We’ll end our nautically themed evening on a more peaceful note, with a gorgeous coral reef scene by Shannon Ocean:
That brick-built hammerhead shark is truly fantastic, as are the variety of other undersea flora and fauna (including skeletons as bleached coral).
Aaron “DARKspawn” Andrews sends forth the Imperial Navy’s Commodore Bainbridge to certain doom:
Notice how placing bricks on their sides has allowed Aaron to “float” various items in the water. Achieving a similar effect, he demonstrates that carrying a cannon in a rowboat isn’t such a bright idea:
In 1941, Konrad Zuse built his Z3, the world’s first “Turing-complete” computer. (That’s four years before ENIAC.)
In this vignette for the Reasonably Clever Brick Science contest, Moritz Nolting puts Zuse in front of his shiny new computing machine:
Michael Jasper is one of our favorite builders here on The Brothers Brick. He has recently updated his Characters gallery with major contributors to the sciences: Alfred Nobel and Carl Zeiss.
Shannon Ocean portrays the process of letting go and the chaos that lies beyond death. If what Shannon shows in his vignette is true, then I’ll be going to a world with endless colorful LEGO bricks after I die, but I’m sure that’s not the case presented here.
I was a strange little boy, with my LEGO and my stories and my classic black and white movies. One of my favorite films to this day is Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, from 1940.
Piglet recreates a famous scene in which Charlie Chaplin, as “Adenoid Hynkel,” parodies Adolf Hitler’s ridiculous (and ultimately terrifying) oratory style:
However, I like to think that this is the movie’s final scene, in which the Jewish barber (mistaken for the identical Hynkel) delivers a beautiful speech calling on humanity’s better nature. Here’s one of my favorite passages:
We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another.
In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
Truer words couldn’t be said today, nearly seventy years later. Watch the full speech here:
Via VignetteBricks.
Aaron Andrews lets something in with this nicely detailed vignette. I really like the posing of the red minifig in this one. Aaron has always been a talented builder, but he has been definitely improving on his fig posing lately. Cheers, Aaron!
I suspect that there isn’t a living person on the planet — whether they speak English as their native language or not and whether they even know who Kenny Rogers is — who doesn’t know the lyrics to “The Gambler.”
Nathan Proudlove certainly does:
(Now I have that song in my head for the rest of the evening. Better than the Chocobo’s Dungeon soundtrack, I guess…)
The recent Beijing Olympics — and NBC’s coverage of them here in the U.S. — painted a picture of the People’s Republic of China as a veritable utopia of modernism in harmonious balance with ancient tradition.
In this vignette depicting alleged organ-harvesting of Falun Gong detainees, Rocko suggests that the truth may not be so pleasant:
You can read more about this issue in the surprisingly well-sourced Wikipedia topic.
(Via VignetteBricks.)
Working my way further back through Moritz N‘s photostream, I encountered this great vignette highlighting the importance of being tolerant:
Moritz says:
Although there are still incurable boneheads in both the dwarf and the troll society, Gnork and Shroeder finally summon up the courage to come out of secrecy.
Living their relationship freely they join the Cristopher Street Day parade to demontrate for tolerance and equal opportunities.
Go Gnork and Shroeder, go!
Aaron Andrews has been working on a fun series of pirate creations, populated by a hapless band of buccaneers. In his latest, he sends them down a lava tube. I don’t know if they’re going to make it out of this one alive!
