We are made of star stuff
Sarah Palin visits Canada
“Believe it or not — this was in the ’60s — we used to hustle on over the border for healthcare that we would receive in Whitehorse,” she told the crowd.
“I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing, and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn’t that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting healthcare from Canada?”
Yes, actually, that is ironic.
Trailer for El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky. 1970)
The strangest movie I’d recommend?
Allen Klein presents an ABKCO Film.
“Bad pinhole,” she said.
Fuji 200 C-41 developed in expired Fomadon LQN for 10 minutes. Presoaked and rinsed in water.
“Why do I keep trying?” my Flickr friend asked. ” I just can’t make myself stop wasting film on this whole pinhole thing.”
The ensuing conversation is a long one, I warn you, but it’s a good one. You might enjoy reading it even if you’re not into the whole pinhole thing. People talk about what constitutes waste, about learning by experimenting, about what film is made of, about how to save money on food, about pinhole cameras — and about paranormal phenomena.
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the first legal male prostitute
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
Congratulations.
(via marginal revolution)
Heavy Metal magazine, January 1978
Holiday Jewelry Commercials in Need of New Copy
Diamond Dick opens the little box; she shows the weakness he likes and reaches for him, leading with the puppies he bought for her last year–and the recession is over.
Captions?
violation
The Mesquite ISD — yes, that’s Texas — has outlawed skinny jeans.
“We don’t allow striped shirts or check shirts,” said Laura Jobe, a district spokeswoman. “There are certain types of clothes that are not acceptable dress style.”
For Andrew
“Of course from one point of view she was right about the Church, which grew so far, almost at once, from anything which can have been intended, and became so blood-stained and persecuting and cruel and war-like and made small and trivial things so important, and tried to exclude everything not done in a certain way and by certain people, and stamped out heresies with such cruelty and rage. And this failure of the Christian Church, of every branch of it in every country, is one of the saddest things that has happened in all the world. But it is what happens when a magnificent idea has to be worked out by human beings who do not understand much of it but interpret it in their own way and think they are guided by God, whom they have not yet grasped. And yet they had grasped something, so that the Church has always had great magnificence and much courage, and people have died for it in agony, which is supposed to balance all the other people who have had to die in agony because they did not accept it, and it has flowered up in learning and culture and beauty and art, to set against its darkness and incivility and obscurantism and barbarity and nonsense, and it has produced saints and martyrs and kindness and goodness, though these have also occurred freely outside it, and it is a wonderful and most extraordinary pageant of contradictions, and I, at least, want to be inside it, though it is foolishness to most of my friends.”
Rose Macauley, The Towers of Trebizond.
Overheard
some years ago at the National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago):
“We wrote letters to the dead!”
Happy Hallowe’en!
I may have posted this before, but you need it again, especially tonight.
Look Around You
dear clusterflock
What song did you wake up singing?
2012
I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff.
Overheard
“Do you guys sell wall-mounted bottle openers?”
I hear Alberta looks much like this.
Ra Addresses the Youth
Oakland, California. 1972.
From Space Is the Place (1974). Directed by John Coney. Featuring Sun Ra, Ray Johnson, Christopher Brooks, The Intergalactic Myth-Science Solar Arkestra with June Tyson, John Gilmore, Marshall Allen. (Reissued in a revised edition on DVD in 2003. The edition on VHS presents the film as released in 1974. This clip appears to be from the revised DVD edition.)
Sun Ra Meets Napoleon
Over the winter of 2004-2005, the Philadelphia-based Slought Foundation sponsored an exhibition titled “Sun Ra Meets Napoleon: Fragments of the Alter-Future”. In conjunction with the exhibition, a 1990 recording of Sun Ra in conversation with jazz critic Francis Davis was released.
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John Frum Day
A cargo cult on the island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu celebrates John Frum Day every February 15th. The Smithsonian gives some context:
This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”
Magic Missile, Y’all
For all of your spell casting needs.
from the comments
Cece:
Think I’m spooky? How about these gems:
“Passengers and crew on Eastern Airlines’ L-1011 fleet of jets during 1973 and 1974 see, hear, and speak to solid looking apparitions of two crew members, Captain Bob Loft and Second Officer Don Repo, who died soon after Eastern Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades. The reports cease in mid-1974, when the airline removes all salvaged parts of Flight 401 that had been installed in sister ships of its L-1011 fleet.”
It covers the whole gamut including the odd things animals do. Shelia talked about false cats. The book cites a husband and wife who each saw a medium-sized house cat in their new home racing around. It would dart into rooms, sit by the refrigerator, then vanish. A mother and daughter were having dinner and became aware of a large white cat under the table. They stood up and pulled back a chair and the cat walked out and down a hallway, stopped, looked at the women and dematerialized. A year later the same white cat appeared when they were visiting a relative. It walked in front of them and then dissolved from view.
One man woke from a nightmare about drowning, then had a second dream involving his dog, who was lying in water. The dog’s body was later found, having been hit by a train while on a bridge that crossed over water. Like my friend’s dream.
The book also talks about people known for walking into rooms and electrical things malfunction. These people can’t wear quartz watches because they always stop. Ahem. Well, the electrical things don’t seem to malfunction anymore, at least. Most of the time.
My guiding light
henceforth shall be this vision conjured forth by Deron: embrace the oh my fucking god.
A few folks
seem to like this photo.
Everything You Need to Know
Figurine. Calcite. Circa 10,000 BCE. (Mesolithic.) Found/acquired: Ain Sakhri. Small cave in the Wadi Khareitoun, south-east of Bethlehem in the Judean Desert.
A clustercommenter introduced me to this Mesolithic figurine, now held by the British Museum. I thought it might get buried in the great midden-heap of commentary, so I reckoned I’d bring it to the surface.
“Awesome and humbling,” says the commenter. I concur.
View from the ISS
Roads and circular fields in the desert in Egypt.