Rats and art

First off an interesting post I read over on the make blog yesterday. Turns out some guy gets paid to study laughing rats. Which is more interesting... that rats laugh, or that this guy gets paid to tickle them? All in the name of science I suppose. Anyway, it's a pretty interesting discovery though. The article starts off with a quote from Aristotle that says humans are the only animals that laugh. Well, I think Jaak the rat tickler has proved him wrong. check out the link, then click on the movie to watch the video. Makes it a little harder to kill the little buggers now doesn't it? Speaking of rodents, I was awoken today by the return of the squirrels in my attic. They have made an appearance on and off throughout the winter, but never seemed to take up residence (thankfully), I hope this one is not looking for a place to make a spring nest. I've determined though... it's worse dealing with my apartment maintenance people than it is the squirrels. So I'm going to give it a shot of living with them.
Finally a quick post about my art class... things didn't seem to click the other night. I struggled to find that groove I had last week. I did finally sort of give up and tried to just have a little fun. The painting turned out pretty cool (if I do say so myself). Totally different than what I was doing before. Maybe I'll try to scan and post it here. We also hung some of our artwork in the student show, so this will be the second time I've had a piece of art hanging in an art gallery ;) I almost put a price tag of $1,000,000 but figured that a bit steep. The teacher chose which of my paintings to hang, which I thought kinda odd, but I went along with it.
A funny little art fopa (sp?) on my part too... the teacher came in and made an announcement that the library was selling some books to clear space for cheap. $1 - $10... $1 a book? I gotta check that out. Well, turns out many of them were not worth that much. They were like student art history books. Entire books about art with not one photo or picture. Something wrong with that. But I did find a small book with some renaissance type art that struck me and it was only a $1. So I bought it, and went back to class. The teacher then was making her rounds looking at our work, when she saw my book... "Ah, how did I miss that one", she said. Michael Angelo. I looked at her with a blank stare - what? Then I read the title which was in Italian or something, and the last words were Miguel Angel. So here I got a world famous art history book, and I didn't even recognize his name :) I just liked the pictures which is what counts in my book :)
Well, this rambled on a bit longer than I thought, sorry bout that. Enjoy your Thursday, only one more day until the weekend.
Hey! Go make some art yourself. Take a photo, or paint a picture, or doodle a character with a pen on a post it... it's all art.