Below is an unforgettable and somewhat controversial piece of U.S. history. Commissioned in 1951 by the US government, Duck and Cover was distributed as a children’s safety education film that taught atom bomb preparedness.

This film is chock-full of alarming statements like, “There are two kinds of attack: with warning and with no warning”  and “Tony knows that the bomb can explode any time of the year, day or night, and he’s ready for it!”, over striking footage of schoolchildren dropping to the ground in the middle of play, “enemy planes” dimming the skies, and the U.S. military at the ready. Made during the height of the red scare, Duck and Cover feels more like a Pinko-paranoia-induction tactic than a safety film, especially when we consider that all of the methods shown would be absolutely useless at ground zero. From the film’s Wikipedia page:

For those not at ground zero, there would be a delay between the flash (indicating the need to duck and cover) and the arrival of the blast wave, which could shatter windows and cause other blast or impact injuries (although electromagnetic radiation, such as infra-red and gamma rays, would arrive at the observer’s position at the same time as the light flash, leaving the observer no time to find cover from these particular aspects of a nuclear detonation). A newspaper would, at least in theory, block alpha radiation although skin does this anyway, provide some shielding from the heat (IR, visible and UV) radiation and small debris, though it would have no effect on the beta and gamma radiation or on the shockwave that would accompany an atomic detonation.

Watch Duck and Cover below and pay close attention. After all, you never know when the bright flash may come.

A surreal clip, ailment taken on a beach in Finland, of an ominous thunderstorm coming in on a spectacular shelf cloud, sending beach-goers off in panicked flight.

Thanks, Evan!

Brought to us by the sick bastards over at Bad Advice For Good Times.

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The Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull has received a fair bit of attention of late. Not unexpected, buy cialis considering that its insidious ash cloud momentarily brought air travel in the vicinity of Europe to a standstill. No doubt, advice this is some sort of evil, ailment Nordic plot, the ins and outs of which are of no concern here. What we wish to call attention to here is the footage above, a bit of geological geekery. As the volcano continues to erupt one can see the shock waves from each explosion of magma ripple through the plumes of smoke and debris. Such is nature that it can be so beautiful and fascinating in its destruction.

Just in time to put you off your lunch, the Friday Afternoon arrives with 2009’s Food Inc, the scathing documentary/critique of America’s food industry. Directed by Robert Kenner and co-produced by Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, Food Inc is of the variety that both infuriates and terrifies in equal measure. It must be pointed out, however, that if you are already up on the subject matter, or have already read Fast Food Nation, there isn’t a whole lot that is new here. Still, for those uninitiated in the horrific practices of companies like Monsanto and Tyson it can be an eye-opening experience.

Recently, it was shown on PBS for their POV segment — it can be viewed on their website until this coming Thursday, should the YouTube version get pulled — and was followed with the delightfully Lynchian Notes on Milk (Click that link to watch. Do it!) a short film looking at the rise of milk in America.

So get to watching, dear readers, and get a better picture of the horrible stuff we put into our bodies everyday. In the meantime I’ll get back to my Big Mac, because nothing tastes quite like Creutzfeldt–Jakob.

Update: Reader rbk points out that PBS is not viewable in America’s hat, Canadia. Therefore, filthy Canucks should go here.

I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wan smile touched her face for a moment. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.”

“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

Story goes like this: there’s an emergency ship en route to a plague-ridden planet, carrying essential medicine. The pilot finds a stowaway; a young girl, Marilyn, who just wants to see her brother.

The pilot now has a problem: he has enough fuel to get himself to the planet, but no one else. Interstellar law is clear: all stowaways are jettisoned immediately.

But space captains are heroic sorts. Whatever harsh decisions the author puts in their background to prove their grit, this is still a story. This time will be different. Marilyn is the perfect, plucky sidekick-in-training; surely the pilot can figure out some way to save both her and the planet’s populace.

No. There is no solution. She says her goodbyes and is ejected, with “a slight waver to the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing, then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again.”

The above is from Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. When it came out in Astonishing Science Fiction in August, 1954, it shocked the hell out of the magazine’s readership, used to the last-minute triumph of human ingenuity.

Godwin’s classic was only the beginning. The ensuing decades would see American sci-fi delve into realms unthinkable to its forebears. Desperate to shake off the genre “urinal,” as Kurt Vonnegut so succinctly termed it, writers first ditched one of the key assumptions: that the hero will always save the day. Maturity, in this view, meant uncomfortable truths. Often, it meant unhappy endings, not just for the protagonists, but frequently the entire world.

This is a scattershot story of how the bleak tomorrow came to reign, and how it changed our visions of the future.

Any Invader Zim fans here? If you fell into reluctant love with the tiny, spiteful Irken invader and his robotic companion Gir, you might have been keeping up with the recent blog posts of show creator Jhonen Vasquez. Over the past few weeks, Vasquez has been sharing daily bits of behind-the-scenes Invader Zim trivia, complete with grotesque digital illustrations, unforgivably long rants, and anecdotes that will probably get him killed very soon. Evidently, this stuff has been building up inside Jhonen and eating through his soul like some kind of psychic bile, until it exploded into a month-long pontification of, well, DOOM.

