Accused penis thieves captured.
Police in the Congo have arrested 13 individuals suspected of stealing, or
shrinking, their victims’ penises. It seems that the accused practitioners of
black magic were nabbed for their own protection. A dozen years ago, mobs killed
a group of men rumored to be penis snatchers. From Reuters:
Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa,
Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants.
They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of
fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.Purported
victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply
touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents
said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure…“But
when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell
you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent, (said Kinshasa’s
police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko.) To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if
you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.
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Inflatable tube man dances to Cream’s “Glad”
One of the best songs ever combined with one of the most whimsical roadside
advertising gimmicks equals a video of pure joy.
I drive a 12 year old Pontiac convertible to my place of work, so I
get quite the panoramic view. I was waiting for the light to change across from
a storage complex, when I noticed how the end of Cream’s “Glad” matched so
beautifully with the tube man on top of the storage complex’s roof as he waved
his pneumatic arms and whipped his pneumatic head back in an unbridled
expression of glee and air-filled pride.
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Kids’ book about pot: “It’s Just a Plant”
Sure enough, it’s a kid’s book about grass. But the book is actually
a lot more thoughtful than the provocative premise might seem to be at first
glance.“It’s Just a Plant” is a children’s book that takes a similar approach to sex
education in talking about another difficult topic. That is, the book explains
that marijuana can be a positive and healthy thing for adults, but it’s not for
children. In twenty years I haven’t seen anything quite like this in how it
approaches the topic.
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It Can’t All Be Brass, Dear
accompany the genre along its transmogrification from a form of fiction into
fashion, music, and ‘misapplied technology’.
“It was a time where art and
craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks
roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance
through wit, will and wile.”
Yet the clever adventurer may wish to ignore
the anemic, spluttering blog of this budding
contraption and enjoy the gilded gas-lit forum or go straight for the
high-mineral content of its sturdily constructed journal, the four extant issues
of which being entirely downloadable.
Riveting.
Brace for interviews with the likes of Michael Moorcock; art
from the likes of Molly
Crabapple (of Dr Sketchy’s fame) and
Colin Foran; as well as
contributions by the Catastrophone Orchestra
collective, inter alia.
Of course, they’re not alone; others have
refined the steampunk blog into a well-oiled engine: Brass Goggles; Aether Emporium; Voyages Extraordinaires;
and of course the Steampunk
Spectacular.
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How to catch and eat a rat
rat. Really. This is for if the bartending or the blacksmithing don’t work
out.
When the recession starts, you won’t be able to earn a living mixing daiquiris
anymore, and after that, during the depression, it’ll be tough to make it as a
blacksmith,
so when it gets really bad, this will give you the skills that the
times require.
Your instructor, Cody Lundin, is not unaware of the
humor in this, so I sense. But there’s still a hardcore element there, eh?
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Purgatory Iron Works
The folks at Purgatory
Iron Works are making a series of 10-minute how-to videos for beginning
blacksmiths. Current introductory topics include anvils, building a forge (part 2), and making charcoal (part 2); if there are
topics you’d particularly like to see, the host is taking requests.
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Cancer Cured?
Crazy, But good news…
What if we told you that a guy with no background
in science or medicine-not even a college degree-has come up with what may be
one of the most promising breakthroughs in cancer research in years?Well it’s true, and if you think it sounds improbable, consider this: he
did it with his wife’s pie pans and hot dogs.His name is John Kanzius,
and he’s a former businessman and radio technician who built a radio wave
machine that has cancer researchers so enthusiastic about its potential they’re
pouring money and effort into testing it out.Here’s the important part:
if clinical trials pan out-and there’s still a long way to go-the Kanzius
machine will zap cancer cells all through your body without the need for drugs
or surgery and without side effects. None at all. At least that’s the idea.
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Woman goes on YouTube to air divorce grievances
A woman who is divorcing a rich Broadway executive is airing her grievances on YouTube:
A New York woman involved in a divorce battle spilled
secrets about her husband, his family and their intimate life in a
“scary, new step” in user generated content, attorneys said.Tricia
Walsh-Smith can be watched on YouTube lashing out at her husband,
Broadway executive Philip Smith, in a teary and furious clip that has
been viewed more than 150,000 times.Local 6 reported that lawyers can’t think of another case like Smith’s and are calling it a “scary, new step.”
>During
the video, Walsh-Smith goes through their wedding album on camera,
accuses her husband of trying to evict her out of their apartment, and
even makes embarrassing claims about their intimate life.
