Realized by Improv Everywhere.

The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is the number 1 promotion vessel of the Google float.
It costs too much to the company to not agree with the analyses of Jacob Nielsen at the end of the post.

Brendan Newnam for Marketplace decided to find out why Google decide to maintain his “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, that forwarding directly the user to a website reduce the market, 1% less that means $110 million in lost ad frevenue.

The ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button on Google’s search page may cost the company up to $110 million in lost ad revenue every year according to a report on American Public Media’s Marketplace.
Marisa Mayer, Google’s vice president responsible for everything on the search page, says that ‘it’s possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money’ and the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky,’ button reminds you that ‘people here have personality.’

Web usability expert Jacob Nielsensays this expensive button serves another business purpose, and precisely to communicate: ‘Oh we’re just two kind of grad students hanging out and having a beer and having a grand old time,’ not you know, ‘We are 16,000 people working on undermining your privacy?

David Lynch’s Berlin visit on the 13th of november in Berlin was turned into a chaotic fiasco by his friend, “The Raja of Germany”. They’re there to present the Since he just kept repeating the same words when asked to clarify, the two latter seem closest to the truth. The crowd started screaming and booing, David Lynch and his american entourage looking dumbstruck, not having understood a word of the Raja’s speech in german. Nose on the Nosedef blog reported everything:

“We want an invincible Germany! Invincible Germany” exclaims the “Raja of Germany”, dressed in a white robe and golden little crown.
“What do you mean?” cries the audience. “Hitler wanted an invincible Germany as well!”

“Yes, but unfortunately he didn’t succeed!”

“WHAAAAAAAAAT”?!?!?!?!

And then Lynch tries to explains…

Lynch had also brought spokespeople for the enlightenment movement / cult called Transcendental Meditation, and announced that the David Lynch Foundation yesterday bought Teufelsberg where it will build the “Invincible Germany University”. A place for 1.000 students to learn all there is to learn – plus Transcendental Meditation™ and yoga flying. A lot of people expressed doubts about this Transcendental Meditation™ procedure, like Joe Kellet.

Here’s a photo of the University / Tower of Invincibility on Teufelsberg and it’s quite scary:

Panyrat Kirapatpakon, a Thai business student, beat 24 transsexuals and transvestites at the extravagant pageant in the resort town of Pattaya to the Miss International Queen title. The contestants, shortlisted from more than 100 hopefuls, came from 15 countries, with a record number from Europe.

Miss International Queen is a beauty contest for transsexuals and transgendered individuals held in the Tiffany’s Show cabaret in the resort city of Pattaya, Thailand about 150 km (93 miles) southeast of BangkoIn.

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Tiffany’s Show Pattaya wants to provide an opportunity for transvestites/transgender to be part of Thailand’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in the 21st century, breaking boundaries and defining what it means ; to create human rights awareness among international communities; to make a donation to the Royal Sponsored AIDS Foundation ; to build friendship and exchange ideas among international lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities; to support the Tourism Authority of Thailand by increasing the number of tourists arrivals in Thailand and Pattaya city, to support and continue to build Pattaya city one of the most entertaining cities of the world, to build Tiffany’s Show Pattaya as a bridge between the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and the rest of the world.

Bangkok is also a global centre for sex-change surgery, and appears very tolerant with transgenderism. In reality, Pattaya is one of Thailands most commercially developed beach resorts, just 47kms east of Bangkok. It began as an R&R capital for American troops during the Vietnam War and has retained its legacy of go-go clubs, beer bars and massage parlours. The tourism boom of the 1980s exhausted the infrastructure, leaving the beaches in the area quite unpleasant, despite modern efforts at clean-up. However, Pattaya is still home to many international resorts and is crowded primarily with sex tourists.

George Alan O’Dowd, better known as Boy George (born June 14, 1961 in Eltham, London) is a rock singer-songwriter and Club DJ. His music is often classified as blue-eyed soul, since he was heavily influenced by Rhythm and Blues and reggae. Mainly O’Dowd is a essential part of the British new romantic movement which emerged in the late 1970s and was popularised in the early 1980s. He and Marilyn, born Peter Robinson were regulars at ‘The Blitz’, a highly stylised nightclub in London run by Steve Strange of the musical group Visage, and a place which spawned many early 1980s pop stars such as Spandau Ballet.

Publication date: 17/03/2005 • 304 pages • 242×161mm • ISBN: 1844133907 Order this book

From 1979 he worked as a DJ alongside Jeremy Healy until he joined forces with DJ Michael Craig and drummer Jon Moss in 1982 to form the 80’s super group Culture Club. Over the next four years, the group made history with their music including the huge hits “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me”. The group split in 1986 and reformed in 1998.
http://www.culture-club.co.uk/

Dread-locked Boy George challenged the traditional boundaries of gender: wore makeup, exotic outfits and brought this androgyny to a mainstream market, which was later dubbed as gender bending.

Today Boy George is recognized foremost as a leading dance music DJ, a solo artist and for his Broadway musical Taboo.

