New Beginnings

I started a Xanga account freshman year in college but didn't really get to update it often. In fact, I probably have less than 10 entries in it. So why should I start blogging now? Well, simply because there are so many cool things out there that I find daily and want to keep track of - everything from random links to new stores visited. None of those deserve a full page of summary, but they are all things I want to remember and share. And voila...the blog! Who knows, maybe from dumping everything here, I'll finally figure out what I want to focus on in life.

Today marks more than my entry into the world of bloggers, but many other things as well. Since things never work out if I talk about them in advance, I'll save those other beginnings for when they attain a more tangible form.

Link of the day: www.wheresgeorge.com
What is it: a place to track dollar bills by their serial number. I had bill K42517930C. It started its journey on 14-Jan-07 10:54 AM in Norton, MA, but apparently didn't make it farther than 28 miles in more than a year. Of course, that's most likely because no one bothered to go on wheresgeorge.com to enter in their location. Hopefully when I release it back into the world, it'll land in the hands of more curious people. So long K42517930C!

Artist of the day: Athanasius Kircher
Who is he: a man ahead of his time. I came across an image of Poussin's Peter and John Healing the Lame Man and decided to look for information on Nicolas Poussin and his use of parallaxial shifts. I remembered the painting from a high school museum visit and at the time never fully comprehended the master's use of perspective, so I decided to do some online research. Googling yielded few results, but did lead me to a blog on Kircher, who apparently taught Poussin perspective. Kircher has more to his name than that though. Described by the NYT as a postmodernist of the 1600's, Kircher was an eccentric artist who invented things like eavesdropping statues and vomiting machines and whose pursuit of knowledge often led him to conduct dangerous experiments on himself (think Ben Franklin and his kite but with active volcanoes). This is one old artist I intend to keep an eye out for.

Alright...off to work on my new beginnings