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Tail-slapping rooftop dance nets charges in Saint John
Wow.. Nothing is funnier then the news. From CBC:
Saint John police spent an hour on Tuesday night trying get an intoxicated
man down from a rooftop.Police arrived at the home on Duke Street West to find a man dancing on the
roof.The man then took off his clothes and danced a bunny-hop across the roof
while slapping his buttocks, police said.The man was drinking out of a bucket he said contained tequila, police
said.Despite police efforts to convince the man to come down, the man remained on
the roof until a friend arrived and talked to him.He was arrested and charged with indecent exposure and causing a disturbance,
police said.Police are not releasing the man’s name.
He is expected to appear in court in Saint John on Wednesday.
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Go Bots!
Screw Transformers. GOBOTS hits the big screen this 4th of July, and the special effects are AMAZING! A first look at this glorious film is brought to you exclusively by Black20 Trailer Park.
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Rule of Thumb
The Rules of Thumb, a website created by Rules
of Thumb author Tom Parker, is off and running, with thousand of
user-submitted rules of thumb. Some are more useful than others, but they are
almost always interesting.
DIRECTION CONVEYS TIME AND EMOTION
In advertising, art and photography, the direction the subject is looking or the flow of the composition
can affect the tone of the image. Left is the past, right is the future, up is
positive, down is negative. For example: a subject looking up and to the right
is looking positively into the future. Submitted by: Jeremy Reid, Graphic
Designer, Belleville, Ontario, Canada
MAXIMUM VALUE OF A SERVICEThe value of any service is highest *before* the
service has been rendered.FINDING SMALL THINGS ON THE FLOOR
To find something very small that you have
dropped on the floor, lay a flashlight on the floor and rotate it. A small
object looks a lot bigger when it has a shadow too.WALKING WITH SMALL CHILDREN
When walking with small children who are falling
behind, the slower you walk, the slower they will walk, until they stop. If you
maintain your pace, they will keep up with you, albeit somewhat behind.
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Elephant Polo and other strange things
Elephant Polo.
Alf Leif Erickson is the Captain of the American Screw Tuskers Elephant
Polo team . Alf is a retired attorney and former law professor from
Florida. This alone doesn’t make much of a post, but, you guessed it,
there more, sometimes NSFW, inside…..
It seems that Alf retired to Bangkok and maintains a site called “Alf’s Balloons”, with a focus on, well, balloons, and of course corkscrews, and elephant polo.
Alf’s elephant polo team seems to consist entirely of transexuals (the riders, that is, not the elephants).
Don’t let the somewhat odd nature of the polo team throw you, because
it doesn’t really get strange (and, by the way, NSFW) until you begin
to explore the inner workings of Alf’s PatPong Corkscrew Club. This is no casual club, annual meetings are held, and the club, like, I assume, all corkscrew clubs, of course, its own balloon and meetings where the members sit naked on Alf’s lap.
Spend some time exploring Alf’s world.
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Four miles of yarn on a car
Timothy Klein gets art. I mean, he really gets it. And he likes cars. So when he decided to become an artist, he covered a 1967 Chrysler Imperial Crown luxury car with yarn. Correct, yarn. Then, Tim didn’t just show his car off to the local cruzers at the Dairy Queen. No. Tim took it to Artscape at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore in 2002, where he met other famous automotive artists like Harrod Blank and Chris Hubbard. He took it to the Outsider Art Fair in New York in 2003. Wherever he takes the Yarn Car, he documents the trips on his site.
He got featured in Reader’s Digest and “made Diane Sawyer giggle”. Tim will be in Houston on May 10 for the 2008 Art Car Parade. Don’t miss the yarn phone in the car.
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You’re a spared man, Charlie Brown
In 1943, over Allied bomb ravaged Germany, US pilot Charlie Brown‘s B-17 was badly damaged and straying further from friendly territory. Luftwaffe ace fighter pilot Franz Stigler pursued the bomber intending to shoot it down, but refrained when he saw the extent of the damage and directed Brown and his crew out of harm’s way. The two pilots were reunited 46 years later.
Herr Stigler passed away last month.
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“Eat these [bleeping] ribs . . . then tell me about [bleeping] Texas!”
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Software Easter Eggs
It’s a little heavy on the movie Easter Eggs but if you ever wanted to find some interesting stuff in your favorite software — this is a good place to start.
