Hangin’ out in outer space

I just love this picture of an astronaut on the Space Station hanging out, listening to some tunes and looking out the window at the entire freaking Earth.

Maybe I’m wrong: he might be performing about 16 experiments at once in this photo. But I’d like to think he’s just taking a break and enjoying the fruits of his labor.

Also, check out all those bolts on the window, and that looks like at least a quadruple seal. No leaks in here, no sir.

It makes you wonder. Surely, there’s got to be some leakage, and they have to factor for that when they’re building it. I wonder what the allowable leakage rate is? I tried googling it, but all I got was this page about a Freon leak on board, which was scary enough to put me off for the rest of the night.
(via APOD.)

The temptations of Pandora

I was checking in on Ffffound! and I saw this incredible still from the German movie Pandora’s Box, made in 1929.

I have to say, I had a serious craving for a cigarette when I saw this picture. German women smoking in period films can make you crave a cigarette even if you’ve never smoked.

Luckily, I’ve found that the best way to quit smoking is not to have any cigarettes laying around, so I don’t.

But I still think of myself as being a smoker who just hasn’t had one lately, as opposed to being an ex-smoker.

Village Voice fires Nat Hentoff

Holy crap! Isn’t that like the Catholic church firing the pope or something?

I used to read the Village Voice religiously, soaking in the idea of a boho New York that I, as a west coast Canadian, could only dream of. And Nat Hentoff - hired by the paper in 1958, for cryin’ out loud! - was utterly symbolic of why I read it.

Now, I haven’t read it in over a decade, and I know it’s been going through some hard times, but this just seems like ripping the soul out of a once-proud institution.
(via Gawker.)

The Dishmaster Imperial

When we bought our house about five years ago, the original appliances were still in the basement: the clothes dryer was a Kelvinator and the big freezer was a Ben-Hur (of all things). Both were well north of 30 years old, and I fell in love with the ornate chrome (steel?) logos on the front of them. The washer and dryer are long gone, and I kick myself to this day for not prying that gorgeous Kelvinator plaque off the front of the dryer on its way out the door. Ben-Hur is still faithfully freezing our food and when the day comes, I will make a point of saving his logo, although it’s not quite as beautiful.

Which brings us to the incredible Dishmaster Imperial. It’s billed as the ideal solution for families whose kitchen is too small for an electric dishwasher though I’m not sure why, as it seems to be little more than an elaborate soap dispenser. However, another line of copy says it’s “Ideal for husbands who hate to do dishes,” and I can certainly buy into that, as I could stare at this thing all day, while dreamily washing pots and pans.
(via Dinosaurs and Robots.)

Great song, stupid video

Basically, Neil Finn, Tim Finn, Crowded House, Split Enz, whatever; it’s all good. Even this awful pirate-themed video can’t diminish the goodness.

We need a loaf of bread

People in Vancouver are kind of in shock about what just happened to them, and that they survived. There’s a certain undeserved perkiness in the air.

On a related note, I drove to work today and the worst part of the commute was my own driveway. Who’s gonna clear that for me, huh? Oh, yeah. The Melt Patrol.

There’s a certain joy in having all-wheel drive. Once just one of your tires catches some good pavement, you can haul yourself into position like nobody’s business. It’s awesome.
(Ffff!)

Foreign correspondent

One of my longest-serving friends is currently the print pool reporter for CanWest/Global in Kandahar City, Afghanistan. She’s blogging about her experiences here. I’m proud to say I’ve known and worked with Darah since she started reporting.

I ganked the above picture off her Facebook page: it’s the mosque at Kandahar University with a Canadian troop carrier parked outside. She says she’s no photographer, but this is a nice shot.

At one point in my life, I would have been green with envy at a colleague who went off to be a foreign correspondent. But now I realize that I like the nicer things in life: a daily shower; hanging out with my kids. I’m quite content to stay home, thanks, and let others be foreign correspondents on my behalf.

So the ultimate point of this post is: Good work, Darah. We know you’ll do us proud.

Talking to a stranger

Oh my. I forgot this ever happened.

Oh yeah, here’s a palate cleanser

White Denim, FTW.

Snowed in

We’ve been socked in since Christmas Eve here, but we have enough necessities to get by. In this scene from Christmas morning, the youngest and I load up on some Mandarin oranges prior to the present-opening main event. If I look rough, it’s because it’s about 6:45 a.m. and the coffee has yet to perk.

It was really all about him this year. At three years and three months, he’s just about the perfect age to have a kick-ass Christmas experience. And we made sure that he did.

This is getting ridiculous

Look, I know most of North America is in the grip of winter so I'm not looking for sympathy. I also recognize that I don’t live in Florida, where you can pick oranges off the trees in your backyard on December 24th.

But this is bloody ridiculous. Vancouver is not meant to have this kind of weather. Having lived in the mountains, I can handle it, but most cannot. And that is the worrisome part.

Joy to the world

I’m not sure how much posting I’m going to do over tonight and tomorrow, so here are my season’s greetings to my faithful readers. (Yes, there are a couple.) May the holidays bring you peace and joy.
(Video via Geekdad.)

