Dali Museum » Surreal News & Links

                      (& other ridiculously interesting things you should know)

The unique wedding cake has gained national so much attention that NBC's Conan O'Brien Show has asked the same cake maker to make a life-sized cake of him. He is 6'4".

Want to fulfill your dreams of having an edible life size you?

More info: iReport, Dallas NBC

YouTube Video of landscape

Multifaceted Dali

Nagoya, Japan - May 11, 2007

Japan is celebrating Salvador Dali with a series of exhibitions. Multifaceted Dali has showings in three important cities between March and September 2007. Sponsored by the newspaper company Chunichi Shimbun and Tokai Television Broadcasting, the ceremonial celebration of the exhibition on was at the Nagoya City Art Museum in the Nagoya, headquarters of Toyota and one of Japan’s principal cities. The other host cities are Osaka and Sapporo, Japan.

At the ribbon cutting ceremony on Dali’s 103rd birthday, Dali Museum Trustee Karen Lang Johnston opened the exhibition together with representatives of the Nagoya Museum, the Spanish Foundation, the Cervantes Institute. At the podium, Mrs. Johnston addressed the appreciative audience of sponsors and press in Japanese, inviting them to visit St. Petersburg and to see our Museum.

Several hundred thousand visitors in each city are expected to tour the exhibition which emphasizes the diversity of Dali’s work in painting, book design, installation art, and sculpture.

More images here

Dali's Freeway

Oakland Tribune

A stretch of highway near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed after a gasoline tanker crashed and burst into flames. Charred, twisted, spilling toward the ground, reminiscent of Salvador Dali's surrealist painting of a melting clock. The mammoth concrete and steel freeway connector ramp looks like a burnt paper ribbon.

Full Story at:

Inside Bay Area

Click above to see more

Surreal times on the SS France

BBC News

If the ghost of Salvador Dali appears off the coast of Gujarat, he may well be on the deck of the SS France, walking his pet cheetahs.

Full Story at:

BBC News

Rock, Paper, Scissors!

NPR

Hilarious interview with Rock, Paper, Scissors champion Jason Simmons from NPR Morning Edition.

NPR Rock Paper Scissors!

Full Story at:

NPR Morning Edition

Strange Clouds

On Friday night, June 2nd, sky watchers in the United Kingdom witnessed a vivid display of electric-blue noctilucent clouds. Paul Evans took this picture from Larne, Northern Ireland (see right).

Noctilucent clouds (NLCs) are a mystery: They float through the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere at the very edge of space. Some scientists think the clouds are seeded by space dust and fed by rocket exhaust. Others suspect they're a sign of global warming. Later this year, NASA plans to launch a satellite named AIM to investigate.

Visit http://spaceweather.com for observing tips and a gallery of recent sightings.

The Da Vinci Code and the Prada Pope

"The Da Vinci Code" will make its debut at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday night. Critics and other journalists will first see the movie on Tuesday night, barely allowing them time to write their articles for the Wednesday premiere and Friday opening in theaters around the world.

This man (on the left wearing a fabulous vintage chiffon-lined Dior gold lamé gown over a silk Vera Wang empire waist tulle cocktail dress, accessorized with a 3-foot beaded peaked House of Whoville hat, and the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in the Wizard of Oz) is worried that The Da Vinci Code might make the Roman Catholic Church look foolish.

Surreal Numbers

How unreal or hallucinatory have numbers ever seemed to you?

In the beginning, everything was void, and J. H. W. H Conway began to create numbers. Conway said, 'Let there be two rules which bring forth all numbers large and small. This shall be the first rule: Every number corresponds to two sets of previously created numbers, such that no member of the left set is greater than or equal to any member of the right set. And the second rule shall be this: One number is less than or equal to another number if and only if no member of the first number's left set is greater than or equal to the second number, and no member of the second number's right set is less than or equal to the first number'. And Conway examined these two rules he had made, and behold! they were very good.

Didn't catch that? [Click here for more....]

Making Sense of Modern Art: Surrealism

SFMOMA

This section of Making Sense of Modern Art explores the Surrealist art movement. Inspired by Freud's recently published insights into the hidden reaches of the unconscious, the Surrealists sought to subordinate the rational mind in favor of the liberation of instinct. Led by the poet André Breton, the Surrealists proposed an alternative agenda for the transformation of society.

Making Sense of Modern Art offers an extensive and engaging guide to modern and contemporary works in the Museum's permanent collection. Its rich-media format enables you to "zoom in" on full-screen details of individual artworks, explore excerpts from archival videos and films, and listen to commentary by artists, art historians, critics, and collectors.

