also the Matchbooks page with classic Nevada casino matchbook art.

- Las Vegas Chip Hall of Fame from Casino Rarities. Presenting some of the rarest and finest Las Vegas chips known, from as early as the 1940's to nowadays. One of the rarities is a $100 Flamingo chip from 1947, when Bugsy Siegel reopened the Flamingo.

- Classic Vegas - This is the site dedicated to providing you the best in classic entertainment, Las Vegas style. The hotels, audio files, the entertainers nicknames and profiles (Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin, Elvis Presley, Wayne Newton, Bobby Darin and more). Some links don't have any content.

- Flickr has thousands of images tagged as Las Vegas, but if you want to find more specific stuff, go to the groups. Las Vegas is the best group to find topics and discussions about the city, with tips of places to visit and a lot of pictures from Las Vegas, Nevada.. casinos, bright lights, nature, citylife and people. My other suggestion is the group Vintage Vegas with Photos and Ephemera from the early years (Golden Age) until 1970.

- "Las Vegas: Vintage Graphics from Sin City" is a nice Taschen book with many images, as someone said to me. The site has few images and small content review.

- List of films shot in Las Vegas, set in Las Vegas and a huge list of Movies Filmed in Las Vegas Area, from Boulder Dam to Rat Race, including movies for TV, Cable TV and cinema, but it only goes to 2001.

- Posters: I tried to find a site with vintage Vegas posters, but all the pages that I found with a nice gallery of images were sites selling posters. So if you don't care, Art.com has images of many Las Vegas Posters and Prints. I also made a selection of individual poster pages: Las Vegas United Air Lines by Stan Galli from 1950's, Las Vegas Fly TWA, one more Las Vegas United Air Lines, Hotel El Rancho Vegas, Vegas Nights - The Exotic South American Beauty Elvira Pagan, Las Vegas Western Air Lines - Skyway to Western Playgrounds and Stoppover at the exciting Las Vegas, Nevada - Go Union Pacific Railroad.

- Roadside Peek it's not a site about Las Vegas, it's about the roadside treasures of old routes across America. The old motels, bowling alleys, drive-in theatres, neon signs, petrol pumps, googie sites and tiki villages. Of course, they have a Las Vegas session, divided in categories, like vintage postcards, neon and downtown.

- The Las Vegas Matchbook Collection a very nice collection of vintage and modern casino matches and matchbooks with images and descriptions.

- The Story of Classic Las Vegas is a documentary project made to the Las Vegas Centennial (2005). It's composed by two parts, The Story of Classic Las Vegas and The Women Who Built Las Vegas, result of the research and interviews made with 130 people native born and longtime Las Vegas residents that narrated their memories of old Las Vegas. Don't miss the trailers, they will give you an idea of how interesting the films look.

- Vegas Views: The main purpose of this site is to create a repository of photographs of views available from Las Vegas hotel rooms.

- Viva Las Vegas Blog: a site about Vegas with posts about music, hotels, spas, fun, photos, sports, travel info, books, gifts, things to do in Vegas, clothes history, movies, gossip, art scene, getting married and much more. For Vegas fans.

- "When The Mob Ran Vegas - Stories of Money, Mayhem, and Murder". Sizzling, behind-the-headlines stories about the men, the Mob, movie stars, and missing money that made '50s and '60s Vegas such a hot spot in the Nevada desert. The book site has a sample chapter, info about the book, the author and an excelent gallery with Photos of Vegas "when the Mob ran Vegas" as slideshow.

More about Las Vegas at Cynical-C Las Vegas category, growabrain Las Vegas Archives and the related posts Vintage Vegas and Tom Jones Live in Las Vegas.

Posted by Bibi at 07:15 PM in Books, Cinema, Culture, Photography, Photography, Vintage | Comments (3) ||

I know that link blogs don't have that many comments, but I'm trying to make my blog entries a bit more interesting to attract more commenters. I'm not sure if it's working or whether this blog has more comments now because it has more readers. The other technique that I'm trying is to reply to most of the comments, even if they don't need any answer. My next step will be to try to apply some of those 10 Tips for Attracting More Comments. It's an interesting article for bloggers and I'm going to start with the first tip: Ask.

This blog is open for comments. I like comments, specially if they are positive ones, with new ideas, links, suggestions or nice words, who doesn't love that? Comments gives me an idea of what people like, what kind of content people appreciate, issues that I may research, etc. I don't answer them all, but I read all the comments and I visit the blogs when the readers put a link to them.

