October 13, 2013
Better out than in.
Last Saturday this guy was selling canvases of "spray art" from a Central Park sidewalk stall for 60 bucks each. He sold seven of them. [more inside]
Danger is his first name
Danger Mouse (previously), Count Duckula, and Victor and Hugo were three of the many very silly, very British cartoons created by the Manchester-based Cosgrove Hall animation studio. First airing in the 1980s and early '90s, each of the shows were chock-full of wordplay, bad puns, absurd humour, and general zaniness. The studio stopped making original shows after being sold off by its parent company in 1991, and eventually shut down in 2009. The BBC recently covered the history of Cosgrove Hall in a short article and a much longer 30-minute radio tribute by David Jason, voice of Danger Mouse himself (as well as Count Duckula, Hugo, and many other characters). [more inside]
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: explorer, shaman, proto-anthropologist
' "Discovery" is such a loaded term nowadays in American cultural studies that one dare not use it without immediately qualifying it as problematic and politically charged. We tend to prefer "invasion" or "dispossession" or "conquest" because those words, and their attendant categories, suggest a more accurate way to characterize early American exploration.... Homi Bhabha's theory of the "hybrid" colonial subject, and his focus on the production and maintenance of colonial power, has compelling implications for the relationship between European explorers and Native Americans in Cabeza de Vaca's 1542 discovery narrative La Relación. Several scholars have commented on Cabeza de Vaca's hybridity—the collision between his Spanish heritage and his acquisition of Native American culture—but none has discussed it in terms of the exercise of colonial power and its resultant ambiguities.' This is a verbose introduction to the interesting and complex life of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the four survivors of the 600-strong Narváez expedition, in the period of inland Spanish conquistadores. You could read more, or watch Cabeza de Vaca, the 1991 film that is "sometimes straightforward, sometimes pagaentlike and sometimes hallucinatory ... a road trip movie set in a time before there were roads."
There Must Be Something in the Water in Iceland
Icelandic band Árstíðir sings the hymn "Heyr himna smiður" a capella in a German train station, to beautiful effect. [more inside]
Contemporary poetry from around the world in English translation
Poetry International Rotterdam has contemporary poetry in English translation from all over the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, including countries as different as Argentina, China, Finland, Iran and Romania, in languages as unrelated as French, Malayalam and Zulu, as well as many poems originally in the English language. The poets range in age and stature from those barely over thirty to Nobel prize winners. There are also videos and audio recordings of poets reading, as well as articles about poetry.
Aging face transformation gifs
Young to old, gifs showing the transformation of age. One noticeable thing in all photos is the known ‘random fact’ that the ears and nose are 2 body parts that never stop growing and getting bigger – from birth to death. All on one page, where you can click the hand icon in the corner of the image and slide the bar back and forth manually. Video from dovga. [more inside]
Never Listen to the Hat
Ben Edlund, creator of the Tick and writer for Angel, Firefly, Supernatural, and most recently Revolution, has joined twitter. So far, he has used it for posting random doodles, mentioning myths he long held to be true, and other assorted thoughts. [more inside]
A Secret Life
In 1994, the Tampa Bay Times published a riveting story about Kenneth Hardcastle. One of Tampa Bay's civic elites, Hardcastle also had a burgeoning crack addiction and a fondness for underage prostitutes. [more inside]
Grumpy isn't a mean dwarf, but he's a pessimist and has little patience
Everything Is Terrible digs up a real find: highlights from a Disney suited character performer training tape from 1976!
The Bus.
Paul Kirchner's The Bus is a surreal gag strip that ran in Heavy Metal magazine in the early 80s. It can be bought as a book, but the book is out of print. Here it is on Imgur. Downright scrumptious, old-fashioned flavor with that 70s east-coast anomie vibe.
They call me Happy Pete/I came to this store to buy myself a treat
Selling is Service, Service is Selling - A Musical Training Video
Edit by 04882 joel backdoor
"How do you calculate the effect that demons have on property value?"
Does Satan worship lower a Las Vegas mansion's value? [latimes.com] How do you determine a price people might pay for such “stigmatized properties?” It’s simple, really. You call Randall Bell.
The Death of the Urdu Script
How the internet is killing the traditional nastaliq script form of Urdu, and how Windows 8 might save it.
A Genre of Surpassing Banality
The tornado did nothing to the sharks, sorry.
Twitter: @HardSciFiMovies imagines the plots of SF/F movies moving more in line with reality.... [via mefi projects]
If you put up posters in the right place, witnesses know.
London's Great Exodus.
Whittingham Hospital
Whittingham Hospital is a beautiful abandoned psychiatric hospital near Preston, Lancashire, England. It pioneered the use of EEGs in psychiatry, and was at one point the largest such hospital in the country (and second largest in Europe), with its own railway station, 500 acres of farmland, a water tower, theatre, brewery and butchers. Said to be haunted, and now slated for redevelopment into homes, you can now take a virtual tour, and read up on its history, with horrifying patient abuse, and a nurse convicted of manslaughter in the death of a patient.
Other duties will involve catching and eating the fish and crabs
Kevin Smith has been given the green light to shoot his next film, a horror movie about a man forced to dress up in a walrus suit by a sadistic tormentor. The film will be called 'Tusk'. Smith was inspired by a real life advert placed on Gumtree earlier this year in which a man who had befriended a walrus called Gregory while living on a remote island off Alaska (now heartbroken, having returned to the UK), offered free rent in his Queen's Park flat for anyone willing to wear a walrus suit for two hours a day. The advert was a prank by a Brighton performance poet. I am not making any of this up. [more inside]
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