Your Japanese word of the week is...

"kumiawase" 組み合わせ which means combination/pairing.  I actually just picked this word up watching Best Motoring, an awesome monthly DVD-zine that has racing drivers testing new cars.  Less awesome is the fact that it's all in Japanese but that's ok, I persevere and get as much as I can out of it.  Like this new word.

But it actually turns out to work quite well because this week, I discovered Mike Stimpson and his site RedBubble.com, which specializes in Lego.

Most specifically, he's combined (see how I transitioned there?? heh) Lego with some of the most famous photographs in history to produce recreations, which you can find on his Flickr page.

To give you an idea of what he's done, here's an example that I'm sure everyone will recognize.

The key to making pictures work (as Stimpson so dutifully describes in his Flickr descriptions) is the lighting, which has to be done in such away as to reproduce the lighting found in the original.  Luckily, Stimpson usually provides a picture of the setup to show just how much thought goes into each shot.

In other news, congrats to all those who graded at PSWK's last grading of 2009!

Lastly, I hope everyone has a very happy holiday season and thanks for checking into the blog all this year =)