The Japanese writing system has a long and deep history, tracing back to the scratching on Oracle Bones in ancient China. This depth of history thus carries a huge weight of etymology behind it. This etymology is not just frivolous either. The old forms of chinese are used in Chop Seals which are effectively signatures of legal documents.

The difficult thing with the etymology of a given Kanji is actually quite problematic. When Han'zi characters were imported to japan, they were (generally) imported as their "traditional" version. During the communist revolution in China, the government simplified a great number of characters. Thus, there are currently two versions of a given Chinese character. For example, the character for "see" is 見 in Traditional Chinese, and Japanese, but 见 in Simplified Chinese. To make it even more confusing, there are a few characters of exclusively Japanese origin (called Kokuji). Finally, the Japanese went through their own simplification process.

What this boils down to, is that if you are wanting to study the Etymology of a Kanji character, you might have a couple of places to look. The first step is to take a peak at this great Chinese etymology database put together by Richard Sears. You can feed it a simplified or traditional chinese character, and it will come back with results. The only time that it doesn't come up with any results, is when you try and input a kokuji, or even just a Traditional Chinese character that the Japanese simplified (if that is the case, you can search for the kanji you are looking for at the link I just provided).

On a completely different angle, the writing of Kanji has progressed in a different direction, which is to say, calligraphy. I'll be talking about that more in another post, but I thought I would mention 2 great calligraphic dictionaries I have found:

http://www.font.com.cn/fontzd/

http://www.9610.com/zidian/index.asp

Both dictionaries are on Mainland China, which means they are exclusively simplified Chinese. This means that if you want to look up a traditional chinese character, you need to find its simplified equivalent. This isn't too hard, because Thats where Richard Sears saves the day again. It provides a good amount of information on any Chinese character you feed it. Simplified or Traditional.

Even if you are not studying Japanese (or Chinese!) you should go have a look at these sites, some of them have quite beautiful imagery, and it it is quite interesting to see the etymology of a few different characters. If you need some example characters, you can use these (you'll just have to copy/paste them):

• Sun 日
• Moon 月
• Mountain 山
• Stream 川
• Tree 木
• Gold 金
• Soil 土

Check out the cool ass the essence of rabbit mandala.

Cool Ass. (thanks Nat!)

Phil Corbett is a pretty amazing artist of the disturbing-cute variety that I enjoy so much. His Kitten Parasites project is very cute, weird, and wrong. Quite nice. Check his main site for twisted-cute-bunnies.

I also particularly enjoy it when an artist picks a theme, and runs with it. Variations on a theme can be a real creativity boost.

There is a great book called Cambodia: A book for people who find television too slow. Well, I had an idea, what if there was a podcast of sorts for people who find YouTube too slow? You would call it "Angkor Wat" Of course.

What would you feature on it? How about I whet your appetite with a few links:

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: part one and part two.
Clay Shirky, Making Digital Durable - Seminars About Long Term Thinking (video broken about 22 mins into it, but it fixes itself.)
Scheme as an introductory language

Ideally I—and perhaps we, if we can make it a community endeavor—can come up with at least one video per day, tagged with 'angkorwat' on del.icio.us, and suddenly we start to build our own personal distributed television station about really cool shit.

The subject, seen as a whole, is of a man (representing me) lying on a barren plain before a wheatfield, with his head split open. The point of view is from the top of his head. The subject is then roughly divided into the left hand side of the picture, [with] the thoughts made in his head represented as a maze; and the right hand side, the view of the rest of his body. The hands and feet are seen through the eyes, nose and mouth, tapering off into the distance and the outside world.

THE MAZE [left-hand side of painting] An exitless one, it occupies and divides the inside of the cranium into groups of thoughts, the passageways being calculated to do the grouping. The white rat curled up in the central cavity represents my Spirit (I suppose). He is curled up with frustration from having run the passages so long without hope of escaping out of this maze of unhappy thoughts. They [the groups of thoughts] proceed as follows:-

Group I [top and top right]
Home upbringing: a) I, as a small boy, rejected by my school mates; b) my fear of school bullies and the ridicule of the school girls; c) my fear of being rejected by my father and losing the companionship, food, shelter and warmth of a home; d) my father's philosophy, the survival of the craftiest, pointed out by the plight of the foolish fish.

Group II [top left]
Political: a) my one time attachment to Ukrainian nationalism, which is a cry of anguish at the Ukraine being raped by Russia; b) my subsequent association with members of the Peace Movement, a Communist front organisation; c) the end result of over-zealous political leaning, WAR (my physical fear of it).

