By now you might have noticed I have a thing for spirals.



I am fascinated by them in all their forms.



So what does a spiral mean? The definition of a spiral is this :
  Winding or circling round a center or pole and gradually receding from it; as, the spiral curve of a watch spring.
Or, more fancy, A plane curve, not reentrant, described by a point, called the generatrix, moving along a straight line according to a mathematical law, while the line is revolving about a fixed point called the pole. Cf. Helix.




Our galaxy is a spiral



The spiral also shows up in nature. Tornadoes, hurricanes, snails, the pattern of sunflower seeds, right down to the shape or our DNA.



Is it any wonder I cant stop painting them? They don’t even have to be round to fascinate me.



These images and more can be found here.

Around the world

mixed media collage on panel
24 x 24

I thought this was absolutely beautiful. Something to share. The colors are amazing!

   

Orion Nebula Stocktrek Images

  * A toymaker, for example, who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA.

  * A work at home mom in Minnesota who makes cloth diapers to sell online must choose either to violate the law or cease operations.
 
* A small toy retailer in Vermont who imports wooden toys from Europe, which has long had stringent toy safety standards, must now pay for testing on every toy they import.
 
* And even the handful of larger toy makers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007.

you can read the full law here

Here are some more links about it….

National bankruptcy day

When you’re not overtaken with smells there’s sometimes plenty to listen to even when you don’t want to. Some people just want to be heard by everyone. Usually younger people. The two teenage boys for instance. They could not help but talk about about sex with their girlfriends. The one went on and on about sex with his girlfriend. How she could not get enough because of how big his … um …. Member was. And how he could get her to do anything he wanted because he was so big. Gotta love teenage boys, right? There were just a few of us in the rear of the bus. But one older gentleman felt the need to chime in. In all seriousness he says “Enjoy it while you can boys, it shrinks when you get older. Mine is the size of my pinky finger now.” I wanted to turn around and see if they were as pale as their silence indicated as this man went on and on about his urologist and how it started to shrink in his late thirties, but I was too busy trying not to laugh too loudly. A few stops later and he pulled the bell and was off.  To the urologist no doubt.
Then there was the guy, mid twenties I’d say, that “was late because I had to change pants because I shit myself”. Fortunately for him it looked like a mustard stain or so he said. He went on about it for twenty minutes. How proud he was. Fun times!

This is part of a column I sometimes (read not nearly often enough) write for my friend arin721. You can find the whole thing here.