March 8, 2012
Jan Švankmajer [shvank-mai-er] (b.1934) is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay. An early influence on his later artistic development was a puppet theater he was given for Christmas as a child. He studied at the College of Applied Arts in Prague and later in the Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts.
He contributed to Emil Radok’s film ‘Doktor Faust’ in 1958 and then began working for Prague’s Semafor Theatre where he founded the Theatre of Masks. He then moved on to the Laterna Magika multimedia theatre, where he renewed his association with Radok. This theatrical experience is reflected in Švankmajer’s first film ‘The Last Trick,’ which was released in 1964. Under the influence of theoretician Vratislav Effenberger Švankmajer moved from the mannerism of his early work to classic surrealism, first manifested in his film ‘The Garden’ (1968), and joined the Czechoslovakian Surrealist Group.
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March 8, 2012
PES (Adam Pesapane) is a director and animator of numerous short films and commercials. He uses everyday objects and stop-motion animation to create short films such as ‘Roof Sex,’ and ‘Western Spaghetti.’ An early influence on PES’s animation style is the work of Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer. PES’s first animated film, ‘Roof Sex,’ features two life-sized chairs having sex on a New York rooftop. Though only a minute long, the film took 20 shooting days to complete. The war short ‘KaBoom!’ (2004) was instrumental in defining the artist’s personal style and approach to animating objects. The film features an atomic airstrike on a miniature city using children’s toys and festive objects such as gift bows, Christmas ornaments, and clown-head cupcake toppers.
In ‘Game Over’ (2006) PES recreated classic arcade death sequences (from the games Centipede, Frogger, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man) with familiar objects including muffins, toy cars, insects, pizza and fried eggs. The film was inspired by an interview with Toru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man, who said the original source of inspiration for the Pac-Man character was a pizza with a slice missing. In 2008, PES released his short ‘Western Spaghetti.’ The film shows PES cooking spaghetti (the hands in the film are PES’s) but all the ingredients in the dish are replaced with objects such as tomato pin cushions, rubber bands, rubik’s cubes, post-it notes, and bubblewrap, and all are brought to life through stop-motion animation.
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March 6, 2012
‘Asshole: How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a Shit About You’ is a 2008 spoof self-help book and memoir by American author Martin Kihn. The first line of the book, is ‘I was the nicest guy in the world and it was killing me.’ Kihn, who worked for a marketing company, was told by his boss that unless he started ‘playing hardball,’ they were going to demote him and upgrade a colleague Kihn calls ‘The Nemesis’ to a window office. So to save his career, Kihn decided to turn himself into an asshole, and in telling his story, he describes exactly how the reader can can follow his lead.
To become an asshole, Kihn builds a team, consisting of an acting coach, life coach and both personal and dog trainer – to help ‘master the art of assholism.’ Kihn then creates a ten-step “assholism’ program which involves ‘ignoring other peoples’ feelings, never saying sorry, dressing in black silk and only eating red meat.’ Other tasks saw Kihn signing up to the National Rifle Association, learning kickboxing, screaming at colleagues and eating garlic bagels on public transport. Additionally, Kihn takes inspiration from famous figures whom he considers ‘assholes’ such as: Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Martha Stewart, David Letterman, Nicole Kidman, Machiavelli, Scarface and Paris Hilton. He also takes inspiration from Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘The Virtue of Selfishness.’
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March 5, 2012
A shock site is a website that is intended to be offensive, disgusting and/or disturbing to its viewers, containing materials of high shock value which is also considered distasteful and crude, and is generally of a pornographic, scatological, violent, insulting, painful, profane, or otherwise provocative nature. Some shock sites display a single picture, animation, video clip or a small gallery, and are often passed around via e-mail or online forums as a bait and switch hoax.
Some have gained their own subcultures and become internet memes. Goatse.cx was one of the best-known shock sites, featuring an image of a man stretching his anus with his hands. The site featured a page devoted to fan-submitted artwork and tributes to the site, and a parody of the image was also shown by a BBC newscast as an alternative for the then recently unveiled logo for the 2012 Summer Olympics. The site was shut down in 2004; however, various mirror sites featuring the image still exist.
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March 5, 2012
A viral video is one that becomes popular through the process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites, social media and email. Viral videos often contain humorous content and include televised comedy sketches, such as The Lonely Island’s ‘Lazy Sunday’ and ‘Dick in a Box,’ amateur video clips like ‘Star Wars Kid,’ the ‘Numa Numa’ videos, ‘The Evolution of Dance,’ and ‘Chocolate Rain,’ and web-only productions such as ‘I Got a Crush… on Obama.’ Some eyewitness events have also been caught on video and have ‘gone viral’ such as the ‘Battle at Kruger.’
The proliferation of camera phones and inexpensive video editing and publishing tools credited with fueling phenomena. These consumer-shot videos are typically non-commercial, intended for viewing by friends or family. A video becoming viral is often unexpected, and an accident, and therefore a video cannot be called viral purely in the creator’s intention at the time of recording.
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March 2, 2012
Corinthian leather is a term coined by the advertising agency Bozell to describe the upholstery used in certain Chrysler luxury vehicles beginning in 1974. Although the term suggests that the product has a relationship to or origination from Corinth, Greece, there is no relationship; the term is a marketing concept. Some sources say it was a blend of leather and vinyl (seat surfaces were leather and seat sides were vinyl), while other sources say it was simply a trade name for American produced leather, much of which was produced at a plant outside Newark, New Jersey.
