Monthly Archives: May 2011

Slitherin’ Slytherin

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I have finally re-immersed myself back into the Google-verse of Sketchup!  I spent a beautiful Saturday afternoon in my fortress of pseudo-solitude, Netflix on the peripheral running early-century sci-fi and classic Broken Lizard comedies, with a driving focus to design my new workshop.  I hope to have a preliminary set of drawings in the next couple weeks that I can present to the District for my application to the Board of Variance…so I will, at last, be able to explain to them why I shouldn’t be required to conform to their “laws.”

However, as the dinner hour approached, it began to feel like I was pushing the societally-accepted limits of the lazy PJ-wearing Saturday.  So I took a break from blueprinting to reaquaint myself with a failed toy experiment from last week.  Keep in mind that it is purely coincidence that this toy happens to fall upon the now-defunct weekly toy schedule…rest assured that the focus of this month will be buckling down with the garage design.
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Peking Ducks

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With a population of only 9000 residents, the small Russian village of Bogorodskoye is still famously known for its hand-carved wooden toys that bear the village’s namesake:  the Bogorod toy, a craft that has been generationally passed down over the last 500 years.

Oddly, most of the websites I found referring to the traditional Bogorod toys seem to indicate that they are ONLY made in Bogorodskoye and nowhere else!  Accurate or not, it’s as if our fellow comrades were permitted to build these playful wonders, but ONLY within the confines of their tiny village.  I would argue that it bears some resemblance to the questionable circumstances surrounding Eduard Khil and his “offendingly western-positive” lyrics that led to Mr. Trololo.  Trolololo-lo-lololo-lololo…

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Caterpillar Automaton

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I’ve always found automata strangely fascinating.  Yes, it’s a fairly broad topic that can describe any self-operating machine, but I’m primarily talking about the wooden ones.  The kind of engineering delights that use cams and gears, cranks and crank shafts, levers and linkages!  It could be as simple as a wind-powered rooftop whirligigs — yup, that’s it’s actual name — that animates a lumberjack chopping wood.  Or on the opposite end of complexity spectrum of automata, amazing kinetic sculptures that artists like Reuben Margolin or Theo Jansen design!
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