Artists Design Sheep Wagon For The 21st Century

July 13th, 2010

Artists Design Sheep Wagon For The 21st Century
Colorado artists want to give a futuristic makeover to the rustic sheep wagons used by immigrant workers across the West.

Immigrants from Peru, Chile, Mexico and PP-R pipeNepal who come to the U.S. sometimes live in worn-out one-room trailers in desolate landscapes, including in Wyoming, California, and Utah. The working conditions caught the attention of Colorado lawmakers this year, but no legislation materialized.

Immigrant advocates argue that the workers’ living conditions and salaries are deplorable, while sheep ranchers maintain that their workers were treated and paid fairly.

Artists with the Yuma-based nonprofit M12 say the least they can do is spurce up the portable homes in a creative way.

They created three proposals to revamp the sheep wagon — known to the workers as “campitos” — and will show the designs on the walls of a trailer turned into a gallery, along with an old sheep wagon for comparison.

“There’s been a lot of attacks on ranchers. Our perspective is not that. Our perspective is a creative one that’s looking at the structure,” said Richard Saxton, one of the members of M12.

The exhibition is part of Denver’s monthlong “Biennial of the Americas,” a festival that began Thursday and highlights the arts and culture of the Western Hemisphere. Artists from 35 Latin American countries and world leaders are coming to PP-R fittingsthe event.

“These things look like covered wagons because they were designed in the 19th century at a time when that made sense,” Saxton said. “Our question was, what would a campito look like for the 21st century?”

What M12 came up with were tricked-out wagons that look like they came out of “The Jetsons.” One design looks like a roly poly, folding into a ball to be towed by a truck and unfolding into a tent-shaped wagon when it’s parked. In another design, the wagon looks like a space capsule with wheels similar to those of a Mars rover. The third design is made up of three modules for a garden, bed, and kitchen — features that all the designs have, along with a global communications system to make phone calls.

They’re up to 14 feet wide — much larger than the current campitos.

The designs address some of the concerns raised by immigrant advocates, mainly that the workers don’t have showers, electricity, or a way to communicate with their bosses or relatives back home while they work their three-year contracts in the U.S. The length of the workers’ contracts also influenced the designs.

“Somebody herding sheep for three years, sort of in isolation, it’s not so different than sending somebody off to the moon to live. That’s why a lot of these (designs) — this is very sort of very NASA,” Saxton said. “We like those sort of parallels. What happens if you merge sort of the NASA aesthetic with a farm aesthetic.”

It’s unclear how much the wagons would cost if they were built, but Saxton argues that they could be manufactured for about $16,PP fittings000. He admits the ultimate problem, however, is that sheep ranchers just don’t have the money to buy new campitos.

The American Sheep Industry Association has said that about two-thirds of U.S. ranchers have quit in the last 15 years, in part because of competition overseas and the competition to wool from synthetic fiber. Any cost increase to the ranchers, the industry has said, could put them in jeopardy. The Colorado Wool Growers Association did not respond to calls for comment.

Thomas Acker, an associate professor of Spanish at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, for years has advocated for improving the living conditions of the sheepheders. He said he hopes the exhibit will open up a dialogue on all the design possibilities for a campito.

Giacometti ‘Walking Man’ Sculpture Sells For $104.3 Mill Auction Record

July 13th, 2010

Giacometti ‘Walking Man’ Sculpture Sells For $104.3 Mill Auction Record
With so much of the news these days being about the dark economic clouds of budget cuts, unemployment and foreclosures, it’s good to know there are still some people out there who not only can see a silver lining but own it.

And not only do they own it but they own so much of it that they can afford to spend $104.3 million on a six foot tall stick-man sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, one of the 20th Century’s most important artists.

The sale at Sotheby’s in London Wednesday evening to an anonymous buyer set a new record for an art work sold at auction.

As The Wall Street Journal put it:

Alberto Giacometti’s 1960 sculpture of a spindly man, “Walking Man I,” sold for 65 million pounds ($104.3 million) in a Sotheby’s auction, shattering the record price for a work of art at auction and signaling a potential resurgence in the art market.

In a tense contest at the company’s London salesroom, bidding began at ??12 million and then escalated, with roughly 10 bidders vying for the sculpture. The winner, who pays the final bid plus Sotheby’s commission, bid over the telephone through Philip Hook, senior director of Sotheby’s European operations, and chose to remain anonymous.