The term was first used during the marketing campaign of the 1974 Chrysler Imperial, but the it is usually associated with the marketing campaign for the 1975 Chrysler Cordoba and that campaign’s celebrity spokesperson, Ricardo Montalban, who described the car’s seats as being covered with ‘soft Corinthian leather.’
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March 1, 2012
‘Every time you masturbate… God kills a kitten‘ is the caption of an image created by a member of the website Fark.com in 2002. The image features a kitten (subsequently referred to as ‘Cliché Kitty’) being chased by two Domos (a Japanese TV mascot), and has the tagline ‘Please, think of the kittens.’ This phony PSA is quite out of character with Domo’s image in Japan.
The phrase originally appeared as the headline ‘Fact: Every Time You Masturbate, God Kills a Kitten. How Many More Have to Die?’ with a kitten photo on the cover of ‘The Gonzo,’ a satirical publication produced by students at Georgetown University, in 1996.
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March 1, 2012
The Masturbate-a-thon is an event in which participants masturbate in order to raise money for charity and increase the public awareness and dispel the shame and taboos that exist about this form of sexual activity. The event awards several honors for those who raise the most money as well as for multiple orgasms and endurance. In 1999, the Masturbate-a-Thon was originated by the collective Open Enterprises, which operates Good Vibrations a sex shop in San Francisco. The slogan ‘Come for a Cause’ was coined by Rachel Venning, the founder of the sex toy shop Babeland, formerly Toy in Babeland, which has branches in Seattle, in Brooklyn, and Manhattan.
In that year, the first live event was held at San Francisco’s Campus Theater, by the Center for Sex and Culture (CSC)’s Carol Queen and her partner, Robert Lawrence. CSC is an education-based non-profit providing professional-level sex education. The annual events are used as a public-health-education device to increase awareness of self-pleasure as a strategy for safer and healthier sex and to de-stigmatize self-love. The winner of ‘Longest Time Spent Masturbating/Male’ is Mr. Masanobu Sato, who in 2009 masturbated for 9 hours and 58 minutes. The winner of ‘Most Orgasms/Male’ was set by Big Rob in 2010—at 83 climaxes, a world record. The women’s world record is 222 orgasms.
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March 1, 2012
The Invisible Pink Unicorn (IPU) is the goddess of a parody religion used to satirize theistic beliefs, taking the form of a unicorn that is paradoxically both invisible and pink. She is a rhetorical illustration used by atheists and other religious skeptics as a contemporary version of Russell’s teapot, sometimes mentioned in conjunction with the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The IPU is used to argue that supernatural beliefs are arbitrary by, for example, replacing the word God in any theistic statement with Invisible Pink Unicorn. The mutually exclusive attributes of pinkness and invisibility, coupled with the inability to disprove the IPU’s existence, satirize properties that some theists attribute to a theistic deity.
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March 1, 2012
In academic publishing, the least publishable unit (LPU), colloquially ‘publon’ – the smallest measurable quantum of publication, is the minimum amount of information that can generate a publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The term is often used as a joking, ironic, or sometimes derogatory reference to the strategy of pursuing the greatest quantity of publications at the expense of their quality. Publication of the results of research is an essential part of science. The number of publications is sometimes used to assess the work of a scientist and as a basis for distributing research funds. In order to achieve a high rank in such an assessment, there is a trend to split up research results into smaller parts that are published separately, thus increasing the number of publications.
‘Salami publication’ or ‘salami slicing’ is a variant of the smallest-publishable-unit strategy. In salami slicing, data gathered by one research project is separately reported (wholly or in part) in multiple end publications. Salami slicing, apparently named by analogy with the thin slices made from larger pieces of salami meat, is generally considered questionable when not explicitly labeled, as it may lead to the same data being counted multiple times as apparently independent results in aggregate studies.
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February 29, 2012
Wim Delvoye (b. 1965) is a Belgian neo-conceptual artist known for his inventive and often shocking projects. Much of his work is focused on the body. He repeatedly links the attractive with the repulsive, creating work that holds within it inherent contradictions. He has an eclectic oeuvre, exposing his interest in a range of themes, from bodily function, to the Catholic Church, and numerous subjects in between.
Though Delvoye started tattooing pig skins taken from slaughterhouses in the United States in 1992, he began to tattoo live pigs in 1997. He ultimately moved the operation to an Art Farm in China in 2004 where restrictions regarding animal welfare were less strict. The pigs have been inked with a diverse array of designs, including the trivial, such as skulls and crosses, to Louis Vuitton designs, to designs dictated by the pig’s anatomy. Delvoye described the process of tattooing a live pig, ‘we sedate it, shave it and apply Vaseline to its skin.’ As another manifestation of contradiction in Delvoye’s art, he owns a pig farm though he is a practicing vegetarian.
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February 27, 2012
Cycle polo is a team sport invented in Ireland in 1891 by retired cyclist Richard J. Mecredy. It is similar to traditional polo, except that bicycles are used instead of horses. In recent years, an alternate form of the game known as ‘Hardcourt Bike Polo’ or ‘Urban Bike Polo’ has grown in popularity. In this variation, teams composed of three to five players compete on tennis courts, street hockey rinks, or whatever other surfaces are available.
The rules vary slightly by city. In the case of a ‘foot down’ or ‘dab’ (touching the ground with one’s foot) the player must ‘tap out’ by riding to mid-court and hitting a designated area with their mallet. There is usually a tap-out located on either side of the court. In order to score, the offensive player must hit the ball across the goal line using the narrow end of the mallet – this is called a ‘shot’ or ‘hit’ – hitting the ball across the goal line with the wide end of the mallet is called a ‘shuffle.’
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