The wild child

May 9, 1910. St. Louis, Missouri. “Johnnie Burns, a newsie who sells on Grand Avenue. 9 yrs old. Father says he is uncontrollable. Father also said his 4-year-old twins would be selling soon.” Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

I think one of the most remarkable things about subscribing to Shorpy (what? you don’t subscribe to Shorpy? [turns away]) is its depiction of the lives of children. It certainly bears no resemblance to what we have today. Childhood was reserved for the upper class, and if you ask me, it doesn’t really look like the rich children were having a blast.

But compare the idea of the Astor and Vanderbilt kids having their glum fun to the photographs by Lewis Wickes Hine, who specialized in pictures of child labor. For his subjects, as soon as they could reasonably be put to productive work, they were. And it was often dangerous, debilitating work. But still, with some of them, particularly the newsies, it looked like they might actually be having fun under the circumstances.

Some of Hine’s captions can just kill you: Young ruffian thinks he might be six years old, and he's doing some incredibly dangerous job. While smoking a pipe.

Get a hobby

This morning, while freezing my ass off for 45 minutes waiting for a bus, I noticed this tiny little propaganda poster, carefully taped to the wall of the bank fronting the bus stop. It’s like the author is coming from a sympathetic place; a valid cultural comment seems to be about to be made, and then it all veers off into incomprehensibility. Kinda like this blog!

Sorry for the iPhone fuzziness. This thing was only about 2" across. Also I was starting to freeze solid at this point, and frankly, I was dressed quite well for the weather. Standing still is a lot different than moving when it’s cold.

High over the desert

The Big Picture has a nice series on the life cycle of a space shuttle mission, including this stunner.

Also, if you haven’t already, check out The Big Picture’s year in review. Some amazing shots there.

9 Deaths of the Ninja

Don’t trouble yourself: I counted. There really are nine. Truth in advertising!
(v. O!MSE!)

Vintage Swiss design

And it’s for sale!

I may “please call” as they advise, to find out the price of some of these beauties, but I am also severely traumatized by my recent attempt to purchase some art.

The ultimate one-hit wonder?

Len were (are?) a band from Toronto who sampled a brief bit of “More, More, More” by the Andrea True Connection and turned it into one of the catchiest pop songs of 1999, “Steal My Sunshine.”

Turns out it’s damn hard to find an embeddable version; Sony/BMG has it pretty well locked down. But I have prevailed!

I originally went looking for it because abigvictory suggested it as one of the sunny songs that could help us through our current bout of cold and snow.

And I don’t want to sound like an overprivileged whiner, but we are not used to this sort of shitty winter weather in Vancouver, and we would like it to go away now.

On a related note, Vancouver’s transit system has become a marvel of technology since I last rode it. (Overprivileged!)

Seriously, call me George H.W. Bush, but I am astonished that the bus’s on-board computer system knows exactly where it is. Then I notice that it thinks it’s about seven blocks north of where it actually is, then about three blocks north, then suddenly it’s back on track. That’s some serious smart technology.

Put yourself in the picture.

Great spot for Amnesty. I’m even willing to grudgingly admire the music by REM, of whom I am otherwise utterly sick and tired.
(via MTLB.)

Cube art

I’m liking this site of seminal images rendered in Rubik’s Cubes. Interestingly Obviously, the images are more recognizable as thumbnails than in a larger format.
(via things.)

Small town values

I don’t think I’ve ever before posted here that I think Alex Pareene is a freakin’ genius, but it’s true, and here is his take on the latest Sarah Palin debacle:

This is a sad and not-at-all entertaining story of broke-ass bored trashy people in a miserable unhealthy little sprawling town using and selling drugs to briefly escape the dull pain of their shitty lives, and it would not be news that the mother of a high school dropout who's marrying some idiot girl he impregnated was arrested for using drugs except that at some point we were all instructed to admire these exalted Real Americans. The Republicans were sort of right, these people are representative of America's small towns, and that is why as a whole we decided to elect the smart, educated, well-off urbanite aspirational black couple from Chicago instead of the angry Vietnam veteran and the scary PTA moron-bitch with the fucked-up family.

Yes, yes, yes! Goddamn, Pareene!

Beer slander potential

Festisite has some user-generated stuff like the beer-logo thing here. Sadly, they only have three logos to play with, but who am I to criticize, as that is three more logos than I am offering for the public to customize.

Having said that, I prefer Tuborg to Heineken, and fermented cat urine to Corona.
(via Coudal.)

Christmas turkeys

“This illustration appeared in a magazine about 20 years ago. When he saw it, Gene said, ‘Thank God I had my hands above the blanket.’”

Ebert has just posted a lengthy but hilarious collection of his most scathing one-liners. If you like Roger Ebert, this is the sort of thing you live for.

The following sample is by no means the best; I just realized I was nearing the end and had to pluck something out of the feed:

“‘Pearl Harbor’ is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.”

Epic baseball poetry

I’ve never bothered with baseball-card bloggery before tonight, though I’m sure it’s a big deal.

But I am familiar with cornball American poetry, which is why this stands out. And I guess this was the guy’s final post, which makes it even more poignant. Superb images to illustrate his retirement.

(PS. I posted this late at night and didn’t credit anyone, and now I can’t remember who should get the link. If I stole this from you and you feel slighted, please let me know.)

Good old Homestar

I don’t think I’ve posted before about how much I love Homestar Runner. I mean, I’ve long since moved on (though I still think Strong Bad is awesome), but my kids are crazy for it. Stinkoman is archetypal in our house.

