When sign design goes awry

I'm sure I can't be the first person to have noticed the Pimpark sign near the corner of Broad and 11th, though I'm not sure if Pimpark noticed it when they were designing this sign (or the logos on their website, for that matter).

Pimpark.

Perhaps it's a reference to the ever-popular 'Pimp my Ark' chapter of Genesis wherein Noah totally puts a 52-inch plasma TV in the back of that shit ... for the unicorns, you understand.

Or maybe it simply proves that no matter how cute a company's pseudo-manga-inspired mascot is, no one is above a freudian slip.

Nonetheless, legend has it that if you stand near this building and listen closely on Monday mornings, you can hear a voice in the wind asking "Where my money at?"

More News Room Shenanigans

I'm not saying this wouldn't happen at prairie dog. A few years ago when I used to do the film listings I ignited a storm of Keeley Hazell (pictured) Googling with one blurb I wrote. But we never had cameras rolling as this Aussie TV station did when a news staffer decided to check out steamy nude photos from Aussie supermodel Miranda Kerr's recent cover shoot for GQ magazine. Hilarious. (Break)

Climate Cover-up Author at Selam Tonight

Richard Littlemore, one of the authors of Climate Cover-Up will be speaking tonight at Selam Restaurant (2115 Broad St). His talk runs from 7 to 9pm and the event is free.

This should be a nice palate cleanser after last year's assault of the climate crack-pots courtesy the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Littlemore is an environmental journalist who's worked at newspapers such as the Ottawa Citizen and the Winnipeg Tribune. He's also one of the minds behind DeSmog Blog, an invaluable resource for anyone interested in finding out about the climate change denial industry and its efforts to obstruct the work of legitimate scientists.

For our climate change feature, we interviewed Littlemore's Climate Cover-Up co-author, James Hoggan. You can read the complete transcript of that interview here.

Pick of the Day: A Brush With Genius

For my Monday pick-of-the-day, I featured Michelle Provost's show Selling Out at the Dunlop Art Gallery. With all the action figures, comic book covers, artist trading cards and sliding puzzles that she's assembled, there must be over 200 artists represented. Oddly, despite the vast catalogue of artists, which cover many of the most famous names in art history, there seems to be two curious ommissions.

Given that the show, at least on some level, critiques the way that the arts help sustain and even fuel consumer culture Salvador Dali is conspicuous by his absence. Truly, if you look up the word "whore" in an art dictionary, you will find his picture. Yet as far as I've been able to discern in two reasonably thorough visits to the show, he's not mentioned.

Neither did I detect any reference to Vincent van Gogh. That's surprising because among artists he is virtually universally revered as the antithesis of Dali-- an artist with impeccable integrity. The man, according to legend anyway, never sold a painting in his lifetime. Pretty hard to accuse him of selling out, isn't it? Which is perhaps why Provost seems to have elected not to include him.

If you're hungering for a van Gogh fix, though, you can always see this Imax flick which opens Feb. 5 at the Saskatchewan Science Centre. An admittedly unusual, but potentially intriguing, cinematic excercise, Brush With Genius retraces van Gogh's steps as he painted some of his most famous masterpieces -- first in his native Netherlands, where conditions are generally dark and gloomy; then later in sun-drenched Arles, Saint Remy and Auvers-sur-Oise.

Here's the trailer (YouTube). And for a bit of comic relief, here's the trailer for Vincent Minnelli's 1957 biopic Lust For Life which starred Kirk Douglas as van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Paul Gaugin. (YouTube)