From Smarts to Arts

I started out the new year yesterday with a corollary to a piece I posted last year about smarts (I gave you the wrong url for it — right o­ne is http://www.theconversation.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=176), and am following it up today with a matching piece to a post from last year about arts: illusions o­n sidewalks are joined now by illusions o­n trucks. These came from a contest in Germany “sponsored by an outfit that rents out advertising space o­n the sides of trucks,” and if you want to know more you can read all about it here: http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/truckart.asp#photo. (For a bit of practicality in this post, note that this url is from the site where I check out whether questionable things that come to me in email, that I might even be tempted to pass along, are for real: http://snopes.com.) Human ingenuity is so beyond the beyond that mindbenders like this somehow give me hope for how things in the world might not forever be as bad as they are now. (PS: The last design won.)