The 6-foot-tall bronze depicts a wiry man in mid-stride, his right foot jutting forward, his head erect and and his arms hanging at his side. Giacometti, a modern master known for his haunting sculptures of blank-faced Everymen, cast the work 60 years ago as part of a commission to plant several of his bronze figures on Chase Manhattan Bank’s Pine Street plaza in New York City. The artist famously struggled with the project, eventually quitting it but casting stand-alone versions of several of the planned figures, including “Walking Man I.”

The price breaks the existing $104.2 million auction record, set six years ago at Sotheby’s, for Pablo Picasso’s 1906 portrait “Boy With a Pipe,” whose buyer remains unknown.

Actually, I’m quite jealous of whoever bought the Giacometti. One, because of the size of the fortune you’d have to have to part with more than $100 million for a work of art and two, because who wouldn’t want to Read on for a guide to light dimmerown one of Giacometti’s uniquely skeletal like figures in his home?

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President Bush’s Remarks on the World Agenda

July 13th, 2010

President Bush’s Remarks on the World Agenda
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all. Please be seated. Laura, thanks for that short introduction. I’m proud to be introduced by my wife. I love her dearly. She’s a great First Lady.

And I appreciate the chance to address the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign. This is a fine organization and it’s an important organization. It’s rallying businesses and non-governmental organizations and faith-based and community and civic organizations across our country to advance a noble The led mr16 is one of the latest pipes resulting from European advanced technology of gos.cause, ensuring that the United States leads the world in spreading hope and opportunity. It’s a big deal, and I appreciate your participation.

It’s a big deal because your efforts are needed. Millions suffer from hunger and poverty and disease in this world of ours. Many nations lack the capacity to meet the overwhelming needs of their people. Alleviating this suffering requires bold action from America. It requires America’s leadership and requires the action of developed nations, as well.

That’s the message I’m going to take with me to Europe next week, when Laura and I go to the G8. At that meeting I will discuss our common responsibility to help struggling nations grow strong and improve the lives of their citizens. And today I’m going to describe some of the initiatives that I will be discussing with world leaders next week to help developing nations build a better future for their people.

Before I do so, I want to thank George Ingram, the President of the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign. I thank the members of my Cabinet who share the same passion I do for helping those less fortunate around the world — that would include Carlos Gutierrez, Department of Commerce; Secretary Mike Leavitt, Department of Health and Human Services; Secretary Sam Bodman at the Department of Energy; Administrator Steve Johnson of the EPA. Thank you all for coming. Proud to be serving with you.

I am glad that the Acting Director of the U.S. Foreign Assistance and Acting Administrator of USAID is here, Henrietta Fore. Thanks for coming. I appreciate John Danilovich, who is the head of the Millennium Challenge Corporation; Rob Mosbacher, the head of OPIC. I appreciate other members of my administration who joined us today.

I thank the members of the Diplomatic Corps who are here today. I thank the members of the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign.

We are a compassionate nation. When Americans see suffering and know that our country can help stop it, they expect our government to respond. I believe in the timeless truth, and so do a lot of other Americans, to whom much is given, much is required. We’re blessed to live in this country. We’re blessed to live in the world’s most prosperous nation. And I believe we have a special responsibility to help those who are not as blessed. It is the call to share our prosperity with others, and to reach out to brothers and sisters in need.

We help the least fortunate across the world because our conscience demands it. We also recognize that helping struggling nations succeed is in our interest. When America helps lift societies out of poverty we create new markets for goods and services, and new jobs for American workers. Prosperity abroad can be translated to jobs here at home. It’s in our interest that we help improve the economies of nations around the world.
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Motown Goes Green at Auto Show

July 13th, 2010

Motown Goes Green at Auto Show
The North American International Auto Show will be on full swing for the next couple of weeks in Detroit. The event has broken up into different, quote, “events.” That begins with this press preview, which is why you’re hearing all the reporting on the show now.

And then there is the industry preview. That’s what all the car companies take a look at the new goods. Then there’s a charity preview, which is a bit of a misnomer. That’s when big companies entertain clients or reward members of their team, reason to that what you will.

And finally on the very end, they let the general public in to see what’s going on. This year’s show follows a rough year for American car companies. They lost The led mr16 is one of the latest pipes resulting from European advanced technology of gos.billions of dollars. And so with this show, U.S. carmakers are hoping that a new commitment to green will re-interest the car-buying public and put the industry on the path to recovery.

