The Tricarrotops was once the crunchiest creature to roam the Earth.
I was asked recently by two Italian crowdsurfers what to do if you had one day left in Malmö. “We’re thinking of going to the Copenhagen bridge” one of them said, “I mean, just to see what it looks like”.
I nodded, thumbs up, “Yeah! It’s really a pretty cool view almost anywhere the bridge’s included” I said.
“Do you know that there’s quite a thrilling limestone quarry nearby, as well? Where they’ve found lots of cool stuff!”
In my mind had popped up a sentence from a short article I read about the quarry last summer; “Discover the dinosaurs of Malmö and its rare plants and animals!” The article spoke about that summer’s guided tours, which, of course, never happened because of Covid-19.
The small notion about dinosaurs,however, remained in my mind, keeping me wondering “What the heck?”
Now, with two eager travellers right in front of me, it felt like the perfect time to pass this knowledge on. Giving tips and information as a local is indeed part of the air b’n’b business idea, and here I was, a breakfeast-eating local, at my friend’s – the host’s – apartment.
“I think maybe there are some dinosaur skeletons down there” I said. “I’m not sure, but since you’re already going there, why don’t you check? If you have the time? And you want to? Please also then tell us if you find something!”
The two young women looked at me firmly. I could see a tiny flicker of ancient-reptiles-findings-exitement in their eyes.
They made sure that they had the information written down.
A few hours later we all, however, realized that even if the area in the Limhamn limestone quarry stems from the approximately 66 million years’ old Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, when all the dinosaurs and a bunch of plants and animal species died out after a believed asteroid impact, the dinosaurs findings in this area haven’t been so prominent (algea, moss animals and corals’ fossils are more common).
Most of the skulls, jaws and limbs from these giant ancestors have actually turned into lime, making up a perfect foundation for sugar refining, paper, steel and tap water production, cow’s and chickens’ feedingstuffs, and fertilizers for seeds, for instance.
Thus, if the Tricarrotops was once the crunchiest creatures to roam the Earth, it might still be that. Only in a different form so to say. That coffee latte and the sandwiches we had that morning might have been either made possible by, or even born some traces of, Tricarrotops in the flesh.
In retrospect I don’t remember any carroty taste though, but everytime I see some sugar or bread… oh, nevermind.
Unlucky people do not exist, it all depends on their state of mind. Weak people do not exist, it all depends on the tools in their possession. I was a slave of sector 74, assigned to the 10th wave deployment with the promise of freedom if I contributed to beating the main player in the combat arena. That’s every slave’s prize: stop your target, avoid being killed and you’re free to go. And if you achieve that, stay away from troubles in Vesta City or the troopers will bring you back here. This arena fight is not a complicated task. The only problem is that you’re on foot with only a rifle while your opponent is in a combat car, but apart from this small particular you can count on your squad members, if they manage to stay alive.
I was ready, mentally trained and half brainwashed, with just my legs, my weapon and a black helmet like the ones which only show chin and mouth. I jumped in the deployment truck assigned to stage 11, a hell of flames and metal. The other 5 guys from my squad continued to scream during the short trip. I stared at their desperate faces before the back door slammed on the burned floor. Slaves mostly die in the arena, they are just part of the entertainment, but that was not the case for me, at least not totally. We were lucky our driver was a good one, he avoided a minefield on the left and several chunks of debris in flames. If a driver dies before he can stop the truck and open the deployment door, we slaves are dead too. You know what I mean. The combat area was bigger than I imagined, a former warehouse converted into a fighting arena, very impressive. The audience was screaming, the stage lights were blinding and several rays of light were penetrating a big cloud of grey smoke. Some debris fell from above. I checked if my helmet was properly fastened.
The first thing I saw was a yellow laser shooting through the cloud of smoke and I heard screaming tires. That was our main target, a fully armoured black Viper model, drifting while disappearing again in the same cloud of smoke. We all shot with our rifles, we wanted that promised freedom. We didn’t hit. There was zero cover, our truck was gone. No wrecked car skeletons around. I realized why slaves die so often in the Carsteroids arenas. I also realized you have a few seconds to discharge all your firepower praying for your good aim and especially praying that your opponent does not notice you too soon.
