Bill Taylor - Whiteboard Artist

Aspiring cartoonist Bill Taylor from Durham, North Carolina uses the whiteboard in his office as a canvas to express his artistic abilities. A data manager by day, Taylor spends 2 to 5 minutes each day to complete his masterpieces that include the works of artists like Monet, Banksy, Van Gogh, etc

Each piece takes an average of about 6 weeks or more to complete

He gets a lot of people who come by just to see the progress or see what the next choice is. Says Taylor, "I do my daily chunk on it in the time it takes most people to get a cup of coffee from the break room."

Each finished piece is left for a couple of days before he erases it!

Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol

Dorothy and riot policeman by Banksy

Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai

Starry Night by Van Gogh

Departure of the Winged Ship by Vladimir Kush

The whiteboard in Bill's cubicle

W/W - Yee Sang

Here we are tossing the yee sang with our chopsticks for good luck! The "yee sang" is served as the first course (while the chopsticks are clean! LOL!) at a Chinese Reunion Dinner. The fun begins with the communal tossing of the ingredients into the air with chopsticks while wishes are expressed out loud to mark the start of a prosperous new year and it's customary that the higher you toss, the greater your fortunes!

Hubby and the boys

The cousins

For the clueless, yee sang is a traditional, must-have dish during the Chinese New Year. Basically, it is a salad of finely sliced raw fish, julienned carrots, daikon, jellyfish, etc sprinkled with ground peanuts , roasted sesame seeds and shrimp crackers. Each ingredient has a special significance.

There's been a lot of buzz lately over the ownership of this dish with an ongoing food fight between Malaysia and Singapore, our friendly neighbour from the south. Singaporean Prof. Tan Wee Cheng claimed on FB that the dish originated from the island republic and should be entered into UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage List. This claim has since been refuted by several Chinese Associations in Malaysia and sparked an online war!

Cecilia Parades - The Human Chameleon

Using a mix of makeup, paint, costumes and with the help of her assistants, Peruvian artist Cecilia Parades seamlessly blends into her bold, wallpaper-ish backgrounds.

Her hair is the only indication of her presence

June Gilbank - Crocheted Cacti

Unlike my mom who has a green thumb, everything I grow dies on me! Yep, even the hardiest cactus!

I am seriously considering a crocheted succulent - it never needs watering, never dies, and is always in peak condition!

It makes the sweetest gift..

brightens up your window and ...

is most unusual!

These crocheted cacti are the creations of June Gilbank, a crochet pattern designer, craft book author, multi-crafter, animal lover, technical writer and web geek.

Visit PlanetJune for more info on those super adorable cactus patterns.

W/W - Chinese Lunar Year

These pics were captured at the Taoist temple near my mom's retirement home.

The quintessential Lion Dance

Performed throughout the 15 days of the Chinese New Year, the lion dance signifies power, courage and good fortune

The green fruit you see in the pic is a pomelo (think Chinese grapefruit). The pomelo symbolizes abundance. During the dance, one of the lions 'swallowed' the fruit,then sprawled out on the floor and was motionless for a good few minutes. I thought it had fainted from the stiffling heat! What I didn't know was that the front performer inside the lion was carving the pomelo. Suddenly, the lion got up and threw out the pomelo, now sculpted with some Chinese characters, from its mouth. Sorry pallies, I couldn't take a pic of that. I almost fainted myself amid the oppressive heat, haze, pounding drums and jostling crowd!



The lion dance is accompanied by the beating of drums, cymbals, and gongs that synchronise to the movements and actions.

The haze from the smoking joss sticks/coils and firecrackers

Devotees praying with joss sticks

Giant joss sticks (an integral part of the Chinese New Year celebrations) outside the temple



Joss coils - This type of incense is able to burn for an extended period, from hours to days

MIA

Hi pallies! Hope I've been missed! So sorry for not replying to your email and returning visits to your blogs. I was away in my hometown for the last couple of weeks,caring for my 88 year-old mom who was hospitalized for a broken left femur. What a start to a supposedly auspicious Chinese New Year! Thank God, all's good and Mom is recovering well from her surgery. She's now convalescing in a retirement home where she is residing temporarily until she's ready to go home.

Mom (right) with her new buddies at the retirement home

I had abandoned Hubby and the boys for the two weeks so you can imagine the state the house is in!
I'll be visiting your blogs as soon as I'm done with the the chores.

Wordish/Wordful Wednesday - Of Chippies and 99

I found these photos in a missing SD card while cleaning out my handbag.
If my memory serves me correctly, I think these pics were taken somewhere around the Tower of London.

Almost everyone around us was snacking on fish and chips and there was this long queue behind one particular fish & chips kiosk. I was reminded of an ex-classmate who travels to London every year just to get her fish & chips fix. How crazy is that? If I had her moolah, I would prefer to visit a different country every year.
I'm not a big fan of fish & chips but I thought I'd give it a go.

There were several chippies (British slang for fish & chips shops) in the area.




This no-frills British classic meal came in a cardboad box printed with newspaper motifs - a clever substitute for newspaper wrapping. Fish and chips meals traditionally came wrapped in a couple of layers of newspaper, but concerns over ink poisoning phased out this practice.

Salt and vinegar are traditionally sprinkled over fish and chips at the time it is served in chippies in the UK.


Blimey! That was bloody marvelous!

Interestingly, Britain's national dish is chicken tikka masala and not fish & chips! Controversy raged throughout the whole of Britain after former foreign secretary Robin Cooke hailed Chicken Tikka Masala as 'Britain's true national dish.'

Some interesting facts and figures about fish & chips

* 300 million portions of fish and chips are eaten in Britain each year.
* There are more than 10,000 chippies in the UK.
* It is said that Joseph Malin opened the first chippy in London in 1860.

And no visit to Old Blighty is complete if you haven't tasted their 99 Flake.

A 99 Flake ice cream, or more commonly known as 99, is an ice cream cone with a Cadbury Flake inserted into it. The ice cream is usually vanilla flavoured. They are traditionally sold by ice cream vans, parlours and now by the world's first amphibious ice cream van - The HMS Flake 99.


Here's an excerpt from the Daily Mail.

The ‘HMS Flake 99′, which has a top speed of five knots and can also run on land, was created to mark National Ice Cream Week and to emphasise the problem of the increasing number of exclusion zones and decreasing amount of ice cream vans on the roads.
The number of vans falled from 20,000 to just 5,000 over the past fifty years due to growing number of bans from housing estates, parks and outside schools because of concerns about noise pollution and childhood obesity, reports Daily Mail.
After a nationwide tour of Britain’s beaches, HMS Flake 99 will be heading to the canals of Venice next year.


There are many theories as to how the 99 got its name.

Here's an extract from BBC NEWS.

The ice cream in question has gone by that name since 1930, when Cadbury's launched a shorter version of its Flake bar - called a Flake 99 - for the ice cream trade.

Which does rather seem to blow one theory - that the bar is exactly 99mm long - out of the water. The UK is only now edging towards metrification - 70-odd years ago, everything was in imperial measures.

Ditto the suggestion that back in the day they cost 99p. True in the 1990s, but in 1930, nothing cost 99p - it was pre-decimalisation, remember.

Another theory goes that the initials of ice cream are IC, which is one way to write 99 in Roman numerals. But the convention is to write it XCIX - but it's possible this was ignored or not known.

Found this in Cadbury's FAQs
In the days of the monarchy in Italy the King has a specially chosen guard consisting of 99 men, and subsequently anything really special or first class was known as "99" - and that his how "99" Flake came by its name.