And it’s a perfect combination of innocence and cynicism, if you ask me. The younger kids enjoy it for its cartoonish graphics, while the older boy is starting to pick up on its more satirical nature. And I have yet to see it offer up anything that’s totally inappropriate for kids, which is extraordinarily rare, if you ask me.

So today, my boys discovered the “make your own cartoon” area, and one of them produced the above masterwork. I won’t bore you with what’s supposed to be going on, because it’s overly long and pretty nonsensical, but that final panel made me think of Pierre Trudeau and his infamous walk in the snow, where our Dear Leader looked to the heavens for guidance and received… nothing.

So he quit. Yeah, I don’t know either. Maybe he should have gone for a walk in the snow with the six-wheeled killer robot from panel #3.

But my wife and I got to talking about how amazing it is that three children, aged six, four and three, have access to a MacBook Pro, know how to use it, and do things like go to Homestar Runner and create their own comic strips. (Well, not so much the three-year-old, who has been banned from using computer or iPhone until he can keep his fingers out of his mouth. Which is actually a very powerful incentive.)

We live in pretty cool times.

Just try to stay off my six-year-old’s mailing list. (Unless you love emoticons.)

The snow’s back

We’re in the middle of a big snow event here in Vancouver. It’s actually a lot of fun, if you’re willing to be open to the possibilities…
(image from Made in England by Gentlemen.)

Classical Kisses

This is so nice: artist Ron English has applied KISS make-up to classical-style images. It really points to the artifice. Well done.
(via Coudal.)

Heh.

Do fast food places still do the stamp/card thing? Because god, that seems like a hassle now, collecting all the little stamps or having my card punched just so I could have a free pound of coffee or an extra slice of pizza every dozen-or-so weeks. But on the other hand, in our Current Economic Conditions©, a smart loyalty card or points program would seem to be a winner.

Of the zillion loyalty schemes I have joined over the past few years, only the one with our local grocery store has really saved us significant money. Other than that, there's the pet megastore, where every 13th bag of dog food is free, and the gas station, where I load up on petropoints which I never bother to redeem. Amazing how Esso has sucked me in with points that I never use.
(via @apelad, obvs.)

In which Ursula takes an arrow in the back

…then the archers obligingly wait until a new human shield comes along for our hero. Oh sorry, that was a spoiler.

But the best part is about the wall-climbing dog battling the semi-inflated octopus. Oh, sorry, that was another spoiler.

I think my favorite moment comes at about 4:05, in a random shot of the dog, who turns away from the non-stop action with a look of exquisite dog indifference. Oops, ultimate spoiler.
(via O!MSE!)

Thank you and good night from Space Giants

(via.)

Beggin’

Man, I was never a fan of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. But this re-mix by Pilooski goes a long way towards changing my mind. And the video’s kind of amazing as well.
(Thanks to Coudal.)

Animated Pac-Man Christmas Tree

Hard not to re-post this immediately, despite it being as dated as possible.
(via Super Punch.)

Don’t Tell It On the Mountain

Honestly, we’ll all be happier if you don’t.
(via Coudal. Haha!)

Non-threatening Ozzy

Definitive proof that none of us made good hair decisions in the 1980s. Was it the cocaine or what?
(via Murder Burger.)

Too late for Christmas?

Damn! This will only appreciate in value.
(The New Yorker via Your Monkey Called.)

What’s the Fubiz

I always see the name “Fubiz” in my Ffffound! feed, but tonight when I saw an image of a Toulouse Metro station entrance, another example of which is above, I decided to check out the source. And Fubiz is definitely a place for design and fun and inspiration.

It’s in French, if that’s a problem. I kind of like that, as it turns on some of my old brain cells that know French and I feel like I’m doing my brain a favor by doing a little French translation every morning. There is a button at the top left to get an English version of each page, and there’s probably a way to get an English page directly, but I’ll stick with the French for the time being.

The Mactini

I was laughing at this mock commercial by Peter Serafinowicz today when I realized he was also the man responsible for one of the most hilarious videos I have linked to in the last few months. Truly, the man is a comic genius and I must further explore his oeuvre on the YouTube.
(via Coudal.)

Yikes

That is one beautiful book cover, but it still creeps me out…
(via Ffff!)

Mr. Soul

This is quite a find, as it is the same variety show performance as the track on the Journey Through the Past soundtrack. I can tell by the corny joke Mr. Host makes about them owning Buffalo and half of Springfield.

And it’s of excellent quality, both sound- and image-wise.

This would have been lip-synched, right? Because it looks like Stills and Furay are goofing on the guitar solos, or maybe the cameraman is shooting the wrong guy. Can’t imagine why the bass player got shunted to shot-from-behind silhouette mode. Maybe it wasn’t Bruce Palmer. Neil and the host seem to make an overt point of acknowledging him.

My other reaction to this video: that is one snappy hat on Stills. Snappy snappy snappy.
(via Merlin Mann.)

The Cray twins

Wow, I am totally digging this picture of the Cray supercomputer at CERN in Geneva by photographer Lewis Baltz.

So much so that I sent an e-mail to the gallery, asking what they wanted for it. It’s virtually certain to be way out of my league, but there’s no harm in asking.
UPDATE: They’re asking $22,000 for it, which is a bit out of my price range, sadly.

