Category Archives: Art/Style

Wes Fewell’s Club Juana

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Some guys will put a big screen TV and a couple of BarcaLoungers in their basement mancave and call it a day. Not Wes Fewell. Wes is an athlete and a hunter. And an artist. He designs beautiful furniture and his skills are on full display in his basement.

He didn’t offer much history of the original Club Juana so I went looking online and found this from 2006 (source unknown)

The Club Juana was a landmark in Casselberry, Florida, for 43 years, first as a nightclub, later as a strip club. It attained national notoriety in 2002, when its owners staged regular productions of “Macbeth in the Buff” to circumvent local lewdness laws. The Club finally closed in June 2006 and was demolished on November 2 to make way for a freeway overpass. Its famous “Club Juana: Parking In Rear” neon sign, however, was spared by the Morse Museum of American Art in nearby Winter Park. The Museum, best known for its Tiffany collection, saw the sign as a worthy example of public art and local history. The Club Juana sign will join other neon signs from vanished Orlando-area businesses in the Museum’s collection. All of them are warehoused, and none are on public display.

Why does AI art look like that?

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While I haven’t played with tools like DALL-E much every image I’ve created (Caused to be created?) has the same look. (Man resembling Keith Richards; old man holding a rock; man driving old Jeep; old Hindu man meditating.)

Writing in The Atlantic (paywall), Caroline Mimbs Nyce takes a stab at answering that question.

Two years into the generative-AI boom, these programs’ creations seem more technically advanced […] but they are stuck with a distinct aesthetic. The colors are bright and saturated, the people are beautiful, and the lighting is dramatic. Much of the imagery appears blurred or airbrushed, carefully smoothed like frosting on a wedding cake. At times, the visuals look exaggerated.

Someday computer-generated art may shed its weird, cartoonish look, and start to slip past us unnoticed. Perhaps then we’ll miss the corny style that was once a dead giveaway.

1949 Ferrari 166 MM Barchetta

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Mr. Wolf is no stranger to rare and beautiful automobiles but even he sounds a little impressed by one of his recent jobs.

1949 Ferrari 166 MM Barchetta. 1 of 10 short hood Barchettas, I believe it is roughly the 30th Ferrari built, though I could be off by a large margin – Ferrari information is notoriously cloudy. Serious race history, driven extensively by Biondetti.

The gravity of this thing is incredible, just having it around to appreciate in person, in private… I spent some time each day sitting next to it while having my espresso.

A bit of tinkering, rewiring a few things, fiddling with the exhaust and carburetors, and – the best part – designing and fabricating a battery hold down. The original went missing some time ago.

I asked him what he was doing to a car “now worth something like $10,000,000.”

It’s an odd, push-down-from-above battery hold down, and all of the parts are gone, and no reference photos exist. So I got to spend a couple days thinking, sketching, welding… What would a bunch of scrappy Italians have done in 1949?

Basically, a lot of time and effort to make something simple, unimpressive, and invisible once the battery cover goes on, and I’m thrilled!

He describes the owner as “a very cool old fellow, and a longtime Ferrari historian. Very knowledgeable, really knows his stuff. I once re-jetted the triple Weber carbs with him at 11pm outside a hotel in 45 degree weather, preparing to climb the Sierras the next morning.”

Religious service attendance dropping

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More than three-quarters of Americans say religion’s role in public life is shrinking, per a recent Pew Research Center survey — the highest level since the group first started tracking such sentiment in 2001.

A separate Gallup survey published this week found that Latter-day Saints are the only religious group wherein a majority say they attend services weekly, at 54%.

30% of Protestants say they attend services weekly, compared to 28% of Muslims, 23% of Catholics and 16% of Jews.

Jerry Seinfeld: “The Scholar of Comedy”

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Excellent interview in The New Yorker by David Remnick. Not sure if the piece is behind a paywall or not but it’s a good read.

“That’s the way you go through life. You only care about laughing and being funny.”

“And I don’t like old people, either. Even though I’m seventy—I don’t like old people. […] They don’t look good. Everything’s going. Everything’s deteriorating. I don’t want to see this. If you want to hang around, fine, but we’re moving on to younger people. I’m with you up to about thirty-eight. If you want to stay, you can stay, but I’m moving on.”

