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Steve Lambert of The Anti-Advertising Agency started a project to, well, tell people that they really don’t
need all that stuff companies are trying to sell. The concept is simple: plaster a sticker saying "you don’t need it" on ads to subvert its message.
But let me ask you this: is it subversive/guerilla art or just merely vandalism?
Link – via Sign Hacker
Photo: thomwatson
I used to live very close to Daly City in Northern California – and I’ve always wondered about the distinctively retro cute houses in the Westlake district of the city. So it’s a pleasant surprise to read a post about the 50′s "Little Boxes" at The Retro Blog:
A perfectly planned suburban community, the “little boxes” of Daly City feature bright 50’s colors, sharp, interesting angles, abstract garage door art, and creative atomic landscaping. Retro Renovations recently did a post on the topic, which brought my attention to the “little boxes” flickr photo pool as well as a book devoted to the subject.
Ty.rannosaur.us blog has a pretty interesting post (see what I did there?) about 10 famously ugly people. This one to the left is Attila the Hun:
Practically unstoppable, Attila almost wiped out Western civilization until Pope Leo I talked him out of sacking Rome. According to Hollywood he looked like Gerard Butler, better known as Leonidas from 300, since Butler played him in the 2001 television series.
The reality is that he looked more like Shrek. Passages from history describe an extremely short man, built like an ogre, who so hideous that he was “human and yet not.” He is described with a bulbous head, flat nose, moist nostrils, beady eyes, and thin beard. None of this stopped him from marrying 12 beautiful women and dying while devirginizing his last one.
Thembi of What Would Thembi Do? blog went to the Persian Gulf (specifically Doha, Qatar) and blogged about it – one of the interesting things she found and photographed was this shelf of dubious products in a store the Old Souq Waqif.
Buttock Enlarging cream? Virginity Soap? Someone got a sense of humor there … Link
Photo: Philippe Ramette
For his artwork, French artist Philippe Ramette likes placing himself (in his trademark black suit) in surreal and improbably scenes. This one above, titled Rational Exploration of the Undersea: The Contact has him underwater!
Check out more of Philippe’s work: Link | More pics at Exporevue (in French)
I know, I know, Rickrolling is so April 2008 but I got a hearty chuckle when I saw this Rick Astley replacing Daniel Craig as James Bond on reddit, which has the obligatory Rick-ified 007 movie titles
You know the rules and so does he. Well played, sir! Link
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Neat Facts About … Rick Astley!
The earlier post on how a map of the state of Georgia made it into a story about the conflict in the European Georgia was strange, but that sort of thing keeps happening. Officials in Birmingham, England mistakenly used a picture of Birmingham, Alabama when printing official leaflets.
Under the headline “Thank You Birmingham!,” the picture showed office blocks in the U.S. city, rather than its own distinctive Rotunda tower and the curvy Selfridges store.
The council said it had made a mistake, but had no plans to recall the leaflets.
Those leaflets may become collectors items, as well as an embarrassment for the city council. Link
Illustration: James E. Haff and Dick Martin / International Wizard of Oz Club (1980)
National Geographic Map of the Day has a really neat (and zoomable) fictional map of the Marvelous Land of Oz, illustrated by James E. Haff and Dick Martin for the International Wizard of Oz Club (apparently there is such a thing) based on L. Frank Baum’s books The Wizard of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz.
And did you know that when the movie version of The Wizard of Oz opened in 1939, the very first theater that screened it was in the small town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin? Three days later, the movie premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
Link – Thanks Marilyn Terrell!
These neat looking Star Wars themed “hanging banners” are called tenugui, a Japanese cotton towel that is often used as a headband, for souvenirs and as decoration.
They are now available from ThinkGeek in four different models:
The winners of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad opening lines for novels were announced a few days ago, but word is slow to get out because “many newspapers have allowed themselves to be distracted by a large athletic contest being staged somewhere in Asia.” The winning entry:
Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”
This gem was written by 41-yar-old Garrison Spik of Washington, DC.
Garrison Spik is the 26th grand prize winner of the contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982.
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and phrases like “the great unwashed” and “the almighty dollar,” Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the “Peanuts” beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Winners were also named in the categories of adventure, children’s literature, detective, fantasy fiction, historical fiction, purple prose, romance, spy fiction, vile puns, and western. See all the winners, runners-up, and dishonorable mentions at the San Jose State University Dept. of English & Comparative Literature site. Link -via a comment at mental_floss
Director Alfred Hitchcock made a habit of cameo appearances in the opening scene of his films. Is it possible he made more than one appearance in some films? In North by Northwest, he is seen running for a train and missing it. But here’s something else later in the movie…
North by Northwest: About 43 minutes into the film Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) has boarded the Chicago-bound Twentieth Century Limited and is hiding in the restroom. Two Pullman conductors make their way through the adjoining Club car checking tickets. In a brief segment, the conductors pause for a moment to examine the ticket of a plump elderly woman in a blue dress. Eventually satisfied, the conductors move on down the train and the portly woman turns toward the camera and gives a slightly bewildered shrug of her shoulders. At that moment the woman’s features become strikingly familiar.
FilmPosters.com has many screenshots, so you can decide for yourself. Link -Thanks, eLzo!
Update: You can see a good copy of the clip in question here. -Thanks, Alex Zavatone!
You always thought that octopuses had eight arms, right? It turns out that they have six arms and two legs!
A study by scientists at Sea Life centres across Europe found that the invertebrates move across the sea bed using their two rearmost limbs, leaving the other six free for the important business of feeding.
Researchers who observed the creatures in action found they push off with the “legs” and then employ the other tentacles to pump themselves along.
The study, the largest of its type carried out, was designed to show if octopuses favoured one side or the other.
But it found that octopuses are ambidextrous, though many seem to favour their third arm from the front to eat with.
As you watch Olympic diving, you may have wondered how the camera follows the divers every inch of the way from the platform to underwater. The answer is extremely old-fashioned: they drop the camera!
“Ideally,” Rob Brear said the other day, “the diver and the camera drop at the same time.” Mr. Brear, who is the DiveCam’s chief dropper, was in Beijing’s colossal “Water Cube,” the National Aquatic Center, standing behind a plastic screen on a ledge built just below the diving tower’s 10-meter platform. Between him and the platform, the DiveCam’s pipe hung suspended by a chain from the roof.
Mr. Brear, a 54-year-old Australian, was warming up — with the divers — for the first platform events of the Games on Monday and Tuesday. “After the camera drops,” he went on, “what you do is you pull it up again.” Ken East, another Australian and Mr. Brear’s teammate, sat behind him on a stool with his hand on the pulley’s brake. “It’s called gravity,” he said.
There are some other factors. The camera operator has to drop it at the right time, and a bungee cord is used to keep the camera from smashing against the bottom of the pool. The Wall Street Journal has an interactive graphic that shows how the tracking works. Link -via Geek Like Me
