Hal's Friday Evening Blog Review #14 - Make Art Every Day

Sorry to get back to the weather, but this time of the year really is a downer.

The fence blew down on Thursday when we had relatively severe gales and the compost bin lost one of its sides at one point. It was a bit like in Battlestar Galactica when the ship gets hit with nukes. At one point I was checking up and down the road outside the house for Cylon agents, or British Gas workmen as they are known in these parts.

I've been having a bit of a tough time blogs to review because the "new-look" Blogger no longer has the list of recently updated blogs on the lower right hand side of the page when you sign in. There is a scrolling list of recently updated blogs but it takes dexterity to catch one as it scrolls past. There is also the 'next blog' button at the top of most blogs, which takes you to a new blog randomly, but there is so much rubbish around that you have to make 20 or 30 jumps to end up somewhere interesting. Anyway, I found Make Art Every Day and unless I can find a better way to randomly sample (say) at least 10 blog titles at once, this will be the last Friday evening blog review for a while. (It's actually Saturdayt afternoon, but that's the wonders of the post management page.)

There isn't a lot here but what there is is extremely promising: a Boba Fett costume from a website called Instructibles, which is a cool-looking repository of stuff to make. I will get my old mate Nick Woolley to post his instructions for making a rocket out of a plastic squeezy bottle, an apparatus he perfected whilst out of work and living in Crawley in the mid-90s. Needless to say if he tried the same thing now he would probably be arrested...

I've always felt Boba Fett was one of the great Star Wars characters, criminally underused in both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi - although IG-88 and the guy with the reptile head whose name I can't remember had even less screen time - but Fett was cooler for the fact that you never actually saw his head or face because he always had his helmet on (at least in Empire and Jedi; you do see him in Attack of the Clones but he's just a kid then. His dad, Jango, has a similar outfit in different colours, but you see his head, which was a real disappointment for me. And I couldn't believe George Lucas didn't put the kid Boba in an outfit with a helmet too - it would have been an excellent running joke.)

Getting back to the blog, still on a Star Wars tip, there are instructions for making a woolly hat that looks like Princess Leia's hair; and for the Star Trek fans there's a "USS Floppy" - a model of the Enterprise made from the metal bit of a floppy disk. This is a great way of re-using old technology for art and comes from the wikiHow site, which is like a cross between Wikipedia and the old "Teach Yourself" books. Great stuff.

I think it is probably possible to build a Space 1999 Eagle craft from an egg box, some pipe cleaners, a plastic squeezy bottle and some jacks (not car jacks but the things that are a bit like marbles but crosses which you throw), but I don't have time to work out the details unfortunately. File under "projects to undertake after winning the Lottery jackpot".