Imaginary dialogues

Remember my post about Murphy's law? Well, one of blogger servers had several "bugs" including the "403 Forbidden" error... and of course my blog is hosted in that particular server. Seems that it's now fixed. Thanks folks at blogger!

I'm still working on our company's web site. The positive side of having your own company, is that I can't get fired for blogging about our secrets here. I want to build a section "for kids" with interactive flash games like memory and puzzles. So, I checked on creative commons for kiwi pictures available for re-use... and there are just tourist's pictures of the stuffed kiwis at museums (even I have better pictures of those). So I made my search wider... and to my surprise, there are only a few (good) pictures of kiwi birds. It is a shame that being the national icon, there are no good pictures available on the net. Someone should take some good pictures before it's too late and they all get extinct!

Harri Kallio did some amazing job on his project called: "The Dodo and Mauritius Island, Imaginary Encounters". The dodo is probably the most famous (recently) extinct species:

This strange giant pigeon was exterminated due to human intervention between 1662 and 1693 on Mauritius Island --the only place on earth where dodos existed. Although the dodo became extinct hundreds of years ago, it still lives on in the collective memory of the western world.

There are only 4 museums hosting real dodo remains (via) That information and other resources were used to recreate a flock (?) of dodos using fully articulated metal skeletons. Then the pictures were taken "on location" creating an amazing "dialogue between the mythical, art historical and biological dodo".

I have pictures of another kind of imaginary encounters. I noticed that I forgot to upload pictures of the Chinese new year's lantern festival (they are now at my yahoo pics) This year, it was rainy, so there was not so much crowd as last time... or maybe it's because we didn't stay until late. There were some very nice paper lanterns. Check out the chinese versions of "alebrijes"... I wonder if that is a cultural yuxtaposition like this chinese warrior wearing adidas snickers.

ciao