Ross Racine creates aerial views of faux-sprawl.  His works highlight the incredible beauty, mundanity, order (of a sort) and absurdity of American suburbs. Someone should really start marketing cloud-shaped developments.  I can think of a few gated communities from my hometown alone, that would have the gall to construct that kind of awkward utopia.

[via This Isn't Happiness]

* Odessa to the Future on community and crowdsourcing abundance

*Altruistic ants: Infected Temnothorax unifasciatus ants abandon their community, imposing self-exile in order to protect their colony

*Urban Omnibus explores methods for reforesting cities (pictured above)

*Quick rant: The US Mint is updating the penny. Why?! The miniature Lincoln in his miniature memorial was the absolute highlight of American currency.

*Architects at Diller + Scofidio map the chaos of dining

*HP goes big with CeNSE, a billion sensor Central Nervous System for the Earth

*The increasingly pervasive use of the green screen: so much for shooting on location.

*3D printing takes on ceramics

*BLDGBLOG and Atlas Obscura explore the geoglyphs of an abandoned burbclave-cum-ghost town

This surprise recently landed in my inbox care of street artist, NosE.  ”Snow Graffiti” is beautifully minimal and cleanly executed.  Specifically, the final wide angle shot — that type and the stacked edges of the balconies — it kills me every time.

[previously on Spicy: Snow Graffiti: Protest with Kool-Aid]

All I have to say is: Yes.

[via this isn't happiness]

Add this to the list of why I find Detroit (and more importantly Detroiters) so inspiring:

“Ice House Detroit is an architectural installation and social change project currently taking place in Detroit. Photographer Gregory Holm and architect Matthew Radune will use one of 20,000 abandoned houses and freeze it in solid ice, referencing the contemporary urban conditions in the city and beyond.”

Michigan gets a bad rap. Newscasters have thrown around terms such as wasteland or dystopia when describing our mitten-shaped neighbor. All of the gloom makes this peninsula seem uninhabitable. Despite visions of empty factories and urban prairies, it’s not true. This place has so much life. People really do live here.

So, I made a sign that read, “Tell Me A Story,” planted myself on benches and curbs in Lansing — and waited. The stories in this video are the uncurated result of that experiment.

What’s clear is that there is so much humanity and resiliency to be found. It might be hard to hear underneath all of the clanking, but even quietly, it’s impossible to ignore.

As someone who has embarked on the job hunt I’ve been amazed at the way technology has changed the process.  It’s so easy for a prospective employer to hide behind an e-mail — how inhuman the whole exchange can be is fairly disconcerting.  On the flip side though, the companies and people who take the time to have a conversation or respond, truly do stand out.  For what it’s worth here is a NY Times piece that ruminates on the same subject:

Not too long ago, a magazine in Manhattan invited me, by e-mail, to interview for a job. After meeting with me, the managing editor and the director of human resources asked me to take home the standard editing test and return it ASAP. I dutifully obliged.

And then I waited. One day. Two days. A week. A month. Two months. Three … well, you get the picture.

Not only was there no word on whether I would be offered the job — nobody at the magazine even bothered to e-mail me to say that my completed test had been received!

Back in the good old days, people used to duck your phone calls. Or just not return them. But in this, the electronic era, a whole new brand of disdain has come into vogue. The age of the e-snub is upon us.

I have grown weary of this kind of “dissing.” People who seem to go blind, mute and limp when all you are seeking are a few keystrokes in reply. Prospective employers whose computers appear to crash when asked to give something resembling a definitive answer, one way or the other.

Annoying e-mail messages plague all of us, but those of a more legitimate nature are surely deserving of a simple reply. Unfortunately, basic e-courtesy is in short supply. So, having been burned in the past by e-boors, I decided that enough was enough. The magazine had left me in limbo. I was going to have my revenge.

Sitting down at my computer one morning, I e-mailed the managing editor to say that I had happily accepted the job. More specifically, I wrote that I was “delighted to learn that I will be joining the editorial team!” I went on to say that “the salary and vacation are fine and I will report for duty bright and early Monday morning.”

Whereupon, after the prolonged cold shoulder I had received, I was immediately bombarded with urgent e-mail messages, accompanied by the online equivalent of bells and whistles — the red exclamation point. Urgent messages were left on my answering machine, demanding that I call Human Resources at once. It was just too delicious.

When I finally did call back, the H.R. director was beside herself. “Who authorized this?” she demanded breathlessly. “Who was it that told you? There must have been some mistake. Nobody cleared this with me. I don’t get it.”

“Well,” I said sweetly, “I spoke to the editor in chief and he told me I’ve been hired, so I’ll be there first thing Monday. And, let me tell you, I am truly excited about joining your team!”

“But … but … but …” she sputtered.

Finally, I let the cat out of the bag.

“Listen, lady,” I told her, “when you ask someone to come in for an interview, take a test and physically return it to you, and you can’t be bothered after three months to let that person know where he or she stands, much less acknowledge even receiving the test back, you are nothing but rude, thoughtless, unprofessional amateurs.”

