Each furby has 4 controls: mute, crash, loop and reset. The handle turns 8 cams which operate corresponding microswitches to create interesting rhythmic patterns. Part of the ‘setting up’ section at the beginning has been fast forwarded. Please commission me to make lots more of these machines!
Hang in there ’til the furbies gets revved up. It’s actually rather beautiful.
Thanks for the heads up, Jhayne! (If you haven’t been over to Whitechapel’s filthy and absurd “Things That Should Not Exist” thread, go now. Bring wet naps.)
Yeah, okay, I know. Everyone and their granny has already blogged about this, but I just gotta chime in to quickly say that Garfield Minus Garfield is the most unexpected laff riot this side of Cthulhu Family Circus. Some sage old fart once said something along the lines of “the greatest truths are the simplest, so likewise are the greatest men” and that tenet definitely applies here:
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.
It’s a shame that any attempt to make a Garfield Minus Garfield day-to-day calendar would be cockblocked by copyright litigation. Hey, I freakin’ loathe day calendars. They’re pointless, inane, a waste of trees. But seriously, I’d consider running out and getting some soul-destroying cubicle day job just to have an excuse to purchase and read the paper version of Garfield Minus Garfield every gosh darn day. Suck it, Dilbert!
Blurry scan of the cover of an anti-VD mix CD I made back in 2003.
Happy Valentine’s Day to all. And to those who hate the day, I say this: Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens. –Warren Ellis
T-minus 45 minutes and counting to San Francisco’s third annual Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight! Play nice, kids. Attendees are highly encouraged to post links to their photos and bloggings of the event here.
Waaaaugh! Why didn’t anyone tell me about Skywhales? This is incredible. Have you seen it? What about you there, in the back, wearing the Dragonriders of Pern tee shirt? Ever heard of Skywhales? Yeah?
DAMN it. I’d never even heard of Skywhales until just now. What a huge, unsightly gap in my nerducation.
My old friend Adam Lamas and I were just wasting many precious hours of life watching catshavepsychoticepisodes on Teh YooToobz when suddenly he asked “wait, time out, have you seen Skywhales?” Nope, never heard of it. He made with the clickies and I promptly spilled bongwater wine all over myself.
My manta ray is all right.
Completed in 1983, Skywhales is an animated short about a race of green-skinned humanoid aliens who live on a floating island in the upper layers of a gaseous planet’s atmosphere. To survive, they hunt enormous manta ray creatures in pedal-powered airships. As this fansite author puts it, Skywhales “is a window onto an alien way of life–language, culture, taboos… as complete a picture as a short film has ever painted, and its final revelations are nothing short of haunting.”
And how! The “boo bee boo boo bee” stuff is a bit grating at first, but hang in there. It’s epic, as Nadya would say. Uber, even. Circle of life. See it! Skywhales! (Sorry, I just really like saying that. “Skywhales!” While making jazz hands.) But seriously. It’s gorgeous and poignant and disturbing. Like your mom. With a mohawk.
Skywhales!
Skywhales! Directed by Derek Hayes and Phil Austin and produced for Channel 4.
Internet addict Barbie. Neglected children sold separately.
Okay, who didn’t make their Barbies do obscene things at some point? But The Subversive 11½ Inch Fashion Doll takes it to all new levels of wrong.
The author of the site, alt model Theda B, describes the effort as “awful things I did to my old toys in a fit of boredom” and presents the Mattell-made dolls, dubbed “Bobbie” and “Ben,” in some hilarious, completely un-PC scenarios that draw on politics, illness, subculture, deviant sexuality and criminal behavior. And a good time is had by all! My personal favorites are Pretentious Performance Artist Barbie, Bobbie Christ (or the “I’m Going Straight to Hell” doll) and Trench Coat Mafia Ben. Collect them all!
The site hasn’t been updated in 3 years, which is a shame. It would be interesting to see what kind of new dolls people would submit to the site today. My own contributions would be Internet-Famous Bobbie and Sadistic TSA Agent Ben.
Speaking of the Rolling Stones, here’s a blast from the past that I haven’t been able to chase out of my head for days now, the version of “Satisfaction” cited as one of Mick Jagger’s favorite Stones covers:
It’s hard to believe Devo’s frenetic, herky jerky movements here aren’t a camera trick, but watch live footage from the same era and you realize yes, they really were that tightly wound.
Bless these guys for helping legions of spud children to survive pubescence with some shred of self esteem intact. While I wouldn’t put them in the “What Made Me Weird” category, they certainly helped me feel less awful for being weird. I still have an old Trapper Keeper lying around somewhere with the lyrics of “Through Being Cool” scrawled on it.
