Tag: Burst of Weirdness

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

How about we revisit an old feature that I used to run semi-regularly on this site? It’s the Sunday Burst of Weirdness, where I link an item or two that struck me during the previous week as “Wow, that’s really weird.”

We’re going to start with a guy in Britain who decided he was in the mood for cola-bottle gummies (these are gummy candies shaped like cola bottles and flavored like cola), so he bought a 3kg package of them and ate the entire package over three days. I had to look up the weight conversion, because I’m a non-metric American, what do I know about kilograms…that bag is over 6 pounds. Dude ate six pounds of gummy cola bottles in three days.

Did it go well? If it did, I wouldn’t be linking this at all!

Ouch.

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Lazy Linkage!

It’s been a while since I did this, hasn’t it? I am, once again, going to try to be better about regularly updating this blog. Of course, we’ve heard that before, haven’t we?

:: Apparently the person who runs the social media for San Francisco’s mass transit system, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), finally decided to take a different approach in his/her responses to negative comment on social media. The result is some breathtakingly blunt honesty, and it really points up, in my mind, the odd American insistence on creating government services that are just good enough to be disappointing, and then complaining about them without actually committing, as a public, to do better. The money quote here is when this poor soul points out that the BART system was designed to move 100,000 people in a week, and it now moves over 400,000 people each day.

:: Moby Dick, read aloud, by the likes of Stephen Fry, Neil Tennant, Fiona Shaw, Will Self, Benedict Cumberbatch, China Miéville, Tony Kushner, John Waters, Simon Callow, Sir David Attenborough, and Tilda Swinton. Wow! I don’t really like listening to audiobooks — my mind wanders too much and I miss important stuff — but this might bear investigation!

:: CGI recreation of the destruction of Pompeii. Wow, those people had a bad day.

:: The filmmakers of Airplane! reflect on that brilliant movie’s making. Such a classic…although I got in trouble when we watched it as a family years ago, because The Daughter was six or so, and I figured, it’s rated PG. I’d forgotten the gratuitous shot of waggling breasts during one of the air-turbulence scenes.

:: Finally, I didn’t get around to properly observing Pi Day this year, but I did repurpose some older pie video footage of mine into a possible commercial for a new topical treatment for Resting Bitch Face, of which I am a sufferer….


I’m not promising more next week!

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Stuff for a Sunday!

Some links before we head out to brunch in Manhattan, as people do! (I am so going to miss this city…but more on that another time!)

:: A couple of Star Wars links first. Here’s an interesting interview with Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote The Empire Strikes Back and co-wrote Return of the Jedi, and has now returned to Star Wars to write episodes VII, VIII, and IX. Kasdan also wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and Silverado, two other faves of mine.

:: Here’s an interesting history of Marvel Comics’s first foray into Star Wars comics, back before the Expanded Universe or the Prequels or just about anything else. There were some really fun stories in those Marvel comics, and I especially liked the creative team that was in charge at the end of the series’s run; I wish they’d have had more time to flesh out the story they were working on before the series’s abrupt cancellation.

:: Exploring an active volcano via kayak. Don’t try this at home, kids!

:: Many years ago — in 1980 or so — my mother took me to see the Ice Capades when we were living in Portland, OR. The chief attraction was Dorothy Hamill, of course, but to our dismay, Ms. Hamill did not perform when we went, because she was sick or something. But still, I got to see the Ice Capades! I’d pretty much forgotten all about it until a random check of the RetroSpace Flickr stream, whereupon I found that they posted captures of some of the pages from that Ice Capades program. I had this program book, and wow, does this take me back to when I was no more than nine years old!

Ice Capades 1978

And yes, the Ice Capades really were that cheesy, which is why it was awesome!

That’s about all…behave, folks, and regular stuff should resume mid-week! (Today’s our last full day in NYC and then tomorrow we’re on the Amtrak all day.)

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Sunday Linkage Clearing House!

Some links that have been gathering dust in my bookmarks!

:: “Why would you waste cream and sugar on anything that you don’t like?” Nifty little video on one restaurant’s tradition of celebrating departing crewmembers with a pie in the face.

:: Universes that blur the line between SF and fantasy. The genre lines are not sharp borders….

:: Found: Map of Middle-earth, annotated by JRR Tolkien himself.

:: Behold the most complicated watch in the world. This thing is amazing.

:: The tangled cultural roots of Dungeons and Dragons.

:: Unopened mail…from 400 years ago.

:: Making a Dagwood sandwich…and, if you’re so inclined, making the original Dagwood sandwich.

:: How the ballpoint pen killed cursive. I’ve never been able to make up my mind about cursive and whether or not it should still be taught. I’ve never really understood the logic of learning to write twice, but I don’t get the idea that it hurts anything to learn, so…I dunno.

:: They’ve found a new earliest use of the F-word! (And by the way, if you’re one of those who thinks the F-word is an acronym, please stop. You’re wrong.)

:: Making The Warriors. I never saw that movie, but I’ve sure heard of it.

:: How Richard Scarry updated Best Word Book Ever to reflect a newer world.

