:: The alien from Alien, made of vegetables. Seriously. I never liked the Alien movies, but I always did kind of like the design of the alien itself.
:: It’s always fun to go back to basics, which for purposes of the Burst of Weirdness means finding nifty stuff based on Cthulhu. Here’s Termithulhu, which crosses Cthulhu with the Terminator.
:: There’s a David Fincher movie to be found in this creepy news story: a serial killer in Moscow who, after dispatching his victims, marks them off on a chessboard. Via Warren Ellis.
:: A few weeks ago, the Burst of Weirdness had a delightful bit of bathroom graffiti that I suspected was a lot more wide-spread than I had ever known. And sure enough, it is: someone has a Cafepress store selling clothing emblazoned with “Press Button, Receive Bacon”. Hooray!
Again not a whole lot of weirdness that caught my eye this week. Is the Interweb becoming less weird? Or am I just getting less good at finding it? Either way, it’s a disturbing trend. Anyway:
:: Already familiar to readers of his Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana (and if you’re not a reader of it, why on Earth not?!) is Jess Nevins’s defense of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is usually derided as one of history’s worst writers. I’ve never read him, personally.
:: For some reason, Steven thinks that people should feel significant cognitive dissonance over the fact that he has long hair and yet is not a liberal. Maybe he’s not living in the right place; I know plenty of fairly long-haired gents who aren’t hippies at all.
:: I was never a fan of Popeye, either in cartoons or in that horrible Robin Williams movie. Never liked him. But until I started reading Comics Curmudgeon, I never knew that Popeye is a daily comic strip too — and a really, really weird one at that.
I didn’t see a whole lot of standout weirdness on the Intertubes this week, for some reason. I do note that apparently Dark Horse is re-issuing the Gor novels. Now, I never read the Gor novels, but from what I’ve gleaned, they’re a series of planetary romance novels in the attempted vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs that happen to feature a healthy dose of misogyny. So far I’ve read a lot of “What is Dark Horse thinking?!” style of commentary on this. Has anyone out there read the Gor books? How bad are they? I have to admit that I might read a couple just out of curiosity.
(Sorry about the fairly lame Burst this week, but that’s what I had to work with, folks!)
Different kinds of weirdness from the week gone by:
:: I knicked this photo from this post by Neddie Jingo, because I thought it was hilarious. For all I know, this may be one of those types of graffiti that are known the world over and which I somehow have completely missed, but anyway:
In conjunction with this John Scalzi post, I envision John just standing there, hitting the button over and over again, chortling like a Vegas gambling addict who can’t stop putting money in the slots, as he basks in vending-machine bacony goodness.
:: I work with this guy at The Store:
Here he is again, in a longer one, with some other guy:
:: Remember in Wayne’s World, when Wayne and Garth engage in the pastime of lying face-up about twenty feet from the leading edge of one of O’Hare’s runways? Well, check this out:
Here’s another, and note the dust and wind that gets kicked up by the jet’s wake:
MeFi has an entire thread about this kind of thing right now. That airport has a really short runway, with water pretty much flanking in on all sides. Here’s the cockpit’s point of view of that same approach:
And here’s an entire gallery of landing sites to test the mettle of any pilot. Frankly, as neat as the St. Maarten Island landing looks, this one would scare the living crap out of me.
I wouldn’t land there with Han Solo at the controls!
:: I’m torn. Part of me actually wants to see what my cats would be like on distilled essence of catnip, while the other part of me is terrified at that same prospect, since said cats are (a) big lummoxes, and (b) barely smarter than chickens.
:: Sitting on a car airbag and setting it off. I have this feeling that if the very last human being to ever die is a male, his last words — and thus the final words of our once-promising species — will be some variant of “Hey, watch this!”
:: You know those “Mr. Wizard” style energy gadgets that you see in science museums? The ones that generate sparks of electricity that arc right through thin air? Well, in Russia, they once built some really big versions of those gadgets. How big? Really big. As in, “towering over the trees” big.
I wasn’t online nearly as much this week as other weeks, for various reasons, but some weird stuff did transpire.
:: First, Jonathan Strahan links this review of his new anthology, The New Space Opera (which you’d better believe I’m buying). The second paragraph of this review ends with this odd assertion:
Space ships, etc., only show up in one very small subgenre of SF: the space opera.
Now, I’m not sure what the “etc.” refers to here — earlier in the article the reviewer mentions “spaceship and bug-eyed monsters” as appearing in SF as a genre, but I’m not sure that’s what the “etc.” means here. But even if so, this is a terribly odd characterization of space opera. 2001: A Space Odyssey isn’t space opera, and yet it contains one of the iconic spaceships in all of SF (the Discovery). Michael Flynn’s wonderful Falling Stars (that’s not the title of the series, actually, but if you’ve read it, you know the one I mean) series has lots of spaceships, but it’s not space opera, either. Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow has both spaceships and strange aliens, but it’s most definitely not a space opera.
:: This isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a museum in Russia that’s devoted to some very dark stuff. Via Warren Ellis, whom I imagine is starting to feel like one of the victims of the items on display in that museum, given that he apparently can’t smoke in pubs anymore. Seems to me he could just compensate by simply drinking more, but having never smoked, I’m not sure how that works.
Not a great week for weirdness, unfortunately — I didn’t see anything that really grabbed me as weird. But for sheer amusement, there’s always AC Douglas’s spittle-flecking of his monitor in response to the AFI’s Top 100 films list. He can cry “O tempora! O mores!” from the rooftops as much as he likes, of course, but reading his brief roster of films he thinks get too much recognition, as well as those which don’t get enough, pretty much make clear that he considers “detestable pop culture” to basically boil down to “that set of things he doesn’t like”.
You know how retailers these days will sometimes solicit customer feedback by handing you a coupon along with your receipt that can only be activated if you call a toll-free number and answer some questions? Well, turns out that DC Comics once tried something similar by including an opt-in survey in its comics. You fill it out and send it in, and theoretically, DC analyzes the information and…well, I don’t know. Comes up with new comics, maybe, or adjusts existing titles, or something like that.
What makes this funny is that DC did it in the early 1970s. Go look. It’s absolutely hilarious.