Above, Gir and Zim by Jhonen Vasquez, from Invader Zim Fact #25 – just one of the numerous drawings that accompany Invader Zim Facts. With his zip-up dog costume, built-in jets, and an unmistakable squeaky voice, adorable Gir gained a fan base as rabid and vast as Zim ‘s. However, Rikki Simons, comic book creator, colorist on the show, and the man behind the squeaking, paid dearly for his involvement with Zim. Sometimes our work consumes us, and Rikki serves as an all-too-real reminder of what happens when we push ourselves too far. In a spectacular display of callous indifference to his once-colleague, Jhonen showcased a jarring, never-before-seen video interview with Simons in “Invader Zim Fact #31“. From the post:

A bit of info on the video:  It’s apparently a fragment from a documentary about voice actors by “Ani-Mazing” Magazine, one of the many publications I’ve never had the pleasure of taking with me to the bathroom.  The thing never got completed, and Rikki was actually the last person the filmmakers interviewed.  That’s just what the guy told me who gave me this thing.  If you ask me, AniMAZING Magazine should have stuck with magazines because the interview sucks as far as interviews go, and the sound and camera work is just awful.  The title of this last post comes from something the interview touches on, that Rikki, besides playing the lovable GIR, also played the lovable Bloaty the Pig.

Watch below, and be sure to stick around until the very end.

Lucky, lucky Los Anglicans. Your cup runneth over: Tarkovsky festivals, the approaching Hollywood Forever film season, Kenneth Anger screenings… and soon, an encore presentation of Birdemic: Shock and Terror:

Only last month, Cinefamily housed the drunkenly enthusiastic world premiere of this cinematic Tour de Farce. The screening was hosted by Tim and Eric in cahoots with Severin Films, who turned the entire West Hollywood theater into “a temporary aviary with epic displays of Birdemic special effects, props and costumes that… put the Smithsonian to shame.”

Some background on the film from Severin’s official press release:

Birdemic, described by [writer/producer/director] James Nguyen as a romantic thriller, is a horror/action/special-effects-driven love story about a young couple trapped in a small Northern California town under siege by homicidal birds. Birdemic also tackles topical issues of global warming, avian flu, world peace, organic living, sexual promiscuity and lavatory access.

Nguyen, a 42-year-old Vietnamese refugee, wrote, cast and shot the film over the course of four years using salary from his day job as a mid-level software salesman in Silicon Valley. The film pays homage to Hitchcock’s The Birds via location shooting in Mission Bay, California, as well as an appearance by star of Tippi Hedren. When rejected for an official screening slot at Sundance, Nguyen spent eight days driving up and down the festivals nearby streets in a van covered with fake birds, frozen blood and Birdemic posters, while loudspeakers blared the sounds of eagle attacks and human screams.

Severin’s executive producers took one look at Nguyen’s labor of love and bought the rights to Birdemic for the next 20 years.

After the premiere screening last month, Nguyen and Birdemic co-stars Alan Bagh and Whitney Moore stayed on hand for a lively Q&A session with their soused and roaring public. They laughed, they cried, it was better than Cats. Now, thanks to popular demand, Birdemic is hitting the open road. Screenings are scheduled in thirteen cities across the continental US, starting April 2nd. Not since The Room or Troll 2 has a film been so poised for Ironic Hipster Fan Luv.

Hey… can we talk about Ironic Hipster Fan Luv for a sec?

Or not. In fact, I’m going to put the rest of this post under a cut, because I honestly don’t know if its ouroboric tone will be interesting, or merely irritating, to the majority of our readers. If you’re not already rolling your eyes with your arms folded across your chest, I invite you to read on!

I’m really not sure what I have to say to properly convey the danger of robots to you people. Really, at this point I feel that the risks should be self-evident; but almost on a daily basis I am proven wrong. You just do not seem to understand where this road leads to and my words appear impotent, unable to realize the dark future I see should mankind continue down this path towards sentient mechanical beings.

And yet, I find myself unable to just give up. Someone has to be the voice of reason, if only to be able to point out that they told you so; and that person might as well be me if only because I like being right and I am an accomplished pointer, if I do say so myself. With that in mind follow my index finger and gaze in horror and wonder at the sculptures of Andrew Chase. Chase, unlike most who crusade for our demise by automatons, has his sights set squarely on the animal kingdom, making him, perhaps, even more despicable — for what kind of man would set such a plague upon the beasts of the Earth, innocent and pure as they are? Chase has no such qualms, creating giant, lumbering steel pachyderms and lithe, gear-driven, and indefatigable cheetahs. The savannas of the future will be occupied by metal giraffes, wading through the corpses of extinct fauna to hunt down the last of humanity with laser eyes under a smog-choked and blackened sky, mark my words.

And you’ll have only yourselves — and Andrew Chase — to blame.

Previously on Coilhouse:

Credence was given to the supposition that Werner Herzog, or someone who may sound only somewhat like Werner Herzog, can add tremendous weight to even the most mundane and innocent of children’s tales; his intonation imbuing the words with a profound sense of existential navel-gazing.

Ramin Bahrani understands this all to well and therefore enlisted the talent of Mr. Herzog to give voice to the titular protagonist of his short film, Plastic Bag; a film described thus:

Struggling with its immortality, a discarded plastic bag ventures through the environmentally barren remains of America as it searches for its maker.

I like to imagine that whenever a script like this arrives at his mountain-top fortress, he reads the script and, upon finishing it, bolts upright. Standing there, arms akimbo, he exclaims “This is a job for…WERNER HERZOG!” to the chagrin of his ever-faithful manservant who can do nothing but go ready the Herzogmobile.

via kottke