January 3, 2011
Flexible glass is a legendary lost invention from the reign of Roman Emperor Tiberius Caesar (between 14 CE-37 CE). As recounted by Archbishop Isadore of Seville, the craftsman who invented the technique brought before Caesar a drinking bowl made of flexible glass, and Caesar threw it to the floor, whereupon the material dented, rather than shattering.
The inventor was able to simply repair the dent with a small hammer. After the inventor swore to the Emperor that he alone knew the technique of manufacture, Caesar had the man beheaded, fearing such material could undermine the value of gold and silver.
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January 3, 2011
The Young Shuffle is a style of running named for Australian potato farmer and athlete, Cliff Young (1922 — 2003). Young won the 544 mile Melbourne Ultramarathon at age 61, running in overalls and gumboots. He grew up on a 2000 acre farm in Beech Forest in south-western Victoria with approximately 2,000 sheep that he roundup on foot. He arrived at the 1983 Melbourne to Sydney ultramarathon as an unknown. He ran at a slow loping pace and trailed the leaders for most of the course, but by denying himself sleep and running while the others slept he slowly gained on them and eventually won by a large margin.
Before running the race he told the press that he had previously run for two to three days straight rounding up sheep. He claimed afterwards that during the race he imagined that he was running after sheep and trying to outrun a storm. The run took him five days, 15 hours and four minutes, trimming almost two days off the record for any previous run between Sydney and Melbourne. All of the six competitors who finished the race broke the previous record, but Young beat them by running while they were sleeping, and by using an ungainly looking, but very energy efficient running style that his since been dubbed the Young Shuffle.
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December 23, 2010
TV-B-Gone is a type of simple universal remote control device for turning off a large majority of the current available brands of television sets. It was created to allow people in a public place to turn off nearby television sets, presumably because the broadcast was distracting them from other activities. Its inventor has referred to it as ‘an environmental management device.’
The device is part of a key-chain, and, like other remote devices, is battery-powered. Although it can require up to 69 seconds for the device to find the proper code for a particular television receiver, the most popular televisions turn off in the first few seconds. During the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, some individuals from gadget blog, Gizmodo brought a TV-B-Gone remote control and shut off many display monitors at booths and during demos affecting several companies. These actions caused the individual from Gizmodo to be banned for life from future CES events.
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December 19, 2010
The New Yorker cover (March 29, 1976) ‘View of the World from 9th Avenue,’ has come to represent Manhattan’s telescoped interpretation of the country beyond the Hudson River. The cartoon showed the supposedly limited mental geography of Manhattanites. The image shows Manhattan’s 9th Avenue, 10th Avenue, and the Hudson River (appropriately labeled), while the top half depicts the rest of the world. The rest of the United States is drawn as a square, with a thin brown strip along the Hudson representing New Jersey, the names of five cities (Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Las Vegas, Kansas City, and Chicago) and three states (Texas, Utah, and Nebraska) are scattered among a few rocks for the U.S. beyond New Jersey.
The Pacific Ocean, perhaps twice as wide again as the Hudson, separates the U.S. from three flattened land masses labeled China, Japan, and Russia. The illustration, depicting New Yorkers’ self-image, inspired many similar works, including the poster for the 1984 film Moscow on the Hudson; that movie poster led to a lawsuit, Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., 663 F. Supp. 706 (S.D.N.Y. 1987), which held that Columbia Pictures violated the copyright that Steinberg held on his work. Another homage was created for the cover of The Economist newspaper’s March 21–27, 2009 issue entitled ‘How China sees the world.’
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December 17, 2010
Oscar Zeta Acosta (1935 – disappeared 1974) was an American attorney, politician, and minor novelist, perhaps best known for his friendship with the American author Hunter S. Thompson, who characterized him as his Samoan Attorney, Dr. Gonzo, in his novel ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.’ In 1967, Acosta began working as an antipoverty attorney for the East Legal Aid Society in Oakland, California. In 1968 he moved to East Los Angeles and joined the Chicano Movement as an activist attorney. His controversial defense earned him the ire of the LAPD, who considered the ‘Brown Pride’ movement more dangerous than the Black Panthers.
