The Smirkonian Sightseer

Archibald Prize

The Art Gallery of NSW Trustees today announce the Archibald Prize, a prominent portraiture art prize given here in Australia worth $35,000. John Olsen's Self portrait Janus faced won the prize. It would have to be the worst pick of the bunch. I'm not art expert but as you can see it's dark and dungie and I just don't like the look of it at all. So... I've decided to pick my own winner, a portrait of environmentalist Dr. Bob Brown by Robert Hannaford. My runner up choice is a portrait of actor Alex Dimitriades by Michael Zavros.

John Olsen - Self portrait Janus faced

Robert Hannaford - Portrait of Bob Brown

Michael Zavros - Portrait of Alex Dimitriades

Googlisms

Most people at sometime in their web searching life have Googled themselves to find out who shares the same name as them. I share the name Andrew Shepherd with a software engineer, a tobacco grower and a glaciologist, to name a few. The most impressive is Andrew Shepherd the American President, play by Michael Douglas.

Even more fun are Googlisms. A Googlism extracts declaratives from Google by performing searches likely to turn up statements of fact. There's quite an extensive list for me. My favourite being "Andrew Shepherd is squeaky clean" :-)

What you believe in...

I'm not a spiritual person. That is, I'm not religious. Occasionally I'm asked "but what about your interest in Buddhism?"

Well it's all quite simple, much like Buddhism itself. I only study Buddhist philosophy. No complicated chanting, meditation or a desire to reach enlightenment. To me, Buddhism is not a religion but a system of knowledge. It's something I can do on my own.

The main difference is, a religion is where you follow a dictatory path laid down by the religion. You walk the same path as others. With Buddhism I tread my own path in life. It's that simple.

Why do people have to make their lives so complicated?

Firefox

I recently read in Wired magazine about the great work being done on the Firefox web browser and just had to get my hands on a copy. This post has been written using the application and seems to work a charm with Typepad.

In the past I've encounted issues while trying to use Typepad with the Mac's Safari browser and I.E.

Sexual comic book covers

I couldn't browse past this and leave it alone. It's a collection of unintentionally sexual comic book covers. These my two favourites...

Life on the PlayStation

My mate Tony has lent me his PS2 console while I'm on leave. Last night I had a session on it with my work colleague Steve. Yesterday I'd bought Star Wars Battlefront, which I'm having trouble figuring out. I really should read the book. So we progressed on to GT4 and had a few hours of fun on that, trying out various tracks and cars in arcade mode.

Later we tried our skills at International Pool Championship. We just used the simple 8-Ball game but made it interesting playing best of three. The loser dropping his pants. I lost.

 

How to Have Multiple Orgasms ...

I have the next two weeks off for some well deserved leave. So with plenty of time on my hands, it was opportunic during a web surfing session that I found a site for men to develope a technique for having multiple orgasms. It states the level of difficulty as 'average' and to allow one hour for the exercise (or should that be sexercise).

This should be fun. ;)