Dr. Tinkerpaw's Nitt Witt Ridge

First of all - Tinkerpaw? I think I'm in love.
"Known to his neighbors as Captain Nitt Witt or Dr. Tinkerpaw, recluse Art Beal spent 51 years constructing a different kind of castle than that of his famous neighbor, William Randolph Hearst. Nitt Witt Ridge, as it's called, was Art's "castle on a hill", his "Poor Man's Hearst Castle", three tiers of salvaged materials lovingly assembled by the former garbage collector who worked for the town of Cambria. Using only hand tools and whatever he could scavenge, his castle is constructed of artfully arranged junk, mostly cans, car parts, abalone shells, TV antennas, driftwood, and local rocks. It’s an intricate network of terraced gardens, stone arches and buildings. He never threw anything away and the house still displays his clothing and personal effects as if he still lived there. You can just drive by or, to arrange a tour, call Michael and Stacey O'Malley who recently bought the property and are in the process of restoring it."

ROAD TRIP!!!

Actually the interior of this place reminds me of this house my friend in Austin took me to. It was filled with amazing relics, peeling wallpaper, old fixtures, and an overgrown secret garden. I'm a sucker for a dilapidated structure, especially houses and barns. Places like this that you know have so much history but you can only imagine the scenes of what it may have been like when the place was inhabited from the abandoned ramshackle that gets left behind. We don't get a lot of these growing up in LA and if you do they're full of squatters and the types you don't wanna get stuck in a dark alley with. And now that I think about it, as a teenager there were a few instances where we did party in abandoned buildings in very shady neighborhoods with exactly the types I'm referring to. The soundtrack that comes to mind is "I got 5 on it" or Dr. Dre's entire Chronic album.

I still have get up to SF this summer and just need to figure out which weekend to go, why is there never enough free time?

On another note - look at what was just gifted to me!
Yes, this is for real. My parents were camping last weekend in Olema and made friends with the couple camping next to them, turns out they just bought a new RV and had this pop-up camper they're not using anymore, and basically by the end of the weekend the couple decided to give this to me! They have never met me. It sleeps 8 people, has a fridge, stove, sink, and heater. I'm a little overwhelmed by this serious gift. I still don't know where in the world I'm going to park this thing, I live in an apartment in the city after all.

It will be perfect for trips like this with friends though (I'm too much of a chicken to camp without a group of people and a pitt-bull). And Chris also pointed out that it will also be perfect for making hemp bracelets in.

Thanks Sonya!

Off to a great start

This is so cute. I do love a good wedding.

Thanks Sonya!

Lil' Kim & Cyndi Lauper duet

This may cause damage to your eardrums.



Cyndi still gots it.

This is my house

and it's on the cover of the new Japanese home edition of Sweet Magazine

Pics from my phone

Angelo

At the Girl Talk show

Andrea's big 3-0

Friends I met while hiking Runyon Canyon

My friend Angja lives in a yurt in Topanga, I spent the night and this was the view from the shower the next morning!

This is Dot, the best chihuahua I've ever met

Ms. Sophia California, 14mos. old and incredibly brilliant and gorgeous

Sonya Schwartz, anti-blogger and bff

Angelo, my niece (blue), her bff, and my nephew in town for a weekend, super psyched to be in Hollywood

Cruised by Chris's show (Christopher Bettig aka The Mountain Label)
Bumblebee at Seth Carmichael Gallery

Ginger vs. Nana

The best gosh darn bean shooter this here side of the Mississippi!

This story reminds me of the time my grandmother left me alone with my cousin Eli and told him not to terrorize me by shooting rocks at me with his new sling shot while she was gone. Had she not firmly planted the seed in his brain I'm sure my whole life would have turned out differently. As soon as that front door closed behind her you can imagine exactly what went down. Felt like I was running from Jason Voorhees at the time!

Thanks to Matthew Bonifacio Rodriguez for this one.

Snipers and traps to help save penguins

Sally Barnes, NSW Parks and Wildlife Service: "We've had shooters out"

Professional snipers have been brought in to guard a vulnerable colony of penguins in Australia.

