Doogie Howser
Coudal reminded me that SNL, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, this past weekend was really fantastic.
Songsmith and David Lee Roth
Remember that vocal track of David Lee Roth that was floating around the internet a number of months ago? Well, somebody ran it through Songsmith and got this (via kottke).
From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years
Sadly, this will make a new generation read this intellectual tripe:
Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.
Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated “Atlas” as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.
the reporting has begun
Joe The War Correspondent’s first report.
I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for’em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer–and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers.
I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, “Well look at this atrocity,” well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.
Nigerian vegetable helmets
You’d think with a story like this there’d be a picture.
Motorcyclists in Nigeria have been wearing dried pumpkin shells on their heads to dodge a new law forcing them to wear helmets, authorities say.
Road safety officials said calabash-wearers would be prosecuted.
The dried pumpkins are usually used to carry water.
Kano Federal Road Safety Commission commander Yusuf Garba told the BBC they were taking a hard line with people found using the improvised helmets.
“We are impounding their bikes and want to take them to court so they can explain why they think wearing a calabash is good enough for their safety,” he said.
Most of the calabash wearing offenders are motorcycle-taxi drivers called achaba in northern Nigeria and okada in the south. Okada is from the name of a now defunct ex-state governor’s airline, and
Achaba comes from a Hausa phrase meaning “double enjoyment”, referring to taxi drivers being paid for being close to women passengers.
Not only are the achaba / okada wearing the dried pumpkins because they are cheaper than helmets (and sometimes passengers steal them), but wearing real helmets causes them to lose passengers worried about dark magic.
“Some people can put juju inside the helmets and when they are worn the victim can either lose consciousness or be struck dumb,” passenger Kolawole Aremu told the Daily Trust newspaper.
Somali Pirates’ Suicides Confound Naval Forces
An international flotilla of warships has gathered to put an end to the cutthroats’ high-spirited shenanigans but has so far failed to make much impression on the maritime hijackings.
American, British, French, German, Indian, Russian, and Chinese warships are among the naval forces that have assembled to stop the pirates’ self-destructive tendencies, but with limited effect.
“If saving these poor scoundrels from themselves means losing few million tons of freight,” said Canadian Navy Vice Admiral Bruce Allen Haye, “then that’s just a small price we’re willing to pay again and again and again.”
Another pre-Clusterflockstock get together:
Danny and I are visiting Tracy and Bobbi Hinshaw this coming Friday. Can I carry up anything y’all can’t deliver on c’flock you’d like to send up to Tracy? (Cindy, I’ve already printed up a big “Fuck you, Tracy” printed in Comic Sans on 8.5×11 to bring.)
Jesus is watching you.
I guess we all have events in our life that change our outlook and the way we do things for ever. This is my pivotal image and as it happens, still the image that gives me the most pleasure when I look at it. Taken on my last trip to the states in 2002. Taken near Farmington, NM.
There is a bit of a story to it which drives home the rule I apply now . . . if you think it might be a good shot, for god’s sake take it. Anyhow, we left our motel and I saw this vision of beauty and mentioned to Jan that it might make a good shot . . . she agreed but I seemed to think we had a schedule and so carried on for 5 minutes when I repeated the same words . . . she agreed and said, Yeah, you should have taken it . . . on I drive for another 5. Then spout up again. Jan says, You wanna take it go back . . . nah, too far now . . . 5 minutes . . . hell, yes, I’ll go back. By now we are on a highway with a central crash barrier, so I can’t bloody turn around. 15 minutes until I find an exit . . . pretty much a 30-minute drive back. Picture taken.
From that day on, if the notion passes through my head that anything might work photographically, I stop. Film is cheap, digital is free. To ignore could mean a lifetime of regret.
I’ll apologise for the quality of the image. I had to scan a glossy resin print.
Warhol and Spielberg
via Panopticist
Dear Clusterflock
Do you have a favourite piece of music, probably a single release that falls way outside your normal musical taste? A tune that you are almost embarassed to tell people about, one that always surprises them. You probably don’t own it and yet whenever you hear it, you love it.
Perhaps it makes you cry, laugh, dance or all three.
Vintage Ads
via ze
No Insanity In Texas
HOUSTON — A Texas death row inmate with a history of mental problems pulled out his only good eye, authorities said Friday.
Andre Thomas told officers he ate it.
Thomas, 25, was arrested for the fatal stabbings of his estranged wife, their young son and her 13-month-old daughter in March 2004. Their hearts also had been ripped out. He was convicted and condemned for the infant’s death.
While in the Grayson County Jail in Sherman, Thomas similarly had plucked out his right eye before his trial later in 2004. A judge subsequently ruled he was competent to stand trial.
A death-row officer at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found Thomas in his cell with blood on his face and had him taken to the unit infirmary.