Here’s NPR’s Anthony Brooks with the report.

ANTHONY BROOKS: For at least, the past decade, American automakers had counted on big pickup trucks and full-sized SUVs to define their success. Weight, power and muscle were the operative words. But now the industry is embracing a new world.

(Soundbite of new Ford ad jingle)

Unidentified Man (Voice Talent): (As Kermit the Frog) (Singing) It’s not that easy being green.

BROOKS: This new ad from Ford features the green Muppet struggling up a cliff until he reaches the top and finds a brand new Ford Escape, a hybrid SUV that runs on gas and electricity.

(Soundbite of ad jingle)

Unidentified Man: (As Kermit the Frog) (Singing) It’s not that easy being green.

BROOKS: Maybe not easy, but certainly necessary now that gas costs around $3 a gallon and after Congress raised fuel efficiency standards for the first time in 32 years. Little surprise then that this week in Detroit, the North American International Auto Show will be all about green.
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Cellphone in new role

June 23rd, 2010

Cellphone in new role high power isolatorLoyalty Card
Loyalty cards — those little paper cards that promise a free sandwich or coffee after 10 purchases, but instead get lost light dimmeror forgotten — are going mobile. And merchants are looking for ways to marry the led mr16concept to games that customers can play to earn more free items and, it is hoped, spend more money.

Instead of collecting paper cards and fumbling through wallets at the cash impact socketregister, customers are increasingly using their cellphones to track their visits and purchases, and receive rewards.

Some start-ups, like CardStar and CardBank, store existing loyalty cards on cellphones with scannable barcodes. And companies including Motorola and a start-up called mFoundry are providing retailers with the technology to build cellphone loyalty cards.

Loopt is one of several start-ups — including Foursquare, Shopkick and Gowalla — that are experimenting with ways to use cellphones to bridge the digital and physical worlds and turn the tasks of everyday life, like buying coffee and running errands, into a game.

On Tuesday, Loopt, one of the first services to let people use cellphones to share their location with friends, is taking its concept a step further by introducing Oil paintingLoopt Star, a mobile game that rewards people for frequently checking in to particular places. People will compete to earn “achievements” and become “boss” of certain locations, and Gap, Burger King and Universal Music plan to use Loopt Star to reward loyal customers.

‘Way Too Early’ For Optimism On Spill, Obama Says

June 23rd, 2010

‘Way Too Early’ For Optimism On Spill, Obama Says
Visiting Louisiana again on the 45th day of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, President Obama said Friday it was “way too early to be optimistic” about the latest attempt to siphon off oil spewing from a broken pipe 5,000 feet underwater.
Obama said progress was being made in controlling the spill, but he criticized oil giant BP for spending on advertising and shareholder dividends, saying the company must not do that if it’s “nickeling and diming” local businesses and workers.

The president got a briefing The led mr16 is one of the latest pipes resulting from European advanced technology of gos.on the spill and headed to a barrier island to visit local workers affected by the catastrophe. It was his third visit to the Louisiana coast since the disaster unfolded.

BP reported Friday that some oil was flowing up a pipe from a funnel-like lid wrestled onto the broken well, but it was unclear how much could be captured.

“Progress is being made, but we need to caution against over-optimism,” said Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point person for the disaster. Allen said a very rough estimate of current collection would be about 42,000 gallons a day, though he stressed the information was anecdotal.

Meanwhile, gooey tar balls washed up on the barrier beaches of northwestern Florida.

Spotters who had been seeing a few tar balls in recent days found a substantially larger number before dawn on the beaches of the Gulf Islands National Seashore and nearby areas, a county emergency official said. The park is a long string of connected barrier islands near Pensacola.

Talent factory helps create soccer stars, starting Age 7

June 23rd, 2010

Talent factory helps create soccer stars, starting Age 7
The youth academy of the famed dutch soccer club Ajax is grandiosely called De Toekomst — The Future. Set down beside a highway in an unprepossessing district of Amsterdam, it consists of eight well-kept playing fields and a two-story building that houses locker rooms, classrooms, workout facilities and offices for coaches and sports scientists. In an airy cafe and bar, players are served meals and visitors can have a glass of beer or a cappuccino while looking out over the training grounds. Everything about the academy, from the amenities to the pedigree of the coaches — several of them former players for the powerful Dutch national team — signifies quality. Ajax once fielded one of the top professional teams in Europe. With the increasing globalization of the sport, which has driven the best players to richer leagues in We offer wide range of optoelectronic products: Full series of led lamp.England, Germany, Italy and Spain, the club has become a different kind of enterprise — a talent factory. It manufactures players and then sells them, often for immense fees, on the world market. “All modern ideas on how to develop youngsters begin with Ajax,” Huw Jennings, an architect of the English youth-development system, told me. “They are the founding fathers.”

