Ever since I first seen these blackout poems I’ve liked them. I think it’s cool that you can make an interesting mini-story from blacking out words in a boring old newspaper article.

I’ve never tried to make one but it seems like it’d be extremely hard to get everything to turn out right. On the upside it seems like the format would force you to make stories like you wouldn’t ever be able to make on your own.

Check it out for yourself, here’s video of a newspaper blackout poem being made. The whole process is condensed into twenty seconds:

From what I can tell this is what the poem turned out to be:

WITH

little
to gain or lose,
he was
red
and unfinished
and forward
I don’t know how many times
over the years
he
he looked up a dress
with owlish eyes
and
he somehow
turned catastrophe into
nothing

Lol at the ‘owlish eyes’ part! Maybe I will try my hand at making one of these, seems like it might be fun.

Though I gotta say that I haven’t touched a paper newspaper in a very long time so I’ll have to grab a screenshot of a newspaper article online and black the words out in a Paint-type program or something.

What do you think about newspaper blackout poems, are they dull or awesome? Ever tried making one?

Yone Ohishi was born during the 1800′s in Japan to a family that was quite poor. So when she showed a talent for classical dancing and was adopted into a dancing school it was looked upon as a blessing, there she would have the opportunity to get training in the arts and could eventually make a decent living as a geisha.

MURDEROUS RAMPAGE

However, when she was seventeen years old things took a horrible turn at the dancing school when the man who owned the place went on a murderous rampage…with a katana sword.

He ran around killing geishas but for some reason didn’t kill her, instead just chopping off both her arms and moving on to the next victim.

Okay first off, holy crap amiright? Second, can you imagine what it was like for her to be just going about her business at the dancing school and then having the owner come in and chop off one of her arms, then another? Or maybe it was more involved than that I don’t know, but the fact is at some point she ended up lying there next to her bloody, severed arms. Damn.

THE BIRD’S BEAK

Amazingly she kept on training to be a geisha, moving into a role as a comic storyteller and singer. She traveled with a theater group for a while under the name Tsumaikichi and one day had a life-changing insight while watching a canary in a cage.

She realized that birds use their beaks for all sorts of suprisingly intricate tasks and it inspired her to try painting by holding the brush in her mouth. With much intensive practice she became a famous painter and calligrapher.

Here’s an example of her work, painted late in life after she’d married, raised two children, divorced, and was living out the rest of her days as a very active Buddhist nun called Oishi Junkyo.

The painting is titled Spring Orchid and the inscription offers some advice for life: “One flower, one leaf” “Bloom as a youth, flourish as an adult, mature and wither naturally without regret.”

Wise words and what a life she led, truly remarkable!

I’ve seen a ton of pictures illustrating the Little Red Riding Hood story lately but this is one of my favorites so far.

I love how the artist articulated the wolf looming in the woods, the danger he poses is everywhere and nowhere at once. Also love how Little Red Riding Hood is skipping into the woods with pigtails up, not a care in the world …yet.

It’s interesting to think that some of the oldest versions of this story didn’t include the happy ending that we’re all so familiar with. In those old versions after Little Red Riding Hood is eaten by the wolf there is no nearby woodcutter to come and rescue her nor is she able to outsmart the wolf and run away.

Instead the wolf eats her and…that’s it, that’s the end. A harsh story for what was often a very harsh world back then. But as the world changed so did the story and the danger of the looming wolf was transformed along with it.

Saw this book cover over on Pinterest and was immediately drawn in by the fantastic style of the artwork. Done in watercolor the illustration is elegant and quiet in a way that gives it a very introspective feeling.

The cover shows a boy walking on a hillside with some animals and carrying a red kite, the tail of the kite dancing airily behind as he walks. To me it looked like he was on a journey to find something and a quick trip over to Amazon revealed what it was:

Nikolai is a boy who believes that if he can find the answers to his three questions, he will always know how to be a good person.

His friends–a heron, a monkey, and a dog–try to help, but to no avail, so he asks Leo, the wise old turtle.

“When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?”

Leo doesn’t answer directly, but by the end of Nikolai’s visit, the boy has discovered the answers himself.

I decided to go ahead and check out the rest of the book, partially for the story but mainly because I wanted to see more of that great artwork.

The Three Questions turned out to be a pretty good book and the rest of the illustrations by John J. Muth definitely lived up to the beautiful one on the cover.

