The (Best Ever) 12 Days of Christmas

This is the very best rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas that I ever have heard. Happy Holidays. Enjoy!



If the video does not play or display properly above, click here to view it on YouTube.

Eyeballing: A game for craftsmen and compulsive picture-straighteners

Do you engage in work or leisure tasks that entail judging whether things are straight or crooked? Woodworking, maybe? Are you a compulsive picture-straightener? Or perhaps you just like puzzles.

There is a woodworking website called Woodgears.ca that has a nifty little game that will challenge you. They call it The Eyeballing Game.

The game presents the player with a series of geometric figures. Tasks include straightening figures that are awry, bisecting angles, and judging the location of points such as the center of a circle or triangle.

The presentation is very simple but the tasks may be more difficult than you think. Fortunately, you can do the game over again -- and over and over and over. (Yes, it's one of those games: one you're likely to keep on doing, even though you know you should be doing something else...)

I'm finding that practice does improve my score. Maybe it's a question of tuning the ol' eyeballs to the task.

Try it: The Eyeballing Game

The 10 Ugliest Buildings in the World

There's an amusing feature on the travel information website VirtualTourist.com that you may be interested in reading: The World’s Top 10 Ugliest Buildings.

The introduction to the list says:

The great thing about travel may be seeing the world through a different lens, but that doesn’t mean the view is always pretty. With this in mind, the travel experts at VirtualTourist.com have come up with a list of “The World’s Top 10 Ugliest Buildings and Monument.” General manager, Giampiero Ambrosi talks about the selections: “Some of these picks have all the charm of a bag of nails while others are just jaw-dropping in their complexity. Love them or hate them, the list is certainly entertaining.”

The list:

1. Boston City Hall - Boston, Massachusetts
2. Montparnasse Tower - Paris, France
3. LuckyShoe Monument - Tuuri, Finland
4. Metropolitan Cathedral - Liverpool, England
5. Port Authority Bus Terminal - New York City, New York
6. Torres de Colón - Madrid, Spain
7. Liechtenstein Museum of Fine Arts - Vaduz, Liechtenstein
8. Scottish Parliament Building - Edinburgh, Scotland
9. Birmingham Central Library - Birmingham, England
10. Peter the Great Statue - Moscow, Russia

The website includes a photo of each 'winner' on the list, as well as a brief critique.

Ugly buildings are amazing when you think about it. Someone had to think up the design, develop it, commit it to paper, and present it to the people who commissioned it. Then those people had to approve the design and authorize its construction, and fund it. Did they like the design? Did they actually think it was beautiful?

One can only imagine that perhaps there were practical, utilitarian, political and economic considerations that trumped aesthetics.

[Photo Source]