Pages of Lumin

A while ago I was flicking through books in a gift shop, waiting for some people to surface from an exhibition. I was feeling a mite grumpy. The exhibition had been so rammed i'd given up on it, and now I had to loiter in a crowded shop, pretending to be interested in tidy displays of pencil sharpeners and posters.

I nestled into a small gap infront of the books and started to paw hopefully at intriguing-looking spines. Help, I willed the books. And they did! When I peeled open a copy of The wrong place by Brecht Evens, my grumpiness lifted. People nudged and jostled past me, hands reached above my head for heavy books, and I stood there oblivious, staring into the colourful scenes, engrossed, my feet locking unmovable roots into the ground.

I didn't notice my buddies had already left and were huddled outside the window in the street, kicking their feet. I don't know how long they had been there. I'd been lost in those pages for a while, and I shuffled out feeling guilty and entranced.

Wandering around town, I was still mulling over the images. I had so wanted to keep the book, but I always find it hard to justify buying anything that isn't edible. I don't like to accumulate stuff. But I still want to paw at those luscious watercolours. They look like beautiful, kaleidoscopic 'Where's Wally?' scenes. I don't really know what's going on in them but they are somehow hypnotic. Nightclubs, stations, parquet floors, parks, streets, shadows.. it's an alluring, quietly chaotic journey.

Here is his blog. He's Belgian, so only a little of it is written in English, but there are a glorious amount of pictures.

This makes me smile

Space cartoons, handclaps and desperate lyrics.
Hailing from 1980, meet Italian duo La Bionda and cartoonist Guido Manuli.

Huff huff huff, pastry

Yesterday was a strange mixture of tension and nostalgia, and then I found a tax rebate in my post. So today I stole some time to myself.. I woke stealthily at 5am and had coffee and pastries in the park, and sunk into a new book. It was brilliant.
Then the joggers started streaming by and I began to feel shifty, sitting there eating a box of pastries and doodling like a five year old in the midst of their shining halos of exuberance.

Old Octopi

I was looking for images of vintage octopuses and found these pictures.. along with a Japanese illustration of lady-octopus sexy stuff, which um, I won't include.

The internet also tells me that all octopuses are venomous, but only the blue-ringed octopuses are known to be deadly to humans.  Octopuses have three hearts, and their beak is the only hard part of their body (Here is an anatomical diagram of our tentacled friend).  They can defend themselves with camouflage, ejecting thick black ink to aid escape, and autotomising limbs (self amputation).  The crawling arm serves to distract the predators..    

Stealth attack from above.

You are next. 

6 ships are lost to tentacled sea 
beasts every minute. Please donate.