The deployment follows the mysterious deaths of nine of the flightless birds over the last two weeks.

The mutilated bodies of the animals, known as fairy penguins, were found in a national park near Sydney harbour.

The main suspects are dogs and foxes. At 40cm tall, the world's smallest penguin species is clearly no match for such aggressive enemies.

To even up the fight, two snipers have been deployed as bodyguards.

They have started night patrols and have instructions to do what it takes to protect these tiny creatures.

They have joined a legion of volunteers, who have also been guarding the birds during the hours of darkness when they are most vulnerable to attack.

Traps have been also been set in a concerted attempt to catch Sydney's penguin killers.

Source: BBC News, Sydney

Tiny Goat Surfs on Sheep's Back

Thanks Sonya!

Who afterbirthed?

I just received this story from Sonya (who hates to blog). Maybe I found it so funny because I am a mom although I didn't do anything with the placenta after 20hrs of hard work. I might consider this next time around (if there was such a thing, the possibility seems slim), or else I would at least put it in the soil to plant a tree in the baby's honor.

FYI - "Who afterbirthed?" came from an Andrew Jeffrey Wright t-shirt that he wouldn't sell to me for $5.Here's the story - by Joel Stein for TIME, titled "Afterbirth: It's What's For Dinner"

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta. But there are two things you don't argue about with a pregnant woman: what she eats and that being full of life indeed looks sexy. So when Cassandra told me that for $275, a woman would come to our house, cook Cassandra's placenta, freeze-dry it and turn it into capsules to help ward off postpartum depression and increase milk supply, I said, "$275 is a bargain compared with the $20,000 I'll have to spend to tear out our kitchen immediately afterward."

Most mammals, Cassandra explained, eat their placentas, to which I countered that most dogs eat their poop. I stopped arguing there, figuring that like many of Cassandra's hippie ideas — the compost bin, rubbing lemon on her underarms instead of deodorant — she'd give up on this in a few weeks. Even as the due date approached and she was still set on eating her placenta, I couldn't imagine that she'd remember to request it from the doctor after the most physically draining experience of her life. This is a woman who, 9 times out of 10, forgets the bag of leftovers at the restaurant.

Though I am exceedingly squeamish, when my son was born, I was shocked that I saw only the beauty of childbirth. Until the placenta came out. There are many normal human reactions to seeing a placenta, ranging from screaming to vomiting to warding it off with a cross. For those of you who have never seen one, the placenta is to the baby what Stephen Baldwin is to Alec Baldwin. It's what your liver would look like if it got into an accident on the autobahn with one of those aliens from Mars Attacks! and their bloody carcasses threw jellyfish at each other.

When the placenta did come out, Cassandra, dazed from 21 hours of labor, somehow made sure the nurses delivered it to us in a flat plastic container, which I put into an ice-filled Monsters vs Aliens cooler I brought. When I asked if I could keep the placenta overnight in the refrigerator out in the hall, the nurses looked at me like I was crazy. When you gross out people who work at a hospital, you have accomplished something.

In a fog, I drove the placenta home, where I wrapped the container in a bag and wrapped that bag in a bag and wrapped that bag in every remaining bag we had in the house. I slept at the hospital that night, grateful that my son will never remember what his parents just did.

The next day I drove back to the house to meet the placenta lady, Sara Pereira. To my surprise, Sara did not look unkempt, frumpy, heavy or in any way like a Wiccan. She got into placenta-cooking after taking a Chinese-medicine course and has already prepared more than two dozen placentas this year — and orders are picking up rapidly. When I asked Sara if her parents were embarrassed by what she does, she told me that her father sells bull semen.

By law, Sara has to cook the placenta at the placenta owner's home. But to my great relief, she brought her own equipment, gloves, sponges and even more detergent than I'd hoped, scrubbing constantly as she worked. If I ever kill a man in my own home, I am totally calling the placenta lady.

