Kermit the...?

In Mexico, he’s La Rana René (or René the Frog) and in Spain he becomes the flamboyant La Rana Gustavo. In Kuwait, he is known simply as Kamel, and in Turkey not-so-simply as Kurbağacık.

The most severe variation comes from Brazil, where Kermit the Frog turns into Caco o Sapo, translating to Caco the Toad.

Click here for more.

Easter Sunday Run

Axe Cop

This is possibly the coolest comic ever: CLICK HERE

Written by a 5 year old, illustrated by his older brother.

The Edie Monster

bound for the himalayas!

i have been accepted to an amazing design/build program in Ladakh, India this summer focused on sustainable design! the program is from about june 25 - july 26 and has a group of architecture students from Texas, Portland and Harvard participate in designing and building sustainable and culturally appropriate architecture at an amazing school. Ladakh is in the northernmost region of India located in the Himalayas. It is a Tibetan town and the school is focused on maintaining the traditional Tibetan culture in Ladakh.

there is a 25-minute television program about the school and the area. it was made by pbs and is narrated by brad pitt and is really well done. definitely check it out when you get a chance and see where i am a-headin'. here is the link:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/67733/design-e2-the-druk-white-lotus-school-ladakh

sufficiently bent after my bender

so, i am back in school after a week of spring break, which happened to coincide with south by southwest. i am going to do my best to recruit some of you fools (chase, this particularly includes you since i know you read this) to come and experience the wonder that is sxsw next year. it is absolutely amazing! here is my pitch:

i did not spend a dime and every day at several bars/clubs i:
*drank free, endless (often very good) beer
*ate tons of free food
*saw dozens of pretty good bands - a couple great ones
*was given things like free t-shirts and sunglasses
*enjoyed the greatest people-watching tht can be done this side of odessa
*went to a lot of parties with more bands, free food and free beer

so, if that doesn't sell you - there is a movie festival that makes up the first few days of sxsw and many of the movies are also free, again with parties to go to, etc.

my final selling point is this - there are pancakes. and not just pancakes. free, delicious pancakes from a spray can with the most wonderfully disturbing name imaginable:



oh, and i played some serious disc golf and we have some fantastic courses in austin.

so, 2011! - who's with me?

ham and cream

so, for whatever reason, a scary amount of great architects have ended up dying poor and alone. it is almost comical how often this is the case when you look into an architect you come across. however, i think that the great adolf loos may take the cake for the harshest bio i have come across so far.



Born in 1870 in Brno, Moravia, Loos was only nine when his stonemason father died. A rebellious boy who rather lost his bearings, he failed in various attempts to get through architecture school. Contracting syphilis in the brothels of Vienna, by 21 he was sterile and in 1893 his mother disowned him. He stayed in America for three years, he had an uncle living in Philadelphia, he visited the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, appreciated the work of Louis Sullivan, visited St. Louis and did odd jobs in New York. He somehow found himself in that process and returned to Vienna in 1896 a man of taste and intellectual refinement, immediately entering the fashionable Viennese intelligentsia. His friends included Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arnold Schönberg, Peter Altenberg and Karl Kraus. He quickly established himself as the preferred architect of Vienna’s cultured bourgeoisie. Diagnosed with cancer in 1918, his stomach, appendix and part of his intestine were removed. For the rest of his life he could only digest ham and cream. He had several unhappy marriages. By the time he was fifty he was almost completely deaf; in 1928 he was disgraced by a paedophilia scandal and at his death in 1933 at 62 he was penniless.

i mean...how do you compete with that?

so, you have probably heard of the great american architect mentioned in the bio, louis sullivan. he completely changed the rules in architecture, was the father of modernism, the mentor of frank lloyd wright, and often referred to as the inventor of the skyscraper. ...yeah, he died alone, penniless and drunk.

i am going to go ahead and start drinking heavily, hitting the penicillin pretty hard, and eating ham and cream out of dumpsters now in hopes of becoming a great architect. who am i kidding, i have been doing two out of those three things regularly for years. i am on my way, guys. i am on my way.

Morning Miscommunication

Baby Quinn was eating, made a squeak, which made Dylan bark. Cue the commentary...

Dad: "Dylan! Relax, it's just the baby eating."
Edie: "Baby Eden?"
Dad: "No, the baby eating."
Edie: "Baby Eden?"

You say "tomato," I say "potato."

Thursday mornings are like Christmas for the girls because we get our box of organic fruits and veggies delivered from Nature's Garden. They love unpacking the box and celebrating the species of plant inside. This morning one of the interactions went like this:

Meka: "A tomato!"
Edie: "Potato?"
Meka: "Tomato."
Edie: "Potato?"
Meka: "TO-MA-TO."
Edie: "Potato?"
Meka: "TOMATO."
Edie: "Potato?"
Meka: "TOMATO!"
Edie: "Potato?"
Meka: TOMATO!!!!!"
Edie: "Potato?"

