7/21/2005: Gerbil art

Oddly produced art and art produced by animals, this is an IotD natural. This woman, Sally Madge, is having this gerbil eat the book on purpose. The book is a 1933 edition of the New Illustrated Universal Reference Book.

full story

Sally says she's fascinated in the gerbil's "personal translation" of the book by choosing particular words and phrases.

When the book is completely transformed, the shredded paper will be turned into a new piece of artwork.

Okay.

cool gerbil. stupid woman.

I was so scared of where this could have gone.

I had to look anyway.

Ok, so this chick is a Brit which means in no way, shape or form did my tax money go to fund this. *Whew!*

Be careful with gerbils. You never know where they've been.
Sally to Gerbil: "You're gonna eat those words, rodent."
If she keeps the fecal material, she may wind up with a thesaurus.

Would have been more interesting if she'd put paint on its little feet and let it run around.

What a waste of a good book! - at 72 years old, doesn't it deserve a little more respect?

That book's probably older (and a great deal more interesting) then she is and yet she feeds it to that rat-thing! If she wanted to make a decent statement, why didn't she let it eat/cr*p on Hello,OK or any of the other rags that are degrading our society & brain washing our children?

Is it safe for the gerbil to eat all that paper with all that ink on it. I hope it digests it safely. I don't know much about gerbils we don't have them here in Oz, but they do look cute. :p

Welcome Bograt! The gerbil is probably enjoying the book, don't you think? I don't get Hello,OK around here. That's not like Hello Kitty is it? By the way, are you in London? I hope all's well with you and yours.

Shucks. I was sort of hoping for sculptures made out of gerbils. I was even thinking about what sort of substances one would use to affix them where they were needed, the color variations of individual gerbils used to effect a color pallette, gerbils of various ages/sizes needed to fit certain areas to bring out the desired look...

If you threw in some squirrels, chipmunks and other small, furry creatures, you could have mixed mammal media.

Is it me or does it look like a vulva? Or maybe the Madonna or wait Jesus Christ!

So all this time what my guinea pigs were doing was art. My one eats carrots like corn on the cob and all you have left is a little sliver...
I could make a mint!
The tan one is the artist--the black one has passed

can someone check the server's log file?

I wanna know Richard Gere's IP address.

Hello BigV

Hello & OK are trashy "celeb" mags for people with so little going on in their own lives that they have to waste them watching other peoples'!!!


I am indeed indeed in London - thankyou for your concern. Yet more bomb alerts & a palpable sense of fear on the Tube this morning. After years of IRA bombs, as Londoners we were relatively OK about 7/7, partly because we thought we'd had our attack after NY & Madrid, but there's a definite sense that we're in for the longhaul now.

The police did shoot a suspected bomber this morning, which was a bit shocking, so soon after yesterday's attacks!

Actually, the gerbil isn't EATING the paper...it's shredding it. I used to have a whole colony of gerbils and know their habits well. They shred paper and the like to make bedding for their nests.

brian, the little bit that i know about you + now knowing that you owned a colony of gerbils... nah, maybe i don't really want to know.

I had lots of gerbils too over the years I was a kid, and it was AMAZING how fast they would chew up a toilet paper or paper towel roll...I always wondered how come they never got cramps in their jaws like I would when I chewed gum too long.

Reminds me of a book I once saw where this person allowed cats to shred furniture on purpose and then anylized it as if the it were a piece of art and cat were an artist. As if the cat had a cognitive thought in it's little kitty head. You know what the cat was thinking when it was shredding the couch? Must....shred....couch....must...shred...couch...must...piss...on...couch...

I love cats... they taste like chicken.

I haven't thought of it in a while, but the previous comment reminded me of the Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man.