The story I got is that the way to guarantee that something won’t fall over from frost-heave is to have more of its volume and its mass underground than aboveground. That’s why the standing stones in my yard are only 5 feet tall. That was the most that the Komatsu could handle…
When I first moved up here and discovered that there’s a steady wind across my fields, I cooked up the idea to make installed things that would make noises. I started researching what it would take to make a stainless steel frame and curved sort of “lips” to produce an aeolian harp. I also thought up a “wind hammer dulcimer” -- the idea being to have a big stainless sound-board that would change pitch depending on how much rainwater was in it, strung with strings that had wind whirligigs with cams and hammers that would lift and drop based on wind speed. Then I went to my buddy Mike, who owns the MiG machine and asked him how hard he thought that would be. And that was the end of that project.
I had a dream once in which I had gigantic curved blades, like airplane propellors, on big posts in the field, positioned so that they would direct and control the blowing snow into shapes that could be seen from high above. Turns out that’s a math problem and one doesn’t simply request stainless steel to assume elegantly curved shapes.
No flint in that group. All I did was run them under some water and give them a quick scrub -- leaving the rat piss on would have been cheating, that stuff is sticky!
Rock gardening?
Blf:
That’s a nice idea. Problems though -- first, I’d have to clear out some area of my semi-feral property. Prairie winds. There go my rock towers.
Nice. :D
Why? The rocks will grow just fine amongst the bugs, plants, and bepuppeted rats.
Mass. Stonehenge. Which is an example of “balanced art”.
I assume you’ve seen the movie of Andy Goldsworthy’s “Rivers and Tides”?
Blf:
That kind of mass I don’t have. Very little can stand up to prairie winds.
Marcus:
I have not.
By the way, these are some seriously awesome-looking rocks. Are they local?
rq:
Some of them. Some of them date back to SoCal, some from Utah, some from Montana. A little here, a little there. :D
Forty-foot high killer rats: Rathenge.
They are magnificent.
Caine@#7 -- it leaves me panting with excitement, my hands twitching with the need to grab something and do something to it.
The story I got is that the way to guarantee that something won’t fall over from frost-heave is to have more of its volume and its mass underground than aboveground. That’s why the standing stones in my yard are only 5 feet tall. That was the most that the Komatsu could handle…
prairie winds
When I first moved up here and discovered that there’s a steady wind across my fields, I cooked up the idea to make installed things that would make noises. I started researching what it would take to make a stainless steel frame and curved sort of “lips” to produce an aeolian harp. I also thought up a “wind hammer dulcimer” -- the idea being to have a big stainless sound-board that would change pitch depending on how much rainwater was in it, strung with strings that had wind whirligigs with cams and hammers that would lift and drop based on wind speed. Then I went to my buddy Mike, who owns the MiG machine and asked him how hard he thought that would be. And that was the end of that project.
I had a dream once in which I had gigantic curved blades, like airplane propellors, on big posts in the field, positioned so that they would direct and control the blowing snow into shapes that could be seen from high above. Turns out that’s a math problem and one doesn’t simply request stainless steel to assume elegantly curved shapes.
Marcus, I’ll have to watch it. Thanks for the mention!
Are those flint nodules?
And did you varnish them or oil them or something to make them look so nice?
No flint in that group. All I did was run them under some water and give them a quick scrub -- leaving the rat piss on would have been cheating, that stuff is sticky!
leaving the rat piss on would have been cheating, that stuff is sticky!
Oh, ah!
I’m not going outside, except to go in the pool.
Thermometer on the back porch is currently reading 123F. (It was hotter yesterday.)
Pretty rocks, though! I want to go see if I can find my trilobite fossils now.
For Marcus:
Wind driven kinetic sculptures: https://www.google.com/#q=wind+driven+kinetic+sculpture