We stayed in formation, we saw again our target on the right, it was busy trying to avoid a couple of explosive barrels. We shot and we hit! The barrels exploded, but the Viper spotted us and quickly turned around. He was on fire and charging us at full speed. We maintained our formation, we screamed and kept shooting straight ahead. The last thing I remember was the metallic bumper breaking my leg, me falling on the ground and the car passing on my arm. The helmet saved my head, but half of my body died. After that battle all our squad achieved freedom, but I am the only one able to tell of it.
One day in November last year I learned that the top part on your feet are in Spanish not “toes”, but “fingers of foot” (“dedos del pie”). Later in the evening, when lying in bed, trying to name actually all the parts of my body (as was the homework of the Spanish course I attended), I came to think about the anatomy of horses that I studied when making drawings back in the days of my early adolescense. I remembered that the horses’ hocks up on their back legs are sort of their heals. In the same way their front knees are what we would refer to as wrists. In their “splint boon” are degenerated “fingers”. Their hoofs are more or less the tip of the nails.
Calling up professional puppet-maker, puppeteer and artist Andrew Lamb (CAN) for a video conversation on Zoom one Saturday in April, I ask if the echoes of traits usually strike him when making a cardboard Wendiceratops for the visitors of the Royal Ontario Museum, or a roaming beaver puppet for Canada Day celebrators in the City of Mississauga, or a zoot-suit wearing praying mantis stomping the streets during the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 2015 Massive fundraiser and other events in Toronto.
I love cardboard because it is cheap, easy to work with, strong for its weight and is fairly environmentally friendly. It also burns, which is a fun thing to do once the puppet has lived its life.
Andrew Lamb (CAN)
Not really, it turns out, although he is very aware of for example the function of joints, the concepts of balance and sympathetic movement, combined with different kinds of hardware. But in the end, he’s rather unsentimental about his creations.
“I prefer my work to be cheap to make, free to see and furthermore to be seen unintentionally. I love cardboard because it is cheap (often free), easy to work with, strong for its weight and is fairly environmentally friendly. It also burns, which is a fun thing to do with some friends a night at the beach, once the puppet has lived its life”.
“What? Really?”
“Yeah, haha. One thing you discover when working with these things is that they take up a lot of space, and space is at a premium in cities. It becomes a pain to find new homes for them, as I am only working out of a two car garage.”
What I was talking about earlier though is probably the concept of genetic coherence, he says. Which, true, is the case, to some extent.
Genetic coherence, which is the evolutionary principle involved in the linear evolution of anagenesis, where you have a gradual evolution of a species and the species continue to make babies with each other, as in opposition to cladogenesis, where you have a split and eventually end up with new species.
Once you produce it, it goes out and does its own thing, interacts with the world and people, is interpreted and loved or hated.
Even if humans and horses, along with for example cats, beavers and even dinosaurs, share the notion of a “hand”, used for whatever purpose: walking, gripping or creating art, they are of course seen as different species (although horse brothels were running in Denmark up until not so long ago. But that is a different story, I believe).
Researchers used to debate whether present day humans originate from Africa or from Afro-Eurasia, with respects taken to the afore-mentioned aspects.
In our current technology-infused reality, it could – if one is free to muse – perhaps be interesting to discuss how much “artificial” influence is possible before humans turn into a new species? An artificial cardiac pacemaker is ok. Micro-tobots swimming through blood vessels delivering drugs. Electrical limbs in contact with finger stumps. Microchip implants. Interacting with Siris or Liza and Hannah.
Andrew Lamb says he is kind of interested in Theo Jansen (NLD), who in 1990 began building large skeletons out of yellow plastic tubes from Dutch electricity pipes, and named them strandbeesten(“beach animals”). The animals are able to move on their own with the help of energy from the wind. Theo Jansen is cited on his homepage, saying: “By developing this evolution, I hope to become wiser in the understanding of existing nature by encountering myself the problems of the real Creator.”
Seeing these animals as a new life form is kind of fun, thinks Andrew Lamb.
“At least as much as it applies to the idea of artwork as much as animals. Once you produce it, it goes out and does its own thing, interacts with the world and people, is interpreted and loved or hated, and so on.”
(The old notion of some artists having contact with a higher power, getting divine instructions for their work, will soon be discussed in a review of Lars Krantz’s (SWE) comic fanzine Dark Chocolat. Check the page some time next week!)
