Animatronic Clothes

As sps pointed out in his journal a few months back, animatronic clothing has finally appeared on the fashion runways of Paris, with Hussein Chalyan's Spring and Summer collection for 2007. In this collection he introduces clothes that change shape and even, in the most extreme case, completely retract into the model's hat.

I've just found his show on YouTube, so I'm embedding it below. Its in two parts since it runs over the 10-minute limit YouTube has. The first part is mostly a normal fashion show, but it gets weirder towards the end, with dresses made out of spaghetti and of bubbles, and finishes with the first of the animatronic outfits.

The second (and more interesting) part has all of the other animatronic clothes. Before watching these, please note that this is a fashion designer in Paris, so these are in no way practical outfits and are, if anything, even more conceptual than ever before. Still, they're a watershed, because now fashion designers have to think about the space of clothes that morph from one use to the next. Maybe it won't be too long before we see something practical.

And now, the videos!

Part 1

Watch on YouTube

Part 2

Watch on YouTube

Strange Statues

Here's some Strange Statues from Around the World. There are some real winners here. I especially liked "Space Cow".

Shit Happens

Linda and I were just getting ready to go out for a walk and to do a minor bit of shopping, when she noticed water in our basement. Our first guess was a broken water heater in a neighbors basement. Sure enough, our neighbor said he thought maybe his brand new tank had just failed. I should have known better than to take his word for anything.

It our sewer backing up. Both his basement and mine are now awash in between 3 and 1 inches of sewage, depending on where in the basement you go. My book and comic collections are stored off the floor although the lowest shelf of my books is threatened if the 'water' rises much more. Linda was in the middle of reorganizing her office though, and many of her precious papers were on the floor and got soaked. Its too soon to tell how bad the damage is, but one of her childhood books that she retrieved from Copenhagen a year ago was soggy.

I ran around doing my best to shove stuff onto shelves and haul it off the floor. For now, we seem to have 'rescued' everything of any value, but I've had no chance to see what actual damage stuff got before the rescue. We've phoned the condo reps, and the city, and our insurance, and I'm about to go phone my parents. We were supposed to visit on Tuesday and this may have some sort of impact on them. I hope not. I hope its solved before then, but one of our neighbors (who now has a back-flow stopper on her drain to prevent this very problem) said it took five weeks to solve the problem when it happened to her. Then again, she says she had over two feet of water in her basement before she discovered the problem.

Ouch.

$550 later, we have a working basement again. Roughly half of that was the cost of the plumber clearing our blocked drain, and half was the cleaning guy who vacuumed the sewage out of our carpet and off the concrete floor. Its still damp in there, and the carpet is probably a write-off but we do have insurance.

The problem, of course, is that the insurance only reimburses us after the fact, and we need to pay the big bill first. *sigh*

I think I'm gonna have to phone up the parents and ask for a loan till its sorted out.