The father of a friend of mine from high school is coming in to town to give a demo on April 17th on Islamic Calligraphy. Mohamed Zakariya is one of the few (only?) classicly trained Islamic calligraphers living and working in the US, and does absolutely beautiful work. Check it out if you have a chance.
What's been on my mind lately? Read on...
I had a great trip to the MFA on Friday. I visited a friend from my NBSS woodworking class who works in the furniture conservation department and got a behind-the-scenes tour of the furniture lab. They have some amazing pieces, and, of course, most are in storage ’cause there’s not enough room to show all of them at once. I was very impressed with the work he does – it’s a tough combination of history (art history, really), chemistry, and studio art with a good deal of craftsmanship required.
A friend of his at the museum was selling their jointer/planer (link goes to a similar but not identical machine) for cheap, so I picked that up on the same trip. Though it had rusted a tiny bit sitting in the guy’s basement, a little cleaning and oiling got the machine up and running in no time. We’ll see if it’s something I really even need, but for forty bucks (!), it would’ve been hard to justify not buying it (tool-buying problem? nope, not me).
After the costuming excitement of the weekend, I decided it was time to see Labyrinth again. It held up pretty well (much better than The Dark Crystal did), but the plot wasn’t nearly as subtle as I remember. There also wasn’t as much contact juggling as I remembered, either. Too bad, since the manipulation was actually done by one of the better CJ artists around, Michael Moschen.
I had a busy weekend. I cooked for a dinner party, dressed up as David Bowie, and made a box from this book. Phew!
While you can expect pictures of the box soon, pictures of me in costume won’t be up here any time soon.
Several university professors (and one grad student) recently released a report on the electronic voting system made by the Diebold Corporation. One of the authors of that report, Avi Rubin, signed up as an election judge in Maryland for the primaries that took place yesterday, and posted a summary of his experiences here. Makes for a good (and slightly scary) read.