Amazing Fantasy Garden - Get Lost in it

Bruno Torf is an artist that creates beautiful works of fantasy art in his sculpture garden. This garden resides in Marysville, Victoria hidden away in a magical rainforest setting.

Originally from South America, Bruno moved his family to Marysville in 1995. He originally started his career as a sign writer, but gradually made the transition to being a fulltime artist. He wanted a place to exhibit his artwork, so he opened Bruno's Art and Sculpture Garden.

He travels around the world quite frequently, studying different styles of art. This is definitely apparent in his garden sculptures. He decided to create the sculpture garden so that he could run it as a permanent attraction. The garden began with a little over 15 life-size terracotta sculptures and now has over 115 on display. Combined with his oil paintings, sketches and small sculptures, there are now over 300 works of art on display at Bruno's Art and Sculpture Garden.











I would love to go to this garden to see these sculptures. It reminds me of a Lord of the Rings type setting. Now that I think about it....I don't want to just visit, I'd totally live in a place like this. Imagine waking up in this fantasy world every day. But then I'd be on display for all of the tourists....they would probably think I was a scary gnome when they see what I look like waking up in the morning.

Source: inventorspot.com

Dolphin birth: Amazing photos

A dolphin born in an aquarium in the Netherlands is to be named by the public.

As these amazing photos show his mother Finagain gave birth in her pool in the Harderwijk Dolfinarium on the 22nd May.

Finagain, a common bottlenose dolphin, was herself born in captivity to Notchfin and Guy in 1992.

Her pregnancy lasted twelve months, and the as-yet unnamed calf is around 3ft long at birth, already fully capable of swimming. Unlike human babies dolphin calves are born “breech”, i.e. tail first.

It will live with its mother until it is six. Male dolphins become sexually mature around age nine to thirteen.

The Dolfinarium is home to sixteen dolphins and six harbour porpoise. As well as hosting dolphin displays it acts as a rehabilitation centre, taking in beached or injured cetaceans and preparing them for life back in the wild.

It was first opened in 1965 by Frits den Herder and his brother Coen. During its chequered history the park went bankrupt after an ill-advised expansion into other European countries.

Only a state intervention by the Dutch government restored it to the not-for-profit animal rehabilitation centre it is today.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Arundel's amazing carpet of flowers open to the public

MORE THAN 100 years of tradition, a sacred moment in time and around 1,500 flowers are on display in Arundel Cathedral from today (Tuesday, May 20).

A 90ft carpet of flowers has been painstakingly designed, organised and laid along the aisle of the cathedral, to celebrate the festival of the Corpus Christi.

The procession of the Blessed Sacrament will make its way from the cathedral, to the courtyard of Arundel Castle, on Thursday (May 22) before moving back to the cathedral, and its colourful carpet.

This year's design is to mark the 150th anniversary of Saint Bernadette's apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.

Mary Bagg, a parishioner who has been helping to organise the carpet of flowers for more than 30 years, said: "Our Lady taught Bernadette to use a rosary, so that is our theme."

A massive rosary, fashioned from cream, gold, pink, red and purple chrysanthemums, adorns the aisle, and 100s of visitors are expected.

Ancient tradition
It is an ancient tradition to lay flowers in the path of important people, a practice that has been adopted by the Catholic Church to welcome the Blessed Sacrament.

Arundel's own tradition started in 1877, when Duke Henry, the 15th Duke of Norfolk, was inspired by seeing streets of flowers in Italy, and for many years the cathedral was decorated using flowers from his own green house.

It has taken place annually since, barring the years through the First World War.

The cathedral is open from 9.30am until 9pm tomorrow (Wednesday, May 21, 2008) and there will be two masses on Thursday. at 10am and 5.30pm.

The procession will begin at around 6.30pm


Source: littlehamptongazette.co.uk

Francis Bacon triptych breaks record at NYC auction

This undated photo released by Sotheby's shows the three panels of Francis Bacon's "Triptych, 1976" which broke a record for contemporary art auctions Wednesday May 14, 2008 , selling for $86,281,000 after three bidders vied for it. It also set an auction record for the British artist.


A three-panel masterpiece by Francis Bacon broke a record for contemporary art auctions Wednesday, selling for more than $86 million after three bidders vied for it, a spokeswoman for the auction house said.

The $86,281,000 price for "Triptych, 1976" also set an auction record for the British artist, Sotheby's spokeswoman Lauren Gioia said.

She said the sale also broke auction records for work by pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, who died Monday at 82. His 1963 painting "Overdrive" sold for some $14.6 million, Gioia said.