Lightning strikes back

APRIL 24th, 2006

A British officer, Major Summerford, while fighting in the fields of Flanders in February 1918 was knocked off his horse by a flash of lightning and paralyzed from the waist down. Summerford retired and moved to Vancouver. One day in 1924, as he fished alongside a river, lightning hit the tree he was sitting under and paralyzed his right side. Two years later Summerford was sufficiently recovered that he was able to take walks in a local park. He was walking there one summer day in 1930 when a lightning bolt smashed into him, permanently paralyzing him. He died two years later. But lightning sought him out one last time. Four years later, during a storm, lightning struck a cemetery and destroyed a tombstone. The deceased buried here? Major Summerford.

Find more strange lightning strikes at www.stragesports.com

"The sensory world and behavioral decisions of embryos may be richer and more sophisticated than we imagined,"

APRIL 15, 2006

...reports a paper in the current Journal of Experimental Biology. The study authors, led by biologist Karen Warkentin of Boston University, report that tree frog eggs seem tuned to vibrations from predatory snakes attacking an egg clutch, leading to early hatching, up to 30% earlier than normal to escape ending up as dinner. [Full story here...]

Dali imagined, even remembered 'intra-uterine" life with explicit detail.  What Dali called an "intra-uterine memory" proves to be the initial inspiration for his painting "Eggs on a Plate without the Plate."

Of this experience, Dalí proclaims, “…all enchantment for me was in my eyes, and the most splendid…vision [while in the womb] was that of a pair of eggs fried in a pan without a pan...” Dalí claims that whenever he wished to conjure this pre-worldly memory, he could engage in the unusual practice of applying pressure with his fingers to his eyes until a slight bit of pain is produced; upon removing his hands, he would see a color effect produced by the stimulated phosphenes. In this painting Dalí reproduces these colors that remind him of his mother’s womb: “the intra-uterine paradise was the color of hell…red, orange, yellow, and bluish, the color of flames....”

Whether or not the colors of hell in his mother's womb led to a 30% ealier than normal birth is another story.

APRIL 5, 2006

This morning, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date was 01:02:03 04/05/06.

Kind of makes you want to sing that song from Sesame Street...

"one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, tweleve!"

William Shatner sells kidney stone

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An online casino has a piece of Capt. Kirk. Actor William Shatner has sold his kidney stone for $25,000, with the money going to a housing charity, it was announced Jan. 14.

"If you subjected it to extreme heat, it might turn out to be a diamond," Shatner said of the kidney stone he auctioned off for charity.

Shatner reached agreement Monday to sell the stone to GoldenPalace.com, a casino noted for its collection of oddities, which includes a partially eaten cheese sandwich thought to contain the image of the Virgin Mary.

The money will go to Habitat for Humanity, which builds houses for the needy. [click here to read more...]

Conan meets Finnish Doppelganger

HELSINKI, Finland (AP) — Finnish President Tarja Halonen met with late night TV talk show host Conan O'Brien at the presidential palace in downtown Helsinki.

O'Brien handed the Nordic country's first female president a Valentine's Day present, wrapped in red paper, as they posed for photographers before the closed-door meeting, expected to last 15 minutes. O'Brien had quipped that he wanted a six-hour audience.

Last year, O'Brien caused a political stir when he endorsed the 62-year-old Halonen for a second six-year term — which she won last month — because "she looks like him," using mock ad campaigns that backed her and attacked opponents.

On arrival Saturday, O'Brien joked he expected to be rewarded for endorsing Halonen with a Cabinet position as inspector of saunas, "mostly women's saunas." [click here to read more...]

Sidewalking

Take a look at this coke bottle on the right.  Would you believe it's actually a chalk drawing? 

Julian Beever has made pavement drawings for over ten years. The coke bottle on the right shows an anamorphic illusion drawn in a special distortion in order to create the impression of 3 dimensions when seen from one particular viewpoint. Trippy. [click here for more...]

Cow Abductions

It's a serious problem. Countless bovines have disappeared from dairy farms everywhere.  And the number of missing cows are on the rise.

A rapidly growing amount of alien cow abduction evidence and documentation has been collected on this site, where you too will become witness:   www.cowabduction.com

The Surreal Gourmet

is the nom de plume of author/illustrator and Food Network personality Bob Blumer. For those with a sense of culinary adventure The Surreal Gourmet serves up fresh attitude towards cooking and entertaining and shows you how dysfunctional kitchens, mismatched dinnerware and low budgets can be easily overcome by a little creativity and an armful of fresh ingredients! [click here for more...]

the vegetable orchestra

music with taste

the first vienna vegetable orchestra plays music exclusively on vegetable instruments: carrots and cucumbers instead of guitars and drums. or, with their new cd automate, a cuke-o-phon and radish-marimba instead of laptop and sampler. the music presents a transfer of electronic music pieces and structures to the instruments of the vegetable garden. [click here for more...]