This week, I went to the exhibition “life on mars” in the Carnegie International Gallery. All in all a fun collection, and one of the most curious exhibits was this:

David Shrigley, 2007: “I’m dead”. The gallery guide writes about this:

With a deliberately naïve style and an intellectually dark sense of humor verging on the absurd, David Shrigley makes drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that collectively illustrate a scathing commentary on the various artistic, social, and political states of humanity. Almost without exception, his works are hilarious, cynical, and sharply intelligent, covering topics that range from music, art, politics, and health care to religion, sexuality, and life and death. Beneath the flamboyant irony and self-deprecating humor lies an undercurrent of vulnerability that lends many of Shrigley’s illustrations and objects a bracing poignancy and reveals intimate notions of individual and collective identities. (…) In I’m Dead (2007) a taxidermied kitten stands sentry with a wooden sign indicating his deceased status—an absurdly ironic yet tender work bordering on the grotesque.

I can tell you, I laughed out loud. Quite literally, even, not in the laughing-quietly-on-the-inside-LOL-instant-message sense. Who would’ve thought museum visits can be so much fun?

(“Cat: I’m dead” photo CC attribution licensed by daveynin on flickr)

Happy new year, everybody!

I wish you good, painless new year’s celebrations and a fabulous and in-spite-of-it-all successful year 2009. Don’t let a “slowing economy” and any other horror stories in the news put you off your personal pursuit of happiness. There are better times ahead!

(funny ecard motive from someecards.com — and no, I am not on ADs; I am needlessly optimistic enough on my own )

Dear Readers!

Merry Christmas from snowy Idaho! I haven’t been posting anything lately as I am busy taking trips, eating good food, and similar things, and I hope you are equally unconcerned with the Internet these days

Here’s a pic from our recent sledding in the Idahoan mountains. The snow here is awesome!

These are Tara’s cousins. Of course, when I tried to gain a similar amount of air, I always crashed

Looks like I need to catch up on the movie front:

Film Addict has a nice little quiz on how many of the IMDB top 250 movies you’ve seen. I got an embarrassing 25.6% which tells me that both, I didn’t have Netflix long enough quite yet, and I need to get done with my master’s thesis so I can watch more movies .

How do you score? Let me know in the comments.

(via kottke)

There’s been a nice little meme going on in the Mozilla blogosphere during this last week: Running your blog through the wordle “word cloud” generator, then posting it. Here is mine:

Comes to no surprise that “German” and “Germany” are two of the most-used words here — I sure hope I am not boring my readership to death by giving them intercultural lessons here

Anyway, if you post yours, feel free to send a ping to this article, or leave a comment with the link to your blog. I am looking forward to seeing how others’ word clouds look!

So I stumbled across this “How Many Countries Can You Name?” Quiz where you need to name as many (sovereign) country names as you can in 5 minutes.

I got a 59 at my first try, while the average is 57 (even though some people take it many times, as the result screen notes).

I do admit it’s hard to think of so many countries in very limited time — and sometimes I pathetically failed at guessing the English spelling of a country’s name as well, such as Mauritania, Kazakhstan, and others…

How many can you come up with?

(via Violent Acres, who got, uhm, slightly less)

A little technical side note:

On Thanksgiving, November 27 between 5am and 7am UTC our server host will perform upgrades on their network infrastructure, leaving this website (and all other domain names and services associated with its server) unavailable for probably about half an hour.

Sorry in advance for the inconvenience.

You should be sleeping at the time anyway

CMU’s newspaper “The Tartan” has an article about Carnegie Mellon University’s tuition being the 11th highest in the nation:

Tuition is on the rise, according to a new College Board list citing Carnegie Mellon as having the 11th highest tuition in the U.S.

(…)

Tuition costs are not the only concern for prospective students. Ranked 11th as the college with the highest tuition, Carnegie Mellon is also ranked 11th by the College Board for the highest total cost. Factoring in room and board, the estimated total cost for the 2008–2009 year is $49,200 according to the College Board website.

That is even higher than the so-called “Ivy League” schools:

Interestingly, the Ivy League schools were not featured on either list in a ranking higher than Carnegie Mellon. Neither Harvard, Yale, Stanford, nor the University of Pennsylvania were listed in the top 25 highest tuition or total costs. Harvard placed as the 118th most expensive college in tuition and 108th in total cost.

Will these people be able to pay off their college loans before they retire?