Ironies | Great Art!

• Paul Jacobs, 42, of South Hampshire, England, ordered a roll of bubble wrap from Amazon in November to protect his plants during a coming cold snap. Soon the box of bubble wrap arrived, protected by 100 feet of brown packing paper -- enough to cover his whole backyard, he told the Daily Mail. "At first I thought they'd sent me the wrong order because the box was so heavy," Jacobs said. He expects it will take two recycling collections to get rid of all the paper packaging. [Daily Mail, 11/21/2017]

• At the courthouse in the Belgian port city of Ostend, performance artist Mikes Poppe, 34, was hoping to make a statement on the weight of history when he chained his leg to a 3-ton block of Carrara marble on Nov. 10 and began slowly chipping himself free. The Straits Times reports that for 19 days, Poppe ate, slept and worked on the marble until curator Joanna De Vos ordered the chain cut "for practical reasons." "I don't see the fact that I was freed as a failure," Poppe told the Flemish-language Het Laatste Nieuws. "The act of getting free in itself was not the main goal," he added, although he admitted that doing so had been more difficult than he thought. "I really underestimated that block of marble." [Straits Times, 12/1/2017]