Finally, on a much more serious note, two pieces that pretty much encapsulate my thinking on the horror that’s been unfolding in the world the last few days: The Price of Civilization by Jim Wright, and Paris by John Scalzi. I honestly don’t have any great prescriptions for making our world better, although I do cling to my faith that we (as a species) are getting better, albeit so very slowly that sometimes it doesn’t seem like we’re getting better at all. I do hope that we don’t completely give in (and by ‘we’, I mean the Western powers and not just the United States) to the eternally-seductive notion that if we just let slip enough of the dogs of war, for a long enough time, we’ll eventually kill all the bad guys and let the credits roll on a victory. History just doesn’t work like that; it never has, and I see little reason to expect it to work that way this time.

With that, I go back to writing. Excelsior, and live well, people!

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Sunday Stuff

Here’s some stuff!

:: An article on “holloways”. These are very old roadways, paths, and thoroughfares whose courses have been literally worn into the ground to the point where they are almost tunnels or walled passages.

:: Yet another hypothesis on the identity of Jack the Ripper. I’ll be reading this book, because it sounds fascinating.

:: Sunset selfies. A guy lived on an island for a while, and he took the habit of making cardboard cutouts of animals or Disney characters or other things, with which he posed in front of the sunset, making wonderful silhouetted vignettes. Via Cal.

More next week. Unless there’s not.

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Stuff

Some links of a questionable nature:

:: I had to check to see if this is a real thing, and apparently it is.

Yes, that is a Christmas ornament, by Hallmark, depicting Kirk and Spock bidding farewell as Spock dies at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Kind of amazing that someone thought this scene, iconic as it may be, needed to be styled as a Christmas ornament.

Hey, why stop there, Hallmark? Why not an entire line of such things, so we can have an entire tree of depressing scenes from movies and pop culture? We can have the kid shooting Old Yeller! Spider Man cradling Gwen Stacy’s dead body! The little girl in the red coat from Schindler’s List! Brooks’s suicide from The Shawshank Redemption! Merlin Olsen’s wife shrieking helplessly with Mary Ingalls’s baby in her arms as the flames engulf her in Little House on the Prairie! The Red Wedding from Game of Thrones! Come on, Hallmark! Let’s have the Depressingest Little Christmas Tree ever!

::  Here’s a fascinating article about how the maps in fantasy novels get made. I tend to be really militant about this: If you give me a fictional world, then you’d better give me a map.

::  Take this with a really big grain of salt, but I love stuff like this anyway: an underwater “Stonehenge” that may point to a civilization ten thousand years gone. I have big doubts on this, but the notion of a massive society flourishing that long ago, and having fallen so long ago that virtually all evidence is gone, is an idea that really appeals to me. Among other things, I could use it as part of my backstory for a future series of space opera novels! There would be this ancient Galactic empire that…oh wait. Did that already.

More next week, maybe! Or maybe not. I’m capricious.

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Some links!

Need some Sunday linkage to go with your coffee? Sure you do!

:: Cane and I go on nature walks every Sunday. This guy goes on NATURE WALKS with his dog. Holy shit, that is one gorgeous dog. I kinda want one of those now.

:: Here’s something I didn’t realize: Since the late 90s, Joe Pesci has pretty much stopped appearing in things. According to IMDb, he’s been in three things since 1998. I guess I just assumed that he was still out there working as much as ever, and I just wasn’t seeing the things he was in, figuring he was showing up in ultra-violent grimdarky Martin Scorsese movies. Turns out he pretty much dropped out of sight: The Mysterious Disappearing Act of Joe Pesci.

:: I remember hearing about this when I was a kid: an artist-dude made a golden rabbit and hid it somewhere in England, and then he released a picture storybook filled with clues as to the golden hare’s location. There’s always something wonderful about a good story about a hunt for hidden treasure and the pitfalls that accompany any such hunt, like discerning clues that aren’t there amidst the ones that are (or having a Staff of Ra that’s too long).

Stay safe, Star Warriors!

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Oddities and Other Stuff for a Sunday Morning

Here are some items of possible interest!

:: There apparently exists a Ned Flanders-themed heavy metal band called Okilly-Dokilly. I am not making this up.

:: Saying goodbye to a secret bookstore. I wish there was a secret bookstore like this in Buffalo…but…what if there is, and I just don’t know about it….

:: The power of walking a million steps. An article by a man who walked the famed El Camino de Santiago in Spain…but it’s also about, well, just walking. I love walking. I don’t need running for that nice Zen thing; I get it walking and hiking just fine, thank you very much. Walking is an important part of my life.

:: And just in case you’re wondering: At the Hugo Awards, the Sad Puppies got the equivalent of being smacked on the nose with a newspaper for messing on the carpet. Of course, since attention of any sort was their goal, they’re declaring victory this morning. But really? Not so much. And of course, since people will be on the lookout for this kind of bullshit in the future and won’t be taken by surprise, their wad has been pretty much shot. Oh well.

All for now!

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Sunday Links!

Some stuff:

:: Here’s a nifty video that spells out why so much of the whining about the “overreliance” on computer-generated images, or CGI, in movies today.


To me, opining that all that model-making and “practical” effects stuff of yesteryear somehow involved a greater amount of artistry is roughly analogous to claiming that writing was better when writers had to use quill pens instead of fountain pens, or typewriters, or word processors.

:: Eleven amazing clocks. Fascinating stuff here! I’m especially happy to see Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Brewery clock featured; I’ve driven past that clock many a time. It’s kind of disappointing that it is currently used as advertising space for AT&T, but hey, the clock’s still there.

:: The Mole Problem: Why Good Animists Make Good Neighbors. Great post by a Twitter peep of mine on our relationship with the animal world, in the wake of that awful killing of a lion last week.

More next week!

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