“”Thomas said he pulled out his eye and subsequently ingested it,” agency spokesman Jason Clark said Friday.
See the whole story here.
There are two things that really get to me about this. One is: people who have no conception of what mental illness is and believe that punishment is the best remedy for it. The other is language such as “subsequently ingested,” which has behind it a perversion of the need for exactness in our use of language. It makes lofty vocabulary do the insulating work of the passive voice. What is needed here is the most simple language. They need to say: We are going to kill a person who has no sense of horror–unless that’s all he has. Okay there’s one other thing that bothers me: Thomas probably got this idea from the “Good Book,” which was most likely the only book they would let him have on death row. But of course if he could read or listen to the book being read to him, why wouldn’t he hear exactly what a god was asking him to do?
Another contribution
from Miss Clack:
“Once self-supported by conscience, once embarked on a career of manifest usefulness, the true Christian never yields. Neither public nor private influences produce the slightest effect on us, when we have once got our mission. Taxation may be the consequence of a mission; riots may be the consequence of a mission; wars may be the consequence of a mission: we go on with our work, irrespective of every human consideration which moves the world outside us. We are above reason; we are beyond ridicule; we see with nobody’s eyes, we hear with nobody’s ears, we feel with nobody’s hearts, but our own. Glorious, glorious privilege! And how is it earned? Ah, my friends, you may spare yourselves the useless inquiry! We are the only people who can earn it–for we are the only people who are always right.”
(p. 227, The Moonstone, Oxford World’s Classics edition 1999)
(Miss Clack is a version of mid-19th century English evangelicalism.)
Maybe Cindy
will forgive me for “You Sexy Thing” if she takes a look at this.
Vollmann Drawings
I have signed first editions of ten different books by William T. Vollmann, and several of them have drawings that he added when he signed them. This one–a copy of Butterfly Stories–contains my favorite drawing.
Photochrom Travel Views: Norway, Sweden, and Denmark
Folgefond Glacier, Hardanger Fjord, Norway. Between ca. 1890 and ca. 1900. Detroit, Michigan: Detroit Publishing Company, 1905. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
The Library of Congress is posting travel views from its Photochrom Print Collection on Flickr, starting in northern Europe with 169 views of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. These are ink-based photolithographs (photomechanicals), and their heyday ranged from the 1980s to the 1910s.
(Via Heather Champ on Flickr Blog)
dear clusterflock
What do you hate most about people?
Late last night
I bought Johann Johannsson’s IBM 1401: A User’s Manual ($4.95 as an Amazon mp3 download). At times it reminds me of Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3.
A Pleasure Dome of the Driftless Region
A little touch of Vegas in the Midwestern night.
Splinterwoman!
Yesterday my index finger was sore because of an embedded splinter, so I exhaled slowly and squeezed the tip of my finger. The idea was to force the splinter out just far enough that I could remove it with a pair of tweezers without making an incision.
But that splinter just shot out of my fingertip like a projectile! Was that cool, or what?
I was hoping to save the splinter and maybe hawk it as a miraculous relic, kind of like a piece of the True Cross, but I went and lost the thing.
Still, it felt exhilarating to fire a splinter out of the tip of my finger. And I got to thinking, What a cool super-power that would be — to be able to fire splinters out of my fingertips.
Splinterwoman!
My Favorite Gorey Book, Translated Into Spanish
Photos of oil stains–Tom Waits
I put a link to this in a comment, but then decided to bring it up front. I bought the Winter 2005 issue of Zoetrope, All-Story when it came out, and the Waits pictures have made me hold onto it. See his notes on design here.
The Moonstone (1868), Wilkie Collins
“I sat down in the hall to wait for my answer–and, having always a few tracts in my bag, I selected one which proved to be quite providentially applicable to the person who answered the door. The hall was dirty, and the chair was hard; but the blessed consciousness of returning good for evil raised me quite above any trifling considerations of that kind. The tract was one of a series addressed to young women on the sinfulness of dress. In style it was devoutly familiar. Its title was, ‘A Word With You On Your Cap-Ribbons.’
Soul Coughing – True Dreams of Wichita
The Architect’s Brother: Photographs by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison
Selections from an exhibit now at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
Pollenation
Flying Lesson
These aren’t digitally-manipulated images. From the exhibit guide:
[T]he ParkeHarrisons printed their photographs from large paper negatives made by cutting and pasting a variety of images together. The underlying mechanics of this technique–including the seams between individual images–are carefully painted out in the negative. A photographic print is then made, which is often painted with a layer of varnish or beeswax. This genuinely original technique, combined with their elaborate process of set construction, crosses many creative boundaries. The result is a fascinating hybrid of sculpture, performance, painting and photography.
More below, and some links
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