Tomorrow marks the 65th anniversary of the death of Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Jr., also known as Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). At the request of readers Lauren M. and pjl, today’s post pays homage to the famous cubist and abstractionist.

1. Piet Mondrian was trained in more “traditional” styles of painting, as evidenced by his 1908 “Chrysanthemum” drawing (above left). Over the years, though, he gradually moved into cubism and abstraction, eventually surpassing most of the other cubists. He is considered to have taken abstraction to its furthest limits, or its logical end. He termed his style “neoplasticism” in English, or “neiuwe beelding” (“new form” or “new image”) in Dutch.

2. Mondrian, who believed “curves are so emotional,” felt a canvas should only contain planar elements—straight lines and right angles. He eliminated all curved lines from his work and became known for his paintings of crisscrossing black lines and white and colored squares.

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Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared last year.

On the subject of the greatest football dynasties of all-time, the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, 1980s San Francisco 49ers, 1990s Dallas Cowboys and more recent New England Patriots teams all likely come to mind. You would be remiss, however, if you failed to mention a less heralded and, uh, less human team that dominated its competition in unbelievable fashion: Budweiser.

From 1989-1997, the self-anointed “King of Beers” dominated Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Bowl, the yearly clash between animated bottles of Bud and Bud Light that was featured in a series of commercials during the Super Bowl. The advertising campaign, which persists today in the form of Bud Bowl-themed packaging and promotional events, remains one of the most popular ever.

The Bud Bowl Architect

Copywriter Grant Pace wrote the six original Bud Bowl ads that appeared in 1989 while working at D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles. Pace said he developed the ads under the assumption that Bud Bowl would be a one-year phenomenon, but Anheuser-Busch representatives liked the prototype so much that Pace actually changed the original ending to leave open the possibility for a sequel.
[See Also: Our 2008 interview with Grant Pace]

More Exciting Than The Actual Super Bowl

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I asked for your best photos taken with celebrities and you did not disappoint. Here’s a taste of what you guys sent us. We normally don’t paginate our articles, but the number of photos in this post made that a necessity. So just click the little numbers to continue reading.

Our readers have posed with the president (that’s him with Jeff Winston of Grand Rapids, Michigan).

The former president (shown here with Jo Ann Graham & family). (more…)

An in-depth zooming panoramic of the inauguration. Can you find anything interesting? There are a few surprises (Thanks to Jan for this link and a few others!)
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This blog goes out to all the Liberal Arts majors …. I feel your pain, but we must restrain ourselves from doing things like this for jobs.
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Have Super Bowl Fever? Learn all about the art of its graphic design, and how the logos have reflected changes in the league and culture over the years.
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Another good reason to play with your food – since they have all-you-can-eat seats, it can’t be long before there’s an all-you-can-eat stadium, right? Behold!
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Take the Huffington World News Quiz this week (and every week on Mondays) and see how you fare (if you dare)
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From Sami: Eastern honey bees use the Hansel and Gretel approach to defending themselves from attacking hornets by baking them … to death!
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From Margo, this link has been tossed around a few times, and since so many people like it I’ll include it this week – for a little bit of mindless internet procrastinating fun, Shave My Yeti!
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For more online gaming that’s simple and fun, try your hand at Super Obama World or this Van Halen game.
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A few great links from Flossy friend Merinda this week – to start, Khan the Opera and other Robot Chicken Star Trek clips that are positively fantastic. And if you’re in a fan boy (or girl) mood, check out Darth Vader playing the blues.

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[Here's the original 12 Classes We Wish Our Colleges Had Offered post, in case you missed it the first time around.]

1. Sex and the City, Oregon State. This class was so popular in 2006 that the original limit of 200 students per class had to be upped to 500. The professor used the HBO series to discuss sex and gender issues in society

2. Brewing Science and Society (New Mexico State University). Sounds like a blast, but as our commenter said, this upper 300-level chemical engineering class is not a cakewalk (or a pub crawl, if you will). It was still on the course list as of Fall 2008.

3. Media Studies: Jim Morrison and the Doors (Plymouth State). It’s only offered the fall semester of odd years, so if you’re dying to take this class, you’d better think about enrolling at Plymouth State soon. “Participants utilize a cultural studies framework to analyze films, television programs, musical offerings and print and online materials in relation to their historical contexts, ideological contents, symptomatic characteristics, and overall contributions to our modern-day understanding of media processes and effects.” Way to make a fun class sound boring! I suppose they have to weed people out somehow.

