Tacky Raccoons

Hazard on the Pitch

Sure it’s a funny picture, but the story is anything but.

Spectacular project of Sebastian Errazuriz in 2006 (“Memorial of a Concentration Camp”, Santiago, Chile):

“A 10-meter magnolia tree is planted in the center of Chile’s National Stadium where dictator Pinochet in 1973 imprisoned thousands of political prisoners who were tortured and killed.

After planting the tree, the stadium doors are open to the public as a park, offering a space to stop, look again, and remember.

An impossible, cathartic soccer match played before 20,000 people, closes the project after a week of activity.”

[Story with more images can be found here.]

It’s Shark Week? Okay. Here you go.

[Found here.]

1,292 Posts = 3rd Year Blogoversary!

Wow. Didn’t think we’d still be around this long. Mostly, we didn’t think at all, just got up did it, starting on 3 August 2007, and we’ve since passed 671,000 views!

The year certainly had its highlights. We had our busiest day, 18 October 2009, with over 20,500 hits. I was invited to post on both AmyOops and The Blogmocracy. Amy’s site is kind of a cornocopia of oddness, and The Blogmocracy is more about current events where I provide innocuous fodder for the Overnight Open Thread. It’s all a lot of fun.

We opened up The Tacky Raccoons Store for TR paraphernalia. Our new FaceBook page was hacked and deleted, but it’ll be up again soon. Thanks to all who logged in.

This post is a retrospective of our past year, listing the Top 10 greatest hits of Tacky Raccoons from August 2009 to August 2010. Previous years’ greatest hits are here and here.

So here are the Top 10 of the past twelve months, with last year’s rankings separated by an appropriate slash. NR = no rating, indicating that the post either didn’t make rank or wasn’t posted last year. Click on the images to see the original posts.

Hey Ho! Let’s go!

No 10/NR: Steampunk Rabbit Hunt

No. 9/NR: The .Gif Friday Post No. 129 – Compound Pendulum, Nematode, Cat Slide

No. 8/6: Southern California Fires – October 2007

No. 7/NR: Bloody Mushrooms With Teeth

No. 6/NR: How to REALLY piss off a golden retriever

No. 5/9: Lesbian Amputee Dwarf Porn
[The title of this one was pure blogwhoring at its best, and it’s still paying off.]

No. 4/1: Lol Ferret Episode 1
[This was the 2nd most popular post since this blog done be borned, with over 30,6oo hits since 8 November 2007.]

No. 3/3: Giant Woolly Bear Caterpillar Discovered Near Las Cruces, NM, Predicts Global Warming for Decades to Come
[Don’t miss the comments on this one.]

No. 2/NR: Amy’s Motivational Poster Collection

AND THE NUMBER ONE POST OF THE YEAR IS:

No. 1/NR: An Expensive Ignosecond
This post got close to 21,000 hits before we realized that the pictures didn’t show an accident. Those guys knew exactly what they were doing, and they did it with precision.

Thanks gobs to all of you who joined up and stayed with us these past years, keep on clicking on. Let’s hope and pray that the results of this year’s November elections bring us all back to prosperity. –Bunk

[Tip o’ the tarboosh to this site that produced the top image.]

Luscious, Tempting and Appealing.

“Guys! Check it out! Babs just showed up with a Tootsie Roll and she’s chewing it! Dump your skanky dates, you’re missing the best part! Man oh man, look at her go!”

True Fact: Tootsie Roll, see, is the life of every party… for wherever Young America gathers… Its popularity is acclaimed by all.

Acclaimed by all 13 dweebs in the advert, that is. The next best thing, besides watching Babs seductively remove her fillings with a brown phallus-shaped wad of sugar, corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, condensed milk, cocoa, whey, soy lecithin, orange extract, and artificial and condensed flavors, is an ether binge.

[Found here. Crossposted here.]

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.]

Saturday Matinee – World’s Strongest Redneck, Derek, Bob, Gatemouth & Johnny, and Buddy Guy

Redneck washing machine. When Steve McGranahan‘s not bending cast iron skillits for charity, this funny guy makes videos.

“Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?” was one of Derek & The Dominos’ greatest hits.

One of my favorite Wailers songs.

Here’s a 44 year old Clarence Gatemouth Brown with a 32 yearold Johnny Jones playing “Chicken Fat” in 1968. [via]

Happy 74th Birthday to Buddy Guy, one of the last original bluesplayers. Here’s a guy who left the south for Chicago and played for sandwiches to keep from starving.

Have a great weekend, folks. See y’all back here tomorrow.

The .Gif Friday Post No. 136 – Zero G, Clearing The Neighborhood & A Floating Oracle

[Found here, here and here.]

Don’t do this. Really. Don’t.

Occasionally while sniffing around the internest I’ll run across an image that jumps up and bites me right in the crackerbockles, and this is one of them. It’s a patent drawing for an invention technically referred to as a WTF, and is apparently designed with meth addicts in mind. That’s meth as in methane.

Of course there may be other explanations for this new addition to the wonderful world of plumbing abuse, but I’m not about to go all scatological here.

[Found somewhere in here, crossposted here.]

[Update 29 July 2010 – Here are the patent papers. Tip o’ the Tarboosh to Lemur King.]

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.]