When the University of Iceland got its first computer in 1964, Icelandic did not have a word for “computer.” So the guardians of the language invented one: tölva—a fusion of tala (number) and völva (prophetess) that adds up to the wonderfully poetic “prophetess of numbers.”
In the Terminator franchise, Skynet is an evil military computer system that launches war on humanity. And at some point, someone in the National Security Agency sat down and thought, “Damn, that’s a sick thing to name a secret system!”
“A human being cannot decipher more than two different levels of sound at the same time. I’m not speaking of just music. Physically, the brain cannot receive more than two sounds at a time. If a director mixes in the general sound column dialogue and the sound effects as well as the music, the human ear cannot distinguish the music. What one hears is a very confusing noise.” – Ennio Morricone
When the expression “Soundtrack composer” comes to mind, it’s hard not to think of Ennio Morricone at first thought. The “Maestro” built a body of work that is spread across more than 500 movies.
The Rome born composer became notorious because of his works in Spaghetti Westerns, most notably his partnership with Sergio Leone, which reinvented the Western genre. Choosing a gritty, organic and sparse sound instead of exaggerated orchestrations of most Westerns traditional soundtracks, Morricone created his own style adding whips, gunshots, whistles and electric guitars to create a narrative element in music.
Leone’s direction put Morricone’s music in the spotlight, as a fundamental protagonist of the narrative, serving as a rhetorical element to emphasize emotions and feelings that were not clear in a story starred by subtle, laconic heroes like Clint Eastwood. Long scenes featuring the music and close shots at the characters transformed some excerpts of the movies in a pre-form of a Video Clip, combining sound and vision in another level, adding significance and semiotic meaning to the images.
Morricone’s influence on modern pop culture can be seem in the way soundtracks are perceived as a part of video creation, in works of Wong Kar-Wai and Quentin Tarantino, both of them using Morricone’s tracks as an important element of the movies. Separated from the movie, the music still has meaning to the listener.
When somebody hears The Good, The Bad and The Ugly theme, a western movie automatically enter their minds. More than an element in the movie, Morricone’s music became a major role on a par with The Man with No Name.
After graduating from a Music School in Italy, he worked for RAI (Italian State Broadcast channel) and produced works both in the Popular and Erudite world, composing for Italian popular artists (Rita Pavone, Gianni Morandi, Gino Paoli, amongst others) and playing the trumpet with the Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, the first free form improvisation collective that worked avant-garde techniques by John Cage, Miles Davis’ electric jazz experimentations and robotic grooves similar to German Kraut Rock band Can.
In the musical field, Morricone’s scores cover Classical, Pop and Avant-Garde. Elements like classical music orchestrations, catchy melodies, surf guitars, voice used as an instrument, Pan Flute, Jew’s harp, Ostinato and strange percussions became his trademarks.
The Morricone Sound was born in The Dollars Trilogy, but went beyond any limit of music or film genre, displaying an eclecticism that influenced a generation of musicians like Yo-Yo Ma, Hans Zimmer, John Zorn, Mike Patton and rock bands like Muse, Pixies, Metallica and Primus.
1. A Fistful of Dollars (1964) by Sergio Leone
This movie was groundbreaking for Spaghetti Westerns. Leone’s violent and cynical camera gave birth to two legends: Clint Eastwood and Ennio Morricone. Eastwood based a career on his The Man With No Name character and Morricone became the official Spaghetti Western soundtrack composer after the movie.
The movie is loosely based on Akira’s Kurosawa Yojimbo, which had an amazing soundtrack composed by Masaru Sato, a result of a combination between Western music and Henry Mancini. Mixture was also the formula for Morricone’s soundtrack, which transformed an arrangement made by Morricone himself to Peter Tavis sing Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of plenty” into a Movie Theme.
“He [Leone] seemed to know exactly what he wanted, and some of my music, which he had listened to, already contained a grotesque, slightly comic irony, which suited the Clint character.” – Ennio Morricone
Leone hired Morricone, who had worked as a soundtrack composer in some westerns before. He knew Morricone since childhood (both studied at the same school), and the partnership extended until his last movie. A Fistful of Dollars was a box-office success with the public and started an era for Spaghetti Westerns genre and Morricone’s soundtracks.