Boy George Feb 2007 DJ Tour Press

Kasou Taishou (欽ちゃん＆香取慎吾の全日本仮装大賞; Kinchan and Katori Shingo’s All Japan Costume Grand Prix) is a semi-annual show on NTV in which various amateurs perform short skits, which are rated by a panel of judges. One of the most successful at faking “special effects” was a skit, widely known as the “Matrix ping pong”.

In 1934 Luigi Pirandello was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature to “For his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art”. Celebrated Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli will present a restaging of Così è (se vi pare) or Right You Are (If You Think You Are), the renowned play by Luigi Pirandello in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and commissioned byPERFORMA 07. .

Ed ecco, o signori, come parla la verità! Siete contenti?
An extraordinary cast of top-billed actors have responded to Vezzoli’s visionary approach to Pirandello’s jewel of a work, Right You Are (If You Think You Are) that implicates the audience in its examination of celebrity, and that points also to the relativity of truth, the necessity of illusion, and the instability of the human persona: io sono colei che mi si crede.

Written and produced in 1917, 18 june at Teatro Olimpia of Milan, Pirandello’s timeless “Così è (se vi pare)” examines the fundamental ambiguity of truth, and the seductive powers of language in conjuring up a female character who may never fully appear amongst the actors on stage as they obsessively dissect her attributes and identity. Rumor and celebrity mongering become the substitute for a deeply examined life, and Pirandello, as does Vezzoli in his own art, points to these empty vessels as a means of drawing attention to existential and humanist concerns. Credits: A PERFORMA Commission, Produced by Gagosian Gallery, New York, Co-produced by PERFORMA in collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Francesco Vezzoli at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
October 27, 2007
at 10 pm.

http://07.performa-arts.org/calendar.php

In June 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright received a letter from Hilla Rebay, the art advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, asking the architect to design a new building to house Guggenheim’s four-year-old Museum of Non-Objective Painting. The project evolved into a complex struggle pitting the architect against his clients, city officials, the art world, and public opinion. Both Guggenheim and Wright would die before the building’s 1959 completion. The resultant achievement, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, testifies not only to Wright’s architectural genius, but to the adventurous spirit that characterized its founders.

Pascal Cotte announced at a press conference Wednesday that he has found definitive proof that when Leonardo da Vinci painted the original portrait he included “Mona Lisa’s” lashes and brows.

Pascale Cotte engineer and founder of Lumiere Technology, largely contributed to the knowledge of the Mona Lisa thanks to the multispectral digitization of the famous painting. The hidden knowledge of the true colors was revealed by multispectrally scanning the painting in thirteen channels – from Ultra Violet to Infra Red. Then the spectral response curve of the varnish in each pixel was isolated and subtracted from the digital file to virtually reveal the surface of the painting when it had freshly exited Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop.

Cotte examined the world’s most famous painting using a high-definition camera of his own design. The device scanned a 240-million pixel image using 13 light spectrums, including ultra-violet and infrared. The resulting ultra-high resolution photograph of 150,000 dots per inch yielded a reproduction of the “Mona Lisa’s” face magnified 24 times. And there Cotte found the evidence he sought : A single brushstroke of a single hair above the left brow.

Jerry Lee Lewis Mona Lisa

http://www.jerryleelewis.com/site.php

THE EXTRA EAR (OR AN EAR ON AN ARM)

What characterises all the projects and performances is the notion of the prosthetic. The prosthesis seen not as a sign of lack, but as a symptom of excess. Rather than replacing a missing or malfunctioning part of the body, these interfaces and devices augment or amplify the body’s form and functions. The THIRD HAND (technology attached), the STOMACH SCULPTURE (technology inserted) and EXOSKELETON (technology extending) are different approaches to prosthetic augmentation. The EXTRA EAR is a soft prosthesis, constructed not out of hard materials and technologies, but out of soft tissue and flexible cartilage. And disconnected from the face, the EAR ON AN ARM could be guided and pointed in different directions…

Constructing the Extra Ear involves a number of procedures, over approximately 8-10 months. Techniques from Cosmetic, Re-constructive and Orthopedic surgery are necessary. But the problem is that it goes beyond mere Cosmetic Surgery. It is not simply about the modifying or the adjusting of existing anatomical features (now sanctioned in our society), but rather what’s perceived as the more monstrous pursuit of constructing an additional feature that conjures up either some congenital defect, an extreme body modification or even perhaps a radical genetic intervention.

Imagine an ear that cannot hear but emits sounds. With an implanted sound chip and a proximity sensor it would speak to anyone who would get close to it. (Or if no-one got close it would whisper sweet nothings to the other ear anyway). Also, connected to a modem and a wearable computer it could broadcast RealAudio sounds to augment the local sounds that the actual ears hear. The EXTRA EAR becomes a kind of Internet antenna that telematically and acoustically scales up one of the body’s senses. But these functional possibilities are not what justifies or authenticates the project. It would be interesting even without any utilitarian use. Why construct an ear? The ear is a beautiful and complex structure. In acupuncture, the ear is the site for the stimulation of body organs. The ear not only hears, but is also the organ of balance. To have an extra ear points to more than mere visual and anatomical excess…

Images and Text Excerpts from http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/