“I stole this book from the library ages ago…”
“Fourth grade” I say, watching them huddled together in the mirror.
“…one of those Marvin K. Redpost books. He kisses his elbow one day and when he wakes up the next morning he's a girl.”
“I meant to make you take it back but I bet we still have it.”
“My mom's cataloging fifteen years of gender-bending in one week.” She says, rolling her eyes.... “Seriously Mom, how did you NOT know?”
She will ask me this a hundred times. I will ask myself a hundred more and still never I didn't have a good answer then and I don't now. Perhaps we simply see what we expect to see and write off anything that doesn't fit into the little boxes we put people into. Or perhaps she'd learned to mask and over-correct, to hide so well that by the time those distinctions matter, I could not see her until she tore down that wall. I wish I'd known sooner.
Behind the Curtain (AKA OMG Marvin K. Redpost is a girl!) is one of the funnier excerpts from
The Complicated Geography of Alice, a memoir in progress.
posted by carsonb
on Nov 25, 2012 -
16 comments
"Over the years in animation, there have been a lot of great animators.
Ub Iwerks was one of those people. We know his work, but we don't necessarily know the man."
The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story (in 5 parts on DailyMotion:
1,
2,
3,
4, and
5) tells of the life of Ubbe Eert Iwerks, from the formation of the friendship with Walt Disney when they met at advertisement studio in Kansas City, their artistic collaborations and Ub's 20 years of animation, to Iwerk's technical creations that kept Disney animated pictures ahead of other studios.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Aug 31, 2012 -
14 comments
Celebrity chef Beppe Bigazzi upset viewers and his host with his recipe for "
cat casserole", and has been suspended from the
program [Italian]. Inhabitants of Northern Italy, particularly those of Vicenza, are still nicknamed "
magnagati" ('cat eaters') as a derogatory term in Venetian. Taking a clue from the Aboriginal population, cooking feral cats has even been proposed in
Alice Springs, Australia, to curb the out-of-control feral population.
[more inside]
posted by atomicmedia
on Mar 9, 2010 -
98 comments
The ALICE Collaboration is building a dedicated heavy-ion detector to exploit the unique physics potential of nucleus-nucleus interactions at
LHC energies. The aim is to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where the formation of a new phase of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, is expected. This website aims both at introducing non-initiates to the field of physics covered by ALICE and at
providing regular information on the evolution of the experiment, with detailed reports of its results and analysis.
posted by netbros
on Sep 18, 2008 -
18 comments
Skelewags - drawings from a delightful Burtonish/Goreyesque world, including some skewed takes on Carroll's
Alice.
posted by Wolfdog
on Feb 6, 2008 -
13 comments
As I'm
sure you all know, today would've been the 74th birthday of actor
Vic Tayback, best known as
everybody's favorite hairy, sweaty, ill-tempered (yet almost cuddly) diner chef on that wacky piece of 70's tv Americana
Alice (Remember when Mel called Vera "dingy"? Sitcom gold!). Kept busy for years as a character actor with constant tv guest spots on everything from "I Dream of Jeannie" to "Gunsmoke," Vic embraced job security when given an opportunity to expand one character in particular, Mel Sharples from Martin Scorcese's drama
"Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (starring Ellen Burstyn [she won an Oscar], Kris Kristofferson, Diane Ladd, Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster). Thanks to Vic, the character of Mel smoothly adapted from his dramatic origins into his new home of sit-com hi-larity... one of the rare attempts of that kind to succeed.
RIP Vic. Oh, and kiss my grits.
posted by miss lynnster
on Jan 6, 2005 -
22 comments
"When he can't get along with the real world, Wallace goes back to the only thing he has left: his computer. Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches conversations stream by on his screen. Thousands of people flock to his Web site every day from all over the world to talk to his creation, a robot called Alice. It is the best artificial-intelligence program on the planet, a program so eerily human that some mistake it for a real person. Richard Wallace has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does."
A fascinating article (NYT), how a beautiful and original mind survives in our corporate society with the help of "a daily cocktail of psychoactive drugs, including Topamax, an anti-epileptic that acts as a mood stabilizer, and Prozac. Marijuana, too -- most afternoons, he'll roll about four or five joints the size of his index finger."
posted by semmi
on Jul 9, 2002 -
18 comments
Curiouser and curiouser... They are talking of making a movie based on the new game, of which some of us enjoyed the recently released
demo. Since I thought the mood of the game was better than its playability (granted, I have yet to find a game whose playability satifies me), this could be pretty cool.
posted by rushmc
on Dec 7, 2000 -
0 comments
Alice demo (
Download, 78MB) has been released. Even if you're not big on video games you might want to give this one a try. *Requires a PC with 3D graphics accelerator and fast connection to download in sane amount of time.
posted by physics
on Dec 2, 2000 -
9 comments