Some of you have noticed that I started to use a comment tool called coComment. On the left side of my main page there is blogbox, with a "miniature copy" of my comments. There you see only comments from my blog, because I didn't see any other blog that I read using it. That's why I'm inviting more people to test it.

coComment is free, easy to install, easy to configure it, it will enable you to efficiently track your comments and conversations with others across the blogosphere and you can sign the feed of your conversations. It also works with Flickr and have an integration with the blog tools Word Press, TextPattern and Serendipity. They are planning more features, like integrating it in the comment form.

Posted by Bibi at 10:44 PM in Blogging, Social Software, Tools | Comments (21) ||

This is for Chris that loves Vegas: Rato Records posted Tom Jones Live in Las Vegas, ripped from the original vinyl album released in October 1969. Jones' impassioned performance and the absence of weak material make Live in Las Vegas one of his most consistent records. Not surprisingly, it was also his biggest hit, peaking at number three on the American album charts.

Posted by Bibi at 05:28 PM in Music | Comments (6) | ||

Origami Underground s the place to find erotic origami on the web. All folding diagrams are free, but don't expect much from them. They aren't the cutest or the more detailed models you will see, but they can give you good times. There are models of people together and alone, female and male anatomy and animals. The site has a Origami Books recommendation page. The first two books on the list have nice naughty origami models: Very Naughty Origami and Pornogami: A Guide to the Ancient Art of Paper-Folding for Adults.

Posted by Bibi at 04:56 PM in Craft | Comments (2) ||

It's been a long time since I last went to the theater. I haven't even watched King Kong by Peter Jackson (but, yes, I did watch the original version). While I don't go to the theater check whether the new version is any good, I can enjoy the alternative and funnier version King Kong in 30 seconds with bunnies..

Posted by Bibi at 04:39 PM in Animation, Fun, Fun ||

Canto do Brazil: great hyper saturated shots of Brazil by Geoffrey Hiller. The picture galleries are divided by State - Bahia, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (where I live) - each one with three issues with a brief audio introduction about it.

Returning to Brazil after 25 years I was captivated once again by the charm and beauty of the country. No doubt the Brazilians are photogenic subjects, but it goes deeper than the image. Compared to the paranoia of people I've wanted to photograph on American streets, Brazil is absolutely refreshing.
Another way of being exists in Latin America, and Brazil's own national psyche is distinctive. It's a country of street poets, where taxi drivers and housewives wax philosophical about the meaning of life. It can be a brutal place, but beautiful too.
The image so often found in these photographs, of faces so wide open, is that of tolerance. Despite the incredible diversity in Brazil, acceptance is part of the language, both the one spoken and that of the body.

Posted by Bibi at 04:29 PM in Culture, Photography, Photography, São Paulo | Comments (4) ||

A Venture in Weevers' Land:
A selection of Peter Weevers' work including illustrations from Alice. A small gallery with a pretty work, but I idn't like so much the the site navigation.

Posted by Bibi at 04:01 PM in Illustration ||

Brokeback Mountain is a great film. I watched it in October, when it had already won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Since then it has won more prizes and acquired more popularity, specially for the "polemic" theme. Brokeback Mountain is conquering the internet too, with many parody versions of its trailer. IFilm has a list of those videos - Brokeback Spoofs: from Stand By Me to Dumb and Dumber, passing through March of the Penguins, Star Wars, and Back to the Future - the first and most popular version, created by Chocolate Cake City (available at You Tube too).

I didn't do a search for more Brokeback recreations on the web, but I bet that there are much more. Cinematical points to a gallery with LEGO Brokeback Mountain scenes, created by Daniel Brown. What can be more cute that a romantic story recreated in LEGO? Claymation? That would be great. I don't know if there is a plan to make a claymation version, but I know that Angry Alien Productions is planning to release a version with bunnies in 30 seconds in March. Until there enjoy the LEGO set, the videos, the film and the book.

Posted by Bibi at 02:43 PM in Cinema, Fun, Fun, LEGO, Video | Comments (2) ||

This Russian page has a gallery with 20 images of images of banana art. There are no references of information about the artists, but the first image look like the works made by Tonico Lemos Auad, a Brazilian artist that uses pins on banana's skin to create those faces that emerge when the fruits begins to rot. More images of his works here, here and here.

I also discovered the creator of the second picture, Henry Rox, a German sculptor that began experimenting with photosculpture--photographing sculptures of characters designed from fruits and vegetables. His photosculpture work won repute in magazines, postcards, a Hollywood film, and as illustrations in several children's books. There are few images of his works here and more banana art posters (like the image bellow) here. (via Slashfood)

Related post: Die kleine Bananenrepublik with more banana art, postcards and pictures.

