popsicle sticks, train tickets, and matches

it's monday - it's pitch black outside - not even a flicker of sunlight and i haven't heard the first robin's fart yet so i'm assuming i'm up too early or something's gone wrong with the big clock. no matter. today’s entry celebrates the “reuse” portion of the environmental mantra "reduce reuse recycle".

to open, we have a replica viking longboat made out of 15 million popsicle sticks! no really. read that again, because i tell you no lies - popsicle sticks!! the ship was painstakingly glued together over a period of two years by three people including someone named robert mcdonald who is apparently a hollywood stuntman.

the sticks were collected and posted to him by children all over the world. mr. mcdonald hopes to sail the 15m (50ft) ship across the atlantic. i think it would be an amazing achievement and i would guess through his vocation that fear and earthly attachments are not a big concern and so he will likely attempt this journey.

"it's a dream come true. it's truly worth all the hard work," said mr mcdonald, quoted by reuters news agency. "i never want to look at glue again. i don't think i will be in a hurry to look at ice cream sticks again."

i wish him well and trust that he didn’t use water soluble glue and that he thoroughly washed all traces of creamsicle off the sticks so as not to attract any of the larger ocean dwellers who might have a sweet tooth. the 45-year-old, from jacksonville, florida, is president of the sea heart foundation, an organisation which runs projects for children in need.

next up is an art masterpiece made from discarded train tickets. how cool is this?! employees at a department store in osaka, japan, built a 2.3 x 1.6 metre replica of da vinci's mona lisa with nothing more than old train tickets - several hundred thousand of them. amazingly, 300 workers spent about 3 months to recreate this masterpiece by meticulously overlapping the black and white tickets.

i have many questions for this crew but the first one is, why would japanese workers recreate the mona lisa? why not something by hokusai? hmmmmm. still, it’s very cool and fairly high up the cleverness quotient scale.

finally. now this is more like it! a replica of the taj mahal “the monument to love” built out of one of the more unromantic objects on the planet - matchsticks. ron savoury- a retired gentleman hailing from an anonymous location in england - spent an inordinate amont of time chopping the heads off matchsticks and then gluing the remaing splintery little body parts together.
questions i have for ron? well, i wonder what the people at the corner store thought when he kept showing up every saturday morning and buying them out of matchsticks? also, i would love to know where the bazillion little bits of flammable substance went! i bet there's a garden shed at the end of his lawn just waiting to be england's first serious entry in the put a man on mars race!

i bet that dusting this thing is a labour of love - and no doubt accompanied by a modicom of fear. you wouldn’t want to snag anything on your duster now would you!