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?

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.

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.

Meet the armchair alien:

This image wasn’t created with photoshop. It’s called light graffit – artist Michael Bosanko sets up his camera on a very long exposure (over an hour, usually) and then creates the image by moving a torch around in the pattern he wants. You can get a better sense of the technique by watching this video:

Here, you can actually see him moving around with the torch. I also like this one, which is called ‘the green dragon’:

Although I like these, I think they’ve got greater potential as animations, rather than just static images. I’d quite like to see a short film about the green dragon. He could even have a sidekick…

To see more examples of light graffiti, go here.

Beedogs. The (self-proclaimed) premiere online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes.

This is one of those sites that reaffirms my faith in the true brilliance of the internet. Where else could those who enjoy dressing their dogs up as bumblebees come together to discuss their shared their enthusiasm for this most bizarre of hobbies?

Say you want an image like this:

I mean, who wouldn’t?

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