Devo’s alliance with the Church of the Subgenius made them cooler in my eyes than any football-throwing Homecoming King could ever hope to be. Their Men Who Make the Music collection of home videos amused the hell out of me back then, but today, some of those skits seem downright prescient, voicing concerns about the sinister manipulations of genetics, food and culture.
I’ve already mentioned the freeform radio station WFMU a few times on C.H. and I surely will again. Based out of Jersey City, this listener-supported outpost of obscure music and culture has been a constant source of delight to me since the mid 90s. Before then, I had no idea that kind of integrity or diversity existed in radio.
Today I’d like to make specific mention of Tom Scharpling’s modestly titled “The Best Show on WFMU”, a comedy segment that often features indie-rock luminary Jon Wurster masquerading as various call-in guests. I can’t think of anything more entertaining to listen to on this chilly Sunday evening than their mind-blowing gaff “The Music Scholar”. The Music Scholar
We all know at least one real-life Charles R. Martin: that elitist snob propped up at the end of every single hipster dive bar in the universe, oozing condescension and pretentiousness, a dismissive amateur musicologist given to Cooler-Than-Thou histrionics and compulsive one-upmanship. Wurster cranks these characteristics up to 11, reducing the most elitist Pitchfork writers or Bedford Avenue disputants to fleecy wee lambs by comparison.
READERSHIP ADVISORY: The following post contains very subjective opinion, frivolity, and the shameless sexual objectification of highly respectable people. In other words, we are about to go totally alt-Cosmo on your ass. You have been warned.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. – Sir Francis Bacon
Preternatural means out of the ordinary course of nature; exceptional or abnormal. That which appears outside or beyond the natural. Extremity – an ordinary phenomenon taken beyond the natural.
10 Klaus Kinski
Bug-eyed, white-haired, rubbery-lipped Klaus Kinski was by all accounts (especially his own) an insatiable fuck machine. Open his infamously filthy memoirs to any random page and gasp at the depravity. He also happened to be gibbering batshit insane. It has been observed that sociopaths are often very charismatic. Certainly, when Kinski wasn’t foaming at the mouth, he could charm the knickers off any lady in the room. Fans of exploitation cinema adore him as the punishing playboy in Jess Franco’s masterpiece, Venus In Furs. His tumultuous partnership with filmmaker Werner Herzog yielded two of the most compelling antiheroes of all time: Aguirre and Nosferatu. Indeed, even in the most paltry cameo roles, Kinski oozed a certain fetid yet undeniable charm.
Good morning. Get back to work. Oh, by the way, GIANT UNDERPANTS!
How could even the most veisalgic or seasonal affective disorder-suffering among us remain mopey after viewing this?
As a matter of fact, Paul Reubens always said that Pee-wee’s Playhouse wasn’t written for children so much as for hungover college students. Nonetheless, back in the day I was about as big a Pee-wee fan as any pre-pube could get. That clip’s got to be one of my top ten most cherished all-time TV moments. No, seriously.
We all know what happened to that poor man back in 1991. Got caught in an adult movie theater –apparently with his pants down– was arrested for “indecent exposure” and immediately vilified by the media. Reruns of his recently canceled show were quickly yanked off the air. Overnight, our beloved Pee-wee was reduced to a sniggering punchline. Does anyone else remember Reubens’ first public appearance afterwards on the MTV music awards? His sad-eyed “heard any good jokes lately?” delivery prompted cheers from the supportive crowd, but watching at home, I was in mourning. We all knew a death knell had been sounded.
Shit, I loved that game! One of my happiest memories growing up was playing it with my dad. My favorite colors to play were black and green together; death and replenishment. I thought that red was for boneheads. I liked blue, but was never able to construct the kind of mindfuck blue decks that won you the game. And white was just… blah. Too pacifist. Green-white decks were for hippies. I remember liking artifacts; Magic was where I learned the word “ornithopter” from. Any time I opened a new pack, I prayed to find the coveted rare card Black Lotus; it would be like winning the lottery and I’d be filthy rich. I loved the artwork, which looks more crude to me now than I remember it being. Phil Foglio and Quinton Hoover were my favorite artists.
While I was a card-flopper, I was never a dice-chucker. I never learned how to play RPG’s because I didn’t know anybody else who played. But at the time, tons of card games were coming out right and left; games inspired by Lovecraft like Call of Cthulhu, the Illuminati card game inspired by Robert Anton Wilson, and the Netrunner game inspired by (ripped off without credit, I heard?) the work of William Gibson. This was my official exposure to all these artists and others, making Magic: The Gathering the official source of What Made Me Weird. My dad got me subscriptions to Scrye and Inquest, which had interviews with people like Clive Barker and Brom. In every issue of Scrye, they printed imaginary cards that readers made up, and I even remember submitting some of my own.
