Category: True Stories

Hot Links of the 11th Dimension

FLATLAND Edwin Abbott

In Dreams is an experimental film about childhood nightmares by Samuel Blain.

“I never forget a face.” Yeah, you’ve heard someone say it, but how would they know? I got a score of 91% and 82% on this test.

The Legend of Chuck Norris lives on. I’m amazed that I didn’t make it into the Top 50, or maybe I did…

Crashing Cell Phone Conversations At The Airport.

This Guy Travelled The Country In A Pink Tutu Just To Make His Wife Laugh During Chemo.

Very cool fractal art.

Yeah, it snowed in Cairo. BFD. Weather happens, and it’s not caused by humans. We don’t have that much power, never will, no matter what Mr. Catastrophe told you.

How long can YOU watch a kitten with nasal problems in front of a fire place? [via]

WorpDress just informed me that this our 2,609th blog post. Wish they’d warned me a few years ago. I’d have cleaned up the yard, re-caulked the tub and got rid of the meerkats (cutesy little standy-uppy weasel-lookin’ bastards).

Top image from Edwin A. Abbot’s 1884 classic novella “Flatland.”

Christmas Arachnids

Christmas Spider

“An old European Christmas legend tells of a poor woman unable to provide the traditional decorations for the special holiday. A spider made his home in her tree and began to spin beautiful webs. On Christmas morning, the first light of sun struck the cobwebs, turning them to silver. When the woman awoke, she found the tree was covered with silver treasure. The spider had brought good fortune!”
[via]

Other versions claim it’s a German or Ukrainian tradition, and that either the Christ Child or Santa transformed the webs. Although I grew up in an area with a large German population, I never heard the story and can’t find an original source.

Yet, there IS such a creature called a Christmas Spider.

[Image found here.]

Phil Jones’ Contribution To The World

Susan and Annie 1

“I have a deep respect for anyone who is willing to put their face on a bus stop bench knowing what people do to them.  I thought it would be fun to do my own take on our local realtor advertisements.” –Phil Jones

Phil Jones’ “take” is to dress up as the people in the bus bench back adverts and replace their portraits with his own. Look closer:
Susan and Annie 2
Clever innocuous graffiti from Minneapolis, and there’s more at his website. Susan and Annie liked it, too.
[Found here.]

Nothing Much Happened Today.

Nothing Much Happened Today

[Found here.]

The Best Crappiest Speakers Ever Made.

RCA

They looked like armadillos boinking a mailbox, and yes, they were speakers. They were virtually indestructible. They hung on the inside of your car window when it was freezing outside and wouldn’t allow you to roll it up all the way.

They were also easily stolen with a pen knife. Lupe had a wall of them in his apartment, all wired together and hooked up to his stereo for a tinny wall of sound. Listening to Led Zeppelin through a dozen drive-in rattlebuzzers was truly something to behold. Truly.

[Found here.]

Crumbling Dice & Exploding Billiard Balls

decompsed dice

Cellulose nitrate was used to make dice from the late 1860s until the middle of the twentieth century, and the material remains stable for decades. Then, in a flash, they can dramatically decompose. Nitric acid is released in a process called outgassing. The dice cleave, crumble, and then implode.

From Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck by Ricky Jay and Rosamond Purcell, 2002.

[Via Wiki] Because of its explosive nature, not all applications of nitrocellulose were successful. In 1869, with elephants having been poached to near extinction, the billiards industry offered a $10,000 prize to whoever came up with the best replacement for ivory billiard balls. John Wesley Hyatt created the winning replacement, which he created with a new material he discovered called camphored nitrocellulose—the first thermoplastic, better known as celluloid. The invention enjoyed a brief popularity, but the Hyatt balls were extremely flammable, and sometimes portions of the outer shell would explode upon impact. An owner of a billiard saloon in Colorado wrote to Hyatt about the explosive tendencies, saying that he did not mind very much personally but for the fact that every man in his saloon immediately pulled a gun at the sound.

[Found here.]

Happy Thanksgiving

Retro Thanksgiving

It amazes me to think that in September 1620, 102 people were so fed up with the English monarchy that they were willing to risk a dangerous late-season voyage across the Atlantic (that lasted over two months at sea) to a new land to establish a free colony.

Disease, scurvy, starvation and weather exposure took their toll, and half of them died before the following spring. In March of 1621, the survivors sought to establish Plymouth Rock, ventured ashore, and met an escaped British slave named Squanto who spoke English.

His first words to William Bradford were:
“Dude. This is a swamp. You f’d up. Y’all gonna die an’ stuff.”
Bradford replied, “Bro, WTF?”
“Here. Plant some of this, but put a fish under it.”
“Dude, no way.”
“Way. Just do it.”
“K.  By the way, we got a plow.”
“Get out. You got a what? What you need a plow on a boat for?”
“We got one. You got an ox?”
“Ordered one on Amazon, but he ain’t showed up yet. They walk slow.”
“Cool. We’re gonna pop some pheasant for supper. Y’all wanna come?”
“Hell yeah. We’ll bag some Bambi and see you about 4.”

And the rest is history.

Have a great holiday, folks, and never forget the Reason for Thanksgiving.

[Image from here.]

Saturday Matinee – RIP JFK & 1963 Radio

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by a communist named Lee Harvey Oswald. I was very young, but I remember understanding that something terrible had happened.

JFK was indisputably the last conservative democrat to hold the Office of the Presidency, and the loss still echoes.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

On a lighter note, in 1963 one of my prized possessions was a transistor radio that I listened to constantly, and I wasted a large number of batteries by falling asleep with the radio on my pillow.
Here are three favorites.

No. 10 in the Billboard rankings for 1963: The Impressions‘ “It’s All Right.” Curtis Mayfield was with the group from 1958 – 1970. The vid is from the TV show “Hollywood A-Go-Go” in 1965.

Martha & The Vandellas, live at The Apollo. Martha Reeve’s voice still blows me away.

The Chantays performed Pipeline live on The Lawrence Welk Show in 1963. According to the liner notes on their album, the oldest member of the band from Santa Ana California was 17 when they invented surf-rock.

This was the also the age of the “girl groups.” Before lil’ Bunk was in the double digits of age he liked girls, just couldn’t admit it to his buddies, and was secretly in love with Ronnie Spector, Skeeter Davis, Barbara Lewis and The Chiffons, but not Leslie Gore – what a whiner.

Have a great weekend, folks.

James Brown was Stillborn.

James Brown Star Time 1 James Brown Star Time 2

James Brown Star Time 2a

Not to disparage the late Butane James, but being born dead and recovering is one helluva fetus. Aside from that, this compilation is completely awesome.

Elevated Turkish Toilets. Fancy that.

bombler.ru

Bombs away me hearties. Now where is the wheelchair accessible one?

Not sure why there are no privacy partitions, unless this lineup is for a competition (Game of Thrones?) but there’s something else missing, and I’m not gonna go there.

[Found in here, archive for Potty Humor here.]