The introduction to the China Chair Project and its catalogue begins with a quote by Richard Artschwager: “Art is useless; furniture is useful. If you sit your ass on it, it’s a chair, if you walk around and look at it it’s art …In fact, the more layers of meaning, the better.” Curated by Paul Hughes, this exhibition features designs by artists given the task of creating a chair. Most of the artists chosen for the commission had never worked in three-dimensional media prior to this, and were given no instructions as to medium or design functionality. The result, however, was a collection of fantastic usable pieces of sculpture on display in Miami last week. Shown above is Space Cadet by the Unmask Art Group.

The pieces in the China Chair Project were sculptures of a variety of media. Xiang Yun’s Spinal Gel Cactus with Footstool is a voluptuous mass of hand-molded silicon, while Nuts and Balls and All Things Nice is a glittery, glamourous chair based on something as simple as the lowly nut. The hand-carved wooden Royal Flush, Let Them Eat Cake by Qu Guangci is one piece that is definitely more sculpture than chair, but spectacular all the same. More exhibits from the China Chair Project after the jump.

Bobr, Belarus: Ivana Kupala Night. On the night of this pagan festival, celebrated on July 7, the Gregorian summer solstice, young women don wreathes and celebrants jump through fire and swim naked. The rites are connected to ancient beliefs about fertility and autopurification.

New Delhi, India: Holi, the Festival of Colors. Indian girls throw gulal (colored powder) on each other during a Hindi holiday which marks the onset of spring.

Bunyol, Spain: Tomatina. In late August, thousands of people pelt each other with over 250 lbs. Of tomatoes in a span of 60 minutes in an event modestly described as the world’s largest tomato fight.

No.6

Novgorod, Russia: Maslenitsa. In Orthodox countries, the week before Lent is marked with a series of celebrations, including a free-for-all boxing match in which there are no rules. In centuries past, the fight ended only when the participates were covered with blood and bereft of clothes.

Inazawa, Japan: Hadaka Matsuri, The Naked Festival. Hidden somewhere in the midst of all these men in loincloths is one fully naked man. Touching him is believed to bring good luck and happiness.CAN YOU FIND YOURSELF?

Lopburi province, Thailand: The Monkey Buffet. Every year, all of the province’s approximately 600 monkeys are invited to eat fruits and vegetables during an annual feast held in honor of Rama, a hero of the Ramayana, who, it is said, rewarded his friend and ally, Hanuman the Monkey King, with the fiefdom of what is now Lopburi.

Lopburi province, Thailand: The Monkey Buffet. Organizers of the annual monkey buffet use more than 3,000 kg of fruits and vegetables for the festival.

Brockworth, England: Cheese Rolling Festival. In a dangerous tradition dating back to Roman times, competitors from all over the world run up a hill and then chase a 7 kg round cheese back down. The first who gets to it, keeps it.

Sabucedo, Spain: Rapa Das Bestas. Since the Bronze Age, Galicians have been taming wild horses. On the first weekend of the month of July, hundreds of wild horses are rounded up by expert stockbreeders, known as agarradores, then trimmed and groomed.

Reading, England: Festival of Falconry. Bird-of-prey handlers from Turkmenistan hold falcons at the first Festival of Falconry. Bird keepers from all over the world attended the event to highlight the popularity and importance of the sport worldwide.

Bedford Square Gardens, England: The Chap & Hendrick’s Olympics. A series of tongue-in-cheek competitions for traditional gentlemen who are against the vulgarity of modern culture, this festival includes events such as mixing dry martinis, the three-trousered limbo and a pipe relay.

Dublin, Georgia: The Summer Redneck Games. L-bow, the official mascot of the Summer Redneck Games, poses next to the mud pit with the festival’s ceremonial torch. Started in 1996 as a spoof of the summer Olympics held in Atlanta, the Games feature bobbing for pigs feet, hub cap hurling and the Redneck mud pit belly-flop contest.

New Delhi, India: Holi, The Festival of Colors. The word Holi comes from Holika, a scarf in Hindu mythology that prevented one of Lord Vishnu’s followers from being burned on a pyre.

Ivrea, Italy: The Battle of Oranges. The origins of this festival are not well understood, particularly because oranges do not grow in the Alps of Italy, where the town is located. One legend has it that the Battle commemorates a popular rebellion of the 13th century, when the local poor deemed the largess of their feudal lord as inadequate, and threw it back in his face.

Boston, USA: Zombie March. For the third straight year, Bostonians dressed as zombies marched from Boston to Cambridge’s Harvard Square in what organizers call a non-political, no-agenda good time.

Bunyol, Spain: Tomatina. Every year, over 30,000 tourists come to Bunyol for this festival. Rules of conduct keep the festivities from becoming a more dangerous brawl.

Eastern Island, Chile: Tapati Festival. A week-long festival begun in the 1970s in an effort to drum up more tourism, Tapati includes a triathlon in which native participates run around the lake of the Rano Raraku vulcano carrying a large bunch of bananas.

1.Venezuela’s Everlasting Storm

The mysterious “Relámpago del Catatumbo” (Catatumbo lightning) is a unique natural phenomenon in the world. Located on the mouth of the Catatumbo river at Lake Maracaibo (Venezuela), the phenomenon is a cloud-to-cloud lightning that forms a voltage arc more than five kilometre high during 140 to 160 nights a year, 10 hours a night, and as many as 280 times an hour. This almost permanent storm occurs over the marshlands where the Catatumbo River feeds into Lake Maracaibo and it is considered the greatest single generator of ozone in the planet, judging from the intensity of the cloud-to-cloud discharge and great frequency. The area sees an estimated 1,176,000 electrical discharges per year, with an intensity of up to 400,000 amperes, and visible up to 400 km away. This is the reason why the storm is also known as the Maracaibo Beacon as light has been used for navigation by ships for ages.

