We had a team building event on Friday. We went to Art by Fire in Issaquah to do some glass blowing. I had a great time. The people working there were very friendly. They helped each of us make a small ornamental orb. We got to add color to the clear glass, put in the initial air bubble, expand and shape it into its final form.

We even get to keep the ornament as a momento of the great team we are building.

Take a look at the glass-blowing pictures.

These videos make me think of the Mandelbrot fractals I did in my graphics programming class in college. I like the third video best. You?

This guy’s job.

Seattle needs at least three lanes each way on the 520 bridge. Here’s hoping!

Some pictures of really hot girls who almost all look the same. I would rank them: Puerto Rico, China, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Israel.

Aside: what’s the the Israeli girl’s picture? She looks like she took a Hezbollah rocket to the stomach.

I, too was punk’d by Geico. Another great Slate article on one of the best ad campaigns in a long, long time.

I forget exactly where I picked up Norah Jones, Come Away With Me, but it is very good. Whenever iTunes pulls up one of her songs, it strikes me that she has the most beautiful voice every time. There are few things better than a woman with a deep rich texture to her singing.

Björk has done a soundtrack for a movie (?) called Drawing Restraint 9, by Matthew Barney to be premiered in Kanazawa, Japan on July 1st.

From the bjork.com newswire:

- Björk has written a suite of haunting music for the sho, one of the oldest instruments in Japanese culture with seventeen reeds and fifteen distinct pipes. It is performed by Mayumi Miayata, one of the world’s foremost sho players. Björk also worked with scholars of the Noh theatre to produce new musical settings, incorporating the low, growling vocal techniques of traditional Japanese court entertainment.

Neat, huh? It’s coming out in “late July” for those of us who care

PS, Movable Type apparently sucks at displaying all foreign characters, not just Japanese… observe the properly-entered unicode: Björk

Chris sent me the rules to this card game (shithead, karma). Heard of it? Is it any good?

For unknown reasons, I despised the whole concept of the Lord of the Rings. I think it was just too over-hyped for me. Most people spend much of their lives making fun of nerds who read fantasy books like Lord of the Rings. It becomes a motion picture and suddenly half the world is dying to see the movie and read about the book?! Hey look, I wrote about LOTR almost exactly one year ago!

At any rate, one of the best songs I have heard in a long time is “Concerning Hobbits”. Howard Shore was the best thing about that trilogy.