After the icy and snowy conditions over the past couple of months, the UK’s roads are full of potholes. It’s taking councils a while to fix them, but one man has come up with a novel solution. He plants primroses in them.

Photo by Pete Dungey

His name is Pete Dungey, and to my eternal disappointment, he doesn’t do this because he thinks it’s a viable solution. He’s a graphic design student, and he’s doing it as part of a project called “subvert the familiar”. According to his website, the flowers are part of “An ongoing series of public installations highlighting the problem of surface imperfections on Britain’s roads.”

It does draw attention to the holes and probably has the added benefit of helping people to avoid them, as they won’t want to destroy the flowers. Or at least I hope they won’t.

Photo by Pete Dungey

Today is the Superbowl, and I’m as excited as an English person who doesn’t know anything about American football can legitimately be. As far as I can tell, it’s like a lot of other sporting events, except possibly with more hotdogs and adverts.

But I’ve discovered that there is much more to this apparently testosterone-driven day. It’s called the Lingerie Bowl.

During half-time at the Super Bowl, two teams of women (the Los Angeles Temptation and the Chicago Bliss this year) will take to the field and play a full-contact game of football, dressed only in their lingerie. This is the final of the Lingerie Football League (LFL), and it looks like this:

A game consists of two 17-minute halves, separated by a 15-minute halftime. In the event of a tie, an 8-minute sudden-death overtime is played. They take it very seriously.

Most of the women are former competitive athletes in other sports, and the many of the teams are coached by former NFL players.

It’s very popular. Any idea why?

I am a reluctant twitter user, but have to admit that very occasionally it throws up a real gem.

Today, I found out that you can follow astronauts on twitter (@astro_soichi and @astro_jose, to be precise) and they are posting pictures of what they are seeing from space.

Like this one of the Golden Gate bridge:

And this one, of the moon:

This is where they are right now:

Somehow, receiving a single person’s impressions of space exploration rather than having it mediated through NASA or a news announcement makes it all the more exciting.

I’ve just come across this infographic on the eternally-fantastic good.is webzine.

I’ve pasted it above to give you an idea, but I highly recommend you click through to the interactive version.

The purpose of all the little people standing in their serried ranks like that is to demonstrate visually the number of Americans who took part in volunteer work last year. Some of the individual trends are rather piquant, such as the most popular voluntary activity among 45 – 54 year olds being that of a religious nature, and the fact that in every age group, women consistenly  out-volunteer men.

But overall, this is a happy story. In 2009, while in the grip of a recession, around a quarter of Americans of all ages chose to give up their time for free to do something for others. I hope it wasn’t just because some of them were unemployed.

Considering the title of this blog, I feel honour-bound to alert you to this lovely set of balloon-photos.

Personally, I like this one:

I’ve just stumbled across this amazing phenomenon on Flickr. Take a look at this image:

by Jason E. Powell

I was pretty struck by the simplicity of the idea: take an old photo, hold it up so it is contiguous with the location as it is now, and snap. Afterwards, you can make all kinds of grandiose statements about change and progress and stuff, but I think the beauty of it is that it needs no real explanation. Compare and contrast and marvel.

Turns out, there is a whole community devoted to doing this on Flickr (I love the internet). They call it ‘Looking into the Past’. Some of the images are real, some are created with software, but they are all arresting.

This one’s my personal favourite, although I would highly recommend you browse the whole gallery.

by Jason E. Powell

She’s walking a rabbit, for goodness’ sake.

On Saturday, I went to an exhibition at a pub called The Library. As I approached it, I was intrigued to see that it had giant inflatable tentacles waving out the windows, like this:

It was a grey, drizzly Saturday morning, so this cheered me up instantly. I was further intrigued when I got to the door and had to be checked off a guestlist by some pretty serious security, and was then eventually let in to the exhibition.

