Buffalo Mao and The Banned Dental Boop

This post has been too long coming. I blame it on the Boop. I love to capture frozen comic frames to tumble on my kaleidocycle, but doing it to the Boop? Well if it`s so easy, you do it.

Not to be stingy, but I feel a little sheepish about posting captured comic frames. I made a couple of test efforts, but I was never satisfied with how much of the 6 min 23 second cartoon I left out. So I`ll let the Boop speak for herself.

Foldplay`s kaleidocycle maker is one of my new favorite toys. Even without Foldplay I was putting pictures onto kaleidocycles, but it took me an hour or more to remember how to crop and stretch my image chunks to get it to work right. One of my home spun efforts (stretched a triangle at-a time in Photo-Shop) appears below. It is the first Buffalo Mao kaleidocycle. It works as well as the one I made with the kaleidocycle maker @ foldplay, but theirs is easier to load, fold, and assemble.

Guilala A.K.A.: Gilala, Girara, and Monster X is an alien kaiju from outer space.

Hey, I tried to wait. I sent a copy of episode 47 of Buffalo Mao to The American Mathematical Society, and a block (they`ll have to use the book to figure out which one). Anyway it`s been weeks now. As far I can determine their arithmetic block department is really busy. According to the USPS (item was delivered at 10:11 on the 9th of April, 2010 in Providence RI 02904). Whatever, it`s probably perfect, after all I am a yenius.

In the mean time, I thought what the heck. How about a Buffalo Mao kaleidocycle? My first effort was very labor intensive.It took 2 hours to get a good one, but I liked the result. I was browsing the web in search of a kaleidocycle assembly tutorial when I ran across Foldplay.

I used a glue stick (sticky kind, not hot kind) to put mine together. I never found the tutorial I was looking for. This will have to do. When gluing the sides shut leave one side flap unglued. Reach inside and squeeze the end flaps to get a good bond, then close the last side flap.

Excellent, this place was amazing. I loaded four pictures into the device at foldplay and clicked make kaleidocycle. The kaleidocycle was ready in less than a minute. I printed the result, scored the lines as instructed, and cut it out. The foldplay device auto cropped the second Buffalo Mao kaleidocycle well enough that, after I assembled and checked it, I didn`t change anything.Well I suppose the afore mentioned "Banned Dental Boop" should be included as well. With the challenges involved in captures from YouTube, my selections from the cartoon were somewhat limited. Still, the crisp black and white images made a pretty cool kaleidocycle. Banned huh, maybe they felt Boop was havin too much fun with the gas.

Colin said quietly behind his hand, "Her head looks like a butt". We tried not to stare. Content for Colin`s kaleidocycle began with two of his own drawings from Paint Box. In addition he wanted a couple of good monsters. His first choice was Helios MK2. The exact spelling was very important, what a monster?

Well this sucks a little, I came back to this post to print some of the kaleidocycles above and the only images I could get loose from it were way too small to print right. I resized and when I made them original  size again they blew up, but now if you open them in another tab they print with the right detail. What ever, they aren`t much to look ya fold em up anyway. I`ll keep an eye on em. 

Buffalo Mao Rides Again

Native American mathematician Buffalo Mao is once again blazing the way to excellent math fun. The 27 arithmetic blocks in this set are accompanied by the latest offering from Mineral Comix. The booklets (one the size of the top of the cube-stacked block set, the other about 2 1/2 inches square, shirt pocket-sized) come in the box with the blocks . There are twelve kinds of blocks and 36 math symbols in this set. Even with no suggestions of games or activities the 36 pages of definitions and somewhat crazed illustrations still manage to evoke a somewhat arithmeticklish worldview.

I mentioned to Kevin that a dove tailed box would be cool, but when I tried to thumbnail the pieces, oy! Later I was trying to use a free UV mapper to wrap peel patterns around some obj blocks. This was much more challenging than all the tutorials suggested. After I fooled around with this for a couple of hours the idea of dovetails seemed much more approachable. I spent quite a while thumb-nailing and then drawing each piece of the box. I used the miter-saw I already had, and improvised a vise (using boards screwed to my portable work-bench with long dry-wall screws). Getting through the dove-tails took several more hours of marking and sawing (while watching TV).











