News about chalk, paint, table settings, New York signs, dudes and wasps.
Keeping up appearances.
What could chalk do for your morning walk?
Ann Arbor’s David Zinn brings concrete and brick to life with his chalk drawings and makes you want to believe in a world of wonder lingering beneath the drab surface of the everyday. Full Story >>
What could painted silos do for your pastoral landscapes?
Australian Guido van Helten is capturing local history and culture as he turns a Minot, North Dakota, silo into a monumental mural. Painting large art is something he’s done all over the world, from “a dam in Australia to part of a former cooling tower at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine.” As of this posting, only a barn and female figures are visible on the Minot silo as the image slowly reveals itself. Full Story >>
TV trays? No. Just no.
Competitive table setting is coming into its own. Extravagantly creative, skillfully crafted and professionally judged, this ambitious new enterprise is rocking county fairs. Surely, senior living communities will join this action soon — community vs. community? Full Story >>
Sign after sign of New York.
Thousands of New York City signs have been fed into a dedicated search engine. And now you can search for maps of all the signs that say “pizza” (111,290), “luxury” (16,731), and “fuhgeddaboudit” (154). Plus, anything else New York-y you can think of. Full Story >>
A word with you, dude.
Word-meisters tracking the evolution of the term "dude" have discovered its start in the 1880s. That’s when certain men who dressed themselves “over-the-top and fancy” (the “hipsters of the 1880s”) became known as dudes, probably due to “Yankee Doodle,” the song celebrating the “unsophisticated American who ‘stuck a feather in his cap’ in an attempt to parade as a kind of European ‘dandy’ in high society.” Then came more than a century of evolution: flashy dudes’ picnics, slickly attired cowboys on dude ranches, the adoption of the term among Blacks and Mexican Americans (“a marker of solidarity and connection”), surfer culture (“duuuuude”), The Big Lebowski (abides), and today’s common usage as an indicator of we-are-or-could-be-pals familiarity. By the way, “bro” has yet to dethrone it in popularity, dude. Full Story >>
The wasps are missing.
At an Aiken, South Carolina, site that once produced US nuclear weapons parts, a radioactive wasp nest discovered on July 3 has been exterminated. “No wasps were found at the site,” the report says. It adds that the wasps in the nest would have “significantly lower radiation levels than the nest itself” and that “wasps generally fly only a few hundred feet from their nest, and that the nest was found in the middle of the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site — meaning there is little chance they flew outside of the facility.” Full Story >>
Wait. There’s “little chance” they fled the facility? Dude! They’re radioactive wasps, and they’re missing! Let’s panic! But of course, if your leads and conversions have gone missing, no need to panic. Call Rally, and we’ll help you get your nest buzzing again.
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