Been there. It was cool.
[More abandoned amusement park stuff here. Related post here.]
A happy dog in a pile of leaves [via].
What a hurricane sounds like: Hurricane Ike 2008 [via].
“Hey, yinz. Stillers ain’t jagoffs. We gotcha tear-bull talls, yah.” This long linguistic analysis of Pittsburghese is missing one thing: audio examples of the dialect [via].
It’s also come to my attention that the Pittsburgh “yinzer” accent was voted the most annoying dialect in the Nation, and I disagree. The New York accent that pronounces the word “all” as “ohl” is worse than the Southern California accent (made famous in Zappa’s “Valley Girl“) that inflects statements into questions?
Robert Goddard’s 1914 Patent for a liquid-fueled rocket. Consider that in 1914 we barely knew how to design airplanes. In those days, the fuel gauge was a pocket watch hung on a nail.
[Top image from here.]
“Anijam” was a 1984 animation experiment created by Marv Newland, and appeared in the movie/video series “Animation Celebration.” No plot, just an exercise in surreal animation focused on an odd character named “Foska.” (Watch for some early computer animation sequences.)
“ANIJAM was created by 22 animators, each doing a different sequence. The first drawing of each sequence is the last drawing of the previous sequence. The animators did not know what action came before, or went after their own sequence. The animators were free to create any animation that they wished. They were required to begin and end their sequence with Foska.”
So where do we go after that level of bizarre? How ’bout this:
“The Flight of The Bumble Bee” [ca. 1900] on trombone is VERY tough to do. I could barely double-tongue on trumpet (dugga-dugga), or triple-tongue (dugga-ta-dugga-ta-dugga) but that guy was quadruple tonguing (dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga) on a trombone at high speed. Spike Jones’ band was awesome.
John Prine & Iris Dement at Sessions at West 54th (full concert) February 2014 [via]. The only thing I have against John Prine is/are his forced rhymes, but his voice and songwriting makes up for it. After all, it’s a Big ‘Ol Goofy World.
Have a great weekend, folks. Be back here tomorrow for more fun.
Seems somewhat appropriate given the results of yesterday’s poll. The majority of the US voting populace hasn’t bought into the crap promoted by the socialists, despite their hollow threats, and that’s a good thing.
[Image found all over the internest, but reposted from here.]

This predates the “For Dummies” books, and although it focuses on VWs, it’s also a primer on how all the systems in a gasoline-powered car work, how to maintain them, how to diagnose trouble and how to fix it. It’s written as if your Uncle Joe was coaching you, and the diagrams (and comics) are hand-drawn in Robert Crumb style. I learned a lot from it when I was in my 20s, and the book is still in print via Amazon here.
Even if you don’t own an old VW, get a copy and read it just for fun, enjoy the illustrations, and pass it on to your favorite teenage greasemonkey like I did. (It’s the perfect Christmas gift for someone with a VW, an adjustable wrench, a hammer and a couple of screwdrivers.)
Oh, and click on the image to see the big picture.
[Popular Science, 1923. Found here.]
[Found here.]
[Found here. Stitched ’em all together into one gif. All I can figger is that the perp painted some honey on the pumpkin for the cheat, but the WIN is awesome.]
UPDATE: Here’s the source vid:
[More awesome costumes here.]