What had Andrew Lamb break through as an artist back in 2012 was his Neighbourhood Watch Project in Toronto. At this point Instagram was kind of new, and lots of people were on a constant hunt for interesting and cool objects, not hesitating long before starting to share the images of Lamb’s refaced “This Community Protected” municipal signs, where Mulder and Scully, Baby Yoda, My Little Pony, He-man and other cartoons’ and cult television series’ heroes silently checked in on the status of the neighbourhoods.
I think that’s what people liked about it, the anonymity of it coupled with the superhero theme.
“I am really grateful for all the appreciation and love I received over those years for doing that project. It was definitely an interesting and unique part of my life. The media attention really caught me off guard, I didn’t even have a website at the time, or really any explanation for why I was doing it. But I think that’s what people liked about it, the anonymity of it coupled with the superhero theme. The fact that these signs seemed like a relic of another generation but the connectedness of the entire thing across a city.”
He worked with the Neighbourhood Watch Project for approxiamately six years. Some of the signs looked decent for years, he says, others peeled off in a few months.
“I’m not sure if any of them are still visible, as I have moved from Toronto. It eventually became creatively uninteresting and then, unfulfilling for me. I am prone to living in the past in my own mind, and that the project deals with nostalgia started to wear on me. The larger idea was always primary in my mind: the project as a city wide installation of unique signs, each neighbourhood or street having its own protector. Although I enjoyed the ritual of putting the signs up and curating the individual images, once the original idea was widely understood, which probably happened in the first couple years, it became more maintenance than a creative outlet.”
If anything ties all my work together, it is trying to break the rigid structure of life with some sort of intervention.
The past year has been a lot about renovating his new house in Hamilton, outside of Toronto. A few months before the pandemic and a subsequent insane inflation in housing prices all over the country, he managed to get a hold of a rough but beautiful piece for a reasonable cost. He now knows how to fix plaster walls and has also started thinking of a mural painting on the back of his garage. But apart from that, and the production of some stickers, he hasn’t done very much of creative or artistic work over the last couple of months, he says.
“I am still not sure about what kind of artist I am or how to define myself. Puppet maker? Artist? If anything ties all my work together though, regardless of meaning or form, it is trying to break the rigid and planned structure of life and work with some sort of intervention. I realize that might sound like a vapid Peter Pan type goal, but it still rings true to me.”
During the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has had different implications for art professionals around the world. Some haven’t been able to work much at all, others have found completely new venues and some have instead worked on their online presence, trying to reach their audience there. What the pandemic will do for himself, or for other artists and for art itself in the long run, Andrew Lamb doesn’t know really.
“Obviously this is a strange time with the pandemic, but I suppose that will return to normal eventually. I think the bigger long term change is with social media and the decentralization of media and information and that has been happening for the last 10 years or longer. I’m not sure what this means for art collectors or art institutions, but it has certainly has changed things for pop art and commercial, small scale producer art, easier exposure, marketing and easier to sell your own art. Especially now with NFT’s apparently for digital art. But I suppose its still difficult to stand out in this large social media jungle, everyone wants your attention.” 🥕
Andrew Lamb with the Running Rabbit puppet. Photo: @dcmism
More on dinosaurs on ushiri.com
USHiRi Magazine got a drawing of a Tricarrotops recently, made by the artist Harenheit. This veggie-horned reptile must have some sort of relation to the Wendiceratops that Lamb interpreted for the Royal Ontario Museum (see top of article), we believe. There is no current research on it (at least what we’ve found), but after having examined its features we think there is a possibility at least for a matter of maybe second cousins?
Anyway, next week we’ll try to get under its skin to see if we can reveal some of its secrets. Look out for that!
If you don’t drink your coffee, the horse man will cut your face to pieces. Nobody wants their face cut off, especially not when you can influence the inner factors by slowly beating your head against a wall. The fractures you create makes it so that the horse man likely won’t appear. You want to avoid the horse man, do you not? He lives across the street in the entrance over there. Whatever you do, don’t peek through your keyhole at 1 o’clock in the night. He will most likely stand there. If he sees a ray of light he will strike and strike until your door is beaten down. Whatever happens next is anything but good, especially for the neighbours who will hear your shriek in the night. So come on, drink your coffee. Otherwise the horse man will guard your door every night, and the night it’s unlocked is the night you lose your face.The first stories of the horse man were told in the 17th century and can be found in the diary notes written by the former landowners of Häckeberga Castle. A heavily built man with a stooped back and a laugh like a neigh was seen near the water mill. That’s how the millkeeper told the story in the beginning of the 19th century. Shortly thereafter he hung himself in the barn. In 1932 the stables were ravaged by fire as two children disappeared from the village. A few days later, a boy said he had seen the children sitting on the stooped back of a man who was playing with them and who sounded like a horse. They were headed for the water mill at nightfall. /Ushiri
This is my official youtube channel for my radioprogram ” Udda musik med Ushiri with selected odd music that I broadcasted from Fountain House, Malmö, Sweden, on the FM radio at 89,2mhz, . I also add in my own odd ideas on how I feel about it things with my sexy, slow whiskey voice. It contains many odd genre´s, just listen through this playlist and you get what I mean.