The box came together tight. I wedged it between wood scraps fastened to the bench and belt sanded it smooth, but a little too sharp to hold comfortably (out on the deck). After the belt sanding I considered the next step. Ease the edges of the box? Take it apart and soften all the edges? It fit so well I had to set it aside and think a bit. It was six inches by six inches by six inches and sorta looked like a big block, except for the edges. Maybe just bevel all the edges? Nah, I finally realized that it could be more than a box, it could be a blox!
This time it`s a "Fibonacci blox", only eleven to go eh? The "blox" the arithmetic blocks reside in is my third experiment in dovetails. My friend Kevin`s kids assembled it quickly (with only a minimum of hand wringing on my part).

"...and that anger is a blocked wish." No Really!

Ok, so Paul Vitti was talking to Primo Sadone at the time, and I don`t really do angry blocks. I still think Paul had a good thread going there for a second. The idea of a blocked wish, killer, I mean I knew you could block hats. Anyway it was a while before a block that really set off the quote, but the Kelly-Hamlin (with replacement Oop) is a hunk-o-wish that should be hard to stuff inna box.

Every block so far has been a wish as soon as it was penciled, and a drum roll till it was burned in. Lest you think I`ve taken these little miracles for granted, I have been stunned and a bit amazed that so many have turned out cool enough to save. I started figure blocks to relieve the grind of the arithmetic blocks. I used the reject blocks to experiment on. A few came out so cool that I had to fix them, and re-evaluate what a block could be. It was these early successes that got me draggin around a sack-o-blocks and a pencil, in case I found something cool to put on one.

Some begun with no plan, burned so well I was hesitant to add anything off the cuff to fill the empty faces. Then came the 17-Fish block followed by the Pin-Up block, an innocent enough wish that bit me a couple of places I`d rather not remember.

These weren't lonely for long. A big coffee-table book, "Visions Of The American West" inspired "The West" and the supplementary "Indian Tribal Art" series that began with a face per tribe on the first two. The series continued to open out with addition the of "The Olmec", a possibly too scary block including the were-jaguar mask and an altar support figure. The Escher-Cairo-Penrose tiling block was the first of a tiling series temporarily on hold, waiting for even cooler blocks to get outta the way.

Re-energized by the discovery that an inch-ana-half square fills up quick, I moved boldly into the second arithmetic-block set, sorta, about a third of the way through. What?, did somebody say pantograph? There`s a reason these things aren't everywhere. Granted, mine came out interesting. It took the better part of three days to get it going and required the making of templates (I used Gimp and a little Photo shop), several hours worth. It took too long to find it again, but here`s the instructions and pattern I used to make the pantograph pictured last post.


I liked a lot of the ones I found while trying to find this one again but this plan did produce a working model, and the plan called for yard-sticks. I used round head slotted 10-32 x 1-1/2 machine screws (I bought 10, used 5). I also got 12 extra nuts (stacked to make em lock, over and under) and 30 washers, galvanized like the rest. The total cost including the 3 yard-sticks was $6.33 at The Home Despot.

Pantographyville Next Stop

OK! I needed a break from the Gimp anyway. Well, the pantograph works like a champ. It required a bit of tinkering to get it and the image platform at the block-face level required for block imprinting, got it!

The rig took up allot of room on the table, cause it`s temporary I didn`t cut anything. I found stuff that added up to block-face and either clamped it or set rocks on it to keep it from sliding (the forces involved weren`t much).

The first experiment was with fonts for arithmetic blocks. They were sooo crisp, but tended to use the room allowed for figure stretching to fill the space less interestingly than hand drawn ones. This pointed out how highly accurate aspect-ratio was in the image transfers, so-what,eh?

