Club and Shield Bedside Table
James McAdam’s bedside table for the paranoid
converts into a club and shield in a matter of seconds!
Link
Posted on
Thursday, September 14, 2006 by CPC
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Condiment Packet Museum
The Internet has got everything, including an
online condiment packet museum with over 900 ketchup, mustard, relish, and
other condiment packets in their collection!
Link
Posted on
Wednesday, September 13, 2006 by CPC
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Japan Wins 2006
International Air Guitar Title
Competitors
from Australia, Austria, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Finland, United
States, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, and Great Britain met last week at the
11th International Air Guitar Championships in Oulu, Finland. Five finalists
faced off on September 8, 2006, against last year's champ, Michael "The
Destroyer" Heffels, and when the dust from the energetic air battles settled,
Ochi "Dainoji" Yosuke (click
to watch Yosuke's performance) from Japan was crowned the winner and will
receive a custom Flying Finn guitar and a Vox BM Special amp designed and
donated by Brian May (Queen).
Press release »
From
Modern Guitars Magazine
Posted on
Tuesday, September 12, 2006 by CPC
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The Dream and the
Curse
In Greil Marcus’s new book,
America goes on trial, and its artists are the judges.
By Devin McKinney |
American Prospect
9-11
is an absence in Greil Marcus’s The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and
the American Voice -- an absence that gives the book its structure, just
as in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 it was a black screen and montage of
screams, and in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center an engulfing shadow. It’s
the thing that isn’t shown, that cannot be shown, but which draws in and
defines all that is shown. In those two movies, the attack is a physical
event; in The Shape of Things to Come it is a miasma, red death over a
landscape crawling with acts and artworks that seem at first unrelated to the
tragedy. Marcus invokes 9-11 and then leaves it to drift as -- to use a
favored Marcusian image -- a curse, one that resonates with the prophesies
voiced at the very founding of our country.
The book’s premise is simple: “There is no
American identity without a sense of portent and doom.” The founding Americans
defined themselves as a chosen people, possessing God’s sanction and deserving
of his favor. Therefore God’s justice would be all the harsher should America
betray its covenants as set down in the Constitution and Declaration of
Independence. But rather than judge our nation on its sworn ideals, we’ve
justified each betrayal, conquest, massacre, and enslavement in “a voice of
power and self-righteousness” -- i.e., our public voice, the one we transmit
to ourselves and to the world.
In opposition to that is the private voice
speaking publicly, acting symbolically, carrying out that original prophesied
judgment of American doom in “speech and acts that begin with a single citizen
. . . saying what he or she has to say.” Marcus hears that voice in the later
novels of Philip Roth (self-satisfied American discovers the hidden history of
his century), the films of David Lynch (splatter art in the small town of the
American mind), the performances of actors Bill Pullman (self-loathing highway
existentialist) and Sheryl Lee (figure of innocence both corrupted and
corrupting), the music of Pere Ubu vocalist David Thomas (avant-ranter and
social outcast), and the poetic incantations of Allen Ginsberg (gay Jew
chanting Midwest mantras from the back of a van)...
Read the rest
here
Posted on
Monday, September 11, 2006 by CPC
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Top 25 stories
ignored by media in past year
Each year, Project
Censored compiles an annual list of 25 socially significant news stories
of social significance said to have been missed, underreported or
self-censored by mainstream press in the US.
Here are some of this year's picks:
#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear
Technologies to Iran
#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo
#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in
Afghanistan and Iraq
#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
Here's
details
on each.
Posted on
Sunday, September 10, 2006 by CPC
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The advertising art of Dr.
Seuss
The doctor named Seuss is
well known for books
But here are some other pics
worthy of looks:
Some ad art for sugar, some
ad art for clocks,
Some ad art for shaving
cream inside a box,
Some ad art for bug spray,
some ad art for beer
To heck with this rhyming.
Go on, now,
click here!
via
Drawn
Posted on
Saturday, September 9, 2006 by CPC
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2006 NYC
Fretless Guitar Festival
This
year's fretless festival takes place September 29 (evening) and September 30
(all day) at New York City's Knitting Factory and includes guitarists Dave "Fuze"
Fiuczynski, Ned Evett, Scott McGill, Jon Catler, Ed DeGenaro, Neil Haverstick,
Ratko Zjaca, Michael "Atonal" Vick, among others, performing on instruments
such as the fretless 11-string
Godin Glissentar
(photo), various Fernandes fretless models, and the Vigier Surfreter.
