After almost 3 years here, (we arrived in Sydney in the middle of August 2003) the end of our great Australian adventure is fast approaching.

We had an amazing time here, and I reckon it's going to be a while before we stop talking like good little aussies. Well it's not as if we didn't have any accents in the first place, our english is now this mashup of canadian/californian/australian with little bit of french thrown in for good measure.

We now have less than a month to go before the return to California, so we're adding a whole other layer of complexity to our regular work-related madness, as we start preparing (mentally and physically) for our relocation. Of course we have more stuff than we started with 3 years ago when we moved here, so it is time to start classifying all of that into the usual piles of keep, sell and give away. Then we'll need to figure out some kind of matter transporter (you know like a boat or something) to get all that stuff to materialise on our new doorstep.

Apparently the rumors of Daimler-Chrysler finally making the smart car available in California are getting confirmed, but not before 2008. Dieter Zetsche announced that they would start by distributing the smart brand throught an independant dealership network rather than using the current Mercedes-Benz infrastructure.

CEO Dieter Zetsche said DaimlerChrysler (DCX) plans to make money selling its Smart cars in the USA — something it has yet to do elsewhere in the world. The tiny two-passenger ForTwo model, just over 8 feet long and nearly 5 feet wide, will arrive in the first quarter of 2008. It will be priced under $15,000 and distributed through 30 to 40 United Auto Group (UAG) dealerships, mainly in major urban markets such as New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Chicago. The automaker would not say how many it hopes to sell in the USA, but has sold 750,000 since the brand's launch in 1998.

The smartusa.com website still contains nothing much, but vague propaganda, but today's announcement is on the front page. UPDATE: I did find, however a some spy and concept pictures of the new 2007 model which will possibly be available with a hybrid drive as well as slightly updated but virtually unchanged exterior.

Since I'm a strong believer in instant gratification, I've been trying to get some serious information about the cars imported and modified by ZAP but I haven't been succesful in getting any one to answer my emails and other requests eventhought I've said I would be willing to buy within the next month. I think that the eventual news of Daimler-Chrysler distributing the smart was already factored into the current ZP stock price, but trying to deal with the company as a potential buyer and getting no response at all, doesn't give me much confidence in the grey market importer.

In the meantime, I feel a little bit like chicken little, or like the columnist at the Orlando Sentinel who says: Don't hold your breath for Smart.

I've started contributing to NOTCOT.org because I love the visual metaphor, a collection of little virtual polaroids of interesting things posted on the wall.

NOTCOT.COM is a daily filtration of ideas+aesthetics+amusement. There's no filtering here. ...Other people have forums & submission pages & complexity. This is like the telephone poll covered in flyers. Just put it up. ...When you email your goods to other sites, you wait in anticipation. Two words - INSTANT GRATIFICATION. ...Bookmarks, del.icio.us, blogrolls, etc. make you read and search and think. This is the PICTUREBOOK to their novel.

Here are some of my findings for this week:

• Hairy Chair by Charles Kaiser. shredded paper covering an old chair. watch out for paper cuts.
• The Web2.0 look is everywhere! Glossy Coffee Table with rounded corners and flower insets from Orange22 Design.
• LUVGALZ Worldwide Graphic Tribute to Girls
• famous british grafitti artist Banksy also makes interesting re-claimed paintings.

We went to see the Sydney Art Show this weekend at the Horden Pavillion, which is right next to Fox Studios where I work. It's interesting to walk down the aisles and see so many different things, from figurative to conceptual, and since it is Sydney a fair amount of Aboriginal painting as well. I'm not sure about the Affordable in the tag line. Everything was sold by Galleries, at gallery prices.

This year, it seems that everyone selling aboriginal art had paintings from recently deceased Minnie Pwerle. You couldn't walk anywhere without seeing variations on her bush melon  and bush medicine dreamings.

Some of my show favorites and more pictures after the break:

After the big disapointment of the LivingHomes Prefab which is apparently still being built, I'm still curious about the whole modernist prefab movement.

I was listening to KCRW's latest DnA podcast that architecture firm Office of Mobile Design is installing a model of their Portable House prefab in Venice, at 1650 Abbott Kinney Blvd. I tried to get a bit more information, and unfortunately the OMD website is horrible, but there is some interesting information on the Value Of Architecture website:

Harkening back to original prehistoric models of shelter and dwelling, the Portable House adapts, relocates and reorients itself to accommodate an ever-changing environment. It offers an eco-sensitive and economical alternative to the increasingly expensive permanent structures that constitute most of today's housing options. At the same time, the Portable House calls into question preconceived notions of the trailer home and trailer park, creating an entirely new option for those with disposable income but insufficient resources for entering the conventional housing market.

From the content of the webcast, it seems that Jennifer Siegal, the architect behind the Portable House, talks mostly about the benefits of modernist architecture, ecologically sustainable material, and sidesteps questions about affordabilty and disponibility of her designs. Nevertheless, I found it a very interesting podcast, specially the commentary by Michael Sylvester of FabPrefab about the pros and cons of the current wave of modernist prefab projects, their costs and affordability and I'm looking forward to visiting the site when I'm in LA in a few months.

For some reason I was thinking about Limoncello today. While we were living in LA, we made a large batch after a friend brought us a large grocery bag filled with lemons from the tree in his garden, which we used to make our own Limoncello. Since we couldn't drink it all, we saved a few bottles and stored them while we came to Sydney. I just wonder if it will have kept that long. I guess we will find out in a few months.

