Posts Tagged Paul the Octopus
News Art – URGENT AUSTRALIAN ELECTION UPDATE
Oh…my… god!
Further to my news ARTicle earlier today, the news has JUST reported that a ‘psychic salt water crocodile’ has ‘picked’ Julia Gillard to win the election!!
At first I thought this strange, as surely the crocodile would want to pick a fellow crocodile. But then I read that the crocodile had eaten a chicken carcass with a caricature of Prime Minister Julia Gillard on it.
CLEARLY this is the crocodile trying to devour its master’s enemy!
The only other option I can imagine is that Tony Abbott’s plan to not sleep for 36hours until the election has made him confused and tired already and meant he is sending the wrong psychic directions to his crocodile followers.
I have photographed Abbott as he waited for the results of the psychic crocodile’s prediction and you can detect some tiredness around the eyes I think.
Tony Abbott nervously awaits results
Either way this means there is still no definite prediction here as to who will win. They should have got this much better psychic.
News Art – POLITICS MADE SIMPLE
Posted by Heidi in NewsART Highlights, Politics on August 19, 2010
Living in the UK for the past two years has brought to my attention the fact that no attention is given to Australia in the British news unless it is a story about a dangerous animal attack. There are no exceptions.
I have a feeling most other countries have the same attitude to news about Australia.
This weekend there is a very important and quite dramatic election going on in Australia so I feel it is my duty to find a way to inform those outside our country of what is going on.
Hence I have used my art to explain the battle of the two main parties in the federal election as… DANGEROUS ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS.
As I understand it, JULIA GILLARD, our current Prime Minister who stands for the Labor Party, can be represented metaphorically as a great white shark. She has recently had bad press for attacking a diver.
Prime Minister Gillard circling young Australian
The diver in question was the Prime Minister before her, Kevin Rudd, who only defeated the previous longstanding Prime Minister, John Howard (a box jellyfish), three years ago. Rudd’s popularity had declined drastically over his first term due to several embarrassing mistakes and failures from the Labor Party.
This is why the party chose to overthrow him two months ago and his deputy, Julia Gillard, took the bait (she saw him paddling above her looking like a seal) and attacked. SHARK ATTACK!
This has given her serious image problems in Australia as the opposing conservative party (the Liberal Party) are using this act to portray her as a ruthless backstabber (ignoring the fact that sharks can’t hold knives… and that their leader similarly ousted his predecessor).
But was Julia acting out of malice and plotting or was she just acting on instinct, attacking where she saw necessary to achieve her ultimate aim, ie, victory for the Labor Party/eating a seal?
This is a bone of contention but one that can be solved when we realise that movies have perpetuated the MYTH that sharks enjoy attacking humans. In reality we know that sharks usually only attack humans by mistake or if they can tell the human has no way of winning an upcoming election.
The opposition leader is TONY ABBOTT.
Conservative leader Tony Abbott
I have depicted him here as a crocodile (in one of my most lifelike sculptures yet) because
a) he loves swimming and he loves grinning creepily
b) if you are swimming alone in a river he will often sneak up on you, drag you under the water in a death roll and then devour your lifeless corpse. Particularly if you are pro abortion. And not in a metaphorical way.
I must point out that I’m not an expert on the tiny details of his policies, having been away some time, but I am fairly sure that death rolls and lurking near swimmers are still high on his political agenda.
Also crocodiles are the closest living animal to dinosaurs and dinosaurs also thought climate change was ‘crap’, just like Abbott does.
Also part of Tony’s election campaign is to target refugees coming to Australia in boats. He wants to alert the Australian public to the horror of ‘boat people’ and promises to get rid of them. I believe he plans to do this by swimming up from below the boat and knocking it with his snout.
Julia has stated her belief in climate change but not acted effectively on it so far which is foolish of her, considering the immediate danger sharks face from global warming.
Click here to see Abbott’s refugee policy which begins at the 4:20 mark.
Also click here to see the prediction election analysts have made on the outcome of the vote on Saturday.
A final note on political bias
Whenever politics are discussed or reported, accusations of bias are flung around. So let me declare my bias straight away. It is true that I think sharks are way more awesome than crocodiles, particularly in terms of films about GIANT versions of these animals.
However I have tried to keep my analysis of shark and crocodile politics as objective as possible here.