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Narcoleptic Cat
Boone gets snoozy when the desk light warms up his little brain too fast. This is his day job: Kitty Wigs!
Check out the excellent homage video.
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Limozeen show
Everyone’s favorite fictional band (no, not that one) plays an awesome live show – including such hits as Because, It’s Midnite and Trogdor.
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National Geographic on Biomimetics
This month’s National Geographic has a beautifully-written feature on
the state-of-the-art in biomimetics, the science and art of looking to
nature for design inspiration. The article is accompanied by
mind-blowing photographs, and fortunately the whole package is
available online, with video too. Seen here is an invention inspired by
the way burrs stuck to a dog’s fur… Velcro! From National Geographic:
A research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London
and at the University of Sydney, Parker is a leading proponent of
biomimetics–applying designs from nature to solve problems in
engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields. He has
investigated iridescence in butterflies and beetles and antireflective
coatings in moth eyes–studies that have led to brighter screens for
cellular phones and an anticounterfeiting technique so secret he can’t
say which company is behind it. He is working with Procter & Gamble
and Yves Saint Laurent to make cosmetics that mimic the natural sheen
of diatoms, and with the British Ministry of Defense to emulate their
water-repellent properties. He even draws inspiration from nature’s
past: On the eye of a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber he saw
in a museum in Warsaw, Poland, he noticed microscopic corrugations that
reduced light reflection. They are now being built into solar panels.Parker’s work is only a small part of an increasingly
vigorous, global biomimetics movement. Engineers in Bath, England, and
West Chester, Pennsylvania, are pondering the bumps on the leading
edges of humpback whale flukes to learn how to make airplane wings for
more agile flight. In Berlin, Germany, the fingerlike primary feathers
of raptors are inspiring engineers to develop wings that change shape
aloft to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. Architects in
Zimbabwe are studying how termites regulate temperature, humidity, and
airflow in their mounds in order to build more comfortable buildings,
while Japanese medical researchers are reducing the pain of an
injection by using hypodermic needles edged with tiny serrations, like
those on a mosquito’s proboscis, minimizing nerve stimulation.
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Discovering the Internet’s “black holes”
Katz-Bassett has been working on a project called Hubble, a system that
apparently is able to track what he refers to as information black
holes. These are situations where a path between two computers does
exist, but messages – a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing
e-mail – get lost along the way. Katz-Bassett has published a Hubble
map that enables users to monitor such black holes worldwide or simply
type in a network address to check its status.
To determine a network status, Hubble sends test messages “around
the world” to look for computers that can be reached from some but not
the entire Internet, a situation that is described as “partial
reachability”. Katz-Bassett said that short communication blips are
ignored. However, if a problem surfaces in two consecutive 15-minute
trials, it is listed as a “problem”. The research team found that more
than 7% of computers worldwide experienced this type of error at least
once during a three-week period in fall of 2007.
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The 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time
The fifty greatest comedy sketches of all time from Nerve and IFC. All with video. Some highlights: SNL’s consumer probe & word association; Mr. Show’s pretaped call-in show, Upright Citizens Brigade’s ass pennies, The State’s porcupine racetrack, lots of Monty Python, some classics, and the inevitable winning sketch.
There’s no more sure-fire way to kill something’s intrinsic comedic
value than to try to examine what makes it funny. The minute you start
thinking, you stop laughing. So why, then, have Nerve and IFC.com
devoted an enormous amount of time, manpower, monetary resources,
server space and posh catered lunches to the pursuit of ranking the
boob tube’s finest sketch comedy offerings?
In part, we’re here because magical new technology
(*coughYouTubecough*) allows us to do more than just pontificate for
paragraphs on end — now we can pontificate for paragraphs on end and
provide audiovisual evidence to back up those pontifications. We
provide the context, share our thoughts and feelings, and let you
commence with the guffawing and, naturally, the disagreeing. After all,
the comedy sketch — short, sweet, completely silly or shot through with
social commentary — worms its way into the public mind like nothing
else, and has easily made the leap to the web when other forms have
faltered.
Any list is bound by the limitations set on it — consciously and
unconsciously — by its creators: we kept our 50 selections to stuff
that’s appeared on television by choice, and to what’s appeared in
English out of necessity. One must also bear in mind the availability
of material; who knows what comedic treasures are lost to us because
they simply don’t exist anymore?
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Rube Goldberg-esque pool trick shot
If Rube Goldberg played pool, he’d set up trick shots like the gent in this video.
RobDurdle.com 
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