I’ve always wondered why Crays were built to look like that. Is there a practical purpose? Because esthetically, they look like weird airport furniture or something.
(via Today’s Issue.)

Nuclear Slide Rules

Thought I had a rare find when I saw this first thing this morning, but then my heart sank over the course of the day as all the big blogs linked to it, but still:

Here’s a gorgeous set of slide rules and other calculators related to to the after-effects of nuclear blasts. As Mister Jalopy points out on Dinosaurs and Robots, consider the weirdness of a time when nuclear weapons were commonplace, but a simple electronic pocket calculator had yet to be invented.

Big City Life

Wow, I had never heard of Mattafix prior to tonight, but what an incredible song. I’d say it’s dance-hall meets trip-hop. The Egotist adds a few more influences.

Who cares, it’s friggin’ awesome. (He said, diving back into his fourth straight viewing.)

Shaq-A-Claus

One of the greatest feeds currently on Twitter is @THE_REAL_SHAQ. And yes, it really is him. I couldn’t care less about basketball, but I like Shaq and his happy, funny take on things.

Worth adding to your follows, or perhaps even joining Twitter to experience! Yes, I'm talking to you…
(reminded by @mtlb.)

Big sky

The Morning News has an interview with photographer Matthew Porter, who has several sweet shots of ’70s hot rods in mid-air, à la Bullitt, but this is the one that caught my eye.

“My wife would like that!”

I bet she would, buddy.
(via Why, That’s Delightful!)

Steve Holt!

I’ve been really laid out by this cold, including a nasty case of conjunctivitis, so I’m unlikely to blog much tonight. But I couldn’t not re-link to this.

My wife has a habit of spontaneously shouting out “Steve Holt!” and startling me to hilarious effect, so when I saw Steve on Springfield Punx, I couldn’t help laughing out loud.

Steve Holt!

Merry Microwave

One of the nice things about being on the periphery of the advertising industry is that I get to enjoy some of the creative work that goes into various agencies’ holiday greetings. It seems that for many agencies, making an innovative Christmas piece is more important than, you know, actually coming up with good ideas for paying clients.

I’m not saying AKQA, responsible for the above creative, is one of those shops. I’m just saying.
(Via DE.)

Hard times call for fresh thinking

“We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time.”

Wow. This is exactly what needs to happen again, of course. Not just for Apple, but for everyone.

(From a great Fortune interview with Jobs. via Sci-Fi Hi-Fi.)

Tell me what this video says to you

Alternate title: “I am having some weird cold, and this describes my mental state.”

Truly, I am messed up by a cold. If I had paid for this crazy high, I would be asking for my money back and totally getting my money’s worth at the same time right about now.

So here we have, as so many times before, a piece of music which I have owned and loved for several years, but it never occurred to me to go on the freakin’ Internet to see if it has a video. Which it does, and quite a brilliant one at that.

It’s surprising just how literal this video is. If something - no matter how weird - is sung about, it is also depicted, near as I can tell.

Based on an old Wayne & Shuster comedy routine called… Frontier Psychiatrist!

Invisible Terror

Yesterday, today and tomorrow had a piece on a Dutch artist, Martijn Hendriks, who downloads YouTube videos, erases people from the frames, then re-submits them to YouTube. Interesting effect; some more convincing than others, but worth looking at.

So I was following the links around when I realized I had already linked to Hendriks: he made the 12 Glowing Men video that I blogged about back in July.

But then I discovered what may be his best work yet; Hendriks has taken a copy of Hitchcock’s The Birds, a movie that totally traumatized me at a young age, and edited out all the birds. The result is, if anything, even more scary:

Immigration to the U.S.

I love this sort of graphic visualization of data. I had no idea that there were so many people emigrating from northern Saskatchewan to the States!
(via Neatorama.)

Downwind faster than the wind

Over on BoingBoing, they’ve been having a raging debate about whether you can build a wind-powered machine that can move faster than the wind that’s pushing it. I have to admit I haven’t been paying too much attention, though if you had asked me, I would have said that you probably can’t. (Conservation of energy and all that.)

However, this utterly delightful video starring a group of stuffed toys and a narrator with a charming accent has opened my eyes to the potential of gears and differentials, and now I think maybe there can be a wind-powered machine that can move faster than the wind.

But that ultimately violates the laws of physics, right? You can’t make more energy than is actually already there, waiting to be unleashed.
(Second science post in a row! What kind of nerd am I!)

The hole at the center of the galaxy

We live in amazing times, my friends. The fact that I can share with you a video of the 28 stars orbiting the black hole in the center of our galaxy should blow the minds of all concerned, but it doesn’t. Awesome.

I was mildly amused when Dr. J said that a star flirting in its orbit came within “five times the distance from Neptune to the sun.” That's about as informative as saying it’s a banana shy of a windmill squid.

Just for the record, Neptune is 4.5 million kilometers from the sun, so a five-way round trip would be 22.5 million kilometers. Hey! I drive about 11 km in each direction on my commute! I could be at Neptune in a million 200,000 days! Oh, wait, that's 2,700 540 years.
(Video found via APOD.)

Meta Hate for Blogger

I meant to post a few things tonight, but I ended up going in circles trying to upload a video to Blogger via both Safari and Firefox and not succeeding and what the hell is wrong with Blogger that it’s so shitty about uploading videos? Am now going to bed full of anti-Google bile.

