March 21, 2013
Tourist trap is an establishment, or group of establishments, that has been created or re-purposed with the aim of attracting tourists and their money. Tourist traps will typically provide services, entertainment, souvenirs and other products for tourists to purchase.
While the term may have negative connotations for some, such establishments may be viewed by tourists as fun and interesting diversions. In some areas like Ishpeming, Michigan, Flush toilets may be a sufficient draw to entice tourists to stop as they are not readily available at many tourist facilities in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Wall Drug, in South Dakota, began its tourist trade simply by offering ice water.
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March 21, 2013
The treatment of animals in rodeo has been a source of concern for the industry, the public, and the law for decades. Protests were first raised in the 1870s, and, in the middle twentieth century, laws were enacted to curb events using animals. The American Humane Association (AHA) has worked with the rodeo industry (specifically, the PRCA, Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association) to establish rules improving animal treatment in rodeo and the treatment of rodeo animals. Today, animal cruelty complaints in rodeo are still very much alive, and continue to be a source of aggravation to the rodeo industry.
The PRCA (which governs about a third of the rodeos conducted in the United States annually) has provided rules for its members regarding animal welfare. Some locals have banned the use of certain rodeo tack (equipment worn by an animal) including flank straps (also called ‘bucking straps,’ irritants which encourage bucking) and certain events such as steer tripping (roping). Some charreada (amateur Mexican-American rodeo) events staged in the United States saw a crack down in the early years of the twenty-first century.
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March 21, 2013
Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the purchase of goods and services in ever-greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with American economist Thorstein Veblen. However, the term is also used to refer to the consumerists movement, consumer protection or consumer activism, which seeks to protect and inform consumers by requiring such practices as honest packaging and advertising, product guarantees, and improved safety standards.
In economics, consumerism refers to economic policies placing emphasis on consumption. In an abstract sense, it is the belief that the free choice of consumers should dictate the economic structure of a society. Consumerism has weak links with the Western world, but is in fact an international phenomenon. People purchasing goods and consuming materials in excess of their basic needs is as old as the first civilizations.
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March 18, 2013
Nina Paley (b. 1968) is an American cartoonist, animator and free culture activist. She directed the animated feature film ‘Sita Sings the Blues.’ She was the artist and often the writer of comic strips ‘Nina’s Adventures’ and ‘Fluff,’ but most of her recent work has been in animation. Her early short films include ‘Fetch!,’ ‘The Stork,’ and ‘The Wit & Wisdom of Cancer.’ Paley was born in Urbana, Illinois, to Hiram and Jean Paley in an American Jewish family.
Her father was a mathematics professor at the University of Illinois and was mayor of Urbana, where they resided, for a term in the early 1970s. She attended local elementary and high schools, illustrating a ‘History of the North Pole’ comic in collaboration with University High School history teacher Chris Butler, and attended the University of Illinois, studying art for two years.
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March 18, 2013
Brian Donnelly (b. 1974), professionally known as KAWS, is a New York-based artist and designer of limited edition toys and clothing. Donnelly graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration in 1996. After graduation, KAWS briefly worked for Disney as a freelance animator painting backgrounds. He also contributed to the animated series ‘101 Dalmatians,’ ‘Daria,’ and ‘Doug.’ He began his career as a graffiti artist growing up in Jersey City.
Later moving to New York City in the 1990s, KAWS started subverting imagery on billboards, bus shelters and phone booth advertisements. These reworked advertisements were at first left alone, lasting for up to several months, but as KAWS’ popularity skyrocketed, the ads became increasingly sought after. In addition to New York, KAWS has done work in Paris, London, Berlin and Tokyo. KAWS’s ‘Companion,’ a grayscale figure based on Mickey Mouse with his face obscured by both hands, was adapted into a balloon for the 2012 ‘Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade’ as part of the parade’s ‘Blue Sky Gallery’ feature.
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March 15, 2013
Google X Lab, sometimes known as Google X, is a secret facility run by Google thought to be located somewhere in the Bay Area of Northern California. Work at the lab is overseen by Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders. Reportedly worked on at the lab is a list of 100 projects pertaining to future technologies such as a space elevator, self-driving car, augmented reality glasses, a neural network that uses semi-supervised learning, enabling speech recognition and extraction of objects from video – for instance detecting if a cat is in a frame of video, and the Web of Things (a network of objects with embedded computers).
