Chicken John, the tortured and sometimes torturing soul of San Francisco's innovative art scene, last year started the brilliant Camp Tipsy event. Camp Tipsy is a week+ long camping trip on a lake a little north of Sacramento that's all about building crazy, clever, lousy boats. In Chicken's words:

Boats are judged not only on lack of engineering but also on crummy implimentation. The coveted “last place” award for least effort is the category to watch out for. The idea of Camp Tipsy is to have fun and build boats. Build ‘em outa nothing at all. It’s an excercize in a catyclismic future that Kevin Cosner portrayed so poorly.

More details on the event: Camp Tipsy weblog.

We went to the first one last year (there were two last summer). Here's pics and video I shot:

Inaugural Launch of the Camp Tipsy Bar from Dav Yaginuma on Vimeo.

We had a great time even though we didn't build a boat, but I started idly thinking about what I wanted to build for this year soon after. My first thought was a floating human canon, so you could do canonballs into the lake with style. I have no idea how those things actually work though, and I suspect I shouldn't actually try to build one. Then I thought how about a floating catapult? That seemed doable, but too complicated. In the end I scaled it back to a swingset mounted on pontoons, so you can jump into the water. So that's the plan.

Abstract:

A backyard-style swing set (with a slide and maybe two swings) mounted on two long pontoons with an additional beam or two across the middle for lateral support (also serves as a platform to help get into the swing seats). The pontoons will be wooden enclosures filled with empty containers or foam or whatever can be found.

Concept rendition:

Considerations:

• The whole thing might flip over. Such is life. If that seems likely to happen I guess I'll just try to make the pontoons longer on site.
• Not sure where to mount the slide. Maybe make one pontoon bigger, or extend it for some support. I'm sure some lousy solution will present itself.
• I'd been thinking that it would be nice if the energy produced by swinging was mechanically converted to drive a propellor, but I have doubts that 1) I could pull off implementing such a system and 2) it would provide enough thrust. So there's no plan for propulsion yet, I'll just tow it out with another boat or get a trawler motor which probably will not work either. I'd love to rig a sail, but I think that would be a disaster as well.

I have an alternative concept that would make it so that if the whole thing tipped over due to swinging, it would just land on another set of floats so you could keep on swinging, but the one depicted above is probably good enough and easier to build:

On Wednesday night I went to a class on Flame Effects at Langton Labs (billed as Learn 100% of the technical skills you need to make 80% of the fire art you see at Burning Man) so now I'm thinking it should have propane flame effects as well, but that might have to wait for the next event. Besides, we're totally going to win without going that far.

Today I was skimming the front page of The Wall Street Journal and I read this blurb:

Gates said there is evidence North Korea has begun work on another long-range missile, but a launch anytime soon remains unclear.

I realized the word 'unclear' strongly brought to mind the word 'nuclear', for obvious reasons. Then I started wondering if that word choice might be a deliberative one. I did a Google News search for the words "North Korea" and "unclear", then compared the results count to many synonyms for unclear that I found on an online thesaurus:

1,610 for north-korea unclear

13 for ambiguous,

80 for dim

26 for elusive

6 for fuzzy

4 for hazy

2 for imprecise

110 for shadowy

531 for uncertain

481 for unsettled

11 for unsure

47 for vague

I also threw in another word that I thought could likely be used instead.

342 for unknown

I don't suppose this answers the question on whether the word choice is deliberative or not (it could be a subconscious choice), but I don't think it is mere coincidence.

My very first of the "52 things" was a comic strip I called The Straight and Narrows featuring the hill towers around San Francisco as the characters. Here's a new one that includes another one of my other favorite San Francisco icons, Frank Chu. You're not going to get this at all if you aren't a San Franciscan, and maybe not even then.

This past weekend Mie, Tesla and I took the RV up to Yosemite for the Strawberry Music Festival. It was a gorgeous weekend! I did a few little watercolors there, and I suppose this is the best one. The very last thing I did at the festival before leaving was attend a watercolor class by Steve Curl where I got to see how an actual artist analyzes and approaches an illustration. I think I learned a bit by attending, from how to think about shapes to understanding how the amount of water used will affect the painting, so hopefully my next attempt will be better.

Here's Steve teaching the class:

More photos from this trip at my Strawberry 2009 flickr set.

This one was a very expensive thing to produce, but here it goes:

F*ck Oil from Dav Yaginuma on Vimeo.