4. Adult Swim (Kent State). Professor Ron Russo has been teaching about Adult Swim’s animation block on the Cartoon Network since 2004. He even wrote the first textbook on the subject – Adult Swim and Comedy. Each class consists of about 30 students and has the full support of the Adult Swim show creators – some, such as Tom Goes to the Mayor’s Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, have even teleconferenced with the class to answer questions.

5. Forbidden Knowledge (Wheaton College). This one sounds particularly flossy to me. But I’ll let the course description speak for itself: “Throughout recorded human history, the acquisition of new knowledge through scientific discovery or technological invention has confronted human societies with ethical dilemmas. Students in this class will encounter these quandaries of the human condition by studying religious, literary, philosophical and scientific texts. The texts selected for this course explore the changing attitudes at various moments in history toward the need to forbid or control knowledge.”

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Blogger David Griner recently came across a “line-a-day” diary kept by his great aunt from 1937 through 1941. Griner’s great aunt (Genny Spencer) kept the diary during her early teens, while she lived on a farm in rural Illinois. The entries in the diary are all very brief — one line a day — which caused Griner’s sister to observe, “This is the Twitter of the 1930s.” A bit of planning and programming ensued, and now we’ve got it — a day-by-day Twitterstream of entries from more than seventy years ago. Here are a few recent posts:

Daddy went to town. Creeks got up. Rained. Fred much better now. Mrs. O’Farrell died.

Had a squabble with the boys over skating. Got Mamma a lot of persimmons.

Stayed home from school because of a bad cold. Kerby went to Johnsons’. Norman shot a rabbit. He is 8 years old. First one.

Got 2 calves from Akins. 3 days old. Mamma and Daddy spent the day with Akins. Peggy Lou, Wallis Warfield are calves’ names.

Anyway, it goes on. Some days are more eventful than others, but frankly there seems be a lot of illness and suicide — at least in the first days of the diary. Follow the diary as it’s posted here, or read more about the diary written by David Griner. (Including the interesting information that Genny Spencer is still alive, though suffering from severe dementia.)

If you like this kind of thing, also check out The Orwell Diaries. Apparently there’s also a Twitter diary of a 99-year-old from 1974.

(Via Fake Plastic Noodles.)

Including the present Pope, can you name the last 10? Take the Quiz and find out. (No need to type the word Pope. e.g. Pope St. Peter would just be “St. Peter”)

Chinese and Japanese character tattoos have been sweeping the West for a decade or more now, to the extent that most of our readers probably know someone who has one. Perhaps it’s just a single discreet Chinese hanzi tucked into the inside of a lady’s wrist — or it could be several huge Japanese kanji blazed across a man’s back. They may tell you they know what their tattoo means. But do they really?

The blog Hanzismatter has been translating odd tattoos, tee-shirts and other misused Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters in the West since 2004, and over the years has exposed some truly ridiculous body inkings. (The site was overwhelmed with traffic the last time I checked it; I had to use the Wayback Machine to find these great examples.)

“Crazy diarrhea”

Chinese translation:
狂 = crazy
瀉 = to flow out, diarrhea

My hypothesis is that either the tattoo artist had a wicked sense of humor, or the customer picked out a few random characters from a book that he or she thought looked pretty. (This is why all your Chinese friends snicker at you, btw.) Also, this tattoo appears to be located just above the waistline on the lower back; its proximity to aforementioned crazy outflow can only add credence to the translation.

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We’re back with another 5-day trivia hunt!

Again, the rules: Every remaining day this week, I’ll be presenting a specific challenge. Your job: come up with the answers and hold onto them! Why? Because on Monday, next week, you’ll need them to solve a short puzzle. The first person to email in the correct answers and successfully show how you arrived at them (thus the title: How Did You Know?) wins a choice of any TWO t-shirts and book from our store. In addition to the above, we’ll be awarding a t-shirt to one random winner who has all the correct answers. So even if you’re not the first one with the right answers, there’s still a chance to wind up a winner on HDYK?

And remember, we’re also giving away a really big, sa-weeet prize to any winning contestant who can defend the title three months in a row. Katie Richie and Stacy Vallely are our current champions.You can read about them here.

As with previous How Did You Know? posts, comments have been turned off, but I definitely encourage you to work in teams like our present champions did. Write your friends, send around each daily challenge, conspire, work together, whatever it takes to make sure you’re armed with the right answers going into next Monday’s puzzle.
If you missed Day 1’s challenge, you can find that right over here. Day 2 can be found this-a-way and Day 3, right here.

Today we’re playing Name That Equation. On each of the following pages, you’ll find different equation. Your job? Name ‘em.

Take the weekend and go over all your answers and remember to tune in Monday at 8:00pm ET (5:00pm PT) for your final challenge.

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