Not (Yet) on iTunes

Tra-la-la... Music Monday!

Without Ted Gideonse, Fosco would miss all of the good blog memes. This is a great one: the Random CD Cover Meme. Let's get the rules from Ted (so you can do it yourself):

Here are the rules:

1. Use Wikipedia’s random article page to find your band name.

2. Go to the Random Quotations Page. The last four words of the very last quote is your album name.

3. Visit Flickr’s interesting photos page, the third image, no matter what, is your cover art.

4. Use Photoshop or Paint.NET to put all the pieces together.

5. Post it to the group!

For example, my random Wikipedia article was on Ski Bums, a gay and lesbian ski/snowboard club (how interesting!). My random quote was from the loathsome Woody Allen:

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.

[Rimshot!]

And if you think that none of this seems very promising for poor Fosco's band so far, wait until you see this "interesting" Flickr pic.

However, I must say that a little PhotoShop can do wonders. Here is the complete CD cover:

It actually came out looking surprisingly professional, I think (certainly much better than these covers). Lest you think that Fosco knows much about PhotoShop, allow him to reassure you that he did most of this by accident. That cool "molecular" background beneath the titles? That was (somehow) the default background texture. But for some reason, it looks pretty rad with the other elements.

The next step, of course, is to record this album. Anyone know any songs?

Two Armies Clash in the Mushroom Kingdom...

Oz's flatmate has an eleven-year-old daughter who comes by on weekends. This past weekend, she was working on a project (for junior high) that required her to create her own chess set (Fosco's junior high never assigned creative projects like that; and I'm not sure any of the teachers knew what "chess" is.). She came up with the idea to make an all Super Mario chess set. She and her dad spent much of last week sculpting the characters out of clay. Oz pitched in and sculpted one of the Yoshi figurines. Fosco's contribution was to doubt from afar that the whole thing would work (he's an eternal pessimist).

It turns out Fosco was wrong, because it came out totally cool. Here are the "good guys":

The "bad guys" are a little trickier: who would you pair up as the King and Queen? Oddly enough, L chose to make a cross-species evil romance between Bowser and Donkey Kong. And no, I'm not sure who's the top and who's the bottom. But it's still cool.

The Bishops there are Mario and Luigi's evil doppelgangers, Wario and Waluigi (for those of you who stopped following all of this sometime around Super Mario World). Here's the detail:

Remember: this is done entirely with clay and poster paints (no molds or models)! Impressive, no?