Frivolity
bioephemera | January 22, 2009Story from North America from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.
"Story from North America"
Garrett Davis and Kristen Lepore
Thanks to reader Claire for finding this strangely poignant yet bizarre short film. I'm not sure what to think of this one.
bioephemera | January 21, 2009
Okay, kids - I know you loved those robot photos from SFO's science fiction in popular culture exhibit. So before my flight out of SFO after New Year's, I snagged a few more snapshots! First up: Spaceman Air Freshener. Umm, that doesn't exactly instill confidence - I think the space station probably smells like a rusty latrine.
Ahhhhhh! Attack of the space Mrs. Butterworths!
Tom Corbett Space Academy. (It's just like a wild west fort - in space.)
"Mr. Hustler?" Really?
These are a few female space alien figurines. I'm not sure how powerful a blow they struck for feminism in Mr. Hustler's…
bioephemera | January 18, 2009
A biology-driven ad for the Oslo Gay Festival, via Sociological Images. Demerits for promulgating the tenacious myth of the sentient sperm, but kudos for production values - those are really nice flagella.
bioephemera | January 18, 2009
Look, it's Ken's "Buddy" Allan! ("All of Ken's clothes fit him!")
This is my all-time favorite example of unintended scandal in advertising. I assume that this tagline somehow sounded okay in the 60s, but come on - those quotation marks are provocative regardless of the decade, because they're just so unnecessary*
Now via Pure Pedantry, I've discovered that there is an entire blog devoted to gratuitous quotation marks and their unintended consequences.
Wonderful! I laughed and laughed this morning. Definitely worth adding to the blogroll.
The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks
*Alas,…
bioephemera | January 16, 2009I hate Battlefield Earth not because it's a bad movie - bad movies can be fun! - but because it's so unrelentingly bad, by the end I was just plain depressed that it existed. The same goes for this truly ghastly ad for Microsoft Songsmith. At first I thought it had to be a spoof. But. . . I'm afraid not (there's a demo here).
If they wanted a musical, they needed to call Joss Whedon. (And make a better product).
Via Stephen Fry's twitterfeed. (Yes, that Stephen Fry).
bioephemera | January 16, 2009Whether you love or hate modern art, you should find this amusing.
Via Eva Amsen at Expression Patterns, I discovered this hilarious TED performance by Ursus Wehrli, author of the rather scarce book Tidying Up Art and its sequel. A deadpan Wehrli rescues modern art masterpieces by Vincent Van Gogh, Keith Haring, Rene Magritte, Jasper Johns and others by restructuring them into clean, happy, sensibly organized graphics. He should start working on government next!
If the embedded video doesn't work, the link is here.
bioephemera | January 14, 2009
I'm hooked on the website tiltshiftmaker.com - it lets you run a quick-and-dirty tilt-shift filter on your snapshots, making them look like miniature models. Here are some snapshots I took on Book Hill Park in Georgetown: are they not adorable?
I'm waiting for the miniature train to run through. . . or Mr. Rogers to loom over the horizon. Try your own photos!
bioephemera | January 11, 2009
Thanks to user B-Baily at Livejournal, we caught a glimpse of this little-known book of dubious etiquette, illustrated by the immortal Edward Gorey. But the book got a little too much attention, and the post was deleted from Livejournal. Fortunately, Joey deVilla snagged the whole thing at his blog, so if you have not yet had a chance to read this remarkable text, head on over. It's hilarious.
bioephemera | January 11, 2009
"I Want You To Want Me"
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for their "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition
Mining data from online dating profiles, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar have created a romantic, bittersweet peek into the human psyche. This video tour of the "I Want You to Want Me" installation ends on an up note - apparently "intelligence" is the top turn-on for online daters! Still, the sight of all those balloons bumping randomly past each other in the sky serves as a reminder that finding love anywhere, online or in meatspace, is a total…
bioephemera | January 6, 2009
Via Scibling Corpus Callosum comes this story of a photographer arrested for taking this photo of an Amtrak train. . . in order to enter Amtrak's own "Picture Our Trains" contest. Uh, PR snafu, anyone?
This is especially annoying because it's been an ongoing problem in DC for some time. Tourists often take photos in Union Station - and often get harassed by guards for doing so, even though station reps have admitted it's not against the law. It's hard to say how taking photos like this one, from public areas, is a security risk - but if it is, Amtrak should get some kind of consistent policy…
bioephemera | January 5, 2009I love reading DCist's collections of overheard quotes. This week they have a great indicator of poor science literacy among the DC public:
On the Corner of 13th and F last week:
Guy 1: "You know who's frozen?"
Guy 2: "Who's that?"
Guy 1: "Walt Disney. As soon as he died, they froze him using generics."
Guy 2: "You mean genetics?"
Guy 1: "Yeah, genetics. Whatever."
Both dudes clearly meant cryogenics, not genetics (at least they knew "generics" wasn't quite right.) But cryogenics is wrong too - cryonics is the correct term for freezing people with the intent to revive them later. Also, Walt…
bioephemera | January 4, 2009
Is it a small torpedo? A thermos? A shiny handbag? Who cares, it's adorable!
Metal purse by Frank Strunk, who has also created some really uncomfortable-looking "industrial chic" outfits and men's ties. Uh, I'll just take the purse, thanks.
Via Haute Macabre via Coilhouse.
bioephemera | January 3, 2009
Coming through SFO last weekend, I encountered a wonderful exhibit of classic science fiction toys entitled "Out of this World! The Twentieth-Century Space Invasion of American Pop Culture." Tired and sick as I was, it made me wish I had more time to kill in the airport!
The show opened with two monolithic silver robots assembled of found objects by sculptor Clayton Bailey:
Check out Bailey's gallery of robots here.
The robots were followed by display upon display (all in acid 50s aqua, naturally) of vintage board games, toys, costumes, primitive robots, remote control aircraft, cap guns…
bioephemera | January 2, 2009
We spent most of last night playing a very cool board game, Pandemic. It's sort of like Risk, but instead of fighting opposing players' armies, you're cooperating against a global wave of infections.
In the game scenario, four different diseases break out in different regions of the world (they're given colors, not names, though you can guess at an ID based on the games' illustrations; one is clearly a bacillus, another is a filovirus). The players have to cooperate and pool their resources to treat and control local outbreaks, while searching for cures for all four diseases. The surprising…
bioephemera | December 31, 2008In honor of yet another pi x 10^7 seconds of my life evaporating, here's a sign from our hotel in Idaho:
"Temporally out of order" just seemed like an extremely fortuitous typo. . . happy new year.
bioephemera | December 30, 2008
I've been a big fan of mashups ever since Freelance Hellraiser superposed Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" on the Strokes' "Hard to Explain." But what happens when the pop music monoculture becomes so homogenous, you can mash just about anything together? In this track/video, DJ Earworm remixes twenty-five pop hits into a concoction that makes just as much melodic sense as most hits do. Frightening.
When music is this interchangeable, you know you've got a dangerous genephonic bottleneck on your hands. . . and that's a recipe for extinction, baby. Just sayin'.
bioephemera | December 28, 2008The Guardian calls out celebrities who made scientifically illiterate statements in 2008:
Kate Moss, Oprah Winfrey and Demi Moore all espoused the idea that you can detoxify your body with either diet (scientifically unsupportable) or, in the case of Moore, products such as "highly trained medical leeches" which make you bleed. Scientists point out that diet alone cannot remove toxins and that blood itself is not a toxin, and even if it did contain toxins, removing a little bit of it is not going to help.
bioephemera | December 27, 2008Dan Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University, said calling Obama a geek is unfair both to the president-elect and geeks. ''He's too cool to be a geek; he's a decent basketball player; he knows how to dance; he dresses well,'' Sarewitz said. ''It's too high a standard for geeks to possibly live up to.''
Hey!
From the NYT.
bioephemera | December 27, 2008Assuming you have some downtime to digest, vegetate, and recover from the holidays, here's a cookie plate of links. Enjoy!
Boing Boing Gadgets presents "How it works. . . The Computer." Hilarious.
Via Morbid Anatomy, I found Monster Brains' repository of Krampus ephemera. For those in blissful ignorance, the Krampus is a grotesque devil figure that abuses young children as part of traditional Christmas festivities in Germany. Yikes!
Speaking of children, these vintage illustrations are, um, shocking:
From "30 ways to die of electrocution" flickr set by bre pettis.
Erratic Phenomena has…