Well, *I* think she looks cute in the helmet! But Lydia VIOLENTLY DISAGREES.

To promote the upcoming West Chester Dish/Guerilla Drive-In Ice Cream Tattoo Quest, I visited WCOJ 1420 AM this morning and sat in on Mary Bigham’s show “Eat, Drink, and Meet Mary” to give J.T. the DJ a tattoo. Mary hadn’t explained what we were going to do, so JT looked a little uncertain as I pulled a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves, a razor, and a bottle of alcohol out of my Pelican case.

We explained the rules of the upcoming event: you’ll show up at the courthouse at 6:30 PM on Thursday the 26th, and get a basic ice-cream cone tattoo. Then you’ll travel with your friends to all the local ice-cream shops, collecting a star for each one you visit. If you get all five, you can LEVEL UP your tattoo with an awesome RED FLAME BUFF. You can spend all weekend telling lies about the new ice-cream gang you’ve joined. Or the band of costumed mystics with a secret undeground temple that you narrowly escaped. It’s totally up to you.

I don’t have any ice-cream-cone stencils yet, so I gave JT the best, the awesomest, and the MOST BRUTAL tattoo I have. That’s right, I went right for my “A” game (over J.T.’s objections), and gave him the MAGICAL SPARKLY UNICORN:

Take a moment to check out the Ice Cream Tattoo Quest page for all the details about where to be and when.

J.T. has a graduation party to go to later today. Thanks for being a good sport, hoss. Like I told you, that tattoo is gonna WORK for you.

A week or two ago, I brought the Guerilla Drive-In projector rig over to Harold’s photography studio to take a beauty shot. I think it turned out AMAZING: kind of hyper-real, like the spaceships in 1970s science-fiction films that started out as actual models (rather than computer wireframes). Click on the image to zoom in (check out the metalflake tank!)

From a total layman’s perspective, here’s how Harold does it (once the bike has been rolled into his studio):

Harold positions the camera lens using a great big rolling boom and locks it into place. He uses a little camera-back thingy with an eyepeice on it to look through the lens to get the focus right, then he attaches a digital back to the lens. At the push of a button, the whole studio is plunged into darkness. Harold then picks up a big fiber-optic hose with bright light streaming out of one end, and pulls a trigger mounted to the hose. THere’s a big SNICK! noise as a metal shutter in front of the camera opens, and Harold "paints" light from the wand directly onto the subject.

While the shutter is open, there’s a measured "beep beep beep" sound, which Harold tells me is his metronome. He uses the beeps to keep track of how much light he’s painted onto various parts of the subject.

There are also different attachments for the hose: a paddle, a long tube, a little dentist-sized curlique: the whole thing is like a marriage between a vacuum cleaner and a light saber. All in all, it’s pretty DAMN cool to watch. Thanks for the image, Harold! I’ve already made it the “hero” of the GDI main page. Next step is to photograph nighttime backgrounds!

I’ve been having a great time bragging on West Chester since I stopped commuting to NYC in January. West Chester is filled with smart people who are really good at what they do. Yesterday, I bragged on Harold Ross. Today, I (almost literally) ran into another local luminary in the Pantheon of West Chester’s Awesomeness, so I’m gonna take a moment to brag on her and her blog project.

I was riding my sidecar rig to Starbucks this morning to get some coffee for Kate and me*, and Mary Bigham of the West Chester Dish restaurant blog flagged me down. She was doing a radio remote for local AM-talk station WCOJ, and she had me answer a few questions about breakfast on air.If JT in the studio (and on the phone) guessed what my answer was going to be correctly three out of five times, I’d win circus tickets.

Tip: if you want a radio DJ to guess what you’re gonna answer correctly, don’t claim your favorite breakfast drink is “Tang” because of the astronaut connotations.

Anyhow, in my career as Internet Court Magician to big companies, they’ve often wanted to know what the New Generation of Bloggers will do with the Internet. “How will the Internet Natives use blogs for business?” ask a hundred hand-wringing Forrester reports.

