Silly meme thing

Nabbed this one from RandomURL:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

'While living in cramped, uncomfortable conditions, the gods were startled by a gleam of light which was seen between the bodies of their parents.'

Readers of the Illuminatus! Trilogy will no doubt recognise the significance of the numbers 23 and five.

Nightmare

This indexing job was couriered to me and had a Saturday delivery, but I didn't get it till yesterday evening. There's a bunch of houses up our drive, and the courier just dumped it outside one of the ones above us. This just blows me away - you're not sure which house it is (even though we've put large numbers on our front door that are clearly visible from the drive if you actually look), so you just pick a house at random to dump it on!?! Why not put it in the letterbox? Bizarre.

If I knew which house it was, I'd go and remonstrate with the occupants as well. Two large courier parcels with large stickers saying 'Saturday delivery' on them, not to mention my name, address, and phone number, arrive outside their door and they do nothing about it. Bastards.

So I ended up losing four days I could've been working on it. Those are four days I can't really do without. I'm going pretty slowly and don't see a good way of speeding up. The book's over 500 pages long, and I need to have it back to them by Friday next week. I see some late nights in the immediate future.

Oh well, at least the book's pretty interesting (might even be able to get some ideas for paintings from it, you never know), and it's for a new client. There's also the by no means irrelevant observation that a big whack of hours does have something to be said for it when you're on an hourly rate.

Prehistoric pet cat

Archaeologists have found the 9500-year-old grave of a cat in Cyprus. Previously cats were thought to have been domesticated by the Egyptians 4000 years ago.

Yes well

As Riverbend puts it, 'Baghdad is calm and relatively quiet if you don't count the frequent explosions.'

This looks pretty cool

The aim of Distributed Proofreaders is to
help Project Gutenberg publish public domain
books as free ebooks by getting volunteers to proofread one page each.

(Nicked from BoingBoing.)

Link for Dave

Here's the link to Philip Guston's Poor Richard I was talking about the other night (other people can check it out too).

Website updated

I've finally got my website updated. A couple of the Illuminati Guy paintings have broken links, and I can't quite work out why. I'm not going to worry about it right now, but will try to get it sorted soon. I also plan to add the dimensions at some stage. Some are quite large and some are quite small, but you wouldn't know it from the pics.

I've included some crappy ones (but by no means all the crappy ones!) and some studies, and set them out in a rough chronological order.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

Time to freak out

I thought I had a bit of time up my sleeve for the old website update, but it's all suddenly run out. I've got a somewhat massive indexing job arriving tomorrow and want to get the update done and dusted before I start on that. The job's updating the index for a new edition of a book first published in 1963. The book's about 520 pages, and the index is 20 pages with three columns per page. There's a tight deadline (of course), so it's going to be a bit of a mission.

Doing more painting (including finishing off the ones on the go at the moment) will probably have to wait until after it's done. We've also got to get the catalogue done in there somewhere (that should be pretty sweet though). This weekend's also when most of the films I want to see at the World Cinema Showcase are on.

The main thing lacking for catalogue, website, and show are titles for the Skeleton Guys. I'm a bit stumped. I've rejected 'Untitled (Skeleton Guy) No 1' etc as too boring, but don't really have any other ideas.

Another Banksy stunt

This time, according to this Guardian story, Banksy smuggled his work into the Natural History Museum.

More links

Another link from RandomURL: the WebCollage.

The explanation reads in part:

'This is what the Internet looks like.

'WebCollage is a program that creates collages out of random images found on the Web. More images are being added to the collage about once a minute, so this page will reload itself periodically. Clicking on one of the images in the collage will take you to the page on which it was found.

'It finds the images by feeding random words into various search engines, and pulling images (or sections of images) out of the pages returned.'

It's strangely addictive.

RandomURL and BoingBoing both provide links to Seinfeld and Superman's American Express ad, which I've also had emailed to me. For some reason it doesn't seem to work for me though. I'm probably neglecting something blindingly obvious (I tend to do that).