Remember Cecilia Gimenez, the lady who tried to restore a fresco in a church near Zaragoza and did it wrong? The story is twisting down some interesting paths, copyright-wise.

According to El Correo (in Spanish, English via gTranslate), thousands of people started visiting the church in the town of Borja after the botched restauration became famous ( Read more... )

Theo Gray, element collector and many other things, constructed a table with a hand-carved wooden tile for every element in Mendeleev's periodic table. Each tile hides a sample of the element inside the table. It's a beautiful piece of work, and I love how it shows that there are real, physical, interesting things behind that perfectly boring grid ( Read more... )

The last few days have been absolutely surreal. I spent the whole weekend tracking down my Japanese friends and all the students from our Japanese Studies department who are currently studying in the country. Apart from that, I've been glued to the Japanese TV news and didn't accomplish much of anything productive.

For help_japan, I'm offering a fic ( Read more... )

Most of us have heard of help_haiti by now. I'm auctioning off three illustrations for any Harry Potter fic here.

EDIT: that's four illustrations now.