—T. S. Eliot

It’s Friday—I’m in love… (original image source unknown)

—Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970)

Sounds like fun… whatever it means. (-:

(original image source unknown)

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On a good day, the monkey rides the goat.
On a bad day, the goat rides the monkey…

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Some fun experiments in lid-design from Good, an agency in Kazakshstan (see more here).

Pittsburgh, USA

Artist Golan Levin has created an adjustable stencil for making infographic graffiti pie charts… you can download the pattern for it here.

—Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Skopje… take your pick.

I have fond memories of Yugoslavia, so I was delighted to chance upon an online collection of graphics from this former nation, here.

Yugoslavia came onto my radar when I was 10 years old (living in Switzerland at the time) as a result of a pen-pal who I corresponded with in the northerly city of Novi Sad (now Serbia) on the Danube. On boxing day the following year (I was 11, it was 1965) I boarded the Orient Express in Basel for a 32-hour epic train-ride to go visit my friend “Rosie” on the other side of the Iron Curtain (I still can’t believe how much trust my parents placed in me to do this on my own—hard to imagine in today’s over-protective context). Needless to say, I had a blast, I learned a lot (including some significant life-lessons), and I was enamored by almost everything I encountered.

During the late 1960s we would occasionally make day trips into Yugoslavia (now Slovenia) while on family camping trips in nearby Austria. During the 1980s, I visited designer friends in the Zagreb area (now Croatia) with my wife, and spent some fine holiday days in/around Bled (now Slovenia). Later on, I was invited to contribute works to and then serve on design juries of ZGRAF (including one visit in 1991 in the midst of what had become a civil war). The last time I was in (former) Yugoslavia was during the Icograda events in Zagreb, Croatia, in April 2001.

I’m looking forward to another visit to these remarkable Balkan lands some day soon… in the meantime, I’ll enjoy the vintage nostalgia here.

Vancouver, Canada

Ice hockey is Canada’s national sport, and the annual crowning moment in the sport of hockey in North America is the winning of the National Hockey League’s (aka NHL, not actually national now with more U.S. teams than Canadian ones… but that’s another story) Stanley Cup. Most Canadians watched the Vancouver Canucks lose the final game of the series to the better-playing Boston Bruins in Vancouver earlier this week—and most were also mortified (ashamed, embarrassed, upset) at the full-moon riots (triggered by a relatively small group of anarchists and drunk teenagers) that ensued, sullying the reputation for human kindness and friendly hospitality that the City of Vancouver (and Canada in general, we’d like to think) has long enjoyed.

Among the thousands of photographs of rioting, looting, and general mayhem that appeared online within hours of the event, one image in particular caught the attention and imagination of viewers—and at almost light-speed, circled the globe to become an instant icon of an ironic moment in time. After having been knocked down by advancing police troupes armed with shields, Scott Jones and his girlfriend Alex Thomas were captured by photographer Rich Lam in what appears, at first blush, to be the amorous act of love-making—in reality, Scott was simply trying to comfort and calm her.

CBC’s news-sleuths were quick to track down and reveal the back-story (text article and a video interview) here.

You can’t always trust your eyes… especially with smoke in them.