My New Favorite TV Show: Mad Men

I know that I am a season behind and I am trying to catch up but my new favorite show is Mad Men.

Set in 1960s New York, the sexy, stylized and provocative AMC drama Mad Men follows the lives of the ruthlessly competitive men and women of Madison Avenue advertising, an ego-driven world where key players make an art of the sell.

Created, executive produced and written by Weiner, this drama series stars Jon Hamm (We Were Soldiers), Elisabeth Moss (The West Wing), Vincent Kartheiser (Angel), John Slattery (Desperate Housewives), Christina Hendricks (Kevin Hill), and January Jones (We Are Marshall) along with guest star (and stage/screen legend) Robert Morse (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying). Michael Gladis (Third Watch), Aaron Staton (The Nanny Diaries), Rich Sommer (The Devil Wears Prada), and Bryan Batt (La Cage Aux Folles”) round out the cast.

The Premise: The series revolves around the conflicted world of Don Draper (Hamm), the biggest ad man (and ladies man) in the business, and his colleagues at the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency. As Don makes the plays in the boardroom and the bedroom, he struggles to stay a step ahead of the rapidly changing times and the young executives nipping at his heels. The series also depicts authentically the roles of men and women in this era while exploring the true human nature beneath the guise of 1960s traditional family values.

Mad Men depicts the society and culture of the early 1960s, highlighting cigarette smoking, drinking (alcoholic beverages), sexism, and racial bias as examples of how that era, not so long ago, was so radically different from the present

You can watch Season One via On Demand with your local cable company or purchase the DVD here (The clever packaging can be seen below). Season 2 began on Sunday July 27 at 10PM on AMC.

Jim Mullan’s Fantastic Bird Sculptures

Jim Mullan was inspired by his fascination with birds and antique objects. The crows were used as hunting decoys in the 30’s and 40’s and the smaller birds were carved in the 1950’s. The original decoys were passed on to Jim in 1991 and just recently he has turned each one into an eclectic one of a kind piece of art. You can see Jim’s lively sense of humor in each one of his creations.

Jim begins by hand painting each bird and then adds a variety of vintage pieces when creating his sculptures. The unusual relic’s he uses, such as, croquet balls, binoculars and old toys give each inspiring bird his own personality. Objects that were cast aside as useless are used in his designs to demonstrate the fragile balance between nature and industry.

The birds give life to the once forgotten pieces of yesterday. We invite the observer to find warmth, history, and humor in each and every bird sculpture.  

 

You can order Jim’s whimsical bird sculptures at:

 

Mullanium Jewelry
575 South Cypress Road
Pompano Beach, FL 33060
mullanium@aol.com
Phone (954) 782-9049
Fax (954) 782-5979

 

 

 

 

Lego Album Covers

Please click here to see 20 album covers recreated in LEGO.

Amazing Auditory Illusion

Here is a terrific auditory illusion called a Shepard Scale. Listen to the video, then replay it. Again. And again. And again.

From Wikipedia: A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the base pitch of the tone moving upwards or downwards, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower.

 

Richard Branson Unveils Space Tourism Craft Today

British tycoon Richard Branson unveiled a futuristic aircraft today that will ferry tourists to the edge of heaven as part of Virgin Galactic’s much-anticipated space program.

The aircraft — WhiteKnightTwo — was rolled out for invited guests and media at an early morning ceremony in the Mojave desert, north of Los Angeles, at the headquarters of aerospace firm Scaled Composites.

The high-altitude aircraft, also named “Eve” in honor of Branson’s mother, will act as the mothership for the spacecraft Spaceship Two, which in turn will launch in midair and send two crew and six passengers hurtling into space.

The first flights of WhiteKnightTwo are expected to take place later this year, with Spaceship Two being attached for a maiden flight sometime in 2009.

Virgin Galactic is hoping to send its first paying customers into suborbital space some 110 kilometers (70 miles) above the earth in 2010. The company has said more than more than 200 passengers have already signed up for the first flights, which will cost 200,000 dollars each.

“The rollout of WhiteKnightTwo takes the Virgin Galactic vision to the next level and continues to provide tangible evidence that this most ambitious of projects is not only for real but is making tremendous progress towards our goal of safe commercial operation,” Branson said in a statement.

Branson said the decision to name the launch vehicle after his mother reflected the pioneering spirit of his space tourism venture.

“We are naming it ‘Eve’ after my mother, Eve Branson, but also because it represents a first and a new beginning, the chance for our ever growing group of future astronauts and other scientists to see our world in a completely new light,” Branson added.

In an interview with CNN, Branson later said that he and members of his family would be among the first wave of space travelers, and admitted he expected to be nervous at take-off.

“I’m going up myself, and I’m sure my stomach is going to turn, my children, my parents are going up,” Branson said.

“There’s going to be an element of nervousness, but it will be I think the journey of a lifetime .. So, you know, you’ve got to have a little bit of nervousness. It’s natural.”

WhiteKnightTwo boasts a wingspan 140 feet (43 meters) and is the world’s largest carbon composite aircraft, Virgin Galactic said.

With a maximum altitude of more than 50,000 feet (15,240 meters), the twin-fuselage craft will be able to support up to four daily spaceflights, the company added.

WhiteKnightTwo was designed and built by Scaled Composites, a California-based aerospace company run by engineer Burt Rutan.

Episode 1 of Stephen King’s N. is Now Available

Episode 1 Stephen King’s N. is now out. You can check it out here.

 

Post-it Note Art

The Post-it note, invented by Spencer Silver and Arthur Fry is a piece of small stationary with a re-adherable strip of adhesive on the back. This widely popular product is often used for temporarily attaching notes to documents, computer displays, and so forth. However, for some, these “sticky notes” have other more creative uses.

Here are some delightfully sticky and creative art projects people have come up with using Post-it notes.

George Lucas on a Fifth Indiana Jones

With Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull having earned a massive $743.7 million worldwide (#27 on the all-time worldwide list), The Sunday Times asked George Lucas if he, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford would be up for a fifth film:

“We were hoping for box-office figures like that, which is, ultimately, with inflation, what the others have done, within 10%,” Lucas explains. “So, we squeaked up there. Really, though, it was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level.

“If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.” (From ComingSoon.net)