Papa

Edie in Uncle Todd's China Clothes

Jesus Gave Me Water by Sam Cooke. And by Meka. And by Eden. AUDIO & VIDEO

Where Curling Stones Come From. Scotland, of course: Fairy Rock.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

To quote Jesus, "It is finished." Except I mean our bookshelf proje ct & not dying for the sin of all humanity.

investigating the origins of holey cheese

so, my favorite living architect is peter zumthor, a swiss architect. my favorite architect from the past is le corbusier, also swiss. rudolf steiner, a philosopher/writer/architect created a kind of architecture based on his philosophy of anthroposophy that is of great interest to me and all of his buildings (15) were built in the town of Dornach, Switzerland.

anyway, switzerland is my personal architecture mecca.

i just received word that i have won a travel scholarship based on a proposal I wrote to conduct independent research in Dornach, Switzerland on the work of Rudolf Steiner and the evolution of building in the area, as influenced by his anthroposophical style.

point is - we are going to switzerland for about 2 weeks this summer! i am going to get to experience some of my favorite works of architecture in person!

curiosity killed the bobcat

so, this is my latest studio project. we had to build a cabinet of curiosity that considered their traditional uses and applied our interpretation to what would be equivalent modern objects of curiosity. my cabinet features objects similar to those commonly seen in curisoity cabinets form the 16th century (objects found in nature) and juxtaposes them with what i consider a modern marvel, western medicine. each element in the cabinet - the bobcat skull, rhea egg, goat horn, crystal, and shell - are traditional components of eastern medicine. the cabinet opens to reveal that all of these objects have been cut in half and are behind glass, containing their western medicine counterpart on one side of their interior cavity.

this project will ultimately inform designing architecture around objects and/or a collection, as is often done in the design of museums.

The Times They Are A'Changin

How amazing and surreal and satisfying must it have been for Dylan to play for and shake the hand of our first African-American President after all his songs and after what he's been singing for for the past 50+ years?

we are the...pathetic

so, if you haven't seen the new we are the world video to benefit haiti - watch it now! it is on hulu. so entertaining but, i warn you, so damn depressing. it may be a bigger disaster than the earthquake itself.

now, i am all for good causes. i have worked in the nonprofit world for years and have been part of all kinds of less than glamorous events that had good intentions but sometimes didn't come off particularly well. but this whole video (AND THE LINE-UP OF "MUSICIANS") is absurd.

compare the line-up of the original we are the world to the new one and see if you don't do the impossible and end up longing for the '80's. oh, and don't worry - to underscore just how bad things have gotten in music, there is plenty of auto-tune going on. the new line-up seems so much less moved by their cause and much more eager to compete to masterbate into the microphone for the sake of their own egos. i think that their choice of opening singer says it all. yep, it is this kid...this freaking kid.



did we learn nothing as a culture about the danger of trying to re-live the past after the riots at "woodstock 30"?

haiti needs help. how about we collectively approach the problem by asking what would be most effective now and not misappropriate a genuine effort made in a completely different time in a fundamentally different society.

twins...i don't care for 'em...not even a little.

so, twins freak me out. i mean, a lot. identical twins. if the parents of twins were considerate human beings in the least they would stop monopolizing the earth's resources and choose ONE kid. i am a reasonable man so i understand the reluctance to do so. that is why i suggest putting the other kid in a chamber where they can be kept for spare parts but in a place where the rest of us won't have to look at 'em. i mean, allowing two of the exact same looking human to walk around on the planet is just thinking too damn much of that one typology of person.

knowing that i feel this way, you will understand why this picture freaks me out so much. i do not want twins anywhere near my wife! if there are two of them there could easily become an army! and then we can be overrun with plaid and androgyny!



this picture was taken by a photographer friend of sabrina's while they were in twinsburg, ohio during the international twin festival. the fact that ohio supports twins and twin-like behavior is the foremost reason why i will never move back there. i plan to avoid nevada as well because of their festival in the town of nazi-pederast, nevada. but between the two, i am more likely to become a nevadan.

this picture was published in a magazine a few years back. it was either an art magazine or a magazine for people traumatized by the shining but can't get enough of the grotesque fear and shock created by the sight of nature's cruel double-dare.

i particularly blame double mint gum and the olson twins for glamourizing twindom and allowing twins to feel free to be seen together, teach in our schools and hold public office. they act like the debate is closed but the jury is still far from in and i, for one, believe that twin-ing is a choice! it is nurture not nature. there are viable alternatives (see more detailed information on the aforementioned spare-parts chamber in my manifesto: towards a twinless world). let's say no to the supernumerary and stand up for family values. after all, it was adam and eve - not adam, adam's identical twin brother shmadam and eve.

Prayer | from "Things Needful" in The Valley of Vision"

Fill the garden of my soul with the wind of love, that the scents of the Christian life may be wafted to others; then come and gather fruits to thy glory. So shall I fulfil the great end of my being - to glorify thee and be a blessing to men.

Message from 1.31.10 // Insomnia - Stress

settlers of divorce (me and sabrina's knock-down, drag-out version)

although we are of scottish blood and this t-shirt might cause some misunderstandings, settlers of catan enthusiasts would think you were cool...which might, in fact, prove that you are terribly uncool.

The District of Snowlumbia

While I recognize that I risk pushing this whole snowstorm thing past saturation point, I hereby present too many pictures from our foray out into a genuine Winter Wonderland of over two feet of snow.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

NYTimes: ‘Lost,’ Nearing End, Nods to the Beginning

From The New York Times:

'Lost,' Nearing End, Nods to the Beginning

By MIKE HALE

Tuesday night's season premiere of "Lost" seemed to be trying to strike a balance between the show's convoluted mythology and its more human, character-driven dimension.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/arts/television/04lost.html

Aren't ready for LOST tonight? Not sure what's happening? Catch up in 8ish minutes