Huffily, she started to give me the stock speech about “our hiring procedures,” until I abruptly cut her off with the appropriate barnyard epithet. Then I barked: “Do you get it now? Well, do you?”

Meekly, she conceded, “Yes, I get it.”

No, I did not get the job. But there have been other satisfactions — most notably, the kudos of other slighted job seekers when I relate the tale. Having been subjected to similar indignities, they tell me they love it, absolutely love it. In fact, it’s been something on the order of a collective cheer.

[via NY Times]

*Entrancing, ambient art piece detailing artificial reef construction in Thailand: Leviathan by Richard Mosse [BLDGBLOG]

*Italy plans to open a transgender prison

*Alain de Botton talks about art and the (infrequent) representation of contemporary workplaces

*The Scottish potato trail: Veggie Tourism

*Self-rolling snowballs apparently do exist in nature [WMMNA]

*Inspired by salad dressing: self-assembling solar cells

*Despite the fact that it’s on the Wii, I’m so excited for NBA Jam (it’s 2nd grade all over again). You have no idea.

• - Please Say Something by David O’Reilly (above first)
• - Marc Trujillo’s Urban America (above second)
• - Reimagining rain reservoirs as public parks
• - Follow-up to an earlier post: Swiss voters ban the building of minarets
• - Yay supermax! Sigh: Depressed US towns battle for Gitmo North
• - Good title sequences get me flustered: BBC’s How We Built Britain
• - On the 17th connotations of milkmaids and kitchen items: Vermeer’s Kitchen Fantasies
• - “Old Fashioned:” Donuts as art
• - A doll house for our times: Miniature shipping container homes
• - Apparently self-service checkouts make other people crazy too
• - In other machinated news: Tesco opens grocery store sans workers
• - Stats: Green roofs and carbon sequestration
• - The psychology of menu design
• - Pass on the pasta zoo goo: McDonald’s regional food varietals
• - Artist Kristin Lucas legally changes her name to Kristin Lucas: Self refresh
• - Flavored weather modification: the Cloud Project
• - The area required to completely power the earth with solar/wind
• - Country for the city: The sad/comic ballad, “Shutting Detroit Down”
• - Baron Ambrosia’s bizarre public access food adventures: Bronx Flavor
• - The relationship between cupcakes and gentrification
• -Yes! Yes! Yes! The eels drop two new songs from their forthcoming album, “End Times”
• - Tobias Fränzels Ping-Pong door might be the best thing ever invented (below)

I’m not really a cake person, so this is what was presented to me for my birthday.  Yes.  It’s a cake made entirely of donuts.  Eat one slice and you get a taste of the whole box.  The cake comes care of my mom and Lindsay over at GrumpyWhenHungry.   Extra points for being made of George’s Donuts.

[You can find more pictures on her site.]

Hey! Here are two long overdue and highly deserved shout outs to the family spicy:

Ornithologist-brother-of-Spicy, Clay Graham, was recently featured on It’s Getting Hot in Here. He was speaking his piece about the implications of building a coal plant in southern Ohio and sounding very smart at the same time.  (Clay is the slightly vampire looking guy second in from the left).

Zac, of Lionel the Robot fame and friend of Spicy recently pointed me to the Black Moth Super Rainbow and Octopus Project collabo, The House of Apples and Eyeballs.  It’s not new, but I had never heard of it.  It’s definitely worth a look if you love yourself a bit of dreamy synth-pop.

Diabetik’s urban intervention in DC is just in time for my favorite holiday.  I think I’m going to be Count Chocula this year.  Or the hamburgler.  I can’t decide.

[via Wooster Collective]

A lot of gluttonous food posts are uninspired combinations of worn out equations.  Take [x] food and add bacon, then deep fry it, then stack, etc.  Every once in a while though, a true fatty (in size or in spirit) creates another ingenious edible.  The El Niño is one of them.  Pretty much puts all of the Mexican pizzas of my youth to shame.

[via This is why you're fat]

[image via Fishbowl NY]

I was absolutely devastated in 2007 when I found out that Weekly World News was closing up shop. Though it’s not quite the same, there is a bit of respite to be found in the fact that archives can now be found online.

Also, despite the fact that the periodical is no longer in publication, the WWN website is still maintained.  Here is a recent headline that made me cackle:

Bat Boy For Nobel Peace Prize: [...] “Many speculate that Bat Boy felt slighted by the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s choice of Obama for the prize as they overlooked the groundbreaking global work that Bat Boy has done to stem the tide of a viral pandemic that is wiping out bat species around the planet.” [...]

In other semi-related, but actually true Halloween news, it has been found “that there has never been a single substantiated incident of a kid being sickened, hurt or killed by doctored candy handed out during trick-or-treating in the history of America.”  Though I am overwhelmingly happy about this, I do wonder if they ignored the angst and psychological trauma caused by repeat raisin and pencil eraser distributors.

“Boarded Up” by James Reynolds.  Some of James’ other artwork was also recently featured on Spicy.

[via Wooster Collective]