As she steamed the placenta with some herbs, the kitchen got that ironlike smell of cooked organ meat, with vague undertones of a consciousness-raising group and a Betty Friedan rally. Sara said Cassandra had a particularly robust placenta, and she hoped to get 120 pills out of it. As she sliced the cooked organ and put it on parchment paper in a dehydrator, she told me that some people drink the placenta raw as a smoothie. "I do this for a living, and I couldn't do that," she said. The pills, she explained, were superior, since Cassandra could stretch their hormone-rich benefits much further, perhaps even freezing some for menopause. Sara did not understand that when Cassandra's looks fade in her 50s, there's no way I'm putting up with this crap.

I drove back to the hospital where, thanks to my experiences, the food looked good. When we got home the following day, Sara gave us a truly beautiful placentapill presentation: a pretty glass jar, a card, a CD of lullabies and a satin pouch. In which was part of my son's umbilical cord, fashioned into a heart. When I asked Sara what the hell I was supposed to do with that, she said people often use it to keep a baby's first tooth and lock of hair. That's when I realized that placenta-eating is really just the beginning of how gross we humans are. And I went to change my first diaper.

New serigraph show coming up July 25th at Barracuda

This show is being curated by my pal Ramsey. Hope to see you there!

New serigraph show coming up July 25th at Barracuda in Hollywood. This show is going to be really super-fantastic, with limited serigraphs from 8 amazing illustrators: Cleon Peterson, Mark Whalen (Kill Pixie), Megan Whitmarsh, Nathaniel Russell, Deedee Cheriel, Albert Reyes, Jared Purrington and Ramsey Dau!

Come out and have a drink, listen to some music, and check out some great prints. We all know the economy is eff’d right now, so these super-limited prints are recession-friendly priced! There will also be a handful of very limited hand-colored/customized artist proofs available.

Barracuda
7769 Melrose Ave,
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Girl Gangs of the Serengeti

Lions form prides to defend territory against other lions, not to improve their hunting success.

In doing so, they act much like street gangs, gathering together to protect their turf from interlopers, says a leading lion expert.

The bigger the gang, the more successful the lions are, information that could help conserve wild lions.

The discovery helps explain why lions, uniquely among the cat species, live together in social groups.

Lions stand out amongst all the cat species for their gregarious nature.

Across Africa and Asia, lions form prides of varying sizes comprising one or more males and often numerous females and cubs.

The bigger the gang, the more successful it is at controlling the best areas. Lion expert Craig Packer

But why they do so has remained a mystery. A long-standing idea is that female lions socialize in order to hunt cooperatively. But despite the common sight of multiple females working together to outflank and bring down large prey, there is no clear link between how many lions hunt together and their hunting success.

Another is that lions gather to protect territory. Indeed, a range of animals from social insects to primates form social groups that defend territories against competitors.

But while there has been anecdotal evidence that bigger groups have a competitive advantage, the idea has never been rigorously tested over long periods of time.

That has now changed with a study analyzing the behavior of 46 lion prides living in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania.

'Street Gangs'

Larger prides with more adult females not only produced more cubs, as might be expected, but the females within these prides were less likely to be wounded or killed by other lions.

Prides with more females were also more likely to gain control of areas disputed with neighboring prides, and those prides that recruited lone females improved the quality of their territory.

"The most important way to think about this is that lion prides are like street gangs," says Packer.

"They compete for turf. The bigger the gang, the more successful it is at controlling the best areas. The main difference from humans is that these are gangs of female lions."

Large coalitions of female lions are so successful at dominating small neighboring prides that male lions step in to try to alter the balance of power. Males will often attack and attempt to kill female lions in neighboring prides to tip the odds in favour of their own pride.

Taken from BBC

Stoned wallabies make crop circles - did you hear this?

The mystery of crop circles in poppy fields in Australia's southern island state of Tasmania has been solved -- it appears the wallabies have been eating too much of "the good stuff" aka poppy heads and hopping around in circles.

"We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," the state's top lawmaker Lara Giddings told local media on Thursday.

"Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high," she said.

Many people believe crop circles that mysteriously appear in fields around the world are created by aliens.

Poppy producer Tasmanian Alkaloids said livestock which ate the poppies were known to "act weird" -- including deer and sheep in the state's highlands.

"There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles," said field operations manager Rick Rockliff.

Taken from Rueters