Up our lives today

I find it hard to believe that out of all the viewers on YouTube, I am only the 785th person to have watched this.

It’s Lambchop, probably one of my five most-favorite bands, doing a killer version of Up With People, which would totally be on the top-10 list of my life, if I was forced to choose by a gun-toting maniac.

And it’s excellent quality, too, which is good because I was actually looking for a video for The Decline of Country and Western Civilization, because I think that might be the best song title ever, by anybody, but the only video I could find was baaaaad, man.

Money by N.A.S.A.

I’m not sure who N.A.S.A. is, but the video is by Shepard Fairey and David Byrne, Chuck D and Seu Jorge are all on board, so it must have some merit.

Brown States and Purple States

It’s hard to argue with the results of this election in the Ukraine: the east-west split is stark.
Via Strange Maps.

Soundproof

I am almost in drunken nostalgic tears watching this lengthy 8-minute tribute to Soundproof, Vancouver’s second and longest-serving local-access music video program.

Yes, there was a time when music videos were so unfamiliar that the only time you ever saw one was when the manager of your local cable provider’s mandatory public-service channel decided that airing weird punk rock music videos was better than just going dark for the night. So why not hand over a couple of hours to technicians Dave and Buzz, and let them go nuts?

This clip may be excruciatingly boring to anyone who’s not from Vancouver, but if you are, and of a certain age, there are a lot of familiar faces in there. (Doc Harris!)

I’m at a loss for words

I really have nothing to say about this video, other than “WOW.”
(via Pink Tentacle.)

Bl Helvetica Black

Oh my word.

Found in Mom’s Basement is a massive archive of vintage advertising goodness which is immediately going into the feed. Coudal found the one above and it’s so beautiful, I couldn’t help re-linking.

Don’t get drunk on the moon

(AdFreak.)

Hovering Multiple Kill Vehicle

Holy crap. Is this what we have come to? I won’t deny the coolness inherent in a hovering multiple kill vehicle, but somebody saw fit to actually build one? I guess I’m a bit behind in the fantasy armaments world…
(Danger Room.)

Tuskegee Airmen

Obama’s invited all the Tuskegee Airmen to the inner circles of the inauguration. That’s a classy move. Not that McCain wouldn’t have done it himself. But it’s still significant in the broader context, right?

“Hey, good-lookin’! We’ll be back to pick you up later!”

I love the Internet! Have I mentioned that lately?
(I am also in love with Francesco for finding this awesome souvenir of yesteryear. Seriously, I almost wept because I didn’t think of looking for this commercial before he did. Fuckin’ Francesco.)

“A Noble Spirit Embiggens the Smallest Man”

Holy cow, check out this interactive map of Springfield! I saw this several months ago, and it was impressive even then, but now it’s interactive. This is truly astounding, and the artist says he’s still not finished - it’s a work in progress!
(via Neatorama.)

Jim Lehrer is funny, who knew?

I think I may actually record this. In which case, a YouTube video on the Internet has convinced me to alter my television viewing, and that hasn’t happened before, I don’t think.
(via AdFreak.)

Two bridges

First, via Gunslinger, Edward Steichen’s cool shot of the George Washington Bridge.

Then, a dizzying National Geographic shot from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Hacking NASA

Apparently, it’s still pretty easy to do!

In 2004 a cyber-trespasser who poked around NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley caused a panicked technician to pull the plug on the facility's supercomputers to limit the loss of secure data. Two years later, and well after the protracted incident at the Kennedy Space Center, top NASA officials were tricked into opening a fake e-mail and clicking on an infected link that compromised computers at the agency's Washington headquarters.

This is to say nothing of the still-unknown individual who successfully ordered a satellite to change its orientation. Wow.
(Hard-to-read via Super Punch.)

Happy Tuesday!

Usually, Gunslinger posts pictures of Tuesday Weld on Fridays or whenever, so I have to make a real effort to remember to follow up when Tuesday comes around.

It turns out that Tuesday Weld appeared in both 77 Sunset Strip and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis! The fact that I think this is cool shows you just how old I really am…

Glue Society, again

While searching for info on the Obama portrait below, I found the Joy Engine site, which in itself is pretty cool, and now part of my RSS feed. Poking around on Joy Engine, I found another sweet ad by Glue Society for 42Below vodka. I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s pretty nice.

Superb Obama portrait

By Phil Fung. It’s beautiful.
(via Ffffound!)

Why do I not remember Night Music?

I was reading the Wall Street Journal’s review of Elvis Costello’s new chat ’n’ music TV show (it’s quite good, apparently) when the writer mentioned Night Music, a show which aired in the late ’80s and early ’90s on NBC. I have no recollection of it, and the only explanation I can offer is that I was living in the Canadian Rockies, usually without a TV and always without cable, for that period of time. So I just plain missed it.

What a shame. Programmed by Hal Willner and featuring Jools Holland and David Sanborn in the house band, it looks like it was a seriously cool show. (That’s Sanborn sporting the totally cheesy ’80s haircut in the clip above. And I must say, Ms. Harry has never looked more sultry.)

