I was following up my earlier comments about Lego, and I was simply unaware of the huge amount of Lego related stuff there is out there - just acres of it. While on one level finding all this unbelievably cool and having to fight the urge to download and install enormous great Lego CAD programs and libraries (not to mention the urge to go and buy vast trugs of the bricks) it also seems perhaps just a tad obsessional.

I mean if I wanted to create Milhouse or the Linux Penguin out of Lego I would like, you know, try and keep quiet about it. Not these guys tho. I mean if you have the time money and energy to create this, you abviously have a lot of talent and committment. Is all this really the best outlet?

Escher's "Balcony" in LEGO by A. Lipson 2002

Don't get me wrong here - I think what these guys are doing here is basically pretty cool - approximately 200 times more valuable than going to see any major sporting event as a pastime for example and about 1000 times better than sitting in the multiplex watching The Matric Reloaded / X-Men / A.N.Other lunkhead dumbass cash-extraction-maxed advertainment masquerading as a movie.

In fact anything like this is way cooler because it's an active rather than passive pastime, which is nearly always better because when it's done you have something to show for your activities, you most likely learnt something about the way the world works and you also now have memoreis of something real you did rather than something fake you watched (qv Bill Waterson). For some reason though at school this sort of creativity generally got you singled out for special punishment by one's peers - perhaps the urge to be creative is beaten out of us at school by the destructive shitheads that seem to thrive there (and indeed any non-democratic hierarchically arranged establishment).

So I guess my point is that if these people can achieve all this with lego what could they achieve with achitecture, painting, industrial design, sculpture, pottery, urban planning or any of a hundred other industrial and engineering artistic disciplines?

Check these out.

Reading all of the above I sound a bit like a summer camp motivational speaker, whereas the only artistic thing I can really do is throw pottery. Plus note I said 'nearly always'. If you're going to write 300 pages about the hot love affair betweem B'elana Torres and 7 of 9 then seriously - turn off your computer and go to a ball game. Cast off thy literary cloak and on with the antic pants.