The 27th Silly Olympiad

The 27th Silly Olympiad, an event held traditionally every 3.7 years, which this year has brought together competitors from over 4 million different countries:
-100 yards for people with no sense of direction
-1500 meters for the deaf
-200 meters freestyle for non-swimmers
-Marathon for incontinents
-High jump
-3000 meter steeplechase for people who think they're chickens
Hide And Seek Olympic Finals

WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY: Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Graham Chapman.

The Voice of Peace : Abie Nathan (April 29, 1927 - August 27, 2008)

From Somewhere in the Mediterranean...(hebrew)

Fly to Israel with Air France...1951

Milkmaid Toy

Commissioned by the Dutch Souvenir project, and initiated by the European Ceramic Work Centre,the Milkmaid by Oooms is not your typical souvenir. Inspired by Johannes Vermeer's innocent painting "Het Melkmeisje" (The Milkmaid) this blue and white ceramic dildo is a perfect alternative to bringing back windmills, clogs and tulips.

Studio Oooms has created a line of art pieces that are both ingenious and humorous. Visit their site to see USB sticks encased in chunks of tree branches (so awesome!), cabinets whose doors cannot all be shut at once (so subversive!), hats made out of real human hair (so creepy!) and small huts that can be placed in urban settings for the purpose of clandestine observation (so sneaky!).
The Milkmaid Dildo is part of Studio Oooms’ “Dutch Souvenirs” project, which pokes fun at the sorts of small gifts people typically bring back from the Netherlands. Made of white hollow ceramics, the dildo shows an image of a pensive milkmaid tending her flock. The design is rendered in shades of blue, and the piece is completed with a cork plugging the product’s end.
A small card tucked into the dildo’s packaging warns that the piece is intended as art and not a hard-core sex toy.

Description:
Type: Ceramic delft blue dildo with cork
Designers: Davy Grosemans & Guido Ooms
Dimensions: 22 cm / 8,66 in, Ø 2,5 cm / 0,78 in
Price: 130,- Euro

An American from New York City

Conjuring up visions of southern California, Ein Hod is home to some 450 inhabitants, the majority of whom are painters, sculptors, writers and musicians. People like Naomi Verchovsky, a potter, and Dan Ben-Arye, a sculptor.

Verchovsky, an American from New York City, has lived here since 1974 and has had her own studio since 1982. Ben-Arye, originally from South Africa, has been in Ein Hod for the past 23 years.
Verchovsky produces functional stoneware and teaches pottery classes. Her husband, Zeev, whom she met on an ulpan in a kibbutz in the Negev, operates a grocery store and a second-hand bookshop. He is also an immigrant, having been born in Riga, Latvia. Ben-Arye, who conducts guided tours of Ein Hod as a sideline, resided in Jaffa before coming here. His wife, Leah, is a fabric designer from Safed who has lived in Haifa.
At least one member of each family in Ein Hod is an artist. “We’re a very mixed group in terms of age and ethnic origin,” said Verchovsky. “We absorb people from alternative lifestyles, not too square, not your usual people. There are a lot of characters here.”
Members of the community are approved by an absorption committee. Candidates who pass muster have to live here for a minimum of six months and mount an acceptable exhibition.

read more...

QuinQuag or Ein Hod?

The story so far: Having purchased land in the Catskills on which to build a conference center for his Wellness Solutions Group, dot-com entrepreneur Mike Smith has made an exciting discovery. The site used to be home to QuinQuag, a Utopian artists' colony founded in the late '40s and bankrolled by a certain Isabelle Nash, patroness of the arts and the wife of a rich dental-supplies manufacturer. QuinQuag's reputation, we learn, rests largely on its output of folksy handpainted tiles and clunky wooden rocking chairs. Both enterprises were resounding financial failures, though one of the rockers was supposedly given to JFK by Jackie. Halston allegedly contributed a design for another, but "for some reason, it didn't catch on." Despite this, it's all a thrilling revelation for Mike, who, seeing a perfect fit between QuinQuag values and Wellness Solutions' goals, has adopted the colony's name for his company. "When people think about 'wellness' in the future, they'll think 'QuinQuag'!" he declares in a promotion al video, his expression suffused with a nicely judged blend of awed humility and visionary zeal(from UBUWEB)
For Ein Hod Future(FEHF) CLICK HERE

Happy Assholes

Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?
Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe — not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns? Are we to believe that four out of every five Americans can be content amid the general woe? Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss? Aren't we suspicious of this statistic? Aren't we further troubled by our culture's overemphasis on happiness? Don't we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?(read more...)

Rev. Gary Davis playing "Candyman."

Candy man been here and gone
Candy man been here and gone
Candy man, salty dog
If you can't be my Candy man you can't be my salty dog

Candy man, candy man
Candy man, fattin hog
Candy man, Santa Claus
If you can't be my candy man, can't be my fattin hog

Candy man, candy man
Candy man, been here and gone
Candy man, salty dog
I wish I was in New Orleans, sitting on the candy stand

Run get the pitcher, get the baby some beer (6X)
I'd give anything in this god almighty world
To get my Candy man home

Candy man, salty dog
Candy man, fattin hog
Candy man, salty dog
If you can't be my Candy man
You can't be my man at all