In opposite to some people’s belief, meat protein isn’t really necessary when building muscels. There are seveal vegan athletes and body builders online…
today, to find the strenght to start this new site, we eat carrot soup.
Our opinions:
Ushiri: I feelt a strong urge to start infusing carrots in liquid form into my body since I feelt the taste was a bit weak and there for this seems like the most unlogical idea to get more carrot inside you 🙂
Anna: I like the texture with chunky bits of vegetables and cheese. The overall taste is a little bit anonymous but good anyhow…
Some months ago, Svenska Dagbladet also told about what good can come out of different carrot usages. If you have a scar for example, just put some carrot (like aloe vera) on it, and watch it heal. In all we give this Swedish carrotsoupfrom Felix 3 carrots in total.
If you have other recipes feel free to write to us 🙂
She-he, God-Goddess, as consciousness itself, has not only waited since time immemorial to have a body capable of experiencing pleasure, a body through which he-she can incarnate the supreme orgasm of creation. In this aeon-long wait, she-he waited to have a mind that can make love to her, to him. Isn’t it what art actually is, the human mind, this small parcel of the divine mind, making love to God himself when being creative? It is copulation of cosmic forces, the yin penetrated by the yang, and yes indeed, the yang, in what it has of yin, being penetrated by what of yang there is in the yin. A yang ectoplasm ejaculation fertilising the yin ectoplasm, both part on one universal mind, we call “God”. It is also an epic masturbation.
The divine masturbation of God, through our minds having sex with his own self, which is not he nor she, and also is he and she at the same time. How have we ended up denying God theirself the pleasure they conceived as the ultimate earthly gift to us? We have moralised sex. We have commercialised and standardised art. We have, in other words, repressed God’s sexuality. Sin is not to fornicate but to abstain from fornication. Sin is to deny the body and sin is to desecrate the quill writing bibles. Sin is to aspire to achieve fame and to mechanise the magic intercourse, instead of letting ourselves be possessed by a frenzy of ethereal magma, flowing explosively through us, and to let it create through us what we fear to create. God wants you back in the church. Not the Catholic or orthodox, the synagogue or mosque.
Not the ashram or the crack-pothippy-guru’s sect. God, the ultimate she, the ultimate he, wants to hear the temples erected in his name trembling and vibrating with the moaning of creation. He wants an immoral soma to replace the wine. A soma equally forbidden replaces the bread. Isn’t the wine in any case the fruition of the fornication of the grapevine? And the bread that of the wheat? Claim back those gorgeous architectural works of art, built by unaware libertines like you, away from the claws of “institutions” and bring them to the life they deserve.
Turn them into the bridal bed where an endless orgy honours God’s sinless debauchery. Turn the physical church into the archetypal church, that one hidden in the depths of your soul. Open the portal to the womb of the collective unconscious where nothing is sin and all is permitted. Be fornication, be art. Be art, be philosophy… be what you will to be, but be! Return to the temple, I command thee! Undress! Copulate! It is God’s will, written in your
body, written in your mind. Written in the air. The most delicious pheromones, craving to inebriate you oblivious, the ink. Abandon your sinful waysand just… be!
Two years ago I actually made a big painting for the first time in my life and it’s based on an idea to make erotic art with less sexualised characters. This one here is a mix of Donald Trump and the Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven, also some parts Belgian blue (the anabolic steroid cow) and silicon tits.
The kitchen knifes in the background also add a nice feel to it. It was not actually my point that it should like the character in the painting has a knife in the butt, that detail was pure coincidence. This painting is now hanging at ” Vegan bar ” in Malmö and the owner of the bar said each week many people admire it.
