Cow Sculpture Stolen in Downtown Prague
(AP)

3D Printing in Stone, or Copy a
Sculpture in Rock

"Hanging Corpse Admired as Sculpture on
Campus"

Hanging Corpse Admired as Sculpture on
Campus

story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=1&u=/nm/20 031114/od_nm/odd_hungary_sculpture_dc
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Assemblage sculpture/clock of surpassing
gorgeosity

NAMM: Apple previews Sculpture,
UltraBeat, Guitar Amp

For a Drab Mouse, Light Sculpture and
Mood Lifter

Meet the Fuckers. FCC posts complaints
of Olympics coverage for showing a naked
Greek sculpture.

Winter Dry

Cold Winter

I got another free product in the mail the other day to review — a PS2 game called Cold Winter.

It was rated M (for Mature), but I'm not much of a gamer so I enlisted my 10-year-old son to play it with me.

It's something of an espionage adventure that starts in a Chinese prison. You are Andrew Sterling, disavowed secret agent of some kind, and you have to fight your way out. I gather there's a lot more after that, but we never found out (keep reading).

Cold Winter earned its M rating: in one of the first cut scenes, Sterling gets tortured and has his finger bent back until it breaks (yes, it's as bad as it sounds). Thoughout the rest of the game, when he's holding a pistol so you can see his hands on the screen, he flexes his left hand as if it's still stiff from the break however many months ago. And when you get shot, there's a lot blood. And...chunks. And then there's the guy who gets killed sitting on the toilet, and just kind of slumps there. It's not elegant.

Anyway, the storyline didn't hold our interest so much, so we quit that and just went to two-player mode — you know, Capture the Flag and all that. It turns out that Cold Winter is a pretty good first person shooter.

It tends toward the realistic side of combat, rather than the cinematic. There are a lot of weapons to pick from, and they have realistic touches: you run really slow while carrying the rocket launcher (tough to do much but camp), and if you fire anything more than a short burst from the MP5, the recoil kicks it up so you're shooting at nothing but air. The controls are good and, before long, we were running around blowing each other to smithereens for a couple of hours.

The gas grenades are the best part. You can lob one and seal off an area with poison gas. Your opponent can only wait until it dissipates enough to make a run through it (though I'm willing to bet there's a gas mask in the game somewhere — we were two busy killing each other to bother looking).

If you get exposed to gas, your vision starts getting blurry and you may go down for the count, which makes you pretty picky as to whether you should risk making a run for it. (In fact, you can get shot in this game, but not die right away — you limp away from a fire fight only to lose too much blood and go down around the corner or something.)

There's a poetic joy to trapping your opponent in some alley with a cloud of poisonous gas, then just firing rocket after rocket blindly into the cloud until he comes stumbling out.

Later, as we were cycling through the game options to play, we found an interesting one called "Headmatch." It's like the flag-based games where you get a point for every second or so you're holding the flag. Except there's no flag. It's the "decapitated head of an unknown man." Seriously.

When you start a headmatch, first you have to find the head, which could be anywhere. So me and the boy are running around the rooftops of some Morrocan town, looking for a decapitated head, which was pretty funny, actually.

He finds it first and yells, "I've got the head! I've got the head!" I tell him to wait so I can come over to look at it. Then I tell him to turn around so my guy can crouch down and look under it while he holds it aloft by its hair.

Then, suddenly, it hit me: I'm the worst parent ever.

The Tick in Winter

Winter nostalgia

It is tough to imagine anyone being nostalgic for this past winter in New England but perhaps this photo of sammies in the snow will do the trick.  It comes to us from Willie Stromeyer, whom I met as an 8-year-old son of a friend.  He's now married and living in Upstate New York.

Keeps you warm in winter

Winter Weather

A Walk in Winter

A few photos from a walk on a winter day.

Alan Burlison always has such nice pictures and stories from his own walks around the Peak District that I thought I'd have a go with my urban landscape. No fields of heather or peat bogs here, but it's home. :)

We took a nice walk around the southern edge of Helsinki and I needed to finish off a roll of film. We wound up walking out on the ice which made me nervous even though it appeared to be a very popular Sunday pastime for quite a few people. Where I come from, only stupid people who want to die walk out on the invariably thin ice, but Finland's ice is much thicker so that only a few people manage to fall through each year. :) It's strange to walk on the ice where in summertime there are only boats. The abandoned fuel station looked out of place and abandoned in spite of the people with strollers, with pets, with friends all wandering on the ice around it. It may be winter here, but we don't let the cold keep us inside all the time.

Now is the winter of SCO discontent

Winter Gear From REI

Winter Corporation

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