The story itself is based on one of the same name that was written by Leo Tolstoy, but this version is told from more of a Zen Buddhist perspective.

It’s a children’s book so the story is laid out in a very simple and easy to understand way but the artwork and lesson of the story I think will have a resonance with people of any age.

That said, I think the storytelling could have been done a bit better since it comes off feeling a bit lackluster like maybe it wasn’t a top priority in the making of the book.

However the artwork more than makes up for that and in many ways it tells a better story than the words do, which in my opinion is a bonus for kids who can’t read just yet but still like to thumb through books by themselves. Overall a great book and I’d definitely recommend it :).

Great cover art here for a book that delves into what drugs can do to the mind.

Not only does the book cover illustrate one thing transforming into another, it also shows a benign everyday item changing into an exotic potentially lethal animal.

There’s no mistaking what the POV of this book is, don’t do drugs if you don’t want your teapots turning into scorpions lol.

Ground control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.

You might remember the song Space Oddity by David Bowie, it was a sort of trippy song that told the story of Tom, a man who was sent on an ill-fated mission into outer space. Best listened to while drawing deep from a nice joint no doubt.

Well someone recently made a picture book based on Space Oddity. The illustrator of the book, Andrew Kolb, explained the project with ‘Have you ever been soo inspired that you simply want to create?’

Here’s a sample of some of the pictures from the book:

Cool huh? You can download the whole book in PDF form from this link if you want to see the rest: http://www.mediafire.com/?j0zczbm666a6lkh

If you’ve seen the movie Lost In Translation then you probably remember how Charlotte went to the Buddhist temple and tied a little note to a tree that was chock full of notes from other people.

When I saw this part I thought that ritual seemed cool but since the movie didn’t explain it I wondered what the heck was written on all those notes.

My guess was that people wrote some sort of wish on each strip of paper and then tied it to the tree in hopes of it coming true.

So it turns out that these notes are called omikuji and they are basically fortune telling papers (kind of reminds me of fortune cookies). Basically in the temple there’s a box set out and inside it are tons of these omikuji strips of paper which tells you if you’re going to have good luck or bad luck in stuff like business, illness, romance, etc …you know, basically the regular lineup when it comes to fortune telling.





You donate the recommended amount of money for a fortune, take out one at random, and then unfold your possible future. However at this point though the future is still not solidified. To complete the process you need to tie the piece of paper to the proper place, this is usually a tree branch but in some temples it can be something like rope or some part of the surrounding architecture.

The belief is that if you have a good type of future predicted by the fortune then tying the omikuji to the tree branch will make it come true. And if you have a bad future predicted then you’ll have successfully avoided it through this process.

All in all it seems like a pretty cool tradition, I do plan on visiting Japan sometime and will definitely do this if I get the chance. And of course it’ll be really awesome to take in the surreal scenery of trees that have hundreds of little notes tied to them.

A spectacular Carl Sagan video was passed on a while back by Gunthar via the Facebook page for this blog.

The video was made by someone who was frustrated with how badly NASA is doing at telling it’s story, which interestingly enough is exactly the same situation that lead Sagan and some others to make the Cosmos tv series so many years ago.

The foundation of the video is Carl Sagan reading from his beautifully written book The Pale Blue Dot. As usual he was through words trying to rouse people into the same love and adventurous spirit that he felt for space exploration.

I think that the person who made this video did an excellent job of translating Sagan’s poetic words into just the right images. I love the subtleties, like the tree with it’s array of limbs shown during the part where Sagan is saying ‘Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the solar system and beyond, will be unified.’.

Anyway check it out, I think you’ll be inspired:

But ideas lie everywhere, like apples fallen and melting in the grass for lack of wayfaring strangers with an eye and a tongue for beauty, whether absurd, horrific, or genteel.

- Ray Bradbury
Zen In The Art Of Writing

(via WishesAndWhimsies)

So basically this is a game you can play with your kids where each person takes a turn at making up a part of the story. The rules are you have to roll the dice and then incorporate into the story whatever picture is up.

I don’t know if this particular concept has been around for a long time or not but I think it’s a great idea. And I bet kids would have a blast making their own storytelling dice too, it wouldn’t be that hard and they’d probably have a lot more fun telling stories with characters and elements they made up themselves.

Either way though very cool idea and I hope to see more of these around in the future.