"The Art of Looking Sideways"

[fiefoe]

Metafilter FPPs and "Sideways" mash-up:

* Razzle Dazzle Camouflage: A British artist and naval officer, Norman Wilkinson, promoted a new camouflage scheme that was derived from the artistic fashions of the time, particularly cubism. Instead of trying to conceal the ship, it simply broke up its lines and made it more difficult for the U-boat captain to determine the ship's course. The British called this camouflage scheme 'Dazzle Painting.' The Americans called it 'Razzle Dazzle.'

* The sculptures of Shigeo Fukuda show that shadows and reflections may not be what they appear to be.

* Nek Chand, a roads inspector in northern India in the 50s, collected materials from demolition sites and used them to create a secret place which would soon grow into a beautiful rock and sculpture garden.
  Ferdinand Cheval (1836 - August 19, 1924) was a French postman who spent 33 years of his life building an "Ideal Castle" (Palais idéal).

* The 18th-century Lunar Society boasts among its members Erasmus Darwin, writer on medicine and botany whose ideas on evolution anticipated those of his grandson, Charles; Joseph Priestley who isolated oxygen...

* Each of the sacred unit fractions which the ancient Egyptians attributed to the six parts of the eye of the god Horus: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, and 1/64. According to a legend, the pieces were lost in a battle, and restored by the god Thoth.

* To NBC's surprise, it turned out that the mark was already in use by NETV,

* Reason to think twice about visiting the Amazon jungle: It swims up a man's urine stream and lodges itself in the urethra with a ring of retrose spines preventing its removal.

* Morphic resonance is a term coined by Rupert Sheldrake for what he thinks is "the basis of memory in nature....the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species."  The blue tit was the first bird to peck the metal foil tops off milk bottles to get a drink. This scam was first recorded in Southampton in 1921 and by some 20 years later every blue tit was at it. This behaviour did not gradually emanate or spread out from Southampton but arose suddenly and independently in random places all over the British Isles.

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