Western movies after A Fistful of Dollars had two options: hire Morricone or hire someone to make a Soundtrack that Morricone would make. Luis Bacalov’s famous Django theme (Django,1966, directed by Sergio Corbucci) can be said as one example. In Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, Bacalov’s song is side by side with Morricone’s tracks on the soundtrack.
“In the late sixties and seventies you couldn’t see an Italian movie without Ennio Morricone’s music, which sometimes is memorable and sometimes is just a repetition of a movie that you have seen before, it was a kind of big factory.” – Bernardo Bertolucci
Having low budget to compose the tracks, the Italian composer replaced an Orchestra for juxtapositions of uncommon sounds, evoking the wilderness in the scenario. The theme seemed to carry, in the form of galloping drums, the bravery and cunning necessary to survive in a world like that.
2. The Battle of Algiers (1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo
His first work with Gillo Pontecorvo, this score is manly formed by Military March drum snares, serving as a background for a piano and brass instruments that alternate in a growing tension evoking the clash between the French Army and National Liberation Front (FNL).
The soundtrack is composed by different pieces of music, including pieces influenced by Arabic music like “Ali’s theme”. The curiosity here is the fact that Morricone composed the soundtrack together with Pontecorvo, which was a contract clause. This work expanded Morricone’s musical horizon, showing that he was not limited to Western Spaghetti’s clichés, producing a soundtrack that was filled with different elements and moods: seriousness and climatic tension produced by repeated notes on a piano dialoguing with trumpets.
The main theme is not as sparse as his Western Spaghetti’s soundtrack, but dense and loaded with intensity at every moment. The marching drums are protagonists both at the beginning and end of the song, evoking the Military tone of the movie and the highly-charged atmosphere.
The Theme Song from the movie was later used in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Bastards”, in the scene where Brad Pitt rescues Sgt. Hug Stiglitz from a Nazi prison. Pontecorvo and Morricone later worked together in another political classic from the Italian director, “Queimada!” starring Marlon Brando.
3. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) by Sergio Leone
The ultimate Spaghetti Western, this movie is recognized to be a masterpiece of cinema, carrying the five stars necessary to validate a classic: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, Leone’s camera and Morricone’s music. The film is considered to be the capolavoro of the Dollars Trilogy.
Sergio Leone subverted the Western genre even more after A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More: the three protagonists are not plain heroes/villains, with only good or evil intentions. They vary according to the opportunity; even at War (the bridge explosion scene), they demonstrate individualistic traits and intentions.
The Soundtrack contains two masterpieces instantly recognized by every movie fan: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and The Ecstasy of Gold. The former is a classic Western Spaghetti composition with martial Drums alternating 3 and 2 hits, sounds emulating coyotes and a crescendo. The latter is an epic piece, used by Metallica for opening their shows, with a superb soprano apotheosis, dialoguing directly with the ecstasy of the three characters in finding the Gold.
4. The Big Gundown (1966) by Sergio Solima
This cult western classic featured two elements from The Good The Bad and The Ugly: the Bad (a.k.a. Lee Van Cleef) and a Morricone score, based on elements similar to those present in Leone’s movie.
A surf music guitar riff gives the tone to a beat that resembles a horse galloping. This movie’s title was used by John Zorn on his homage to Morricone “The Big Gundown”, a reinterpretation of Morricone’s works through the experimental lens of Zorn’s music.
5. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by Sergio Leone
“When I begin a theme in a certain key, say D minor, I never depart from this original key. If it begins in D minor, it ends in D minor. This harmonic simplicity is accessible to everyone.” – Ennio Morricone
Two tracks from this movie became an entity themselves: The Theme Song and The Man with the Harmonica. The former is a divine melody played by violins that grows into a Soprano epic. The latter is a one key song played by a harmonica starting with the emptiness of the desert developing into a violent explosion.
The song is the theme of Harmonica (Charles Bronson) and it is amazingly explored by Leone in the Bar Scene, when there is a shadow/light effect combining with the apotheosis of the song. British rock band Muse uses it as an opening for the track Knights of Cydonia, which is a Morricone influenced epic-rock.