Both buyers were anonymous, and the prices included the auction house's commission, known as a buyer's premium.

The bidding for "Triptych, 1976" rocketed past an estimate of $70 million for the painting, which is full of symbolism and draws on ancient Greek mythology.

The price also bested the $72.8 million auction record for contemporary art, set when Mark Rothko's "White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)" sold at Sotheby's in May 2007.

Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow" was expected to fetch $30 million to $40 million at Wednesday's auction. But it was not sold after bidding fell short of the seller's minimum price, Gioia said. Rothko died in 1970.

Bacon, who died in 1992 at 82, is considered one of Britain's most important 20th century artists. The previous auction record for a Bacon work was $52.7 million, for his "Study for Innocent X, 1952," sold at Sotheby's last May.

The triptych that sold Wednesday has been in the same owner's collection for more than 30 years, according to Sotheby's.

It was purchased in 1977 from the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris. The Tate Gallery in London and the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris also have shown it.

Another Bacon triptych, "Studies for Self Portrait," sold for $28 million at Christie's on Tuesday night.

Source: washingtonpost.com

One mom, 17 kids, plus one on the way

It's a happy Mother's Day for an Arkansas woman -- she's pregnant with her 18th child.


Michelle Duggar is surrounded by her children and husband Jim Bob, after the birth of her 17th child in 2007.

Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year's Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.

"We've had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us," she said, laughing.

The Duggars' oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.

The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children -- whose names start with the letter J -- are home-schooled.

Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.

The new show looks at life inside the Duggar home, where chores -- or "jurisdictions" -- are assigned to each child. One episode of the new show involves a "jurisdiction swap," where the boys do chores traditionally assigned to the girls, and vice versa, Duggar said.
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"The girls swapped jurisdictions, changing tires, working in the garages, mowing the grass," she said. "The boys got to cook supper from start to finish, clean the bathrooms," among other chores.

Duggar said she's six weeks along and the pregnancy is going well. She and her husband, Jim Bob Duggar, said they'll keep having children as long as God wills it.

"The success in a family is first off, a love for God, and secondly, treating each other like you want to be treated," Jim Bob Duggar said. "Our goal is for each one of our children to be best friends, and everybody working together to serve each other makes that happen."

The other Duggar children, in between Joshua and Jennifer, are Jana, 18; John-David, 18; Jill, 16; Jessa, 15; Jinger, 14; Joseph, 13; Josiah, 11; Joy-Anna, 10; Jeremiah, 9; Jedidiah, 9; Jason, 7; James, 6; Justin, 5; Jackson, 3; and Johannah, 2

Source: edition.cnn.com

Platypus mystery solved

The world's first platypus twin puggles born in captivity are shown at Taronga Zoo in Sydney in 2003. The task of laying bare the platypus genome of 2.2 billion base pairs spread across 18,500 genes has taken several years, but will do far more than satisfy the curiosity of just biologists, say the researchers.

Arguably the oddest beast in Nature's menagerie, the platypus looks as if were assembled from spare parts left over after the animal kingdom was otherwise complete.

Now scientists know why. According to a study released Wednesday, the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri -- part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal.

The task of laying bare the platypus genome of 2.2 billion base pairs spread across 18,500 genes has taken several years, but will do far more than satisfy the curiosity of just biologists, say the researchers.

"The platypus genome is extremely important, because it is the missing link in our understanding of how we and other mammals first evolved," explained Oxford University's Chris Ponting, one of the study's architects.

"This is our ticket back in time to when all mammals laid eggs while suckling their young on milk."

Native to eastern Australia and Tasmania, the semi-aquatic platypus is thought to have split off from a common ancestor shared with humans approximately 170 million years ago.

The creature is so strange that when the first stuffed specimens arrived in Europe at the end of the 18th century, biologists believed they were looking at a taxidermist's hoax, a composite stitched together from the body of a beaver and the snout of a giant duck.

But the peculiar mix of body features are clearly reflected in the animal's DNA, the study found.

The platypus is classified as a mammal because it produces milk and is covered in coat of thick fur, once prized by hunters.

Lacking teats, the female nurses pups through the skin covering its abdomen.

But there are reptile-like attributes too: females lay eggs, and males can stab aggressors with a snake-like venom that flows from a spur tucked under its hind feet.

The bird-like qualities implied by its Latin name, Ornithorhynchus anatinus, include webbed feet, a flat bill similar to a duck's, and the gene sequences that determine sex. Whereas humans have two sex chromosomes, platypuses have 10, the study showed.

