Today’s strange bedfellows are travel and origami.  More specifically, foreign currency and origami.  Along with the rest of my family, I’ve been doing origami since I was old enough to know the difference between a mountain fold and a valley fold.  That’s not to say I’m that good at it (though I have converted over 250 used Post-Its into paper cranes while fidgeting through two months of daily team meetings).

I would never call myself an origami artist, because I have never come up with an original design, but I have a great deal of respect for those who are.  And that’s part of the reason I wanted to post this and help show off someone else’s creativity.

This is a gallery of origami creations folded from international currency.  And rather than the usual array of bow-ties and other creations that can be folded from a dollar-shaped scrap of paper, these models actually incorporate the faces of the heads of states and assorted celebrities pictured on the bills.

おりマネーがみ　インターナショナル
ORIMONEYGAMI INTERNATIONAL

I was amused to see some Norwegian kroner thrown into the mix.  Along with the foreign currency, the site also has a large collection of pieces folded from Japanese yen.  Unfortunately the captions are all in Japanese.

You know all of those cute photos of animals that spread across email forwards like wild fires?  You know what would make them better?  Star Wars references.

Animals With Lightsabers

Anyhow, I recently heard about this website, which is basically a digital online refrigerator covered with letter magnets.  You can spell out whatever you want, which in itself is kind of fun (for about 45 seconds), but the thing about the site is that it’s collaborative (or whatever the exact opposite of collaborative is)!  You’re sharing your refrigerator and letter set in realtime with a bunch of other random (and often juvenile) denizens of the internet.  So before you can finish “Hello World” your E has probably been swiped to spell out something profane.  But it’s still an interesting idea!

Lunchtimers – Letters

Zooming in and scanning the crowd, it’s like a real-world Where’s Wally (“Where’s Waldo” in the US) .  For fun, here are a few of the interesting things I found browsing the photo (feel free to see how many you can find in the original):

Someone sleeping?	A person dressed all in pink feathers
Someone wearing a pimp costume	Not a terrorist
Kenny from South Park	A fire extinguisher
A pair of disembodied legs (from where the photos were spliced together)

Gigapan also lets users take and mark snapshots from the original photo. Here are a few of my favorites from those:

Oreo cookies
An antique camera	Obi-Wan Kenobi
And perhaps the best of all: A joke from the stagehands! Two stagehands walked into a bar. The second had gaffer tape.It’s an Easter egg in the presidential inauguration!

Too lazy to look for them on your own?  Click here for a copy of the image with the locations marked.

Yes, that pile of poo or autopsied heart/uterus is supposed to be a UT Longhorn.  But what’s worse than the shoddy artistry and anaphylactic shock inevitably caused by eating that one-pound blob of icing, is the puns that this cake is spawning in my mind…

How about the “Poo-T Longhorns?”  Or is this a “UT-erus?”  *groan*

Get the Glass
(courtesy of your friendly California Milk Processor Board)

This is a stunning 3D board game created as part of the got milk? campaign.  There are a few small issues that can be a bit frustrating, but on the whole it’s a lovely creation.  Oh, and be sure to notice those random numbers that pop up on screen when you finish the mini-games.

floe – Befriend a Bear

Though the Tamagotchi-style concept is pretty basic, this “pet polar bear” simulator looks incredibly good and adds a small level of environmental education in an attempt to encourage people to make grener decisions in their daily lives.

The adopted baby polar bear is so cute, you just may forget that the diminishing ice floes are causing polar bears to become even more deadly killers as they’re forced to move ever closer to the Arctic human populations.

The World Accent Game
See how well you can identify speakers’ accents from all over the world.

I did surprisingly badly, though there were two that I was pleased with myself for getting right.  I was a bit ashamed that I failed to recognize a US accent, though.  I’ll post my results (with spoilers) for discussion in the comments, so don’t read them until you’ve played for yourself!

The Lego-Mizers
There are a few different varieties, for almost endless time-wasting!

If Lucas an I ever showed up in a pre-packaged Lego tie-in set, I guess we’d end up looking something like this:

So would LEGO Meg be “MEGO”?

• Band Name – The tile of this article
• Album Title – The last four words of the very last quote on this page
• Album Cover Art – The third image on this page

And thus, I give you the new hit album Never Be Alone Again by Superstring Fireworks:

In the making of this album, I’d like to thank the Pyrotechnics Guild International, The Heart of the Matter author Graham Greene, and Gojca.

Partly for my own amuseument, I encourage you to create your own band and album and post them in the comments section.  Maybe I’ll even buy the album if you ever actually have it produced!

By the way, in my first attempt at using the Wikipedia RandomPage, I learned about the Cynotilapia axelrodi, a type of fish in the Cichlidae family that is unique to the freshwater lakes of Malawi.  Not to be confused with the Cynotilapia AxlRosi, the Malawian rock-dwelling fish that swims around singing “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”