Here’s another one:


Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Bob Weir and Bongwater! Doing a Roky Erickson song! I am in awe…

Millennium Bridge, Gateshead

This shot of a marine crane makes me think of my dad in about six different ways. He loved to be out on the water; he was a professional engineer by trade; he would have loved the idea of hoisting this beautiful bridge up over the river Thames.

I just wish my dad, with his wide-ranging mind, had been around to have a crack at the internet as we know it now. He would have written the most interesting blog ever, I will guarantee you that small fact.

Mice and birds

This is the single most beautiful thing I have seen all week. It’s by Körner Union, but I think that might be the video company, and the band is Larytta(?) and the song is called Souvenir de Chine.

An utterly simple, yet beautifully singular idea. It takes just a matter of seconds for your brain to be tricked into believing there are eight times as many animals as there actually are in this video. And the symmetry of their motion just becomes even more mesmerizing once you’ve made that transition.
(via Your Monkey Called.)

Dynamic building facades

What looks like a fantastic collection on Oobject of buildings whose exteriors shift their shapes. This one is the first of twelve, and I look forward to checking out the other 11.

Being a contrarian, and having read in the past week that most revolving restaurants no longer revolve because the upkeep is too expensive, I have to wonder how a building like the one above would fare over the long term. In tough economic times, it might be preferable to not fix that broken motor on Window 12B?

What mankind is capable of doing to itself

This is a picture of a bridge in Hiroshima. The white smear leading away from the chalked-in shoeprints is all that remains of someone who was walking across the bridge one fateful morning.

Design Observer has the powerful story of a set of photographs of the after-effects of an atomic bomb; why they were originally suppressed; how they were thrown away and rescued not once but twice; and their significance to us today. Plus a dozen or so very striking images.
(via Coudal.)

This hurts us all as a nation

Guy dressed up as who-knows-what carries a poorly laid-out sign. DEMOCRACY is the big word here, buddy, literally as well as figuratively, so give it its own line. Put the "about" on the line above! And a lower-case “i”… what the hell?

Also, please, don’t be afraid to scrap a piece of paper and start again on another piece of paper. Unless you have only one piece of paper, in which case I totally feel for you, man.

Can’t embed the video; can’t even link directly to the video, which normally pisses me off about CTV, but this was the only image I wanted tonight, so I beat you there, CTV!

Justice for short furniture models!

(Sorry, I’m a bit rusty on the revolutionary rhetoric.)

This British furniture chain has been accused, with a certain amount of justification (it would seem), of using shorter actors, or even filming regular size people against a green screen and then shrinking them after the fact, to make their product seem bigger and more of a bargain. It seems sort of obvious if you watch the commercial with a bit of foreknowledge.

But as AdFreak points out, their bigger crime may be using a song by the execrable Nickelback. Sorry if you like them, but I just cannot stand that guy, Chad Kroeger. Did you know that’s not his real last name? He changed it from something even more forgettable.

Raptors AC320

I’m not even remotely interested in basketball, but I even I can see the beauty of this Air Canada AirBus custom-painted for the Toronto Raptors.
(Via CDR.)

Enjoy Hilarious “Monkey-Shines”

(Click for bigger; via Gunslinger.)

The last word

Canadians are probably pretty sick of Rick Mercer by this point (hey! I love the guy, but still!). But I give him full props for this.

Ouch! for a living!

via (@hotdogsladies.)

The 12-hour nap

We’ve got this weird bug going on with the kids where they have a hoarse voice but are still functional for a couple of days, then they suddenly crash… and sleep for the next 12 hours. And then they wake up fine. Geez.

The Nudger

Every single night, as I am preparing dinner for Rhea Red Helicopter, she gives me a gentle poke with her nose in the back of my knee. I’d say it was an accident; that she’s just brushing against me, and she probably thinks she’s fooling me, too, except that she does it every single night.

I am wise to the ways of black Labs. I used to have one who pretended he was sniffing the cat’s ass (a time-honored black Lab tradition) except that his “sniffs” would more or less launch the cat across the room. “What?” his eyes would say when I yelled at him. “I was just sniffing its ass!” Yeah, not so much, pal…

Anonymous no more

Astute readers will notice that I now go by my actual name and have a contact e-mail above and to the right. There’s just been a growing sense that it’s not too hard to figure out who I am. Most of my regulars already know, I’m on Twitter as myself, so what’s the point of keeping up the “3000” thing?

For the record, “Andy 3000” was my name in Rogue Market, one of those celebrity stock-market games that were so popular for a while in the mid-’90s. I was doing pretty well in it, too, until the site went black one day. That was about the time that Outkast was starting up, so I was pretty flattered that André 3000 decided to cop a variation on my name.

So I stuck with that until recently, when I had a conversation with Murderface about it, and I decided I should be less anonymous. I respect Murderface’s opinions. He may not know it, but I do.

I am going to continue to try to keep my wife and kids’ names anonymous, since this is my blog, and they shouldn’t have to suffer any collateral damage from my stupidity. I suppose a real Internet sleuth could figure it out and occasionally I do post a JPEG with somebody’s name in it, but really, if you’ve got a beef with the blog, it’s with me, so leave the missus and the sprogs out of it.

Also have a new header up top which I’m quite proud of! It’s taken from here. I’m especially digging the tall cowboy with his hands in his back pockets and the white socks. I’m thinking I might do like Jetpacks, and put him in a variety of different headers as my mood changes.

“The glitz of the canning district”

“Come for the weekend; stay for life!”

At first, I thought this was a real, if slightly sarcastic, tourism video about Milwaukee. But it just keeps getting weirder and weirder. So I dug around and apparently the Milwaukee Tourism Commission is actually some sort of strange “alternate reality game” by a company called Synydyne. There’s also a bizarre handbook up on Flickr, which I discovered via Coudal. It’s available for download here. To judge by the Flickr comments, there are people who are lot more up to speed and invested in this thing than I am.

All very strange. There’s a wiki about it here, and the countdown clock on the website suggests that something will happen at noon on January 16th. I’ll have to check back in then.

In the meantime, you really don’t have to know anything, other than the video is hilarious in a surreal way.

Want!

Delicious Industries is doing an advent calendar of design goodness, and today the feature is a company, Unicorn Kiosks, that restores and re-sells British phone booths and mailboxes.

Much as I’d like to ask for a BT phone box for Christmas, the least expensive one, which is unrestored, is £850, or about $1700, and the most expensive is about 10 times that! But man, does it look nice.

Mount Assmore

I have always wondered what was on the other side of that mountain! Up until now, I thought it was the house of that bad guy in North by Northwest.
(via Copyranter.)

Long Duration Love Affair

An incredible tribute to the Long Duration Exposure Facility.

Wu-Tang Financial

Where my money goes immediately.
(via Merlin Mann.)

Orson Welles, his chocolate bon bon, and the whoopsy waiter

Well, that about covers it, wouldn’t you say?
(Thanks once again, Gunslinger.)

Calculated Movements

Wow, this sure seems a lot older than 1985. But I think I usually give the ’80s more credit than they deserve.
(via Today’s Issue.)

More street art

Here’s an excellent image-heavy interview on Fecal Face about his visit with FAILE.

Auto Fail

Just in case you’re not familiar with David Friedman, this was his awesome take on the current news.

GEEV EET TO ME!

(I have nothing more to add. Except that this came from Gunslinger.)

Detective World

Who’s not going to do at least do a double-take on this one when standing in the supermarket aisle? Or maybe they were set aside for discreet customers. Probably the latter, now that I give it any thought. But still, ancient soft-core erotic fantasies are worth a mock.

On the other hand, what the hell is going on with her dress there? That is not natural.

SEX SLAYING! Lust Crazed! Ran Wild!
(via Gunslinger.)

A home for my avatar

I haven’t mentioned Lovely Listings lately, but she’s still cracking me up on a daily basis. Tonight’s listing seems a bit off. Can’t quite put my finger on why…

I hate to be hammering on the RSS thing in three consecutive posts, but honest to god, this blog alone is worth starting your own feed. And you could have just one subscription in it!

Deco trains

Okay, just added Pink Tentacle to my RSS feed and the first article that pops up is this image-rich wonder about decorated trains. Sweet!

“Pabo” is Korean for “idiot”

I may soon have to add Pink Tentacle to my RSS feed. I keep clicking through via third parties; may as well eliminate the middleman.

Here’s their excellent post about Japan’s 60 most popular words and phrases of 2008. Number 2 is Pabo, described as:

2. Dumb characters (obaka-kyara - おバカキャラ): “Dumb characters,” a.k.a. “dumb idols” (obaka-aidoru - おバカアイドル), are entertainers loved for their lack of brains. Nobody better embodies this phenomenon than clueless TV talents Mai Satoda, Suzanne and Yukina Kinoshita, who, as regular guests on Fuji TV’s “Quiz! Hexagon” trivia show, made a name for themselves by consistently displaying a stunning lack of basic knowledge.

The trio recently formed a musical group called “Pabo” (which means “idiot” in Korean) and released their first CD in September.

Real life beats art, every time.
(via lots of places, but Your Monkey Called for this particular one.)

Stop your messing around

I’m just getting around to reading the May 2008 edition of MOJO (my house is nothing but stacks of unread newspapers, magazines and books) and it has a superb feature on The Specials, who were one of my favourite bands of the post-punk era. That Jerry Dammers was quite the cat, and for the band to come roaring out of Coventry, of all places, was apparently some sort of feat.

I remember the times: there was a lot of musical diffraction going on after the initial blast of punk, and bands were taking it in all sorts of different directions. I was mildly intrigued by the fact that The Specials’ debut LP was produced by Elvis Costello, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to drop my money on what seemed to be a nostalgia act, based on an ancient proto-reggae style.

Of course, when I finally did buy the record, it changed my life. The Specials, The Selecter, Madness, The Beat, The Belle Starrs; holy crap, they were all awesome. To say nothing of it leading to my purchase of discs by ancient ska pioneers like The Skatalites and Prince Buster. Wow.

Metric

I’d forgotten about this gorgeous logo that branded Canada’s move from imperial weights and measures to the metric system.

I was in my mid-teens when the big shift took place, so to this day, my grasp of the world is a curious mix of imperial and metric. I can tell you right off the bat that I’m roughly two metres tall, but I’d have to sit down with pencil and paper to figure out how many kilograms I weigh.

When the switch to metric took place, the big joke was that the stoners would suddenly leap to the head of math class, because they already knew how many grams were in an ounce. (28.3, ahem!)