On September 30, the festival will offer a
fretless guitar workshop conducted by several artists performing at the event.
Press release »
Posted on
Friday, September 8, 2006 by CPC
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Bizarre 60s Mosrite/Von
Dutch guitars
This
kind of thing doesn't come along too often: These three guitars were made for
the 60s psychedelic one-hit-wonders Strawberry Alarm Clock by Semie Moseley of
Mosrite (much more about him
here) . As if that wasn't cool enough, Semie sent the surfboard-shaped
guitars to
Von Dutch to be painted. After the band played them in a film (possibly
'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls'), Semie got the guitars back.
After his death, they were bought by food-supplement
millionaire and ultimate guitar collector
Scott Chinery (who also
owned the Batmobile). Scott died aged 40 in 2000, and his family sold the
entire collection to Michael Indelicato of
E Guitars, who are now selling them on eBay, item #120026471951.
from
musicthing
Posted on
Thursday, September 7, 2006 by CPC
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Why teenagers are
"more selfish than adults"
A new scientific study suggests that teenagers use a
different part of their brains than adults to make decisions, resulting in a
kind of selfishness. University College London neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne
Blakemore asked people of various ages decision-making questions and questions
about the well-being of others. In teenagers, the superior temporal sulcus lit
up. In adults, the prefontal cortex was more active.
From New Scientist:
The superior temporal sulcus is involved in processing
very basic behavioural actions, whereas the prefrontal cortex is involved in
more complex functions such as processing how decisions affect others. So
the research implies that "teenagers are less able to understand the
consequences of their actions", says Blakemore.
In (one) experiment, Blakemore asked 112 participants
(aged from 8 to 37) to make decisions about other people’s welfare and timed
how long it took them to respond. The questions included: "How would your
friend feel if she wasn’t invited to your party?"
She found that the response time got shorter as the
participants got older, suggesting that the older people found it easier to
put themselves in other people's shoes.
Blakemore suggests that both findings might be explained
by an evolutionary mechanism in which the development of the brains of
adolescents takes precedence over its performance. “You don’t need to be on
a par with other people because you are looked after until reproductive age.
Only then do you need to start to take into account other people’s
perspectives.”
Link
Posted on
Monday
September 4, 2006 by CPC
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Artificial cartoon-character skeletons
This Korean art
exhibition explores the fictional anatomy of cartoon characters, with
elaborate faked-up skeletons for Looney Toons characters, anatomical drawings
of Mickey and friends, and many other artifacts from the study of toon
anatomy.
Link
Posted on Saturday,
September 2, 2006 by CPC
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Anatomical anomalies of the famous monsters of filmland
Michael
C. LaBarbera, a professor in Organismal Biology & Anatomy at the University of
Chicago, published this wonderful paper about the reality of movie-monster
anatomy in 2003. In the paper, LaBarbera explores the implications of
extremely large and extremely small fantasy creatures, whose mass, volume and
surface-area scale at different rates as they are shrunk/enlarged (ants can
carry many times their body-weight, but if they were the size of tigers,
they'd be crushed under their own carapaces). Other issues covered include the
respiratory difficulties of Mothra, the biomechanics of Jurassic Park dinos,
and the reason ET is so darn cute:
The upshot of all this is that Mothra is going to have to
add a lot of tracheal tubes to maintain a sufficient oxygen supply. Of
course, the more of its volume that is tracheal tubes, the less is biomass
that needs oxygen, but this implies that although Mothra may be heavy
(because it's big), its density is going to be very low--about the same as
your average cotton ball. This insight into Mothra's physiology eliminates
two other problems. Although wearing one's skeleton on the outside has
distinct mechanical advantages (as we'll see shortly), large insects are
prone to a mode of failure called buckling. If Mothra had really been just a
scaled-up moth, its legs would have collapsed when it landed. Second,
Mothra's wings are in the same proportion to its body as the moths that bat
their heads against the lights outside your door. Total lift generation is
proportional to the area of the wings; if mass increased in proportion to
volume, Mothra would have to walk home.
Link
Posted on Friday,
September 1, 2006 by CPC
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