Irrelevance Glorified

Every time a person asks me when I’m graduating, they are moving to the end of the list of people that I will notify when I actually graduate.

Woohoo! On to week 4! This week featured a lot of inside and outside reverse folds. Mostly to do birds.

Week Four, January 21st – 25th

Origami Peace Dove

Origami Mr. Penguin with some sort of beak problem.

Origami Mrs. Penguin, so Mr. Penguin won’t get lonely.

Origami Nathan’s Penguin

Who is Nathan? That’s an extremely good question.

Origami Whirly Bird

The whirly-bird in action:

I know, I know, its some pretty awesome cinematography.

All designs from the Origami Desk Calendar.

Before I continue on this rant, I want to warn that it contains spoilers for the current show “Heroes” as well as, sadly, some fantasy novels.
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Well, I know everyone has been anxious to see this week’s pattern, so I’m posting them. They are all based upon the “organ base”, as can be seen here since I forgot to take a picture of this base fold. Incidentally, while searching for a good link for the organ base, I noted that there are a number of blogs out there doing the exact same thing I am, with the exact same desktop calendar. I just wanted to assure everyone out there that I’m the original one and everyone else is just copy-catting.

Week three, January 14th – 18th

First up, a highly utilitarian origami dustpan

Next, an instruction folder.

This doesn’t make much sense without something in it, though.

Next, a fox puppet.

This was just weird. It suffered from the fact that each page in the calendar is meant to be a piece of origami paper, but it’s just too thick. So for patterns that require a lot of folding, eventually it all catches up to you and the result is ugly origami. Or, I just suck. One of the two.

Origami-of-the-week, a chair!

It’s a little avant-garde, but I love the armrests.

Finally, an origami crown.

Not quite a Burger King crown, it would do in a pinch if you had to fool some really stupid people.

All designs from the Origami Desk Calendar.

Week 2, January 7th – 11th

First off this week, another 2-dayer.
The $2 Pantsuit (literally enough, made of two $1 bills)

Next, a Scottish Terrier

Then, an Origami Somersault

Now, you may think, much like my coworkers did, that I am incredibly lame to post this stupid video on YouTube. Imagine my chagrin when I found that there are multiple videos of this exact same piece of origami from others who have the same desk calendar. In other words, I’m not even an original loser.

An origami photostand

This is from the back. It doesn’t make much sense until you see it in action.

Here, the stand is holding up the birthday card my group gave me this year.

All designs from the origami desk calendar.

Well, somewhat surprisingly, my sister gave me a interesting birthday present this year. Normally, they’re just strange. But this one was a win. It was an origami desk calendar. Each day is not only instructions for folding a shape, but also a sheet of origami paper (although certainly thicker than normal origami paper). So, because I need some content, and you have to be somewhat curious about how to create enough origami shapes for a whole year (it looks like only weekdays so far), I’ll post up my results, week by week.

Week 1, Jan 1 – Jan 4

A fox

A nightingale

A Dog (a 2-dayer)

Nothing fancy, so far, but I’m sure that by December I’ll be making scale replicas of The Twilight Gate or something.

Recently, Bruce outlined his reasons that we should all move to Portland. Frankly, it was a bit overwrought and, shall I say, biased. So I thought I would add my rebuttal, on the benefits of living in Champaign-Urbana.

• Home of one of the finest public universities in the land, UIUC
• Safer from cataclysmic disasters
• No nearby subduction faults, origin of the destructive megathrust earthquakes
• No giant tsunamis, most often caused by earthquakes on subduction zones
• No volcanoes
• Associated with this, no lahars or pyroclastic flows
• No bears
• C-U is nicely situated, being close to the metropolises of Chicago (140 mi), St. Louis (180 mi), and Indianapolis (120 mi). Not many cities can say that. For instance, Portland is 2100 mi, 2000 mi, and 2200 mi from those cities. Man!
• Site of the Morrow Plots, the nations oldest continuous crop experiment
• Home of the Krannert Arts Center, with one of the most acoustically perfect music halls in the nation
• The nation’s lowest incidence rates of altitude sickness
• Birthplace of HAL 9000 (that’s for all my readers who are also unbalanced AI’s)
• Wine Country is only 20 miles away
• America’s heartland evokes it’s own beauty
• We’re developing killer robots
• And self-healing materials
• The white knuckle action at Kickapoo State Park
• Lovely Allerton Park
• You can afford to live here
• You can get a beer for under $4
• Japan House
• The Danville Dans!
• Fantastic dive restaurants with unbelievable steaks, like the Moon Glo. You man up and cook your own steaks in the midwest.
• Midwestern winters give us great experience for when NASA starts searching for extraterrestrial life
  
• The Siberian Express Trail Run
• Sure, a lot of people have visited Bruce up at Portland. But Champaign can lay claim to something that still escapes Portland — Yusuke has visited Champaign!
• Who needs mountains? We have other things to climb.
• Like ethanol? This is where it’s made.

My list isn’t as long as Bruce’s. Of course, I could have just repeated one or two items a bunch of items. At any rate, you can clearly see that little ol’ C-U easily measures up to anything stinky Portland can throw at it.