On the first foray into Pantographyville our block spot-lights the genius of Walt Kelly and V T Hamlin particularly their strips "POGO" and "ALLEY OPP".





The force of the weight (usually my cell phone) on the pencil arm of the pantograph sometimes rolled the block out of the stage-blocks when working close to the edge. Even that small of a weight makes a tweakable pencil image of amazing accuracy. Notice,it`s a little tough picking out that left Oop face on Hamlin-Kelly-blocko2. Cause I`m erasing that crap. Well, I am. The other faces are looking cool enough to invest a burn in to see if they`re possible. Even with good hints from the pantograph, and a simple looking scene, I couldn't`t see any hint-o-Hamlin except the trippy bell-bottom leg. Good thing wood erases good .



Finding the small scenes that will burn and still reveal at least a hint of the artist being remembered is a weird and picky direction to go, but if it works it could open up a cool vein-o-blocks. I want to see Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec blocks, how about Henri Rousseau, or Edward Gorey, gnahhh, gnahhh, gnahhh!

Merry Arithmechristmas boy I like sayin that

The fraction block was`t looking as good as I wanted so I did another one. In case anybody`s counting, yeah yer being shorted one Indian`s O Tha West block. Instead here`s a tease fom the Olmec (aprox. 1400BCE to 400BCE) block so far it`s still in pencil, but it`s fun pencil.

This post includes the two cube root blocks, the two fraction blocks and the first of two varios tribes indian blocks. Unfortunatly I didn`t get all the indian tribes named on their style faces. The research I did was image oriented, tilted at first toward diversity, then more toward a celebration of their cultural richness. I did this research at the public library, and unfortunatly didn`t get tribal origins pinned down on the first few faces. I hope to remedy this eventually, and apologize if I stepped on any religios toes, as I am only a student of these cultures ( and a rookie at that).

On the mass production front, I`ve begun experiments with a pantograph.

It`s built outta yard-sticks from homedepot ($.61 each, took 3) from somewhat incomplete plans and partial instructions found on the web. In the first tests it produced much better reductions than enlargements, but so far I haven`t gotten it to mark on a block face yet. Hey, gimmie a minute, I`ll provide the links eventually (such as they are).

R0 H0 H02

Now see, there it is again. I wanted the headline to read Ro Ho Ho squared but I couldn`t even sneak up on it with a cut, paste, back door like (mañana) cut and pasted from Wictionary to get tha ~ to get over the n. Anyway I finally got the square root blocks done and three Roman numeral blocks. I even did tha-one with the XII and the IIX adajacent to each other, it felt pretty dumd though.

The plan for the next addition to the set is the two cube root blocks and the fraction block. This leaves room for the next two blocks in "The West" series to fill our the next five eh?

Ho Ho Ow, Damn that`s Hot!

Fa la la la hah! Props to Santa, man with all the soot, smoke, and hot ceramic
pipe, I couldn`t even get in the chimney, much less down it. Just as well, I guess, my best efforts at coming up with the 4 or 5 sets of arithmetic blocks I wanted to share with my favorite tiny humans are still well beyond my reach. When Niko first saw the arithmetic blocks he wanted to share them with Chloe and Madison`s cousins, but none of us has been successful making the shift into mass production necessary for this to happen.

But hey, tis the season, there is still hope for the hard-headed. I`m still working on the peels of the original Chloe/Madison set with a few picture blocks tossed in for spice. Today`s installment includes the odd, even, prime, the fibonacci, and the first of the three blocks in "The West" series.

The patterns seem to be getting better looking to me, but there`s way too many to go for me to go back and tweak up the first few yet. Well drag out yer round pointed scissors and yer glue stik. Set up the tv-tray table and go to cuttin anda foldin while watchin re-runs (you don`t need to watch em so close). Good luck, hope the picture matched tabs hide yer seams, they worked pretty well on the test block (da fish). Well, I got my five blocks to photograph and assemble into today`s peels, mañana.