The answer is “Very well, thank you!” Mary’s food blog at WCDish.com looks great, is updated frequently, and has a friendly, clear, and enthusiastic editorial voice. It’s done on a shoestring, mostly by Mary and her designer/programmer Jason Tremblay. That gives it a “let’s put on a show in the barn!” vibe that makes established multinational interactive shops quake in their boots: “Wait, we just did a food site for a million dollars, and it doesn’t have THAT. Or THAT…” For my developer friends, it’s a highly-tweaked instance of WordPress, with clever mapping of tags to cuisines. It’s a great use of the blog model as a content-management framework, pushing it past just “sequenced updates published in a stack.”

Mary works her cross-channel marketing, too: she writes a column for the local paper, has a weekly radio show, and generally hustles like the scrappy newsboy from a Horatio Alger book. She just won “Business Woman of the Year” from the Women’s Referral Network of Chester County. Besides being great news for her, it’s a sign that new media has arrived. Now it’s simply “media”, and it’s a normal part of the local business ecosystem. THIS is what the internet natives are doing; the same community stuff that folks have been doing all along. They’re working hard, and making stuff that reeks of WIN.

Fortunately, I managed to win the circus tickets with the calculatedly-populist answers “Cold Pizza”, “Brinner“, and “I skipped it this morning”. Phew! Mary then moved on to the next fellow walking down the street. Good luck winning circus tickets, friend! Don’t answer “Tang!”

* Believe me, I know that driving a sidecar rig to Starbucks is a white-person train wreck. In 2002, while commuting daily to DC for work, I called in to a Baltimore hip-hop radio station for Wednesday morning “White People Check-in”, but the call screener (the “Black Pather Princess”) refused to believe that I was actually white. I sounded whiter, she said, than any white person actually sounds. Than it is POSSIBLE to sound. “Work on your imitation!” she said, and hung up.

UPDATE: In March 2009, Mary launched a bi-weekly supplement in the Daily Local News called “CC:”, which is all about local restaurants, entertainment, and nightlife. You can check it out at dailylocal.com/cc. Mary has crossed the line from blogging into print, which is a tough trick — but if anyone can pull it off, she can!

My friend and neighbor Harold Ross, who took the Guerilla Drive-In photos last Saturday, as well as the hyper-real picture of the MacGuffin and the awesome long exposure in the Northbrook Canoe Barn, just went to Hagley and took some long-exposure pictures, leaving the shutter open and “painting” the beautiful, massive, and WORKING machinery with an LED flashlight:

Now, I don’t know much, but I do know how to get the Internet to look at pictures of machinery from the days when lathe operators wore leather trenchcoats, brass goggles, and fought magical Confederate golems by gaslight.

I submitted the story to uber-blog BoingBoing under the heading “STEAMPUNK! STEAMPUNK!! STEAMPUNK!!!” (I’m not kidding), and god bless Cory Doctorow‘s fondness for brass gears, they ran with it. And then awesome-design-bricollage blog notcot.org picked it up. So I’m very glad that these photos are getting some of the attention they deserve.

Hagley is a REALLY cool place, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen photos that bring out the… the… BRASS BADASS-I-TUDE of these leather-strap-and-pulley machines before.

A week or two ago, I blogged breathlessly about seeing and LOVING the MOL "alligator carrying a shipping container" logo in the Port Elizabeth Intermodal Depot.

I CONTINUE to think this alligator is fantastic, so I made a needlepoint pattern from it in Pixen, which is a pixel-art editor for OS X that I totally recommend. Here’s a low-res version (the 3600px original is available on Flickr):

The darker-value pixels make a 10×10 grid. When transferring the design to the canvas, I first marked every 10th thread intersection with a small blue dot, and then worked one grid "box" at a time, marking each thread intersection with a fine-point pigma pen.

Marking canvases is HARD WORK, man. Stitching is nothing but fun after that. Well, picking the colors is tricky; two skeins will look totally different in the hand, but then on the canvases they’ll turn out to have totally the same value, and you can’t tell them apart. Kate, with her practiced eye for color, has been really helpful. Lydia, on the other hand, wants me to do it in purple. And pink. And instead of an alligator, have a flower and a butterfly.

You’ll notice that the alligator has an anchor tattoo, which is what made me want to include the sailor’s anchor tat in the booth last weekend.

Did I mention that at my Nerdlepoint booth at the West Chester Festival of the Arts succeeded in selling exactly ZERO hand-painted needlepoint canvases encoded with unique 2D barcodes controlled by a secret password included in the kit? For the love of god, how did this product not find its audience?

