Hasta La Ideas

Google is doing its part to distract the country from the hurricane set to pummel its eastern flank. Today visitors to the web giant’s U.S. homepage are greeted with a Google Doodle honoring the late Bob Ross, born seventy years ago today. The fuzzy-haired host of PBS’s The Joy of Painting promised—in a soothing voice—that “All you need is the desire to make beautiful things happen on canvas.” His “wet-on-wet technique” armed amateurs with a two-inch brush and plenty of encouragement to daub snow-peaked mountains and “happy trees” onto canvases pre-soaked with liquid paint. “Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting,” Ross told The New York Times in 1991. “I really believe that if you practice enough you could paint the ‘Mona Lisa’ with a two-inch brush.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.