In America, with its wide-open spaces and wide-open possibilities, we celebrate the “self-made athlete,” honor effort and luck and let children seek their own course for as long as they can — even when that means living with dreams that are unattainable and always were. The Dutch live in a cramped, soggy nation made possible only because they mastered the art of redirecting water. They are engineers with creative souls, experts at systems, infrastructure and putting scant resources to their best use. The construction of soccer players is another problem to be solved, and it’s one they undertake with a characteristic lack of sentiment or illusion.

High-Tech Hunt Aims to Find Missing Da Vinci Mural

June 23rd, 2010

High-Tech Hunt Aims to Find Missing Da Vinci Mural
It’s one of the great mysteries of the history of Western art: A mural by Leonardo da Vinci that has not been seen for 500 years. The vast painting of the fury of war is said to have been one of the landmarks of Renaissance art.

Now, an Italian engineer has joined his scientific knowledge with his passion for art in an Indiana Jones-type quest. He believes the mural is hidden behind another frescoed wall, and he says he can prove it.

The History

Da Vinci left copious notebooks, and in 1505, he wrote, “On the sixth of June, a Friday, at the stroke of the 13th hour, I began to paint in the palace.”

“The palace” was the grand hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, where he was commissioned to paint a huge mural of the Battle of Anghiari.

“It’s believed the subject was suggested by Niccolo Machiavelli, the adviser to the powerful,” says Stefano Merlini, a legal scholar with a passion for da Vinci. “The point was to commemorate a great victory of the Florentine republic and to celebrate its power and glory.”

The mural was to be coupled with another battlefield scene on the opposite wall by Michelangelo, an artist half da Vinci’s age. But the artistic battle of the two titans of the Florentine Renaissance was never to happen. Michelangelo was lured to Rome by the pope, and da Vinci left his mural unfinished to go work for the king of France.

But even unfinished, da Vinci’s mural was immediately deemed a masterpiece. His contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, an artist and biographer of artists, praised it as “most excellent and masterful for its marvelous treatment of figures in flight.”

The Evidence

Today, it is Vasari’s frescoes that cover the walls of the great hall of Palazzo Vecchio.

For three decades, Maurizio Seracini, an engineer and art conservationist, has been seeking answers behind those walls.

“We know for a fact that there are two walls — one is the original wall on which Leonardo painted his mural, and then Vasari placed another wall on top of it, so hiding … the mural behind this wall,” Seracini says.

What’s known about the lost mural has been derived from da Vinci’s sketches — pictorial renderings of the violent motion of clashing horses — and from a copy by Rubens showing grimacing soldiers and horses entwined in raging battle.

Da Vinci, ever the experimenter, wanted to try techniques used by the ancient Romans that he had read about in a book by Pliny. Seracini, who is based at the University of California, San Diego, acknowledges da Vinci faced challenges in using oil on dry plaster.

“How you going to dry it? It would take forever. Since there was no sun coming, he needed heat,” Seracini explains. “How do you produce heat? How do you apply that heat? And that needed to be done fast. Because if We offer wide range of optoelectronic products: Full series of led lamp.you had applied too much heat, you would end up [with] an extremely dry material that would crack. If you applied not enough, you have the color running down.”

Sweet Jesus resurrected

June 4th, 2010

Sweet Jesus resurrected

New York – My Sweet Lord, an anatomically correct milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ that infuriated Catholics before its April unveiling was cancelled, returns on October 27 to a New York City art gallery, its creator said on Tuesday.

This time, artist Cosimo Cavallaro said he expects the public exhibit to proceed without a problem.

“There is nothing offensive about this,” Cavallaro said. “If my intentions were to offend, if I did do something wrong, I wouldn’t compression fittingsbe doing this. But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Cavallaro, who received death threats before the April show was cancelled, said the vast majority of his mail was in support of his two metre piece.

“I got a lot of positive mail from people in the Catholic Church, people studying theology, people in monasteries,” Cavallaro said. “All kinds of letters and e-mails of support.”