Our neighbors Michelle and Jeremy have this great self portrait hanging in their foyer. It was one of those accidental shots where they were setting up to pose for a holiday card photo and Michelle leaned forward to press the button mistakenly thinking the camera was on a timer. It came out well though, I always liked it. I also like that Jeremy had long hair in it (like me) even though he has always had very short hair since I've met him. So I had the idea to get Mie to help me recreate it.

I snapped a photo of it one day with my iPhone, then this weekend I displayed it on the living room TV (we have an iMac attached) so that one half of the screen showed the original and the other half of the screen was filled with PhotoBooth showing the iSight camera view. I had to set up lights to get the shadows right, but it wasn't too hard to closely match the poses with the side by side display. Mie clicked on the mouse to take our shot. I'm not really pleased with the photoshop work, but I didn't have a lot of time to perfect it.

Mie had the idea to print out our version and secretly put it in the frame in their foyer. I snuck over and gave it a shot, but unfortunately there was no easy way to replace the original in the frame so I had to resort to taping it onto the glass. They found it within 24 hours, but I think it could have gone for a week or more if I could have actually got it under the glass! Here's the two together (after they found it and we moved it):

For this year's card we felt we had to dedicate it to our renewed hope for America. At first we were considering something more directly associated with Obama, but I believe that would be the wrong message. Obama is the personification of the renewed hope, but the promise he represents is up to all of us to fulfill or not. If America is to succeed then we must be prepared to work towards that success. So I went with a more pure representation of America. Started with a CC licensed flag photo from wmc1111card and added an image of Tesla and another one of Mie and I, along with some photoshop artistic filters and the removal of an distractingly dissonant image on my shirt :)

This weekend I finally got time to work on our annual new years card, and while I was playing in Photoshop I got the urge to do another one as part of my languishing 52 things project. Here is is:

I used two Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr and one of my own photos of Mie. The background is from Aele and the wings are from ARTchemist*. And of course also the original of Mie. The title is a quote from Joseph Campbell.

Jed drew his breath in with astonishment, his face and torso awash in warm rush of the sunset. He unclasped his hands from the wheel of the aging tractor drawing them back and out at an even pace, as if flinging them in slow motion towards a position of exultation. He didn't exhale as an epiphany rolled through his inner mindscape like a suddenly fallen apple rolling down a sloping blanket of grass, dimpled with roots, seeds and the rest of Nature's miscellaneous detritus.

"None of this is real," he thought, and the moment seemed to last an eternity.

We got a whole bunch of new office chairs at work and they came in these strong sturdy boxes, so I got the idea to take a few of them and (using McGroovy's Box Rivets) construct a play house for Tesla. It's not really done yet but she's still pleased with it. Over time I'll add some more interior decoration, a doorbell and a light she can turn on and off. I'm also thinking of inserting her OLPC laptop in a way that it functions as a TV. I could maybe write some code that based on motion sensing (it has a built in camera) it could start playing her favorite youtube videos. I bought some knobs (for doors and windows) at the hardware store but they don't quite work because the screws that come with them are made for attaching to thicker material so I still have that to work out as well. I painted the exteriors white with spray paint, but I should have just used a brush. Still, it works more or less and looks ok. I added some touches with glue and construction paper and I'll add more over time.

We are leaving Tesla in the care of Mie's mother while we go to Burning Man this year. That will be Friday until Sunday after the Burn ...ten days. We've never been both away from her for even 24 hours before.

I made a little box with a photo of Mie or I on it for each day and we will put a treat in each one. Hopefully she won't think we've abandoned her completely this way? Parental guilt starting to to get thick...

Mie's nephew Tyler brought out some Dr. Seuss books this weekend while we were having a paint the RV day in Alameda. He pointed out a particular passage in Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book that he liked:

A moose is asleep. He is dreaming of moose drinks.
A goose is asleep. He is dreaming of goose drinks.
That's well and good when a moose dreams of moose juice.
And nothing goes wrong when a goose dreams of goose juice.
But it isn't too good when a moose and a goose
Start dreaming they're drinking the other one's juice.
Moose juice, not goose juice, is juice for a moose.
And goose juice, not moose juice, is juice for a goose.
So, when goose gets a mouthful of juices of mooses
And moose gets a mouthful of juices of gooses
They always fall out of their beds screaming screams
So, I'm warning you, now! Never drink in your dreams.

I thought it odd that the otherwise adventurous Seuss was so conservative in dream juice segregation. I mean, come on, fall out of your bed screaming screams just because you drank the wrong juice? Doubtful. I decided to draw a goose dreaming of moose juice on the RV.