Balloons vs Icicles

Icicles generally win.

We have movie sign!

erasing.org has a look at the International Space Station logs and pulls out all the references to movie night.

6 JAN 2001: We eat dinner and watch "GI Jane". Lots of SEAL questions, and Shep explains why this is not exactly like the real SEAL training.

6 FEB 2001: We ate some dinner and watched the last part of "City of Angels". Shep did his best to explain to Yuri and Sergei what the phrase "chick flick" means.

Oh No!

Music and Arts Festival. Former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters was performing his song, “Pigs,” to 50,000 people when a giant balloon in the shape of a 50-foot pig rose from behind the stage and floated above the audience.

Organizers cut the anchor cables free Sunday night and made plans to retrieve the pig when it landed — but as of late Monday, the inflatable animal has not been located. Now, his owners are offering a $10,000 reward for his safe return, plus lifelong tickets to Coachella for four people.

Great moments in damage control

Classic Television Showbiz shares the tale (and clips) of perhaps the most infamous game show failure in television history.

Many shows have been axed after one show, but this might be the only time where the host was allowed to go on the air and spend a half an hour apologizing for the show having been made.

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Candy for your brain

Enjoy the prose poems of Russell Edson.

I suspect that this might not be entirely historically accurate

On the bloody fields of Pennsylvania in 1863, two great armies collided to decide the fate of a nation. The South rose, and the North responded with fervent mettle.

As every schoolchild knows, at the forefront of the battle stood the mighty Yetis, white-furred giants imported from the wilds of Canada to shred the opposing front lines. From the rear, powerful mastodons hurled boulders into the fray. From even further to the rear, great generals engineered the destruction of the opposing forces—and quite often their own.

(This Week in Pod is Gonna be Just Like) Starting Over

During the course of adding cds to my iPod I sometimes stopped to wonder what would happen when I had more music on my computer's hard drive than I could fit on the iPod.

The answer is that the iPod starts picking and choosing. When this happens, I start to get curious about *how* it is picking and choosing. So I start noodling around with the playlists. The next thing that happens is that I have a big mess.

Not a huge mess. Nothing blew up. More of an "I'm on my way home and want to hear x, and it is not on the list even though I thought I set it up so it would be there."

So I erased my contents and began again.

I was a bit more methodical. It filled up again, I wiped it again, and now once more I'm close to filled up. Again.

This is fun, but rather frustrating.

(Interesting factoid: I have 5 tracks by Lambchop. They all came from Uncut Magazine covermounts! Someone at Uncut is a Lambchop fan!)

As it has been something like four months, I've decided to change the name of this tag from "This Week in Pod" to "This Moment in Pod"

Having done that I will soon discover that I'm back up to posting about once a week.

oh fudge!

Created by OnePlusYou

And in a similar vein

High Noon with added lasers.

An interesting thing will lead to an uncharitable comment

The interesting thing:

Give Us Today Our Daily Terror by Martijn Hendriks. Hitchcocks's The Birds with all the birds digitally removed.

And here I present the uncharitable comment:

"Now do it to Tippi Hedren!"

Thanks everyone. I'm here all week.

Boy, those corners are looking ratty.

Don't worry, I'm on it.

I'm mucking with the template!

Currently, the colors are from a palette based on the cover of Rubber Soul:


The plan is for this to change on occasion. Let's see how it goes.

Another menu from a similar voyage

Dave at Cooking Monster shares the menu from the Titanic, which I link to compare with the menu that I put up from the Oceanic.

I am inspired - now on my far too large list of things I need to do is annotate the Oceanic menu.

And look who else is back!

There's a new CD from Was (Not Was)! I'm really starting to like 2008.

Back in a week

Don't wreck the place, you kids.

Nostalgia explained

This is a clip from The Butterfly Ball. As I understand it, this was the test animation for an entire feature based on the album.

It turns out that the Australian ABC network used it as filler quite frequently in the early 70s, so it causes nostalgia in Australians of a certain age.

The clip was also used as filler on Night Flight in the mid 80s, with absolutely no explanation as to what the hell it was, so it causes a slightly different nostalgia in Americans of roughly the same age.

New horizons in car rental

Count the doors.

It's a little late, but...

I love these Sherlock Holmes Valentines Day Cards.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - He learns how to steal and he learns how to fight in the ghetto

Here Come the Double Deckers - "The Case of the Missing Doughnut" - January 15, 1971

I am often overwhelmed by the skill that British television can use when looking at squalor and despair. This show, as an example, is often listed in textbooks due to its cold hard look at young children who have been forced to live on the streets in abject poverty.


Among other things, this series was most likely the first to show a recurring character operating a methamphetamine lab.


In this episode, we are treated to a glimpse into the hardened mind of the young criminal named doughnut. Deprived of even the most simple needs of sustenance and attention, Doughnut goes on a rampage of wanton destruction.

Rejected by society to the point where he is so base that he is almost literally invisible, Doughnut revels in his strange netherworld placement. Beyond the panopticon, he is free to enjoy only the fruits of his own misery and cruelty.


Note his young compatriot, Tiger. Tiger's companion is a stuffed tiger named Tiger. Societal marginalization has caused a blurring of identity. Notice also her possession of a Danish flag, perhaps a symbol of her sympathy to a Neo-Kierkegaardian sense of disconnection with the religiously enforced social mores of British society.


Ultimately, Doughnut's unstoppable rampage is thwarted. His moment of revelation comes when he is hit over the head with a vaguely doughnut shaped object, a tambourine. (Tambourines are frequently the musical instrument of rugged self-awareness, in the same way that the cowbell is the instrument of delusion). Doughnut is then paddled with cricket bats. The status quo of aristocrical oppression has once again manifested itself.



In the words of Homi K. Bhabha:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

Doughnut's journey to self-awareness has come full circle. He has returned to his normal state of quiet misery, always wanting but never striving. Life for him is a journey, a journey on a double decker London bus. To nowhere.