the blog quebecois

This is it? This is it? A day scouring the Internet and all you can come up with is this crappy interactive guide to Bill Gates's house?

Apparently so.

Well, enjoy!

Everybody got a room
Everybody got a room
Everybody got a room
In god’s hotel

-- Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

For some reason this

reminded me of Kevin Spacey's apartment in the movie Seven (1996, also starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman).

Actually the apartment was gloomy, strewn with junk, crime-scene photos and thousands of notebooks.

Nevertheless, if I were a religiously-obsessed serial killer, I would much prefer the above. It clearly says "insane," but says it with a smile.

It's one of 40 or so theme rooms at the improbably named Propeller Island City Lodge in Berlin, Germany. Some of them are gorgeous, and the prices are quite reasonable -- 65 to 180 Euros a night for one person. You can check them out here.

I don't know if it's called that, but it should be. Part of the definition of baroque:

Architecture, departing from the classical canon revived during the Renaissance, took on the fluid, plastic aspects of sculpture.

It's a bar somewhere in Poland, but that's all I know about it. More pictures here.

This is apparently a real estate listing. I say apparently because it's in Swedish. That need not concern you, though. Just keep clicking on the pictures until you come to the bathroom. Notice anything odd about it?

Via grow-a-brain

I wrote about the bar at right -- what little I knew about it, anyway -- last year. I've since found out that it's called The Crooked House, and was built in 2004 in Sopot, Poland.

And here's
its elegant sister in Prague, naturally enough called The Dancing House. The architects for the latter are Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunc; it would seem that their fingerprints are all over the Polish building as well. (I can't say for certain -- the developer's page doesn't seem to credit anyone in particular.) Either that or someone else got hold of the good peyote, too.

More unusual buildings here.

i’ll remember frank lloyd wright
all of the nights we’d harmonize till dawn
i never laughed so long

simon & garfunkel

A 3-D architectural design studio featuring tips from Frank Lloyd Wright. This is kind of amazing, because the last I heard, he was still dead.

I hope you like the house I designed with the help of Frank. I call it Casa del Go Away, I've Got A Gun.

Do I let the fact that I have absolutely nothing to talk about deter me from posting?

I do not.

I instead put up links like this one, to a gallery of New York scenes constructed from Lego. I think they probably used more bricks than in the original buildings.

I'm just guessing here, but I'll bet there aren't any kids in this household. That glass enclosure would be one continuous smear of fingerprints and PBJ residue.

Or in my case, fingerprints and sweat as I grabbed for the invisible handrail. Bigger picture (and a couple of other designs) here. Warning: Picture on the right side might be somewhat (female nudes in a circle, shot from above like one of those old Busby Berkeley numbers) NSFW.

This picture, allegedly of some trailer park arrangement, has been making the rounds lately. Turns out, though, that it's actually an open-air set built for the Theater het Amsterdam Bos, for a 1995 production of Chekhov's Ivanov. More pictures (including the audience seating) here.

Not being familiar with the play, I looked it up on Wikipedia. It's a tragedy set in rural Russia in the 19th century, so I guess the producers figured it was transferable to a more modern setting. No idea whether it worked or not.

Cracked:

On the island of Malta is a prehistoric underground megalithic structure known awesomely as the Hypogeum of Hal-Saflieni, which sounds like the title of Terry Gilliam's next movie. It was discovered by accident in 1902 when some workers were digging a hole and broke through the ceiling. Oh, and they also found about 7,000 skeletons all clustered near the entrance. So, that's creepy.

Since most humans inherently lack common sense, the workers decided to take a look around, instead of fleeing from whatever it was that 7,000 people clearly died trying to escape. Luckily, rather than having their faces melted off by some Indiana Jones MacGuffin, they found something truly astonishing.