Group III [middle left]
Sexual: a) the merry-go-round string of rag dolls and wallflowers represent my lack of feeling and direction for dancing; b) the bull, dragging along his impediment and galloping towards the cow in heat, represents my fear of the animal side of sex in me.

Group IV [bottom left]
My social relations: choice between a) the hospital, with its ordeal of the panel (I in the test tube), interpreted in turn in two ways:
1) [below] as a benevolent conspiracy, or 2) [above] as a malevolent persecution: or b) the outside world - I continuing to be the outcast, skirting the smooth level highway of life in the ditch behind the hedge, sensitive to being seen in the light.

Group V [middle and bottom right]
Life and death: a) [middle right] Museum of Hopelessness being life and b) [below] the conveyor belt bearing the victim (me) inexorably to be crushed by the roller Death, I being one third there by the clock; c) [bottom right] the last picture is of me trying to convince myself that I am really mortal, using second hand information (the drawing) rather than examining the skeleton or coffin.

OUTSIDE WORLD [right-hand side of painting] Grasshoppers and drought (sun before the clouds) represent the mercilessness of Nature, which bankrupted my father, a farmer, and brought out of him the cornered beast. The thorny, stony ground is a kind of T.S. Eliot Wasteland - spiritual and cultural barrenness: the pile of excrement with flies on it represents my view of the world and the people that live on it. The loosened red ribbon [linking the 2 halves of the skull] bound together the head of a T.S. Eliot Hollow Man, and was untied by psychotherapy (Dr Cormier), but since the outside world is still unappealing, the rat remains inert. Before the head was opened, burrs (bitter experiences) choked the throat and pricked the sensitive underside of the tongue, and when it was opened the sawdust and shavings (tasteless education) spilled out from on top the tongue: mixed with the sawdust are symbols of (to me) equally tasteless Art, painting, literature and music. The burrs also represent, in the eye socket, the successive evaluations of my character by any friend during the process of acquaintance, all repellent but hopeful till the last, when the heart is discovered to be a grub. On the tongue and in the throat, the Kurelek family (big burrs produce little burrs), representing my father as the hard domineering blue burr opening up the mushy yellow burr, my mother, to release a common lot of burrs, my brothers and sisters, and one unique orange one - myself. The last burr, spearing culture, is I at the university. The inverted one is I as a child, trapped painfully between two aspects of my father, the one I hated and the one I worshipped.

-- Kurelek's Interpretation of "The Maze"

Here are a batch of links to some closeups of the overall picture:
Top of the Sull | Kicked Out | Beaten Up |
Crows Attacking the Lizard |
Conveyer Belt | Spikes | Test Tube |
Coffin and Death

What is the cutest, best and most awesomest kids TV show of them all? If you know me, then you might expect me to say "Hello Kitty" and that would be the end of it.

Well, you'd be wrong. The cutest, best and most awesomest kids show is Pocoyo. Bar none. It is the kind of show that I can sit down with Harmony to watch. Harmony loves it, I love it, it's good.

First off, it is very cute in that heart-warming-make-you-smile way, versus the too-sugary-sweet-need-insulin way; it is not like Hello Kitty (the TV show) in it's cuteness. Second of all, the message of each show is really quite good. As an example, Barney the dinosaur has a very superficial message, like: cleaning is fun because I say (sing?) so, whereas Pocoyo will show you how to have fun cleaning up.

But the charm of this show is more then how the message is presented, it is also the quality of the message that is presented. While Barney is singing about brushing ones teeth, and Cailou is busy whining about how scary the next door neighbor is, Pocoyo is learning about how some things (like skipping rope) are hard, and how it takes time, practice, help and most importantly, the ability to ask for help. My favorite episode is called The Key to it All, and is worth watching whether you have kids or not. I've posted the YouTube in the extended body of the entry, so if you wanna watch it, click on the read more link below.

The final statement of that episode sums up why I enjoy this show so much: "This is the best treasure of all isn't it, after the fun we've had today: opening doors, asking questions, and exploring your world. That is the key to it all!"

Effectively the design equivalent of a Haiku, Vormator...

...is the ultimate challenge of your creativity: the aim of the book is to give each artist the chance to show his abilities to create a stunning piece with limited means. The contributing artists each get the exact same set of 8 shapes, the Elements. With these shapes they are challenged to create their own unique page for the book, within the limitations provided in the Rulebook. Designers are thus challenged to create a unique piece within a strict set of rules. It all comes down to pure skills and creativity in this competition.

What a very cool idea. Here are the 8 basic shapes: