Friday Ephemera

The animated Kubrick. // Bookshop reorganised. // The museum of bags. // GPS with “avoid ghetto” function. // Grandma’s robot companion. // Made of straws. // Unorthodox kiting. // Cave of note. // To tenderise meat. // Mere rope cannot hold Mr Houdini. // They’re gaining on us. // Following photons at a trillion frames-per-second. // Pingu versus The Thing. // “The mole’s most distinctive feature is a circle of 22 mobile, pink, fleshy tentacles at the end of the snout.” // Every home should have a glow-in-the-dark crowbar. // What happens to your luggage. // Try a glass of this. // Then watch a live South Pole webcam. Gripping stuff.

Comments

[Simen Thoresen]

The meat-tenderizer looks interesting. Still, wouldn't it be just as useful (and perhaps oh so much more rewarding) to just repeatedly stab the chunk of meat with a small, pointed knife or perhaps a potato-peeler?

Oh, and welcome back. We've missed you...
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/poohraiser/

-S

[Anna]

Yay. You're back.

About time.

How about some crowboarding?

[rjmadden]

The animated Kubrick.

This one wins...

http://www.fastcodesign.com/multisite_files/codesign/imagecache/inline-large/post-inline/tumblr_lex3s2CgQN1qe0eclo1_r9_500.gif

I think it's the eyebrow.

[David]

Simen,

Apologies for the sparse posting. I can imagine the tremendous suffering my absence must have caused.

Anna,

“How about some crowboarding?”

Oh yes, I’m liking that.

rjmadden,

“I think it’s the eyebrow.”

Clearly, there’s an art to eyebrow timing.

[Ted S.]

While you were away, somebody over in the comments section at reason linked to the hilarious microaggressions.com

Readers here will recognize a lot of the same sort of people you post about, and probably have a good laugh too.

[David]

Ted,

It’s good to see stoicism and proportion are back in fashion.

[Anna]

microaggressions.com

Deludedwhinybitch.com was already taken then?

[Sam Duncan]

Ted: I have a rule of thumb that any website that presents a totally blank page with Javascript turned off probably isn't worth switching it on for. It's still holding good.

[TDK]

Apparently Houdini was a star of early film. Perils of Pauline type I guess. If the biography I have is accurate he didn't like trick photography and insisted on really performing the stunts on camera. I'm guessing this click comes from one of those.

[sg]

GPS with “avoid ghetto” function.

Well I'm sold.

[WTP]

Oh, tentacles...never mind.

[David]

This made me smile:

One of the more dispiriting processes I regularly notice in confrontations between Good and Evil is when Evil concedes that it has done something evil, and Good promptly turns round, in the spirit of fair play, and concedes something else evil. It’s like Good is a football team, and when it goes one-nil up, it feels that the fair thing to do is to give the other fellows a goal. […] So, for instance, if Evil concedes that, I don’t know, “socialism hasn’t turned out very well in practice,” Good, in a burst of bonhomie and generosity and brotherhood-of-manliness, concedes that socialism was a nice idea “in theory.”

No it wasn’t. An idea that turns out badly in practice is a bad idea. Especially if the badness was a predictable and predicted consequence of that bad idea. […] The proper way to behave, if you are Good, and go one-nil up in an argument, is to press for a two-nil lead. The proper response to going one-nil up in the above argument about the practice and theory of socialism is to say: “Socialism has indeed turned out badly in practice. Now, about this evil notion of yours that socialism is a nice theory. Let’s talk about that. And let’s you admit that you are wrong about that also.”

[Darleen]

I actually found the baby-robot companion very sad.

[Wayne Fontes]

The meat tenderiser looks like a midieval torture instrument. I can picture Joe Pesci using it in some future Scorsese mob flick.

The best piece of ephemera I've seen on the web this week has to be Jimmy Fallon's fusion of David Bowie and Tim Tebow.

[David]

Darleen,

“I actually found the baby-robot companion very sad.”

It’s a little disquieting. I suppose it’s like any prosthesis - a pity that it’s needed but better than nothing.

[Henry]

Still watching the South pole cam....

[Henry]

....hmmm not much happening there.

Try Times Square NY, where the day (ok a Sunday) is just about to start as I type

Quite windy there it seems

[Col. Milquetoast]

Deludedwhinybitch.com was already taken then?

But Anna, did it make you feel sad, angry, marginalized and/or unsafe?