Project Glass is a research and development program by Google to develop an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD). The intended purpose of Project Glass products would be the hands-free displaying of information currently available to most smartphone users, and allowing for interaction with the Internet via natural language voice commands.
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March 15, 2013
Solve for X is a think tank project launched by Google to incite collaboration to solve global issues, ‘X’ representing a remedy. The project kicked off in 2012 at a three-day convention at CordeValle Resort in San Martin, California. ‘Solve for X’ talks were presented to 50 people, hosted by Google executives Eric Schmidt, Astro Teller, and Megan Smith.
Solve for X was initially believed to be linked to the Google X Lab working on new technology such as web-connected appliances, driverless cars, and space elevators, but ‘eWeek’ reported that Google X is wed to more realistic undertakings, not the ‘moonshot’ solutions ‘Solve for X’ was created to pursue.
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March 14, 2013
Living Machine is a trademark and brand name for a patented form of ecological wastewater treatment designed to mimic the cleansing functions of wetlands. Also known as Solar Aquatics Systems, the latest generation of the technology is based on fixed-film ecology and the ecological processes of a natural tidal wetland, one of nature’s most productive ecosystems.
The Living Machine is an intensive bioremediation system that can also produce beneficial byproducts, such as reuse-quality water, ornamental plants and plant products—for building material, energy biomass, animal feed.
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March 11, 2013
The Kiss Kasket is an item of merchandise licensed by the rock band Kiss. It is an actual casket, decorated with a Kiss logo and pictures of the band members. In introducing the Kiss Kasket, Simmons quipped, ‘I love livin’, but this makes the alternative look pretty damn good.’ The Kiss Kasket went on sale in 2001. Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell was buried in a Kiss Kasket.
In 2010, Kissonline.com announced a new licensing agreement between Kiss and Eternal Image Inc. (a public company engaged in the design, manufacturing, and marketing of officially licensed memorial products) to design, manufacture, and market a limited edition line of official KISS branded memorial products. The line will reportedly include caskets, cremation urns, bronze memorials, memorial prayer cards, registry books, memorial candles, and pet cremation urns—all designed after the famous rock band’s iconic images.
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March 9, 2013
An ideas bank is a website where people post, exchange, discuss, and polish new ideas. Some ideas banks are used for the purpose of developing new inventions or technologies. Many corporations have installed internal ideas banks to gather the input from their employees and improve their ideation process. Some ideas banks employ a voting system to estimate an idea’s value. In some cases, ideas banks can be more humor-oriented than their serious counterparts.
The underlying theory of an ideas bank is that if a large group of people collaborate on a project or the development of an idea that eventually said project or idea will reach perfection in the eyes of those who worked on it. Many ideas banks are provided as free of charge, or set around certain companies in general to work out new inventions. Although ideas are provided by a community of people, problems can arise when people take the ideas of the site and begin developing them. There is no possible way to prove that the idea on the ideas bank was original and not taken from something else.
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March 9, 2013
David Černý [chair-nee] (b. 1967) is a controversial Czech sculptor. He gained notoriety in 1991 by painting a Soviet tank pink, to serve as a war memorial in central Prague.
As the Monument to Soviet tank crews was still a national cultural monument at that time, his act of civil disobedience was considered ‘hooliganism’ and he was briefly arrested. Another of his conspicuous contributions to Prague is ‘Tower Babies,’ a series of cast figures of crawling infants attached to Žižkov Television Tower. For the 2012 Summer Olympics Černý created ‘London Booster’ – a double decker bus with mechanical arms for doing push-ups.
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March 9, 2013
‘Czech Dream‘ is a 2004 documentary film directed by Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, which recorded a large-scale hoax perpetrated by the filmmakers on the Czech public, culminating in the ‘opening event’ of a fake hypermarket (a supermarket and a department store in one).
The film was their final project for film school. Remunda and Klusák invented the ‘Český sen’ (‘Czech Dream’) hypermarket and created a massive advertising campaign around it.
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