A visitor to the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, Holland made quite an impression this week after inadvertently stepping onto one of the exhibits. And if that weren’t bad enough, the exhibit in question was a featureless, floor level tank filled with over a thousand litres of peanut butter.
Much to the amusement of nearby tourists , the startled art lover promptly sank into the installation, a 1962 work by Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers named – appropriately – Peanut Butter Platform, but since the piece is only a few centimetres deep, he was quite able to extract himself, leaving only a few nutty footprints as record of his adventure.
The museum meanwhile has demanded that the unfortunate fellow pay for the damage caused by his impromptu art-criticism, but they may have no solid foundation to do so. This is not the first time someone has accidentally trod on the exhibit, but museum bosses have previously refused to erect any form of barrier around the piece claiming that to do so would spoil its beauty (Herald Sun).
This is a poster currently on sale at Etsy, under the title of "The Fox Catcher," discovered by reader Deborah Newton. Does anyone recognize the fable that it illustrates? The essential events are truly weird.
1) A fox comes to a house and steals away a child.
2) The parents track down the fox to his lair and lure him out with drum and violin music.
3) The fox is beaten and/or killed, and the tearful child is saved.
I thought I knew a lot of fairytales, but this one escapes me!
Scientists have a history of accomplishing what was once thought impossible, be it walking on the moon, splitting the atom or alleviating pain and disease. But now they may have discovered something that will eclipse all that has come before; scientists are on the verge of making chocolate better! A team lead by Dr. Siela Maximova from Pennsylvania State University has pieced together the genetic code of the cacao tree, and not just any cacao tree but the Criollo variety that is widely recognised to produce the very best chocolate. Because of its poor disease resistance, Criollo is almost entirely ignored in favour of hybrid varieties that yield more – if inferior – beans, but Maximova et al hope their work will enable the development of new, elite strains of cacao (News.com.AU).
Meanwhile, here is someone who is taking the chocolate maker’s art way too literally. Jean Zaun of Fredericksburg in Pennsylvania uses a mixture of dark and white chocolate, food colouring and confectioner’s glaze to recreate famous works of art, including the frames, in a deliciously edible form. Her subjects have included the works of Van Gogh, Munch and Da Vinci, as well as a portrait of Ozzy Osborne commissioned by his wife. While the chocolate artworks are edible, Zaun believes they should be souvenirs rather than snacks. “They are meant to be consumed by the eye, not the stomach.” Zaun Explained (Daily Mail).
And the misuse of materials won’t stop there, at least not if Dr. Peter Eisner of the Fraunhofer Institute gets his way. Concerned that meat consumption is both unhealthy and bad for the environment, Dr. Eisner has started looking for ways to supplement or replace animal products with vegetable equivalents. His first success is a milk substitute derived from lupins that can even be used to make cheese, meanwhile co-worker Daniela Sussmann has extracted a protein from the seeds gives low-fat sausages more of the sensation of their unadulterated competition. Eisner reckons that our ever growing appetite for meat could one day be disastrous, arguing that the resources needed to produce 1 kilo of meat could instead yield 80 to 100 kilos of fruit or vegetables (Softpedia).
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.