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I've been collaborating on a computer based interactive art piece in a show called "Help Wanted: Collaborations in Art" presented by Born Magazine.

It opens this Saturday at Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle. Our piece is "Afterwords."

Thanks to my friend Randy Moss for getting me involved.

Today is the start of Organic Farmer Days at Pike Place Market. I bought Bing cherries, strawberries and some kind of apricot plum hybrid.

yum

There is a mylackey.com mural across the street from the building I live in. I like that it is there and enjoy being reminded of the .com era of any-business-plan-on-the-web and odd marketing. There is a lot of development in my neighborhood and the building just below the mural could be torn down and a taller building built in its place in a matter of months. This probably would obscure or destroy the mural. It makes me a little sad to think of this and I wonder if it's possible to have such a recent, potentially ephemeral, advertisement considered a protect landmark.

I think it's great when an industry leader is willing to do something bizarrely original. The most recent product to make me feel this warm, fuzzy feeling about a corporate giant is WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ from Nintendo. The core of it is the opportunity to play over 200 different mini-games. The draw is that some of the games are strange, some cute, some retro, some hillarious, almost all brilliant, and each one takes 5 seconds to play. You'll be challenged by the likes of playing the essence of Donkey Kong by making Mario jump over one barrel to counting frogs as they hop aross the pond to brushing teeth.

This is a fantastic way to get away for five minutes at a time. It's almost theraputic in the way humerously bizarre art can be.

You need a Gameboy Advance to run it.

I'm in the middle of reading "The Promise of Sleep" by sleep researcher Dr. William C Dement. I'm fascinated by sleep and its significance to life. Dement's career has been focused on research and establishing sleep as a standard, prominent aspect of medicine. It's a long book and is more than a pure knowledge transfer about sleep; he goes into detail about the history of sleep research and his career with many anecdotes about sleep problems and discoveries.

It's interesting stuff and you get great things to mention to your friends like: Except when he has a medical problem, a man's penis is always (always) erect during REM sleep.

Scientific American Magazine has an online archive going back to 1993, but it costs money for articles. One great deal they offer is for $7.95 you have 24 hours to download any article you want from the archive.

Tina purchased that offer for some research she was doing. I took advantage of the extra time to read up on how people make decisions and how the universe might bend in on itself.

I like maps. I think it's the dramatic change in scale combined with the objective presentation of the information that attracts me to them. The Atlas of Experience is a collection of fictional maps about life: food, guilt, climate, stress. I've had it for several years and still keep going back to browse and discover new terrain and how the cartographers put it together. Things like how Chaos City has the neighboring cities of Disorganization and Improvisation.

Board Games are much more creative, beautiful, diverse and fun than most Americans think. Sadly, many people think of Monopoly and Chess as the spectrum of board games and that video and computer games are where inovation and real game design occurs. There is a growing market for what some call "designer board games" and, while several American companies are supplying new games, most of the production comes from Germany.

I'm very much into these games and play with Seattle Cosmic, a group that meets weekly.

People make amazing things all over the world and we only get to see a very small fraction of them. I was waiting at the bus stop in front of Egbert's (Belltown, Seattle, WA) and saw some amazing wooden toys and puzzles. I managed to make out the words "naef" and "juba" on one of the display boxes.
After some googling I found that neaf is a Swiss company making some very attractive and expensive wooden things