If you feel that this has not been achieved than I urge you to seek out the advice of a marine biologist, especially one in a lab coat with glasses who likes to experiment in making GIANT sharks, and ask them about Julia Gillard’s failures to commit to Emmissions Trading Schemes or Tony Abbott’s lack of understanding about broadband technology.
NB: Crocodile photo taken by Heidi (from Michael Holley’s photo collection)
News Art – DIPLOMACY SAVES THE DAY
Today I have looked at how far we have come as a species who can now resolve conflict peacefully through diplomacy. Hopefully, as we continue to evolve, we will soon not even need diplomacy but merely psychic octopuses/octopussi to tell us who would win in a nuclear war…
The President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, will still visit the UK. This is despite recent anger at UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s comments that Pakistan was linked with groups that ‘promote the export of terror’. The comments had led to a diplomatic row.
Look How Far We've Come
This story made me glad we have diplomacy to protect us. We have reasoning and debate to rescue us from the fate of our primitive ancestors. Those primitive ancestors who could only communicate with their fists and weapons (and ocassionally interpretive dance).
But we must never forget our violent roots, no matter how much more intelligent and skilled and capable we now are. I decided to make some long spears to represent the continuity of violence in our history.
This was to remind us that we may be 100 times smarter now but there is still the ever present threat of war.
Unfortunately it took me a lot longer than I had planned to chip the spear heads. And then I couldn’t get them sharp or smooth… nor could I figure out how they go on the wooden stick bit thing.
After 9 hours I gave up and left this pile of rough spear heads, unattached to any stick and quite disappointing. I call it ‘Look how far we have come’.
A man at the British Museum offered to teach me the methods our ancestors used to make them but he spoke so slowly that I’m ashamed to say I became frustrated and stabbed him with one of the spear heads. Luckily I hadn’t been able to sharpen it properly so it just bruised him slightly (and cut him significantly).
My difficulties with the project made me question history and the validity of every iron and bronze age finding because how would those men who look really ugly and stupid in the drawings have done it? And how did they cut their hair so nicely?
News Art – PAUL THE OCTOPUS GOT IT WRONG
Posted by Heidi in NewsART Highlights, Religion, Sport on July 11, 2010
This might surprise/upset some of you but I am not a psychic octopus. Hence I do not know who will win the World Cup and had to work around this as I began constructing my artworks BEFORE the final results…
News Art – PAUL EXPOSED AS FALSE PROPHET!
Paul the Octopus was wrong. Spain has lost. All talk of his psychic, almost god-like abilities has been proven meaningless.
But it is far worse than that, it has embarrassed a world who embraced the possibility that this Octopus had other worldly powers. It has shown how incredibly desperate we remain to have some kind of order to this chaos that is life. Despite all our advances in science and evolution and iPhone apps over the years, the moment we see some evidence of possible magical or religious powers we jump at it. And so we put our faith in a sea creature that was too stupid to not be charging huge amounts of cash for his ‘psychic’ predictions.
Is this the behaviour of rational adults? To worship these false idols?!
Victory for Netherlands in World Cup
To MOCK this behaviour I made this golden statue of a random animal. I then put it up on a street in London and asked people if they wanted to worship this elephant and trust its opinion on great sporting events. They all said no. Some even laughed.
However I then surprised them and challenged their perception of the world by asking how this elephant was in any way different to an octopus. I was told that instead of four legs octopuses have eight arms (or tentacles) and can swim very fast. This was most interesting! I researched more about octopuses and found out that they have no internal shell or bones and have a hard beak!?! I began devouring books on octopuses and found, to my surprise, that this is a very poor way to learn anything so I soon switched back to reading.
After several hours of this ‘reading’ I concluded that octopuses/octopussi are awesome, elephants are average and man is a foolish creature who will not only seek evidence of the divine at every opportunity merely to comfort him from his fear of death and the unknown, but also only has two arms and can’t even squirt black ink as a defence mechanism. LAME!
ARTWORK OPTION B- PAUL IS OUR NEW GOD!!!
Paul was right! Spain has won! All hail Paul!!
Victory for Spain in World Cup
I have made this sculpture of the child I would be willing to have with Paul to honour his extraordinary powers. It’s half human (me) half octopus (Paul). I apologise for the slight lack of focus, I was so excited at the prospect of becoming Paul’s first earthly concubine and giving birth to a demi-god with tentacle legs that my hands would not stop shaking. Wouldn’t be a problem with tentacles!!