March 18, 2014
The Mule is a fictional character from Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series (first appearing in 1955 under the title ‘The 1,000-Year Plan,’ it is the story of scientist Hari Seldon’s effort to preserve knowledge as the civilizations around him begin to regress). One of the greatest conquerors the galaxy has ever seen, the Mule is a mentalic, a psychic mutant, who has the ability to reach into the minds of others and ‘adjust’ their emotions, individually or en masse, using this capability to conscript followers for his cause.
Mentalics are not capable of direct mind-control, but can subtly influence other’s subconscious; individuals under the Mule’s influence behave otherwise normally – logic, memories, and personality intact. This gives the Mule the capacity to disrupt Seldon’s plan by invalidating the assumption that no single individual could have a measurable effect on galactic socio-historical trends on their own. Seldon’s discipline, called psychohistory, relied on the predictability of the actions of very large numbers of people.
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March 11, 2014
Florentijn Hofman (b. 1977) is a Dutch artist known for playful urban installations such as the ‘Rubber Duck’ (a giant floating sculpture). They were built in various sizes, including one created in 2007 that is the largest rubber duck in the world at 105 feet long. Hofman’s tour was named ‘Spreading joy around the world.’ He aimed to recall everyone’s childhood memories by exhibiting the duck in 14 cities. The ducks are constructed with more than 200 pieces of PVC. There is an opening at the back of the body so that staff can perform maintenance. In addition, there is an electric fan in its body so that it can be inflated at any time, in either good or bad weather.
Since 2007, the ducks have been on display in Amsterdam, Belgium, Osaka, Sydney, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, and Pittsburg. In 2009, while it was on display in Belgium, vandals stabbed the duck 42 times. The duck on display in Hong Kong was damaged and deflated in Taiwan after an earthquake, before bursting a few weeks later. In 2013, Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblog, blocked the terms ‘Big Yellow Duck.’ The censorship occurred because a photoshopped version of ‘Tank Man’ (the Tiananmen Square protester), which swapped all tanks with this sculpture, had been circulating.
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March 6, 2014
Beyond the Black Rainbow is a 2010 Canadian science fiction film written and directed by Panos Cosmatos in his feature film debut. The films begins in the 1960s, as Dr. Arboria founds the Arboria Institute, a New Age research facility dedicated to finding a reconciliation between science and spirituality, allowing human beings to move into a new age of perpetual happiness.
In the 1980s, Arboria’s work has been taken over by his protégé, Dr. Barry Nyle. Outwardly a charming, handsome scientist, Nyle is in fact a psychopath who has been keeping Elena, a teenage girl, captive in an elaborate prison/hospital beneath the Institute. Elena demonstrates psychic capabilities, which Nyle can suppress, using a glowing, prism-like device.
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March 1, 2014
Comics studies is an academic field that focuses on comics and graphic novels. Formerly dismissed as less relevant pop culture texts, scholars in fields such as Semiotics and Composition Studies are now re-considering comics and graphic novels as complex texts deserving of serious scholarly study.
‘How to Read Nancy’ is a 1988 essay by underground cartoonists Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik. The piece examines the comic strip ‘Nancy,’ focusing on creator Ernie Bushmiller’s use of the comics language in to deliver a gag. Finding correspondences to the minimalist architecture of Mies Van Der Rohe, the essay calls ‘Nancy’ ‘a complex amalgam of formal rules laid out by [its] designer.’
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February 28, 2014
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, these were published in newspapers, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily newspapers, while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections.
Strips are written and drawn by a comics artist or cartoonist. As the name implies, comic strips can be humorous (for example, ‘gag-a-day’ strips such as ‘Blondie’ or ‘Marmaduke’). Starting in the late 1920s, comic strips expanded from their mirthful origins to feature adventure stories, as seen in ‘Popeye,’ ‘Captain Easy,’ ‘Buck Rogers,’ ‘Tarzan,’ and ‘The Adventures of Tintin.’ Soap-opera continuity strips such as ‘Judge Parker’ and ‘Mary Worth’ gained popularity in the 1940s. All are called, generically, comic strips, though cartoonist Will Eisner has suggested that ‘sequential art’ would be a better name.
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February 27, 2014
Bill Watterson (b. 1958) is an American artist and the author of the comic strip ‘Calvin and Hobbes,’ which was syndicated from 1985 to 1995. Watterson stopped drawing the strip at the end of 1995 with a short statement to newspaper editors and his readers that he felt he had achieved all he could in the medium.
Watterson is known for his views on licensing (he refused to merchandise his creations on the grounds that displaying their images on commercially sold mugs, stickers and T-shirts would devalue the characters and their personalities) and his move back into private life after ‘Calvin and Hobbes.’
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February 26, 2014
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (‘Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie’) is a 1972 surrealist film directed by Luis Buñuel and written by Jean-Claude Carrière in collaboration with the director. The narrative concerns a group of upper-middle-class people attempting — despite continual interruptions — to dine together.