Inside, all of the pub furniture had been cleared, the walls were covered with canvases, and the floor space in between was filling up with Islingtelligentsia sipping wine and looking knowledgeable. However, I was distracted by these sculptures, just by the door:

The work is entitled ‘Pigeon English’, and is by FilthyLuker, the same artist responsible for the tentacles outside. Initially, I thought these were well-crafted models, but I spoke to Filthy later on, and he told me that he does indeed practice taxidermy on pigeons as well as putting inflatables in unlikely places.

The exhibition included really diverse mixture of works, including the stuff by Banksy and similar Bristol-based artists. More on the Banksy below, but here a few of the others that particularly caught my eye:

The last one is entitled ‘We are not amused’. Prices for these on canvas were around £500, and there were prints available as well. The collection had been brought together by Bristolian Paul Blower, who has just launched crazyfools.net as an online space for artists to exhibit, and was using The Library in a similar way to bring Bristol artists to greater recognition in the capital.

The real revelation of the exhibition was hidden away upstairs – the original of a never-before exhibited Bansky canvas entitled ‘Portrait of the Artist’:

Quite different from what we’ve come to expect, but fascinating to see something of his in a shiny gold frame, at least. Still polemical, but about art, not politics or consumerism. I think I will find it much harder to dismiss Banksy as a sensationalist or just an activist after seeing this. For me, it added a whole new dimension to his work. It wasn’t for sale, but there was a small sculpture called ‘The Watchtower’ which could be yours for £15, 000.

Paul, the owner, said he was really only displaying these items so as to draw in people to see the newer artists. I’m sure someone else would feel the need to make some statement about this signalling the start of the post-Banksy era in street art (or maybe they already have), but I just found it a really interesting, eclectic mixture of styles and pieces, and thought it a shame that it was only open for two afternoons. I know the pub had to go back to being a pub, and the tentacles couldn’t have stayed forever, but the whole idea of a “pop-up gallery” (as this apparently was) is a bit lost on me. Surely it automatically the number of people who can see the exhibition and dimishes any word of mouth effect in bringing people in? I know it was supposed to create a “buzz” and a sense of exclusivity, but when the contents is of such high calibre, I really don’t see the point of trying to create a false sense of expectation.

Elizabeth Taylor at Michael Jackson's funeral

Has to be said.

Impressionism for the digital age, using an iPhone and an application you can download for £2.99 ($4.99). The results have, predictably enough, been christened the ‘iSketch’.

Jorge Columbo, illustrator, photgrapher and graphic designer in New York, roams the city capturing its bustle and life on his iPhone.

The Brushes application he uses takes the culture of instant gratification a gadget like the iPhone provides that one step futher: now, not only can you capture an image as a photography, now you can capture it in a way that includes something of your own impressions as well.  Not only that, but the application also registers every finger-stoke you make, and enables you to upload it as a video, which means that the viewer of your sketch can also view the process that created it. You can see how the sketch above came to be here.

I quite like some of his earlier, non-New York efforts as well, like this one:

Have a look at some more of Jorge’s New York iSketches.

Read The Guardian’s take on this new phenomenon.

To see more art created with iPhones, have a look at this gallery.

Today, I came across a picture of this watch:

In these pictures, the time shown is (from left to right) 1:37, 1:43, and 10:13. In case you wanted to know what each of the tiny LEDs signifiy, here’s the official explanation from Japanese manufacturers Tokyoflash:

Hours are presented on the upper screen. The hours three, six, nine and twelve in the same positions as on a clock face. Hours one and two are in between, a combination of lit LEDs show the hour.

Minutes are presented on the center and lower screens. The lower screen shows zero, fifteen, thirty and forty-five minutes in the same position as on a clock face, the LEDs in between show five minutes each. The central screen presents four single minutes, a combination of lit LEDs show the minutes.

The date can be read in a similar way with a second touch of the upper button.

Makes almost no sense to me. This is the Hekowatch, and I can only think that fashion-conscious cryptologists and people who want everyone to know how obtuse their brains are will be buying these.

Anyway, it set me thinking about the innovative ways people have come up with to tell the time in an effort to avoid the tediously conventional analogue face. There’s the straightforward counter-clockwise idea:

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