Category: True Stories

Bunky’s Grumpkin 2010

I’m proud to say that my grumpkins make big dogs bark and little kids cry. Previous year’s grumpkins can be found here and here.

Once A Ramone Always A Ramone

As drummer for the seminal punk band The Ramones, surviving member Marky Ramone is enhancing his portfolio by marketing Marky Sauce.  It’s the loudest, fastest and most awesome pasta sauce you’ll ever see in your lifetime. Gabba freakin’ Hey!

[Video here, Marky’s website here. Tip o’ the tarboosh to WN.]

For fans, here’s a bonus clip from “End of the Century.”

Look at this MF Batman

Oh, the possibilities. Were it not for Feldman‘s death in 1982, this movie would have been pure awesome, especially if Mel Brooks had anything to do with it.

Here’s some trivia: Feldman suffered from Grave’s disease, an auto-immune/thyroid condition that caused his eyes to bulge. But that’s not what killed him. He was in a hotel room in Mexico City during the making of the movie Yellowbeard. MAD cartoonist Sergio Aragonés, dressed as an armed policeman for an unrelated film, startled Feldman when he showed up to introduce himself. Feldman subsequently died of a heart attack.

[Image found here.]

“I Am Eating Candy.”

Although the book is sixty years old, Viktor Lowenfeld described the childhood stages of  perception, via drawing and painting, and included a section on the blind and deaf. Lowenfeld was very perceptive and astute in using art to measure the mental progress of young ‘uns.

“I Am Eating Candy” is the title of a clay sculpture by an 11 year old blind and deaf girl who attended the Perkins Institution for the Blind in the late 1940s. It’s from a book entitled “Creative and Mental Growth – A Textbook on Art Education,” by Viktor Lowenfeld, Pennsylvania State College, published by The Macmillan Company, New York, 1950. Here’s the full plate:

I’m tempted to scan the entire book into .pdf format… it’s that awesome.

Nose Harp

[Found in Strider’s awesome collection of crap.]

Several Serious Layers of Awesome

Although the sign says “Mockingbird Heights Drag Strip,” the photo was probably taken at the NHRA Drag Strip in Pomona California in the mid 1960s. Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster was accompanied by Grampa Munster (Al Lewis) for a publicity stunt.

I watched the show as a kid for obvious reasons, but especially to see Marilyn Munster. All the little chicks with the crimson lips fawned over 10 year old Eddie Munster, and one of his fans finally tracked down Butch Patrick.

[WARNING: DISTURBING IMAGE AFTER THE BREAK.] Continue reading “Several Serious Layers of Awesome”

Sub-Basic Pizza

Seems to me that it would’ve been cheaper to order a hamburger with a couple of toasted extra buns, but that involves a lot of planning and logistics, not to mention the aggravation of travel time.

I’d have sent it back because the beef is not on the left half  side, just to see how the pizzaman resolved the problem without using Elmer’s. Of course, if I did that, pizzaman would block my phone number. Not worth it.

[Found here.]

5:06:07 08/09/10

It happened this morning. It’ll happen again this afternoon. Thought you’d like to know [via].

Swiss Army Crapper

“Honey, it locked up again and I’ve gotta go, real bad.”

There’s something about designers who insist on taking a concept that works and trying to fix it. Just because it’s different, doesn’t necessarily make it better, and this is a great example.

Yeah, it looks cool, and it takes up less space than a regular bathroom with a toilet and a shower, but look closer at what it takes away.

  • The floor and all walls of the room need to be waterproofed, and it has to have a floor drain.
  • All electrical fixtures, switches and outlets need to be waterproof, too.
  • The floor is always cold. And wet.
  • Forget mildew problems. Now you have water deposits to clean.
  • To clean it, you need a ladder… and machine oil.
  • No grooming mirror in front of the lavatory so you might as well do it in a dark closet.
  • The toilet seat will always be wet. No furry seat cover cozies for you!
  • Forget about a toilet paper dispenser. You better remember to fish it out of the linen cabinet every time.
  • Women have no countertop space to display all 31 beauty enhancement products and accouterments.
  • Men have no place to set their beer while they pee into the floor drain.

Now, if it had a single button that springs everything into a usable configuration, that might be cool, except when the power goes out. In other words, it’s another great example of pure efficient genius.

[Found here, crossposted here, with a Tip o’ the Tarboosh to Snork.]

Casa de Coprolite

It’s a house. It’s a very ugly house. It’s a very ugly house created for a competition by people who have no concept of aesthetics, let alone standard construction practices. Here’s a partial description justifying the brilliance of the design:

DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE
Faced with the typical house model of a “box construction” made up of standard industrialized components, we chose to build a clever house with systemic logic components, rising into what we call a distributed intelligence. This means that each component of the prototype contains the same level of technology, energy, structural, etc… With this we say that the logic of all is found in each of the parts, and not vice versa.

That is, distributed intelligence can be understood as the development in fusion research systems and materials, implying a change of procedures, multi functionality in the construction field. Opening the possiblities of digital parametric design from the traditional assembly of standardized industrial components of the home-computer.

In other words, they’ve not only designed one of the ugliest dwellings ever imagined, they’ve invented a brand new lexicon to justify it. Archibabble at its worst. Phew.

To be fair, the design is clever in one respect, that the shape was generated based upon solar tracking, that is, a computer model engineered a shape that maximizes the amount of surface area that receives direct sunlight throughout the day and throughout the year, thus determining the configuration of the solar panels. Win.

Unfortunately, the maximum efficiency is compromised by site orientation, its global latitude, and, um, unpredictable cloud cover. And it’s ugly. Fail.

[More info and images here via here.]