6. The Sicilian Clan (1969) by Henri Verneuil
This score gave expression to the Morricone Gangster sound, later used in Once Upon a Time in America and The Untouchables. This one got him away from the Western Spaghetti sound and introduced his choice for traditional melody over unusual noises.
The theme song is a classical music piece with a very distinguished melody all along the way, instead of the experimentations with noises and instruments from the Western Movies.
7. Love Circle (1969) by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi
This soundtrack is extremely rich in styles and genres, varying from Euro Pop, Bossa Nova and Western Music experimentations. The movie’s theme is a Bossa Nova derivate from Morricone’s love for Brazilian music. In the documentary “Il Malamondo”, Morricone started to create tracks heavily influenced by samba and bossa rythms, like “Muscoli di Velluto”.
Later this was beautifully explored in “Samba in Tribunale”, from “Il Gatto” by Luigi Comencini. Morricone also worked with Brazilian composer Chico Buarque in “Per un Pugno di Samba”, when Buarque was living in Rome due to extradition from Brazil’s military Regime.
The theme track features a beautiful melody sang by Edda Dell’Orso over an electric and acoustic guitar, a Bossa Nova beat and a piano (that later on the song repeats the catchy melody sang by Edda), operating in the same way as some variations in Morricone’s westerns themes. Rich Happening is another interesting track, featuring noise experimentations with sitars and percussion.
8. Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) by Don Siegel
This Western directed by Don Siegel featured Dollars Trilogy star, Clint Eastwood. The theme is a unique and extraordinary piece, something that goes above all genres and can only be identified as Morricone’s music. The tension between the heavenly flute melody and the malevolent acoustic guitar produces the beauty of the track.
There is also a strange noise emulating a mule sound and choirs evoking liturgical songs. This piece was later used by Quentin Tarantino in Django Unchained and by Hans Zimmer who made a version of it for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
9. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) by Elio Petri
This Political-Crime thriller is directed by Elio Petri and featured Morricone’s score a partnership that was later repeated on The Working Class Goes to Heaven. It’s the story of a conservative police inspector (Gian Maria Volonté) who kills his mistress and subsequently tries to incriminate himself. It’s a study of Corruption in Italy, a subject that is still relevant nowadays. Morricone composed an ominous, atmospheric and intricate soundtrack for this one.
The major theme uses Avant-Garde elements reminiscent of Morricone’s work with Gruppo de Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza and has lots of rhythm changes and intense chord changes. Fântomas, the experimental heavy metal super group formed by members of Faith no More, Mr. Bungle, Melvins and Slayer did an interesting version of the main theme, adding lyrics to the song and giving it a new interpretation.
10. The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971) by Elio Petri
Another Petri/Morricone collaboration starring Gian Maria Volonté, this movie explores the class struggle going on an Italian factory. Lulu is a dedicated worker who claims to be the hardest working man of his factory, provoking rage in all the southern co-workers (who in his views are “lazy bastards”) and admiration among his masters. He doesn’t want to take any part in a strike made by the union, but everything changes when he loses a finger and start to get influenced by Communist students.
Petri, a Marxist director, operates the change in Lulu’s character, who was just another tool of the system, alienated and unconscious of his condition, and then becomes a conscious blue collar worker who is not satisfied with the conditions at the factory. Morricone’s score combine perfectly with the factory environment, a cold, robotic and menacing place where, according to Lulu, “even a monkey could work”.
The score is also a continuation of “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion”, combining Avant-Garde elements with more Classical composition. The theme song starts with a noise played by a keyboard, emulating the robotic noises made in the factory, then growing into a piano/trumpet session that prepare the tension to the main part performed by violins.
The Rosy Maple Moth is the prettiest moth ever.
(I do not own the rights to these photos, I just wanted to share this beautiful moth with tumblr.)
#beautifulbizarre Issue 009 In-Design Sneak Peek ~ Spread from Julia deVille’s 12 page editorial
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Australian artist, Mahlimae’s beautiful melancholy stone clay sculptures in her 12 page editorial in Issue 008 of #beautifulbizarre
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Just because we're in a drought and the calendar says it's May doesn't mean we can't be treated to a free car wash. [ more › ]
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You cannot download P.T. anymore, and you can’t sell a PlayStation 4 pre-loaded with the horror game, either.
I’m absolutely elated. 2 First Place and 2 Second place ribbons on my 4 entries in the World Taxidermy Championships. #WorldChampionships
Yes, you read that right. A unicorn. Not one that’s alive, mind. A stuffed unicorn! But still: a unicorn. NSFW warning!
A friend of mine raises goats. The babies are almost too cute.
http://cute-overload.tumblr.com
source: http://imgur.com/r/aww/ptOX9Xi
Video of the shooting of an unarmed man in Venice by LAPD on Tuesday still does not explain why one officer opened fire. [ more › ]
Poor Hideo Kojima. Konami removed his name from the Metal Gear games and yanked his brilliant playable teaser for Silent Hills, P.T., from the PlayStation Store, but there's still a place for him in Goat Simulator.
Creator Coffee Stain Studios posted an image today (pictured above) on its Facebook honoring Kojima with an "extra special thanks."
"We heard that Hideo Kojima was removed from the credits for Metal Gear Solid 5 so we added him to the credits for Goat Simulator," the caption reads. "You're always welcome to work with us Kojima!"
Kojima, of course, is expected to leave Konami after the release of Metal Gear Solid 5, while Silent Hills has been canceled.
Konami is trying really, really hard to make you forget that P.T. ever existed. That plan is backfiring.
“Since this recipe is dangerous, please do not imitate absolutely.”
Because Japan isn’t content with simply being on the cutting edge of cuteness, they’ve recently broken new ground the field of high-speed cookery, aka “Three Second Cooking.” Using a double-barreled “cooking detonation velocity” cannon, six raw prawns are propelled through jets of flour, egg, panko, and fire. After slamming into a padded target, the prawns land nicely on a garnished plate, cooked to crunchy perfection in only three seconds, all in the name of advertising high-speed data service for Japanese telecom DoCoMo.
But wait, there’s more. The Three Second Cooking team recently outdid themselves by breaking their previous record. This time the team donned their protective goggles to prepare a batch of gyoza (fried dumplings) in under three seconds:
Ingredients are set out, the revamped cooking cannon (which now mixes ingredients as it fires) is loaded, and the dumpling filling is launched through a cloud of salt and pepper, jets of chopped garlic and chives, and then into a taut dumpling wrapper, creating a dumpling by through sheer velocity. The raw dumpling then flies through billowing jets of fire to finally be caught by a brave cooking tech wielding a metal-lined catchers mitt. All of this happens in 2.24 seconds and now we are hungry for fried shrimp and dumplings.
Bridgethow did we miss magnetic fields at the cemetery?
When McDonald’s announced the new, grittier take on the “Hamburgalar” there was really only one thing for me to do as a responsible citizen of the internet.
[body_image width='1195' height='756' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='the-psychology-of-animal-hoarding-body-image-1430157523.jpg' id='50247']Image via Pixabay.
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
We all know someone who loves cats a bit too much. They have two of them—Molly and Oscar—and they're looking into adopting a third ("Smudge" because of that totally adorable birthmark). Their Tinder and Twitter bios proudly proclaim that they are "a crazy cat lady!" and they have a folder of Lolcats saved to their desktop. But, as of yet, they haven't been mummified in a mound of cat feces.
They haven't,
like Terry, a cashier featured on the American TV show Hoarders, stored the bodies of nearly 100 cats in their kitchen freezer. They don't, like Terry, stroke the remains of dead kittens, tearfully apologizing to their corpses about how they didn't want them to die. Why? Because in reality, they're not "crazy cat ladies" (or men) at all.
[body_image width='1250' height='935' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='the-psychology-of-animal-hoarding-body-image-1430157572.jpg' id='50249']Photos from Louis* taken at an animal hoarder's house.
Animal hoarding is a real-world psychiatric problem. There are between 900 and 2,000 cases every year in the United States, with an estimated 250,000 animal victims. While cases in America seem more rife, here in the UK, stories of animal hoarders crop up in headlines all the time, like the couple who were found last year to be keeping 15 dogs in cramped conditions in their council house near Wigan.
Despite this, animal hoarding has not yet been recognized in the DSM as an official mental disorder. "It does not appear to be a single, simple disorder," says Dr. Randall Lockwood, a member of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and the senior vice president of their Forensic Sciences and Anti-Cruelty projects. "In the past it has been seen as an addictive behavior, and as a manifestation of OCD. We're also now seeing it as an attachment disorder where people have an impaired ability to form relationships with other people and animals fill that void."
[body_image width='1250' height='935' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='the-psychology-of-animal-hoarding-body-image-1430157612.jpg' id='50250']
This doesn't mean that all animal hoarders are lonely old cat ladies. In fact, Dr. Lockwood calls this a "vast oversimplification." Animal hoarders come in all ages, sexes, orientations, and races, and their pets are just as varied. Whether it's keeping 400 snakes or owning more than 70 animals in a home "knee-deep in feces," these people are out there, both causing and experiencing suffering.
Autumn, a web developer in the US, grew up with an animal-hoarding mother. At one point, her mom owned 20 horses, five sheep, eight dogs, more than 20 cats, and an array of rats, mice, gerbils, birds, chickens, ducks, snakes, and, to round it all off, frogs. "I'm sure there were a few more things. I had a hard time keeping track," she says.
But it's not just about the numbers. You could have 600 cats and not be a hoarder, so long as they are all looked after. By definition, animal hoarding requires a person to be unable to properly house or care for their animals, leading to neglect, disease, and death.
"She has always considered herself an animal lover," says Autumn of her mother. "She definitely thought she was helping the animals, even though it's now clear to me that she was making many of their lives worse. There were many, many untimely deaths of animals. I still struggle with the fact that animals were killed because of neglect. We'd find dead animals weeks after they'd gone missing, hidden under a bed or dresser that hadn't been moved in years."
[body_image width='1250' height='935' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='the-psychology-of-animal-hoarding-body-image-1430157640.jpg' id='50252']
That someone could love animals but be so immeasurably cruel to them sounds paradoxical. This is due to a failure in recognizing that suffering is actually one of the characteristics of compulsive animal hoarding, says Dr. Lockwood.
"Denial is very common and also something we see with other addictive behaviors," he tells me. "A huge part of animal hoarding is related to how people define themselves, and one of the important things we have to do when confronting hoarders is recognize how important their feeling that they are somehow rescuing or helping animals is."
WATCH: Our video on Big Cats of the Gulf
Autumn's mother is still somewhat in denial. "I don't think she'll ever realize how bad things were," she says. "I still don't know why she did it, and I'm not sure I ever will. I know her childhood wasn't the greatest, but she never talked about it at length, so I don't know any details."
It's not just Autumn who is confused about why people act like this. Animal hoarding hasn't been firmly linked to any single disorder, and explanations range from delusional disorder, attachment disorder, OCD, zoophilia, addiction, and even dementia. Often, animal hoarders suffer with issues of self-neglect as well as issues linked to child abuse.
"A very common scenario I've encountered is that many hoarders are adult children of alcoholics or other substance abusers," says Dr. Lockwood. "Many of them have their own substance-abuse problems. Hoarders may have some kind of predisposition towards addictive behaviors."
[body_image width='1250' height='935' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='the-psychology-of-animal-hoarding-body-image-1430158089.jpg' id='50256']
Louis,* a software developer in the United States, experienced the connections between such issues firsthand, when his father's girlfriend turned to alcohol and animal hoarding to cope after her struggle with breast cancer. During this time, she was renting a house from Louis. When she was hospitalized for sepsis, the family discovered the damage she was causing to herself, her animals, and the property.
"In the end there were maybe 14 dogs and five or six cats trapped in that house. My dad found a litter of dead kittens in the freezer, along with one or more dead cats. We found other dead animals when piles of stuff were moved," Louis tells me.
"Feces were everywhere. There was so much that it was fermenting into methane. The stench was incredible. A crew of four people in full hazmat gear with external oxygen tanks still had to take breaks every hour when removing everything."