I did that booth as a lark, but still, it smarts a LITTLE bit not have sold a single one. I put the remaining inventory (which is all of it) up on for sale on Etsy, and I’m going to refine my role as a carnie. No more machine-readable hand-embroidery for me, man: that fringe-market stuff is for the birds. No, this time I’m going RIGHT FOR THE JUGULAR. With temporary tattoos.

More specifically, airbrush tattoos. To be precise, using an airbrush rig that I’ve powered with a tank of compressed nitrogen. And just to be complete, here, I’ll mention that I’m going to be delivering glitter paint using this rig. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that from noon to four PM at West Chester’s South Walnut Street Block Party, you can find me, Matt, and my sidecar, offering for sale for a low, reasonable price:

SIDECAR-RIGGED, NITRO-POWERED MAGIC AIRBRUSH GLITTER TATTOOS.

Let me show you the progress I’ve made so far. Pictured below are the sidecar rig (in Guerilla Drive-In mode; I’m setting up a separate table module for the tattoo rig) and the nitrogen-powered airbrush set:

Now for the designs: Matt put together three pieces of classic tattoo flash: A sailor’s fluked anchor, the ubiquitous punk “Black Flag” tattoo, and a magical unicorn with a flowing mane and stars. I sent the Illustrator files to family friend and awesome guy Dave Moroz-Henry of Barking Dog Signs. Dave used a vinyl plotter to cut stencils into Oracal 631, which is sticky sign vinyl with a light, water-based adhesive (unlike most sign vinyl, which is meant for permanent sticking to, say, a truck door.)

Here’s Dave “weeding” the prototype stencils, and Kate modeling a Black Flag stencil, through which the airbrush shoots the color:

Okay, NOW: with glitter paint delivered through the airbrush (or separately via a “poof” bottle, more about that later”, I’ll be able to create the following AWESOME GLITTERY DESIGNS, visualized below. Click on the unicorn to see the actual by-god glitter animation on Flickr!

YES, America! You know you want gold-colored MAGICAL GLITTERY UNICORN TATTOOS! YES, you gen-Y kiddies and sarcastic millenials, steeped in ironic duality! You KNOW you want to sport a Black Flag tattoo, traditional passport to punk legitimacy, except made SCORNFULLY ABSURD with the MySpace Glitter treatment! I will SELL you these tattoos, carefully and conscientiously applied using non-greenhouse gases, all with a background of hand-selected hair-metal music for an optimum carnie experience! With God as my witness, I WILL FINALLY BREAK EVEN ON A HOBBY PROJECT!!!

Well, maybe breaking even is a bit much to ask, given that it’s gonna rain. But if you want to come by on Saturday, Matt and I can sell you a GREAT glittery sailor’s anchor!

PS. Yes, the glittery unicorn tattoos really are magic, and I am prepared to prove it. See you there!

There’s a bunch of really big, really beautiful sycamore trees on our street. Last week, they all started dropping leaves, which was… worrisome. They still have plenty of leaves, but the drifts of crumpled green leaves by the curbs have been disconcerting.

I called up West Chester’s arborist, Debbie (another great thing about West Chester — YOU CAN TALK TO THE ARBORIST), and she says that the sycamores have (gulp!)Sycamore Anthracnose. If I understood her right, this is a fungus that is always present to some degree, but under certain conditions, the fungus really flourishes, and that’s bad news for the tree.

Apparently, the conditions have been really good (for fungus) and bad (for trees) for the past year:

• Drought last year — the effects of a drought show up in the next growing season, apparently
• No hard frost over the winter — hard frost helps keep the fungus under control
• Lots of rainy weather between 55 and 75 degrees — perfect fungus-growing weather (Ick!)

So naturally, the first thing we all are visualizing is what our street will look like SUDDENLY WITH NO TREES, but Debbie says that this isn’t a “ZOMG TREE AIDS!!!” type of a situation. If the conditions continue to be fungus good/tree bad, the trees would have a “slow decline”, but we can fight that with watering and fertilizer. There’s something to do with spikes, too. How do you go about watering a 100-foot Sycamore? I guess the ansswer might be “very diligently.”