Friday Ephemera

You think film trailers are bad now? // Bionic trunk or supervillain accessory? // Octopus steals camera, films own escape. // Unfathomable sounds. // Ostentatious timepiece. // A collection of bread bag ties. // Autonomous towel-folding robot. // Ronald Reagan and James Dean, live, 1954. // We launch at dawn. // Shoe music. // The orbits of Cassini. (h/t, The Thin Man) // “The intestine has been inflated to hold as many drinking customers as possible.” // Anatomy of a tribble. // Testing nukes. // New York’s Lower East Side, 1942. // The periodic table of beer. // Woob: Unknown Quantity. // When advertising works. 

Comments

[mlrosty]

"When advertising works."

That actually choked me up a bit.

[dw]

Nice Woob track. Going back to your roots then, David? ;)

[JuliaM]

The chap doing that 'Empire Strikes Back' trailer is having too much fun, isn't he?

[mlrosty]

"The chap doing that 'Empire Strikes Back' trailer is having too much fun, isn't he?"

It's Harrison Ford.

[JuliaM]

The seatbelt ad is very good indeed.

But no match for the sheer schmaltz of Tony Christie's 'Drive Safely Darling', which was used in a US road safety ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-UTfwwbzE

[JuliaM]

O/T: Incidentally, Bidisha is back:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/22/bidisha

"No modern woman wants to find herself alone on a station platform, counting a poster. It's sad. But it's all part of my investigation into cultural femicide – the erasure of women from public life."

[JuliaM]

It's REALLY Harrison Ford...?

*boggle*

[David]

Julia,

“Bidisha is back.”

Thanks, I hadn’t spotted that. I don’t have time to do the necessary today, but Bidisha really ought to learn how to argue a point. She seems to believe that asserting something repeatedly and hyperbolically somehow makes it true. As usual, and like many of her peers, she leaps to a conclusion that she can’t be bothered to earn.

[Horace Dunn]

David

You say that you "don't have time to do the necessary today". But, consider just one remark from Bidisha's latest offering:

"So what's the solution? The establishment, patriarchy, the mainstream, whatever you want to call it, just doesn't find women interesting."

Once you've dabbed the tears of mirth from your eyes, surely you must come to the conclusion that no further comment is required.

[Anna]

Poor Bidisha. She hasn't figured out she's a parody of what she thinks she is.

[David]

“She hasn’t figured out she’s a parody of what she thinks she is.”

Yes, it’s all a bit tragicomic, what with the mismatch of self-image and reality. The woman who tells us that her entire gender isn’t taken seriously gives us no reason to take her seriously about anything at all.

Some might find her lack of self-awareness charming. I’m not one of them.

[ECM]

There's also video of the anus bar, I mean, if you're into that sort of thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J69yIxq5W8w

[Ted S., Catskills, NY]

Actually, some of the trailers for old movies are really bad. TCM here in the States plays them for upcoming movies from time to time.

One of the more interesting ones is for a re-release of the 1939 movie "Love Affair".

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index.jsp?cid=9872

If you watch carefully, you'll notice that this one doesn't actually use any action from the movie, just still photographs.