The last show was criticised for its timing and its location. The exhibit, in a gallery visible to passersby on a Manhattan street, was set to open one day after Palm Sunday and four days before Christians marked the crucifixion of Christ on Good Friday.

‘It’s not something we’re going to protest’

The Catholic League, which led the charge against My Sweet Lord, said the change in venue and the exhibition’s new opening date would keep it from calling for another shutdown.

“We don’t approve of the piece at all, but it’s not something we’re going to protest,” said Kiera McCaffrey, the league’s director of communications. “This is much less an in-your-face assault on Christians, and it’s not happening during Holy Week.”

Cavallaro’s work features Christ with outstretched arms, as though hanging from an invisible cross. Unlike traditional religious depictions of Christ, Cavallaro’s Jesus China plastic injection moldinglacks a Rubber product supplierloincloth.

The sculpture is actually a new version of My Sweet Lord, created with 91kg of chocolate over three days. The original was stored in a Brooklyn facility where mice nibbled away at its hands, ears, nose and feet, forcing Cavallaro to toss the original and recast the sculpture.

The exhibit at the Proposition Gallery will be accompanied by a set of chocolate Catholic icons created by Cavallaro, a group that includes the Virgin Mary and saints Francis, Augustine, Michael, optic isolatorJude, Anthony and Fermin.oil painting reproduction

“After the cancellation of the show, it got me to look into the Catholic religion a little deeper,” Cavallero said. “I started thinking about the saints, how they were ostracised for their beliefs and then canonised.”

Cosmetic surgery revolution

June 4th, 2010

Cosmetic surgery revolution

Cosmetic surgery is used to erase the signs of aging, but young people are plastic card Systems is a leader in plastic ID card and badge printing technology,increasingly resorting to it to alter their looks in a beauty revolution which is being described as unprecedented.

The trend is clear in Spain, where about 400 000 cosmetic operations are performed annually, more than in We have proposed a light dimmer, which is the latest from Europe, the observing system, one of the advanced technologies used to prany other European country.

Surgery no longer serves just to improve a person’s natural looks, but to change them and even to make them deliberately artificial. Most recently, Crown Princess Letizia, 35, had her slightly aquiline nose straightened in an operation which many saw as modifying her looks in an indefinable, but undeniable way.

Young girls are also “going mad” for breast augmentation, An optic isolator, or optical diode, is an optical component which allows the transmission of light in only one direcaccording to plastic surgeons interviewed by the daily El Pais. Many of them do not even seek a natural look, but round-shaped breasts that reveal the operation, We have proposed a Cable Ties, which is the latest from Europe, the observing system, one of the advanced technologies used to prsurgeon Jose Mallent said.

Beauty becoming a duty
Latin American and Asian immigrants are meanwhile resorting to surgery to adapt their facial features to the Western beauty ideal.

“The constant (media) stimulation of our senses with views of beautiful individuals is We should have the confidence and make great effors to expand overseas PE fittings market in order to look for more opportunity of development.something totally new in the history of our species,” expert and author Ulrich Renz told El Pais.

In the past, being beautiful was something exceptional, but advances in cosmetic techniques, increased buying power and media pressure have turned beauty into a perceived duty which ordinary people can and feel obliged to pursue, according to analysts in Spain.

The number of cosmetic surgery operations increases 10 per cent annually in Spain, where the market turnover is an estimated 800 million euros (1.2 billion dollars) a year.

About 40% of surgical and non-surgical aesthetic treatment is given to people who are under 21 years old. The most common types of surgery on an overwhelmingly female clientele include eye and nose fixes, face-lifts, liposuctions, breast augmentation and tummy tucks.

People want to look like celebrities
The operations are not cheap, but large companies promote them with aggressive publicity and payment facilities. Spaniards also practise “scalpel tourism” to Mexico, Colombia, Brazil or Argentina, where the medical guarantees are more difficult to control than at home.

The Spanish patients’ defence association ADEPA received some 800 complaints about operations that went wrong in 2006, but that does not deter people seeking such procedures, some of whom arrive at clinics with pictures of celebrities whom they want to look like.

The royal palace cited breathing difficulties as the reason for the nose operation on Letizia, wife of Crown Prince Felipe and Spain’s future queen, but commentators linked it with image concerns as well.

“I thought she was a self-confident woman, but she did not like herself,” royalty-watcher Jaime Penafiel commented.

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