The collision with the winds coming from the Andes Mountains causes the storms and associated lightning, a result of electrical discharges through ionised gases, specifically the methane created by the decomposition of organic matter in the marshes. Being lighter than air, the gas rises up to the clouds, feeding the storms. Some local environmentalists hope to put the area under the protection of UNESCO, as it is an exceptional phenomenon, the greatest source of its type for regenerating the planet’s ozone layer.

2.Honduras’ Rain of Fishes

The Rain of Fish is common in Honduran Folklore. It occurs in the Departamento de Yoro, between the months of May and July. Witnesses of this phenomenon state that it begins with a dark cloud in the sky followed by lightning, thunder, strong winds and heavy rain for 2 to 3 hours. Once the rain has stopped, hundreds of living fish are found on the ground. People take the fish home to cook and eat them. Since 1998 a festival known as “Festival de la Lluvia de Peces” (Rain of Fish Festival) is celebrated every year in the city of Yoro, Departamento de Yoro, Honduras.

Goats on trees are found mostly only in Morocco. The goats climb them because they like to eat the fruit of the argan tree, which is similar to an olive. Farmers actually follow the herds of goats as they move from tree to tree. Not because it is so strange to see goats in trees and the farmers like to point and stare, but because the fruit of the tree has a nut inside, which the goats can’t digest, so they spit it up or excrete it which the farmers collect. The nut contains 1-3 kernels, which can be ground to make argan oil used in cooking and cosmetics. This oil has been collected by the people of the region for hundreds of years, but like many wild and useful things these days, the argan tree is slowly disappearing due to over-harvesting for the tree’s wood and overgrazing by goats.

As a result a group of people and organizations have banded together to try to save the tree. To do so one of the primary locations where the trees grow has been declared a biosphere preserve. It was also decided that by making the world aware of the oil, it’s great taste and supposed anti-aging properties, would create a demand for it. However, the people who planned to market the oil could not envision people wanting to put an oil on their food or their face that was collected from goat excrement. As a result, a campaign is being led to ban grazing on the trees by goats during certain parts of the year to allow the fruit to ripen and fall off on its own. The fruit is then collected and turned into oil by oil cooperatives. So far, this arrangement seems to be working.

From 25 July to 23 September 2001, red rain sporadically fell on the southern Indian state of Kerala. Heavy downpours occurred in which the rain was coloured red, staining clothes with an appearance similar to that of blood. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported.

It was initially suspected that the rains were coloured by fallout from a hypothetical meteor burst, but a study commissioned by the Government of India found that the rains had been coloured by airborne spores from a locally prolific terrestrial alga. Then in early 2006, the coloured rains of Kerala suddenly rose to worldwide attention after media reports of a conjecture that the coloured particles were extraterrestrial cells, proposed by Godfrey Louis and Santhosh Kumar of the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam. The terrestrial origins of the solid material in the red rain were supported by an investigation into the isotopic ratios of nitrogen and carbon.

Twice a year, between the months of February and March, the Atlantic Ocean waters roll up the Amazon river, in Brazil, generating the longest wave on the Earth. The phenomenon, known as the Pororoca, is caused by the tides of the Atlantic Ocean wich meet the mouth of the river. This tidal bore generates waves up to 12 feet high which can last for over half an hour.

The name “Pororoca” comes from the indigenous T

upi language, where it translates into “great destructive noise”. The wave can be heard about 30 minutes before its arrival, and it’s so powerful that it can destroy anything, including trees, local houses and all kind of animals.

The wave has become popular with surfers. Since 1999, an annual championship has been held in São Domingos do Capim. However, surfing the Pororoca is especially dangerous, as the water contains a significant amount of debris from the margins of the river (often, entire trees). The record that we could find for surfing the longest distance on the Pororoca was set by Picuruta Salazar, a brazilian surfer who, in 2003, managed to ride the wave for 37 minutes and travel 12.5 kilometers. A surfer’s dream: riding an almost never-ending wave.

During spring in Denmark, at approximately one half an hour before sunset, flocks of more than a million European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) gather from all corners to join in the incredible formations shown above. This phenomenon is called Black Sun (in Denmark), and can be witnessed in early spring throughout the marshlands of western Denmark, from March through to the middle of April. The starlings migrate from the south and spend the day in the meadows gathering food, sleeping in the reeds during the night.

The atmospheric phenomenon known as a circumhorizon(tal) arc, or “Fire rainbow”, appears when the sun is high in the sky (i.e., higher than 58° above the horizon), and its light passes through diaphanous, high-altitude cirrus clouds made up of hexagonal plate crystals. Sunlight entering the crystals’ vertical side faces and leaving through their bottom faces is refracted (as through a prism) and separated into an array of visible colors. When the plate crystals in cirrus clouds are aligned optimally (i.e., with their faces parallel to the ground), the resulting display is a brilliant spectrum of colors reminiscent of a rainbow. The example shown above was captured on camera as it hung for about an hour across a several-hundred square mile area of sky above northern Idaho (near the Washington border) on 3 June 2006.

This is a Fire Rainbow.
The rarest of all naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena.