Try as I might, I can't help but fall into sync with the gay stereotypes of musical taste. Yes, I like Madonna and Kylie. I posted a mash-up of Dolly Parton. Now I must admit that I quite like Bette Midler too. It's her swing stuff that I just adore, like Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy . That's how I came across The Puppini Sisters, and by gosh, they are just faaaaaaabulous! fucking awesome! They do classic swing songs, their own songs and covers of pop songs in the swing style. Their version of Beyonce's Crazy In Love has to be just about the best song I've ever heard. My body twitters uncontrollably whenever I hear it. Though the quality of this YouTube version isn't the best and doesn't capture their amazing voices, you'll still get the idea. They also do delicious covers of Wuthering Heights , I Will Survive and Walk Like An Egyptian among others.

In case you've been wondering how to get more out of Photoshop, or want to learn a few new PS skills, you should probably check out this series of videos by 'Donnie' called You Suck at Photoshop . He hates you, but then he hates himself as well so its ok. Here are a couple of the vids, and the link .

Don't look at me like that. As I'm going to write another post when I can just put another video here. Its about robots ok. Its funny. Just be quiet and watch it, you'll like it!

I saw a clip of an earlier version of this robot a year or two ago, and it was freaky then. They've clearly been working on it, and now it is scary enough to take on the snake robot I posted about recently. All of the sensing and reacting technology that has gone into making this dog robot boggles the mind, but why did they have to give it no face and two heads?

I have a couple of albums by Ken Ishii which I love, because they were a random purchase I made when I went on my high school trip to Japan. I selected them based solely on the cover art, and they turned out to be great. (They were prominently placed in the electro/dance section of the cd store, so I guess that was probably a good indicator too). That was yonkers ago, and I really should find out what he has been doing more recently, as I stumbled across this clip which is just delightful. Simple, clever and very effective, you won't look at space invaders the same again. Oh, and it's very Japanese.

~ First up is this lovely image of a designer light made from a sheep stomach. A preserved sheep stomach of course, it would just be gross otherwise! Check out variations on the theme over at the designer's website . ~ Apparently this game is used by the US Airforce to train their pilots. It's damn irritating, and you'll probably play it over and over again. ~ It seems a sideways walking midget with a pointy hat is terrorising the town of General Guemes in Argentina. The Freaky Gnome has panicked children, and no one wants to go out at night. There is even a creepy video in the article. This would be the sweetest kind of hysterical if its true, but I'm worried it might be viral marketing for J.J. Abrams next film. ~ Here is a cool image of what the all the water and all the air on earth would look like in comparative volume to the earth. For some reason I find this image more unsettling then stomach lights or freaky gnomes!

This tickled my fancy, a competition over on Worth1000.com to design adverts for current technologies and products in the style of old fashioned print ads. Oh what fun. They seem to have lots of fun photoshop gimmickery over on Worth1000. I do like this ad for the Wii, and also the PS3 one you can find on the site.

Record-breaking heat waves are the least exciting natural 'event' you can be part of. Unlike, say a thunderstorm with hail the size of babies skulls, a heat wave it just hot and boring. It saps the energy out of you. I don't want to do anything, and yet I have a million things to do. I'm totally blaming it for why my team and I sucked so terribly doing theatresports last Sunday. You try to think on your feet, under stage lights in a un-airconditioned little church theatre. God, its hard enough to be coherent let alone make up an interesting and entertaining scene. Blah. Haven't had the mental fortitude to find time to write either. I just lay like a mollusc on my couch, hoping if I stay very still the warmness will leave me alone. It never does. I shall retire now to my hot, restless bed so that I may rise weary and bleary-eyed for work. What joy! Who wants to drink themselves unconscious in the Garden of unearthly delights tomorrow?

You may have thought the cockroach controlled robot was creepy, but witness this eerie little snake robot created at Carnegie Mellon University's biorobotics unit. These things will one day rule the earth, and there will be nowhere we can hide. Nowhere.

I feel a little nuts this week, cramming my head with all manner of arts stuff, and being slightly disappointed that what has leaked out so far isn't more meaningful. I guess it just needs some time to stew, but if there is one thing I don't have patience with, its myself. So I feel compelled to wander off my conceptual course, and into the daily funnies. Garfield strips, which never really appealed to me, are so much more interesting with-out Garfield. Jon becomes a strange lonely man talking to himself, and that is fascinating enough. Yet, in my art-overloaded delerium, I look at these absent garfields , and start to imagine him in conversation with the abstract concept of art. It seems so perfectly and bizarrely appropriate. My goodness, I really have fallen off the deep end.