“There were no sitcoms picked up on the fall season of all four networks. Not one. No new sitcoms.”

Clues that you are rich

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A lot of rich people don’t even realize they’re rich. Here are some clues:

  • You are worried about someone hijacking your car when you drive downtown.
  • You can afford things you actually need, like healthcare.
  • You don’t use a calculator while grocery shopping, and you don’t use the produce scales in grocery stores.
  • You spend money on traveling for leisure.
  • You never worry about hidden, snowballing fees or “poor tax”.
  • You never have to hustle to work out where you will sleep or where your next meal comes from.
  • You can invest in something that pays off later or just simply stock up because buying more is cheaper.
  • You don’t hold up the line with your complicated benefits when checking out in the grocery store line.
  • You don’t have to worry about logistics, like how you will show up to appointments on opposite sides of the city in one day.
  • You shop online.
  • You don’t have to worry about your kid’s tech access for school.
  • Bureaucratic procedures, such as getting a driver’s license, are not prohibitively impossible.

— It’s Training Cats and Dogs

How Many Pictures Are There (2024)

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The following statistics are from an article by Matric Broz at phototutorial.com.  The article presents “photography and photo statistics procured with scientific and mathematical methods, including answering questions like “How many photos are taken every day?”

How many photos are taken every year?

  • 1.81 trillion photos are taken worldwide every year, which equals 57,000 per second, or 5.0 billion per day. By 2030, around 2.3 trillion photos will be taken every year.
  • According to Photutorial data, 1.2 trillion were taken worldwide in 2021 and 1.72 trillion in 2022.
  • The global pandemic reduced the number of images taken by 25% in 2020 and 20% in 2021.

How many photos are taken every day?

  • The average person takes 20 photos daily. This number is higher among younger people and lower among older people.
  • According to Phototurial data, 4.7 billion photos are taken every day worldwide in total.
  • By region, the number of photos taken by a smartphone user is led by the US: 20.2/day, Asia-Pacific 15/day, Latin America 11.8/day, Africa 8.1/day, and Europe 4.9/day.

How many images are on the internet?

  • 750 billion images are on the internet, which is only 6% of the total photos that were ever taken since most of the photos we take are never shared.

How many images are on Google Images?

  • There are 136 billion images on Google Images.
  • By 2030, there will be 382 billion images on Google Images.

How many photos does the average person have on their phone?

  • The average user has around 2,100 photos on their smartphone in 2023.
  • iOS smartphone users have approximately 2,400 photos on their phones, while Android users have around 1,900 photos on their phones.

Other photo stats

  • 12.4 trillion photos have been taken throughout history. By 2030, this number will increase to 28.6 trillion.
  • Users share the most images on WhatsApp: 6.9 billion per day. 1.3 billion images are shared on Instagram daily, with about 100 million in posts and more than 1 billion on stories and chats.
  • 92.5% of photos are taken with smartphones, and only 7% with cameras.

Bleak, Crime Infested Towns In the (Missouri) Bootheel

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There is a seemingly endless variety of genres on YouTube, and one that has been showing up in my feed more frequently of late is what I call the “driving tour of small town America” videos. During my many years, on the road in the Midwest, I had occasion to drive through lots and lots of small rural towns, so I’ve found this series interesting.

The video above offers a rather depressing look at four towns in southeast Missouri: Caruthersville, Hayti, Kennett, and Cardwell. Some of the demographic statistics were almost as bleak and shocking as the images.

Tattooed underwear model

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This direct mail marketing piece showed up in our mailbox yesterday. Two things immediately caught my eye: the model didn’t look like he spent hours in the gym every day, his body looked more like a normal person’s body. And the tattoos. Lots and lots of tattoos.

According to a 2023 survey by Pew Research, 41% of Americans under the age of 30 have at least one tattoo. And we’re not talking high-grade Yakuza-class fine art here. These tats look like something you could get in the strip mall. Once again, I turned to ChatGPT for some insight on this cultural phenomenon.