Louis's photos speak for themselves. He ultimately spent $30,000 to $40,000 repairing the damage to the home, and an extra $50,000 remodeling it. The floors and drywall were removed because of the smell. All the fixtures were too disgusting to keep. But even more troubling was that his father's girlfriend could not accept what she had done.
"She was in full-on denial. When confronted with the pictures she actually told my father that someone else must have gone in there and done this. Until then, my father never understood what it was like to stare delusion in the face. He thinks in the end that she actually believed her own fiction because the horror of what she had done to herself and those animals was too much for her psyche to handle. She completely disassociated from reality."
READ: The VICE Guide to Mental Health
Dr. Lockwood says cases like this might be more complex than simple denial, though. "The question I'm often asked is. 'Can't they see or smell the problem?'" At one level, some of the neurophysiology of hoarders suggests that there is difficulty processing the emotional information along with the perceptual information.
"Caring for animals is part of their identity. There are physiological mechanisms to prevent the awareness that they are causing pain and suffering. So in a very simple sense, maybe they do not actually see what's going on."
Louis's story has a clear cut progression. Illness lead to alcoholism, leading his father's girlfriend to lose her job. When she developed diabetes symptoms, including loss of sensation in her hands and feet, she stopped cleaning up after herself. After she got a DUI, she stopped letting her friends into the house and withdrew further from society. Her animals, much like alcohol, were a comfort to her—something that helped her cope.
But what if the animals were the beginning of the story? What if they weren't the outcome, but the cause, of mental illness?
Czech biologist Jaroslav Flegr is just one of the many scientists who have linked the parasite Toxoplasma gondii to mental and behavioral disorders in humans. And where is this parasite commonly found? In cat shit.
"Crazy-cat-lady syndrome" is a term that describes the link between T. gondii and psychiatric conditions. The parasite causes toxoplasmosis, which has been shown to cause altered dopamine levels, which in turn may cause schizophrenia, OCD, ADHD, and mood disorders. Scientists have even linked it to increased risk of suicide. But Dr. Lockwood isn't too convinced. "I don't really put a lot of credence in the idea," he says. "Studies have shown rodents exposed to toxoplasma start food hoarding, but this can't be applied to humans. Animal hoarding has much more to do with definitions of self.
"I've seen no literature that suggests there are higher levels of toxoplasma antibodies in hoarders versus non-hoarders—so it's quite a stretch going from animal studies to thinking that somehow it's influencing human behavior.
"It's far more likely that being a hoarder exposes you to toxoplasma. It's not cause and effect—it's effect and cause." It seems there's no need to send Mr. Tibbles to sleep with the fishes just yet, then.
So if you love your cats and are worried it might spiral out of control, well, there's probably no need to worry. Not just anyone will become a hoarder. "There have to be other underlying components," says Dr. Lockwood. "There's a genetic component to compulsive disorders in general, and hoarding does seem to run in families. There seems to be both biological and developmental components. Often, a very disorganized childhood has impeded a person's ability to form strong and stable relationships with other people."
One thing is for sure, however: Dr. Lockwood says hoarding is on the rise. "The root of a lot of hoarding behavior is anxiety—and we're in anxious times. We live in a time of economic pressures, and these things can potentially exacerbate animal hoarding issues."
Follow Amelia on Twitter.
The weather forecast through Friday calls for rain, wind, maybe even thunder and hail throughout Southern California. [ more › ]
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Professional LEGO builder Ryan McNaught, aka The Brickman, was commissioned by the Nicholson Museum in Sydney, Australia to build a LEGO model of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. Over the course of 470 hours and using over 190,000 LEGO bricks, McNaught built this awesome reconstruction of Pompeii at the moment of its destruction in 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying and burying the city in ash and pumice, how the ruined city appeared when it was rediscovered in the 1700s, and how it appears today.
According to the museum, McNaught’s LEGO Pompeii is the largest model of an ancient city ever made using LEGO bricks.
LEGO Pompeii will be on display at the Nicholson Museum through December 31, 2015. Click here for addition information about the exhibit.
Visit Ryan McNaught’s Flickr account or The Brickman website to check out more of his LEGO creations.
[via inhabitat and The Daily Mail]
Here are 20 cool things to do in L.A. this weekend. [ 
