6 Billion Others

I first saw the 6 Billion Others project in a bookstore, as a book. (That may be why it was in a bookstore.) Six directors filmed 5,000 interviews in 75 countries, asking people forty or so questions to get at what brings us together and keeps us apart. The result is a portait of humanity across the globe. 

Aside from what's in the book, you can watch twenty- to forty-five-minute Youtube compilations of those interviews on topics like love, God, happiness, fears, forgiveness, the meaning of life, and war. Here are a few to get you started.

The Snowflake Cutter's Omnibus

Keely's rainbow avalanche, cut from magazine pagesI mentioned that I'd been cutting paper snowflakes on Twitter the other day, and it accidentally snowballed into something good.  

(I should have posted a pun warning before starting this post, right?)

Keeley started finding and sharing links to tutorials for all sorts of paper snowflakes, and then she went ahead and wrote up a blog post of her own.  She cut the beauties you see above from magazine pages, which takes frugal to free and throws in a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory just for the fun of it.

If you'd like to indulge in an afternoon of cutting your own avalanche, here are some great how-to's:

• how to cut a six-pointed snowflake
• ...and how to make it look 'lacy'
• how to cut the elusive five-pointed snowflake
• how to make a three-dimensional snowflake
• how to make a caribou or maple leaf snowflake (if you need more Canadiana in your Christmas)
• how to make Star Wars snowflakes, (if you need more Darth in your Christmas)

Of course, the great fun of making paper snowflakes is sometimes just the diving-in-and-seeing-what-happens, in which case no tutorials are necessary.  

Thank you, Keeley, for sharing and making and being such a good sport.  

Now: go get your scissors.  Don't run.

Picture Cook

For bodies & souls enduring chilly times & climes, something to warm you up:

from Picture Cook by Katie Shelly; found via the marvellous @brainpicker (Maria Popova) on Twitter.

Or perhaps you've a craving for sweet potato fries on the side, a snack of krispy kale, or a ginger tea break. You'll find the inspiration here. As Katie Shelly explains:

This Old House

I've been thinking a lot about why I don't like houses or furniture, or anything really, that's new but made to look old, furniture that's "distressed" to make it look weathered, wood floors banged up with a hammer so they look worn. 

There is something about this that strikes me as untrue, and I realized what it was when I came across this paragraph in Bayles and Orland's book, Art & Fear. They said,

Today, indeed, you can find urban white artists – people who could not reliably tell a coyote from a German shepherd at a hundred feet – casually incorporating the figure of Coyote the Trickster into their work. A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced. As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman’s hat except a Greek fisherman.

When what looks old really is old, its meaning is embodied, not referenced - and trying to borrow the power of 'old' across space and time can only be referential; it isn't what it is.

If you can't borrow power across space and time then, what's left but to discover your own and embody its meaning yourself?

Our Daily Bird 37: Red Bird Battalion

Love this beautiful Red Bird Battalion, by illustrator Jaime Zollars (twitter: @jaimezollars).