Author: Matt Maldre

I needed to type 99 exclamation points. Instead of holding down the key, I built a web app that does it for me.

Patrick Wentzel picked leaves off the red maple in his yard in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and gave them to his wife Brenda on Friday, October 2. Fifty-six years earlier, to the day, the two of them went on their first…

The art gallery I visit the most often is the cake section in my local grocery store (Jewel-Osco). I never miss their shows #GroceryStoreCakeGallery The current exhibit features a cake masterpiece inspired by Van Gogh or maybe Winslow Homer.

Lately I've been making art with aluminum foil, fallen leaves, fast-food bags, and worn-out baseball cards. Also: building a searchable archive of 25 years of writing, reviving a webcomic, and figuring out how to save snowballs for ten years.

My dream is shattered.

This magic leaf knows what I'm planning.

I went to McDonald’s for Monopoly. I ended up sitting outside, chair-dancing to INXS, folding a McDouble wrapper into an origami crane, watching the wind make the crane look alive, and biking home with a cup of hot tea in…

Turning the “Remember me” checkbox from websites into 2-inch magnets and placing them around Chicago.

Why I duct-taped a postcard to my shoe and mailed it to my alma mater for an art exhibit.

If you fold a baseball card into an origami crane, this is what it looks like. The origami is quite tiny. Using an X-Acto blade, I peeled a baseball card into two parts. I folded the front of the card…

When pressing leaves in a book, write a caption about the leaf on an envelope. Then put the leaf inside the envelope into the book. You'll press a story with the leaf.

Last Wednesday I celebrated 25 years of spudart.org. Today, on the actual anniversary, I totally forgot. I was busy leaving a treasure chest behind the abandoned shopping carts at Jewel.

My first blog post on spudart.org went up on September 28, 2001. It was called "Long Live Long Tables." I proposed that long cafeteria tables are better for conversation than little round ones. This Monday the blog turns 25, so…

Updated September 19, 2026, from Glen Ellyn, IL USA Website Here’s a screenshot of part of the gallery: Family Penciling Reading Baseball Online stuff Pondering Playing with ideas This now page gets updated monthly

Four sculptures on the New York Times list don't work until a stranger does something. Bend the aluminum. Take a candy. Eat the pad thai. Follow the instructions on the wall.

If you got one night on a boat with an underwater speaker to play music for orcas, what would you play?

The night I met Joseph Jachna, and the photo I didn't understand until this week.

The Art Institute of Chicago just released a beast of a Monet digital catalog with insanely high res zoom. You can see individual brushstrokes and even photomicrographs of the paint layers.

September 1 is World Letter Writing Day. Everybody gets letters on paper, so this year try aluminum foil and a Sharpie. Your friend will read your words with their own face behind them.

I thought someone had covered a beach rock with mosaic tiles just because. Then I learned the history behind this famous shark rock.

Oh the days when I owned squirearchy.com. Now the domain is available for anyone.

Jeddah Tower is only 3½ miles from an airport runway. That might be a problem.

I was searching my photos for: Mark Rothko. I was hoping to find that I photographed some close-up shots of his paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. But instead, Google Photos served me up a 2011 photo from my…

I am looking for a globe that spins exactly once every 23 hours and 56 minutes. I believe this is the only globe in the world that does this. And it's discontinued. #savetheearth

It was a fun and memorable day (back on November 20th). I have some fun little stories involving Root Beer Energy drink, busting the belt on my pants, making a graphic that maps out how many days I have left…

Commenting works again on spudart.org. Leave comments, lots of comments. I love comments.

Seven flags on my wish list: Macedonia, France, Chicago, Village of Glen Ellyn, Ireland, the EU, Finland. I own none of them. But I do own a printer.

Croquet has two personalities. One is pristine lawns, all-white clothes, and strict rules. The other is blasting your opponent's ball into the bushes and inventing rules like "no boundaries." Turns out The New Yorker has a connection to both.

A few mystery deer sculptures showed up in an Oregon roundabout. Then more appeared. Then googly eyes. Then a pink flamingo. It reminded me of a weird little toy installation that grew inside Tribune Tower back in 2002.

Turns out The Matrix's code isn't really made of sushi recipes. I fed it to Google Translate and got back an industrial parts catalog, three real cultures, and one day spa.

Tired of digging through a box of dead markers? I started dating my Sharpies with a dab of white-out on the end. Now I'll know exactly how old each one is.