The only two countries that are still not on the metric system are the United States, and (wait for it)… North Korea!

Experimental kitchen model

Our second picture in this series of speculative designs addressing the postwar shortage of housing for mice. This model home has an open floorplan and open ceiling plan as well, with attic storage for giant cigars and oversize tins. Photo: Eric Schaal, Life archive.

The picture itself is no great shakes, but I thought the caption on Shorpy was funny.

Sex with Sun Ra

Every now and then, I find a link-fest that goes the extra mile. Today’s Issue certainly deserves that accolade.

Sgt Serge Gouin

I think Sgt Serge Gouin may have one of the sweeter jobs in the world: staff photographer to the Governor-General of Canada. But he’s got an eye as well: while trying to research the photographic evidence that Michaëlle Jean may be the sexiest head of state ever, I discovered this nice shot, from an opposite-of-vertiginous angle, of our beloved (and hott!) G-G on her way into Prague City Hall.

Photo Information:
Date: December 1, 2008
Photographer: Sgt Serge Gouin, Rideau Hall
Photo Number: GG2008-0420-006

Powers of 10

Although a tad on the long side for today’s modern fast-moving people, this 1977 short by the Eames brothers is well worth the watch. All the way out, then really far in!

It’s depressing that this film seems so antiquated; when it was released, I was still in the bloom of youth.

On the other hand, it’s heartening to realize how much we’ve advanced, because I’m still young, right? Right?
(via today and tomorrow.)

This is getting good

Wow, I had a couple of heated arguments at work today about this. Most people seem to be of the “all politicians are scum, so who cares” mentality, and I try to do my best to persuade them that not all politicians are self-serving jerks.

But others have completely bought into the Conservative rhetoric about how this is a “coup” and the coalition doesn’t have a mandate. Well, first, it’s not a coup; it’s parliament working as it’s meant to work: If a government fails a non-confidence vote, then the other parties are invited to try to form a government. As to the mandate, here we have a party that won 38% of the vote fighting the other three parties, which have a combined 62% of the vote. Who does the “mandate” truly reside with?

As Gordon Wilson so astutely put it today, Harper attempted a Hail Mary, but it was intercepted. Now he wants the ball back and a chance to try the play again. That ain’t how it works.

It had to start somewhere

1956. Edina, Minnesota. "Interior Garden Court with stairway to upper level in Southdale Regional Shopping Center, the first enclosed shopping mall." Color transparency by Grey Villet, Life magazine photo archive.

(via Shorpy.)

Scream and scream again

FromWell Medicated.
I doubt this was very good. But still, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing? Together in one movie? That’s gotta count for something…
(Ffff.)

Out of Season Alpine Hotels

Holy wow, are some of these pictures good. By Maximilian Haidacher. Also check out his Kieswerke I series. Those are some crazy-beautiful gravel-processing machines:
I like that great green set of stairs on the tower there on the left, but I love those three towers over on the right that look like ridiculous robots coming to attack with an overdose of irony. Here come our campy would-be overlords!
(v. things.)

Nice new branding

Okanagan Spring is one of several incredibly good small breweries that we are privileged to enjoy in these parts. A couple of months ago, they totally switched up their design, from this:

A pretty bold move, and I’m liking the sort of early-70s vibe. Especially the little hand-shaped graphic.

I meant to write about the design change when it happened, but then I got bogged down by the daunting challenge of taking a picture of a can of beer. And then I forgot about it altogether. So it took the Canadian Design Resource to remind me.

That’s where I discovered that the treatment was created by a local outfit called Subplot, and that they are also responsible for one of my favourite new re-brandings, for the Vancouver Aquarium:

I do love that fish. It replaced the orca logo when the lack of orcas became fairly obvious.
(Don’t get me started.)

Showdown in Ottawa

To all my American friends: this may seem like esoteric political dealings in a foreign land, but I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.

A mere seven weeks after achieving yet another minority government, those asshole Conservatives are going down, having overplayed their hand like the arrogant pricks that they are. I can’t wait to see the last of of smug morons like Baird, Flaherty, Clement and, especially, Harper.

Oh, I have no doubt that a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition, led by a lame-duck prime minister, is going to be a total freakshow, but if it gets Harper and his band of idiots out of power, I’d root for a tiny car full of clowns.

Go coalition! À bas to the neo-Bushist Conservatives!

2-D, Noodle, Russel & Murdoc

So, this evening, my six-year-old was wandering around the house chanting these weird phrases and I suddenly realized he was singing the lyrics to “Clint Eastwood” by Gorillaz. I have indoctrinated him well!

When I was his age, I was totally into Harry Belafonte because that’s what my dad was playing. So now it’s come full circle. I know at some point he will be into music that is totally offensive to my old-man ears, but for now, we are on the same wavelength.
(Sorry about the annotations in the video. Apparently, they can’t be turned off in the embed code, so you have to do it manually.)

Oh, the humanity!

I do love a good single-topic website, whether it’s weird real estate photos, horrible birthday cakes or suspicious vans.

So I’m delighted to add Truck Spills to my gallery. Nothing but pictures of truck accidents, and the cargo they spill onto the road! I was hoping to post a picture of the cruise missile spill, or possibly the ICBM, but the pictures were kind of boring, so here’s a massive beer spill in the Netherlands.
(via things.)