:: Who doesn’t love some retro-future stuff? Here’s a segment from an old Disney show about highways in the future. Some of this stuff is kind of prescient, while other stuff falls into the “Hey, it’s the 21st century — where the $*&#! are my flying cars!”
I’ll even trade my flying cars for those cantilevered skyways in the mountains!
:: I always figured, from all of my readings, that the ancient Greeks were a generally humorless lot, but a recently unearthed sculpture reveals a hidden side to Greek comedy:
(I have no idea where I got that from. Saw it months ago and copied it because I thought it was funny, and then forgot about it.)
Just one thing this week, because when I saw this over at Cal’s place, I knew that nothing could top it or even merit being in the same post with it, so unbelievably f***ed up this is.
Apparently, there is a fad in Russia where people take their hairless Sphinx cats and get them tattooed.
My brain can barely process how messed up a thing that is.
I wasn’t online much the last few days, so I didn’t see anything myself that seemed utterly weird and goofy, but rather than just leave this post empty of content (any moreso than usual), I’ll simply cull a few links from Neatorama.
Oh, and I found this someplace else (but I don’t remember where). It’s the destruction of a front-loading washing machine. Make sure to watch until the end:
:: I’m thrilled to see my preferred mode of response to the Fred Phelps crew taking hold, whenever these doofuses decided to show up somewhere. My favorite sign, amongst that crowd, is “MAGNETS — HOW THE $&%* DO THEY WORK?”
:: I may have actually posted this before, and if that’s the case, sorry, but: 20 of the World’s Most Beautiful Libraries. I’m pretty sure the one from Dublin, Ireland was the template for the Jedi Library in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
:: On a related note is Bookshelf Porn, which collects photos of bookshelves and libraries and bookshops and everything in between. Truly a source of prime, USDA-grade Awesome, although I found the site’s functionality a little wonky, so I’m using Google Reader to follow its RSS feed.
Via Bookshelf Porn, I’ve just learned of a place called Shakespeare and Company. It’s the bookshelf I must visit before I die:
Which means I’ll have to get myself to Paris someday. Sigh….
:: What a cool blog! It’s a food blog that focuses on food and history. Lots of recipes paired with historical information, and it’s cool to scroll down the blog and read the bits of food history that happened under each American President. Here, for example, is a list of provisions called for at the Second Inaugural of President Ulysses S. Grant:
Among other provisions were 10,000 fried oysters; 63 boned turkeys; 150 capons stuffed with truffles; 15 saddles of mutton; 200 dozen quails; 200 hams; 250 chickens; 400 partridges; 25 stuffed boar’s heads; 3,000 head cheese sandwiches; 2,000 ham sandwiches; 8,000 pickled oysters and 2,000 pounds of lobster.
Sounds like a hell of a party, right? Go over there and read about how the party went!
:: Want to see ladies in bikinis reading lines from Star Wars IV: A New Hope? Sure you do!
:: When I was in grade school, there was a series of educational films that we’d watch in class on occasion. They were called “the Hot Dog movies”, and they were short films on various subjects. They used a lot of goofy humor, and they included appearances by Woody Allen and Joanne Whorley. Apparently these films ran on teevee sometime in the early 1970s, but I saw them in class in third and fourth grade. One of the only ones that I really remember dealt with US paper currency, and as luck would have it, that’s the only Hot Dog film I’ve been able to find on YouTube. Here it is. I just think this is pretty cool!
:: Here’s a really weird story. It’s so weird, I’m not sure the historians didn’t make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn’t much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche.
Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along, lots of other folks in other lands have decided that their Kings and Queens were being douchey, so they came up with ways to replace them. They’d organize revolts, usually behind the banner of some obscure relative of the monarch’s so they could say that their person has a better claim to the throne, and off they’d go. So you’d expect that the folks we’re talking about here would have just said, “You know what? Our King is a douche. Let’s replace him with a new King.”
But these folks didn’t say that. What they said was, “Not only does our King suck, but he sucks so much that we’re now thinking maybe we won’t even have any more Kings. We’ll do it all ourselves.”
Over a year or so, there were some battles and skirmishes between these folks and the troops sent by the King to put down the pesky rebels, but it didn’t work, and that notion — “No more Kings and Queens!” — took hold. It became a really popular idea, so finally, these folks appointed some representatives to gather in one of their cities and talk these issues over. The conversation went like this:
GUY #1: So, we’re all agreed then? Kings suck?
GUY #2: Yes, Verily, they suck.
GUY #1: OK, so what do we do?
GUY #3: Well, we’re already fighting, so we just keep fighting. But we should probably tell the King that we’re being serious and we’re not just a bunch of rabble-rousers here.
GUY #1: Right! How do we do that?
GUY #4: How ’bout a letter? I’ve got some nice parchment, quills, and a new bottle of ink.
GUY #2: Good idea! But you’re about as eloquent as my cow. You’ll just write “Hey King, sod off” and be done with it. We should be a bit more poetic about it.
GUY #4: How about Tom? He’s pretty poetic.
GUY #1: Good idea! Let Tom do it. Now where’s that Adams guy with the beer?
So a guy named Tom wrote the King a sternly-worded letter. It was pretty wordy, given the standards of the time, so here’s a paraphrase:
Dear King,
We the undersigned, being representatives of the people of your colonies, have collectively decided that you are a douche and we don’t want to live under your rule anymore. Furthermore, we’re going to come up with a government of our own that won’t even have a King. Now, we’ve just called you a douche, so you’re probably thinking that we should be kind enough to at least tell you all the reasons we have for thinking you’re a douche, so there’s a list of those reasons later on. For now, suffice it to say that we believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And you don’t. And since we like the whole Life and Liberty thing a lot more than we like you, we’re gonna take those and let you do whatever it is you do with your time in that Palace of yours.
So, here’s the list of ways you’ve pissed us off. Note how long it is. You don’t have to be a douche, you know.
…
See? Really, dude. There’s no reason for some of that stuff, right? So anyway, have a good life and all. You’ve still got your island, and Canada seems pretty happy with you for some reason (but really, they’re weird folks to begin with, what with that odd game they like to play on ice). But we’re out of here.
Signed, All the guys present
PS: Could you make sure your soldiers always wear those bright red coats? It makes it really easy to see ’em in the forests. KTHXBAI.
And so it came to pass that after some years of war, and some further years of cruddy government, they all got together again and figured out how they wanted to set up their new, “No Kings!” government. Their notion was to spread power out amongst a bunch of folks who were accountable to the people, and to further make sure that their government was required to respect certain rights that couldn’t be taken away. It was a really weird idea…and yet, these folks worked hard to make it work, and their children kept working hard to make it work, and their children kept at it, and so on and so on and son on, until today.
Does it still work? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But we’re still here, and we’re still working at it.
So Happy Birthday, United States of America! You’re a wonderful, weird, beautiful, maddening, and awesome country.
:: Jilted husbands across the land take whatever measure of revenge they can get, huh? Behold: My Ex-Wife’s Wedding Dress! Wherein divorced men strike back at the gown their former spouse wore whilst exchanging vows. Funny, in that head-shaking kind of way.
:: An apparent submission for some sort of contest, this will be hard to beat. It’s a buy on a unicycle, playing the Star Wars them, on the bagpipes! WIN!!!
:: This one’s a bit scary, actually: apparently if you’re a seismologist by trade in Italy, and you fail to predict a big earthquake, you can be indicted for manslaughter. I guess a lack of scientific literacy isn’t prevalent just in America, huh?
