Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Let me begin by making up for the horrible unfriendly human “abuse” video of last night with a much more fun friendly animal “abuse” video… some Japanese TV show in which they put a big plush penguin on an RC car and take it to a zoo. The real penguins are blown away, and eagerly follow around the giant penguin with glee — “we love you giant penguin,” they squawk happily.

We always try and do a little clean up on the weekends, so Nefarious made me the deal that if she helped by taking the garbage to the bin (in the rain in her high heels no less), in return I would pull her back to the studio in the wagon. At first I thought to myself how nice it was to hear her laughing boisterously, you know, the purity of childhood happiness and all that. It wasn’t until I went back and looked at the photo that I realized that the laughter and said childhood joy was not entirely “pure”.

If it’s not obvious, the devil is in the details.

Nefarious went to the toy store to spend some of her savings and got one of those foam puzzle mats (with a printed car track) and it fits perfectly in front of the doll house. Following are a couple of night time pictures of the house that I quite like. As you might notice, we’ve slowly been adding furniture and so on, and various decorations, including some for the Christmas holidays.

Other than that, I have some unusual swelling in my leg which I’ve already theorized could be the result of walking around on a broken bone and not knowing it (due to the severed nerves), but could also be another bone tumor growing near the first one… Either way, I think it’s about time to go get it x-rayed. And I do always like getting x-rayed, so any excuse works for me.

Other than that “other than that”, let me post just a couple more animal videos that I bookmarked ages ago. You’ve probably seen them, but for those few of you who are have a low viral load when it comes to the things one catches online, here’s a dog parkour video (which to my surprise you can find lots of) and a video of a foal playing with a ball — I always enjoy watching videos of animals playing, especially when they’re not dogs (because that’s in the “seen it a million times” category) or cats (because I despise cats and have been given non-humorous thought to forming an organization to ban them as pets due to the dangers of trichomoniasis).

There’s a better video of the latter here, but they’ve disabled embedding (bastards).

Oh yeah and while I’m posting videos, I wanted to say that I think I’m going to build the bike with legs in this video, which is obviously based on the work of Theo Jansen, who I’m a fan of. Finally (for real this time), I just saw the greatest project car ever on eBay. If you bid in the next couple days, you can get it for, as of now, about $2,000, which is incredibly given the amount of work invested so far.

First some pictures:

It’s an eight-wheeled Corvette-sort-of-thing, with a double GM front and a double Jaguar rear. The start of a custom interior (including LED gauges) is installed, and the lengthy gull-wing-door fiberglass body looks fairly complete. The engine is totally nuts, made up of a pair of Mazda twin rotary engines put together into a single mega-engine managed by four MSD ignitions. I have no idea how close to running it is, but seriously, what a kooky and inspiring project. This is the kind of crazy backyard engineering that makes up for the stupid shit in the previous entry and makes me love America again. I can’t imagine how much fun that would be to drive around. Holy head turner. Anyway, I’m done now.

Oh wait, speaking of head-turner vehicles, I like these “Big Ass Trucks” too.