The film consists of several thematically linked scenes: five gatherings of a group of bourgeois friends, and the four dreams of different characters. The beginning of the film focuses on the gatherings, while the latter part focuses on the dreams, but both types of scenes are intertwined. There are also scenes involving other characters, such as two involving a Latin American female terrorist from the fictitious Republic of Miranda. The film’s world is not logical: the bizarre events are accepted by the characters, even if they are impossible or contradictory.
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February 22, 2014
Itasha [ee-tah-sha] (literally ‘painful car’) is a Japanese term for a fashion of individuals decorating the bodies of their cars with fictional characters of anime, manga, or video games (especially ‘bishojo game’ and ‘eroge’ – dating and porn games). These characters are predominantly ‘cute’ females. The decorations usually involve paint schemes and stickers. Automobiles are called ‘itasha,’ while similar motorcycles and bicycles are called ‘itansha’ and ‘itachari,’ respectively.
In the 1980s, when Japan was at the zenith of its economic might, Tokyo’s streets were a parade of luxury import cars. Among them, the ‘itasha’—originally Japanese slang meaning an imported Italian car—was the most desired. Since then, ‘itasha’ (as the decorated vehicle) was derived from combining the Japanese words for ‘itai’ (‘painful’) and ‘sha’ (‘vehicle’). ‘Painful’ can be interpreted as ‘painfully embarrassing’ or ‘painful for the wallet’ due to the high costs involved.
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February 21, 2014
A backup singer (also known as a backing vocalist, background singer, or harmony vocalist) is a singer who provides vocal harmony with the lead vocalist or other backing vocalists. In some cases, a backing singer may sing alone as a lead-in to the main vocalist’s entry or a counter-melody. Solo artists may employ professional backing vocalists in studio recording sessions as well as during concerts and other live performance routines.
Working as a backup singer can give a vocalist the onstage experience and vocal training they need to develop into a lead vocalist. A number of lead vocalists such as Ace Frehley, Mariah Carey, Cher, Gwen Stefani, Pink, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins, Sheryl Crow, Trisha Yearwood, Dave Grohl, and Elton John, learned their craft as backup singers, or singing backup vocals as part of a choir.
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February 20, 2014
‘Army Man‘ (tagline: ‘America’s Only Magazine’) was a short-lived comedy magazine published in the late 1980s by George Meyer, the acclaimed writer for ‘The Simpsons.’ The magazine consisted mostly of very short and very surreal jokes, along with some cartoons. Each issue also featured Jack Handey’s ‘Deep Thoughts,’ as well as other pieces written by him. Only three issues were ever published. Although Army Man was never widely distributed, it gathered a lot of attention in the comedy world.
Two of its writers (John Swartzwelder and Jon Vitti) were picked up alongside Meyer to be part of the original writing staff of ‘The Simpsons’ by the show’s developer and show-runner Sam Simon, an enormous fan of the magazine. Eventually other ‘Army Man’ writers would go on to write for ‘The Simpsons’ in later seasons. The writers were usually people Meyer knew from his years at the ‘Harvard Lampoon’ or who worked with him in TV shows like ‘Late Night with David Letterman,’ ‘The New Show,’ ‘Not Necessarily The News,’ and ‘Saturday Night Live.’
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February 19, 2014
John Swartzwelder (b. 1950) is an American comedy writer and novelist, best known for his work on the animated television series ‘The Simpsons,’ as well as a number of novels. He is credited with writing the largest number of ‘Simpsons’ episodes by a large margin (59 full episodes, with contributions to several others). Swartzwelder was one of several writers recruited to show from the pages of George Meyer’s ‘Army Man’ magazine (a short-lived comedy periodical published in the late 1980s; Meyer would also go on to become an acclaimed ‘Simpsons’ writer).
Swartzwelder has been animated in the background of several episodes of ‘The Simpsons.’ His animated likeness closely resembles musician David Crosby, which prompted Matt Groening to state that anytime that David Crosby appears in a scene for no apparent reason, it is really John Swartzwelder. Additionally, Matt Groening has stated that the recurring character ‘Herman Hermann’ (the owner of Herman’s Military Antiques) was originally physically based on Swartzwelder–with the exception of his one arm.
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February 15, 2014
A holodeck, in the fictional ‘Star Trek’ universe, is a simulated reality facility located on starships and starbases. It first appeared in the pilot episode of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ ‘Encounter at Farpoint,’ although a conceptually similar ‘recreation room’ appeared in an episode of ‘Star Trek: the Animated Series’ in 1974. In the timeline of the fictional universe, the concept of a holodeck was first shown to humans in an encounter with the Xyrillian race in the ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’ episode ‘Unexpected.’
The holodeck is depicted as an enclosed room in which objects and people are simulated by a combination of transported matter, replicated matter, tractor beams, and shaped force fields onto which holographic images are projected. Most holodeck programs shown in the episodes run in first person ‘subjective mode,’ in which the user actively interacts with the program and its characters. The user may also employ third-person ‘objective mode,’ in which he or she is unseen by program characters.
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