I was on a flight from Bulgaria to Sweden and I noticed that straight across from where I sat there was a weird young fellow with sunglasses a baseball cap and a big black oxygen mask. He also wore silicone gloves. It all looked really strange. If you truly believe that these precautions will help you even if there is only one person in the cabin with the virus, then you have a more vivid imagination than me. Anyhow there also was a quite cool looking guy that could been from the tv show the vikings with a similar look to Ragnar Lodbrok and with a giant Thors hammer. When we came to Vienna he saw an ID card on the floor and I said it might belong to the “gas mask dude”, so he gave it to him.
He said, very briefly, thank you. On the next flight me and the Viking were sitting on the same row and I said to him that it was so much fun when he gave it to the “gas mask dude”, and I said ” He must got a serious nervous breakdown since you gave it to him with your bare hands.” He answered that he probably would try to use a flame thrower to clean it afterwards and we had a laugh.
We then talked about the Kukeri festival in Bulgaria and lots of things and about cultural differences between Sweden and Bulgaria. I was told that Finnish people really don’t care much for smalltalk and that it takes time to learn to know someone there and for them even to say hi.
Then I remembered a story a friend from Japan told me. When she first came to Sweden she noticed that Swedish people love to talk about the weather she realised that it was smalltalk because we can’t stand the silence here. He then told me about a friend from Japan that he met when he worked on the Silja line who was also a flight attendant and had had a son recently and was living in Vienna, it turned out that it is the same person. So it turned out that the Bulgarian and me, the Swede shared a friendship with the same Japanese girl that lives in Vienna, The world is quite strange sometimes 🙂
When you are talking about cars in you usally hear about different things like engine power and how many miles it has driven and if the AC system is good and about bla bla bla and about the catalysing power of the riddlefilterring possibilities in the blobbpipelines and the thermal dipps in can do in 15 megswoosh.
I cant fathom how all that crap can be of any direct interest more than it’s cool to use one when you want to travel somewhere. If I want to have fun in cars then I play computer games where I can crash cars.
In the Finnish developed Flatout 2 which is an extremely good racing game on filthy roads all over the planet and industrial areas where more than 6000 objects fly all over the road when you driver around and you an crash into planks and all sort of rubble like bus stops and drive through windows in small restaurants and destroy all furniture just because you wanted to take a shortcut. All of this with epic grunge music slamming in the background with songs like ” I’m feeling dead inside” with a most broken male voice that has been drinking too much vodka and sand. Most of the cars are also extremely crappy, sexy and rusty mixed together.
But if you prefer more cool looking sports cars those are also available. My point is; how can you be so anal about the inside of a car, of course because you have a deep interest in it, Personally I always thought it was a sort of weak penis enlarger thing. I guess it’s the same if you are an outsider to some sort of music and just go ” Oh I hate hard rock” when it actually is Terrorcore (which is a niche genré in techno) that you hear. One person asked me one time what kind of car I would like to buy, I answered – “A yellow car” J.
Thanks Mimpo for showing me this game 😀
I give it 5 of 5 carrots, Available for: PC, Xbox360,Xbox,PSP,PS2
This happened in the 80’s when we still had landline telephony. It was Sunday and I would, as usual, vacuum my apartment for it to be clean and nice during the week. I put on the vacuum cleaner and it started to hum. I’ve always wondered why a vacuum cleaner must sound like an airplane engine every time you clean. Therefore, initially I did not hear that the phone rang. I thought it had probably rung a couple of signals already, so I’d have to hurry to answer before they hung up on the other end. Admittedly, I had an answering machine, but I was curious by nature and wondered who it was, calling on a Sunday afternoon.
I turned the vacuum cleaner off, put away the vacuum cleaner nozzle and directed myself to go towards the phone. In my eagerness to catch up to the phone, I happened to trip over the vacuum cleaner and fell forward, while I managed to step on my big toe. It hurt immensely and I couldn’t stand on my foot. Now I understood that it is the big toe that allows the foot to keep the balance, and if you cannot support the big toe you have to walk on your heel.
I called the hospital and they told me that I’d probably broken my toe. Unfortunately, it is not possible to plaster the big toe, as it must heal itself while walking on the heel. I also couldn’t call in sick due to a broken big toe, so I had to hobble to my job in the video store. Sometimes I stumbled on the heel and ended up on the big toe, which hurt immensely. It felt like someone hit the toe with a hammer, with full force. Since that day, I have full respect for the vacuum cleaner and therefore still have an unbroken big toe. Who was calling me on that Sunday? I don’t remember.