"It is much more of a melange than anyone expected," commented Ewan Birney, who led the genome analysis at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge.

The animal also possesses a feature unique to monotremes -- an order including a handful of egg-laying mammals -- called electroreception.

With their eyes, ears and nostrils closed, platypuses rely on sensitive electrosensory receptors tucked inside their bills to track prey underwater, detecting electrical fields generated by muscular contraction.

"By comparing the platypus genome to other mammalian genomes, we'll be able to study genes that have been conserved throughout evolution," said senior author Richard Wilson, a researcher at Washington University.

In captivity, platypuses have lived up to 17 years of age.

In the wild, they feed on worms, insect larvae, shrimps and crayfish, eating up to 20 percent of their body weight every day.

Males grow to a length of 50 centimetres (20 inches) and weigh about two kilos (4.5 pounds), with females about 20 percent shorter and lighter.

The genome sequenced for the study belongs to a female specimen from New South Wales nicknamed Glennie and can be accessed at www.ncbi.nih.gov/Genbank.

Source: Yahoo

Mayor Bloomberg, go see this amazing lady

Make it right, Mr. Mayor.

Take a moment this week to extend New York's best wishes to an uncommonly spirited woman left paralyzed in the crossfire between a cop and three gunmen 74 years ago, but who has yet to receive so much as a syllable of sympathy or a penny of support from her city.

The most innocent of bystanders, Leonora Tomasulo was shot on her 16th birthday. The bullet remains lodged against her spine as she comes to her 90th this week.

"It's still in me," Tomasulo reported from her wheelchair yesterday.

She seems incapable of self-pity. Bitterness only edges into her voice when she describes what the city did for her in the aftermath.

"Nothing."

Tomasulo turned 16 on that May day in 1934 and she was returning home with a strawberries and cream birthday cake she had bought with a dollar one of her sisters gave her.

She was starting onto Cherry St. when she heard gunfire. She saw Police Officer Arthur Rasmusen go down in front of her, fatally wounded, his gun blazing at a trio of thugs behind her.

"They held up a store for $25, a grocery store," Tomasulo recalled.

One stray bullet grazed the face of an off-duty detective's 10-month-old son. Another struck Tomasulo in the shoulder, tearing by her heart and lodging against her spine.

At Beekman Street Hospital, she was listed in extremely critical condition.

"They said I was going to die," Tomasulo recalled. "I told God, 'Please don't let me die.'"

She clung to life, but she was paralyzed from the waist down. She was transferred to Bellevue and was still in the intensive care as the holidays neared. She offered a full measure of her spirit when she started singing.

"Whoever heard of such a thing in the ICU unit?" her older sister Dora Pignanelli said as she sat with Tomasulo yesterday. "She's entertaining all the people there at Christmas. It gave them ..."

Pignanelli paused, searching for the right word.

"Courage," Tomasulo said. "I have a lot, thank God."

She needed all of it.

"I was in the hospital for five years," she noted.

When she was released from a rehabilitation center in Haverstraw, she was able to struggle about with a brace, crutches and pure will power, falling so often she got good at it.

"She fell a lot of times, but she fell easy," her sister said.

A good-hearted citizen gave her a wheelchair. The only thing the city ever gave her was an old hand-cranked sewing machine worth all of $1 so she could teach herself a trade and not be a burden.

Her luck took a good turn when a city worker named Louis Tomasulo chanced to see her by the entrance to her tenement. He announced that she was going to be his wife.

"Of course his mother didn't want him to marry a cripple," her sister recalled. "'He told his mother, 'If I don't marry that girl, I'm going to turn to drink.'"

They were married and if she still had a bullet lodged against her spine, she also had her Louis to help her. He died when he was not yet 60.

Her siblings continued to do all they could, as they had from the start, helping her live with the damage a single bullet can inflict.

"It's something nobody should go through," she said.

A moment of pure horror decades ago remained just a thought away.

"It always comes to me," she said.

Her great blessing continued to be her family. Fifty assorted relatives assembled for an early 90th birthday party at a Little Italy restaurant on Sunday.

She sang as she had in the ICU, as she had through all the years, good and bad. Her spirit was as young as on that day 74 years before when she turned 16. And she still loved birthday cake.

"What happened to the cake that was left over?" she asked at the end of Sunday's party. "It was so good I thought we'd take some home."

Leonora Tomasulo turns 90 on Sunday. The mayor should take a moment to say a few words that should have been said more than seven decades ago.

Source: nydailynews.com