Update: via growabrain I found a very cool blog The Tattooed Banana. The blog has few of the same images that are in that Russian banana art, but with the artists names.

Posted by Bibi at 12:28 PM in Art, Food, Food ||

I knew it! Sooner or later someone was going to do that; someone was going to upload Metropolis to the Internet Archive. Yes, someone did it. Thank you! If it doesn't work for you, or if you prefer other formats try the page of Metropolis at the Public Domain Movies. One of the greatest films ever.

Posted by Bibi at 02:02 AM in Cinema | Comments (6) ||

The last edition of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit have an essay with Heidi Klum as a pin-up. The site has the photos of those four bikini models, pictures of the making of, Klum's biography and a video with the making of. The beautiful photo session is the result of natural beauty of the supermodel and the artwork of the photographer Joanne Gair. Klum appears using only four models of vintage bikinis, but to make each one were necessary almost 11 hours of work, because Klum's was wearing only body paint bikinis by Gair.

Still talking about Gair, her portfolio give a small sample of her terrific work of make-up and body paint. Her portfolio contains works of beauty, magazines covers, body, fashion and advertising. Gair worked with Cindy Crawford, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kim Basinger, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sophia Loren, Celine Dion, Demi Moore and Madonna. Her work with Madonna has spanned 10 years and includes numerous music videos (Express Yourself, Vogue, Fever, Rain, Frozen), the Blonde Ambition Tour and its subsequent feature documentary Truth or Dare. (via sexblo.gs)

Posted by Bibi at 08:05 PM in Art, Photography, Photography, Pin-ups ||

Patricia Waller is the woman behind the fantastic creations that are in everywhere. Everybody posted it and I couldn't resist anymore. She works with the limitation to the material wool and the technique of crochet.

Originally a sculptor, Patricia describes her artistic intention in the following terms: "Wool is often classified as inferior in terms of art and art history. It is not a material of which major works of art are made. We women artists who work with it, reflect our status in art, culture, and society, from this material and method that one can call genuinely feminine." How not fall in love for her cute creations with of tragic scenes?

Posted by Bibi at 05:09 PM in Art ||

The Legend of Zelda is celebrating 20 years. 1UP made a great special called Two Decades of Zelda - 20 years, 20 reasons Link still rocks.

Twenty years ago this week -- February 21, 1986 -- thousands of Japanese gamers played The Legend of Zelda for the first time, and their perspective on gaming was forever changed. Here was a huge world, a massive quest, an open-ended odyssey that demanded exploration. When we Americans first placed that golden cartridge in our Nintendo Entertainment Systems a few months later, we learned what our friends overseas had already discovered: Zelda was addictive. It was adventurous. It was ambitious. It was amazing.

I played it many years ago, more than a decade and I remember that I was very bad playing it - as usual - precisely so it was amusing. 4 color rebellion made a post about it, Happy 20th B-Day Link! with the line of the evolution of Link, while the official site, Zelda Universe, stay quiet about it. But I think that the best way to celebrate is playing it, no? (via /.)

Posted by Bibi at 04:37 PM in Games | Comments (2) | ||

Japanese Dolls on the Western Toyshelf: The "Jap Doll" - Ningyô on the Western Toyshelf 1850-1940. An impressive collection with illustrations and references that suggest the place of the Japanese doll in the minds of American and European children, and of the adults who bought them toys and moralized those toys. The pin-up fans must see the page with Glamour and Risqué images with Japanese dolls. Amusing site. (via MetaFilter)

Posted by Bibi at 03:28 PM in Culture, Illustration, Toys, Vintage ||

Popaganda, The Art and Subversion of Ron English. Paintings, books, billboards and music projects - when pop culture meets the acid critic. (via Drawn!)

Posted by Bibi at 02:32 PM in Art, Painting ||

The talented Japanese artist Mizna has a very nice work of illustration, from kawaii girls to horror illustrations. She loves horror comics from childhood, that explains why there are many works with this theme, even when they are cute, like her creepy dolls. (via Suzanne G.)

Posted by Bibi at 02:00 PM in Art, Illustration, Toys ||

Monster Crochet fantastic crochet creations made by LadyLinoleum, a.k.a. Regina Rioux Gonzalez. She is an exhibiting artist and fabricator of creatures obsessed with fairytales, felt and guerrilla vegetables. My favourite session is the Veggie Liberation Army with angry and scary legumes. I don't know why she didn't make any aubergines or courgettes, because I'm sure that they are evil.

More of her creations can be found at monster crochet blog, including an adorable red crab. (via Quiddity)

Posted by Bibi at 01:36 PM in Art, Craft, Food, Food ||