Limoncello Recipe: Ingredients

• One Dozen Lemons
• 2 bottles (2 x 750ml) of 100° proof Vodka or Grappa
• 750ml of water
• 500 grams of sugar
  

Making your own Limoncello or Limongino is really easy. First take about a dozen lemons and wash them well, since you will be using the rinds. Then, with a vegetable peeler, remove the rind and keep it in a large jar. Make sure that you don't peel any of the bitter white flesh of the lemon. Fill the jar with Vodka, and let it soak for about a month to a month and a half, in a cool dark place, stiring a little every week to allow the alcohol to strip the flavor from the rinds.

The Blade T-6 from Electric Moto Corp matches gas-powered trailbikes like the Honda XR-250 in all aspects, except for the pollution, both from an exhaust and noise level point of view. This means that the Blade can be used in places where motorbikes are restricted, like mountain bike trails.

The Blade T-6 is a breathtakingly quick, responsive off-road cycle that has put big smiles one the faces of pros like Tiger Lacey, Mike Metzger, Travis Pastrana, Chuck Carrothers and Caleb Wyatt.

The batteries charge in 30min, giving between 20 and 30min of autonomy at 18HP and a top speed of 40Mph, which matches most 250cc motocross bikes. A trailbike wouldn't be my first choice, but it's nice to know that the production of electricbikes is starting to happen, and that you can still have all the fun of motocross riding, without the pollution.

A new museum dedicated to the "Art and Civilisation of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas" opens in Paris this weekend.

There was a very interesting newsbrief on australian TV about a month ago, on how some of the most famous Australian Aboriginal artists were flying to Paris to each paint a some of the ceilings and walls of a new museum in Paris dedicated to the tribal arts from around the world. The museum itself was designed by architect Jean Nouvel, who previously worked on the fantastic Institut du Monde Arabe. The architecture itself is worth the visit.

Apparently the Australian Artists were chosen to be part of the architecture because it's one of the few art movement that has managed to survive 600,000 years of continuous history, and at the same time evolve into a contemporary art form. I would argue that the same could be said for the Inuits and First Nations artists, just go to an art gallery in Vancouver to see that their works have also made the crossover, but I guess the art market is currently in love with Australian art more than its Canadian counterpart.

Musee du quai Branly
37, Quai Branly - Portail Debilly
75007 Paris

I stumbled upon Hillman's Top 100 Wonders of the World today, and I realized that I have already seen 25% of the top 100 listing. Most of it is because I was lucky enough to travel to strange places while I was working for Softimage. Hillman has apparently been tracking and travelling all around the world, and maintains a list of the top 1000 wonders of the world.

World's top 100 travel wonders - the best of the best. The world has 100,000 travel attractions. I have been impartially researching and updating my world wonder list for 30 years. I have traveled more than a million miles researching travel and food. I have written major books and articles on those subjects. Only 1 out of 1,000 of them win my Hillman Wonders gold medal. 

I have visited 4 of the top 10 travel wonders, which is a good start. The other destinations are after the break.

• The Egyptian Pyramids at Giza #1. I saw them very quicky as part of a trip to Cairo where I was training a company that had just bought a motion capture system.
  
• The Great Wall of China #2. Walked on the section of the great wall nearest to Beijing, while I was in China for a large sale of softimage|xsi to CCTV the state-owned television network.
  
• The Grand Canyon, Colorado #6. We didn't visit it on a particularly good day, and didn't spend a lot of time there. I apparently said "Oh look, it's a big hole in the ground, can we go now?". So we should probably go back and enjoy the sights on a better day.
  
• The Amazon Rainforest #10. We almost got lost in the river malmanouri, an offshout of the amazon that traverses French Guyana. We did loose a beautiful pair of italian sunglasses when Natasha tried to play the amazonian monkey hanging from a vine.

Simone Legno is another graphic artist I really like. I knew his more colorful design work for Tokidoki but I just discovered his other personal website DesignerGokko and while I really like the way he mixes long legged girls with dragon tattoos with super kawaii characters like the milk carton cow or the cactus girl, I also like the softer look of his paintings, like the one here.

Simone Legno è nato a Roma, dove ha fondato con i suoi migliori amici Vianet.it, il suo studio di grafica e new Media, per il quale è direttore creativo. Attualmente vive a Los Angeles dove sta creando una sua linea di T-shirts e gadgets sotto il nome Tokidoki, in partenza suo sito di sviluppo artistico.

Apparently, GOKKO means play-acting in japanese, what children do when they play cowboy CowboyGokko or doctor DoctorGokko or even in the case of Simone, Designer. (^_^)

Simone Legno and 149 other contemporary illustrators are in my current coffee table book: Illustration Now edited by Taschen.

Branch is part of the Eco 2.0 movement, stating that sustainable and eco-friendly products can actually look good, and that you don't have to choose between good design and an ethical lifestyle.

Everything we sell at Branch qualifies as being "sustainable" in some way or another (often in many ways). This could mean, for example, that a product is made from organically-grown fiber, or from recycled- or reclaimed stock, or from sustainably-harvested wood, or from a naturally-occurring, renewable material. Also—and this is equally important—we think that products shouldn't have to look eco-friendly to actually be "green".

Branch just opened its online store, and will be opening a realworld storefront in San Francisco soon.

[via Inhabitat]

Burning Safari is one of five animated shorts created by the students of the french school Les Gobelins for the Annecy 2006 Animation Festival.

Film réalisé comme court métrage d'ouverture pour le Festival International du Film d'Animation (FIFA) d'Annecy 2006. Par Vincent AUPETIT, Florent de LA TAILLE, Jeanne IRZENSKI, Maxime MALEO, Aurélien PREDAL, Claude-William TREBUTIEN, étudiants de la formation Dessinateur d'animation.

Robots vs Monkey: A spaceship full of robot-tourists lands in a jungle. I love the animation which manages to be very fluid, and doesn't suffer from the usual 3D animation symptoms. Great work!