In the summer of 1967 Acosta met Hunter S. Thompson, who would write an article on Acosta and the injustice in the barrios of East L.A. for ‘Rolling Stone’ in 1971 titled ‘Strange Rumblings in Aztlan.’ When working on the article, Thompson and Acosta visited Las Vegas (inspiring Hunter’s later novel on the city). In 1972, Acosta disappeared while traveling in Mexico. His son, Marco Acosta, believes that he was the last person to talk to his father. In May 1972, Acosta telephoned his son, telling him that he was ‘about to board a boat full of white snow.’ Marco is later quoted in reference to his father’s disappearance: ‘The body was never found, but we surmise that probably, knowing the people he was involved with, he ended up mouthing off, getting into a fight, and getting killed.’
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December 17, 2010
The hobo nickel is a sculptural art form involving the creative modification of small-denomination coins, essentially resulting in miniature bas reliefs. The nickel, because of its size, thickness, and relative softness, was a favored coin for this purpose. Due to its low cost and portability, this medium was particularly popular among hobos, hence the name. Common hobo nickels sell for $5 or $10, and rarer or more desirable coins sell for hundreds of dollars.
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December 10, 2010
Transmetropolitan is a cyberpunk comic book series written by Warren Ellis with art by Darick Robertson and published by DC Comics. It chronicles the battles of Spider Jerusalem, infamous renegade gonzo journalist of the future, an homage to gonzo journalism founder Hunter S. Thompson. Jerusalem dedicates himself to fighting the corruption and abuse of power of two successive United States presidents; he strives to keep his world from turning more dystopian than it already is while dealing with the struggles of fame and power.
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December 10, 2010
Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written subjectively, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative. The word Gonzo was first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style. The term has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors.
Gonzo journalism tends to favor style over accuracy and often uses personal experiences and emotions to provide context for the topic or event being covered. It disregards the ‘polished’ edited product favored by newspaper media and strives for a more gritty approach. Use of quotations, sarcasm, humor, exaggeration, and profanity is common.
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December 9, 2010
Cyriak Harris is a British freelance animator better known by his first name Cyriak, or by his pseudonym Mutated Monty. He is known for his surreal short web animations. A regular contributor to the British website B3ta since 2004, Cyriak displays a surreal and often disturbing animation style with a distinct British theme. He uses a combination of Adobe Photoshop and After Effects for his animation and visuals along with FL Studio (formerly known as Fruity Lookps) for original music pieces alongside his videos.
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December 8, 2010
Clown society is a term used in anthropology and sociology for an organization of comedic entertainers (or ‘clowns’) who have a formalized role in a culture or society. Sometimes clown societies have a sacred role, to represent a trickster character in religious ceremonies. Other times the purpose served by members of a clown society is only to parody excessive seriousness, or to deflate pomposity. A clown shows what is wrong with the ordinary way of doing things, and a clown shows how to do ordinary things the wrong way.
Members of a clown society always dress in some kind of a special costume reserved for clowns, which is usually an absurdly extreme form of normal dress. While in their costume, clowns have special permission from their society to parody or criticize defective aspects of their own culture. Clown societies usually train new members to become clowns in an apprentice system. Sometimes the training is improvisational comedy, but usually a clown society trains members in well known forms of costume, pantomime, song, dance, and common visual gags
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December 8, 2010
Bouffon is a modern french theater term that was re-coined in the early 1960s by French acting instructor Jacques Lecoq to describe a specific style of performance work that has a main focus in the art of mockery. Similar to, but distinct from clowning, the bouffon draws from burlesque, commedia dell’arte, farce, gallows humor, parody, satire, and slapstick.
According to Lecoq, ‘the difference between the clown and the bouffon is that while the clown is alone, the bouffon is part of a gang; while we make fun of the clown, the bouffon makes fun of us. At the heart of the bouffon is mockery pushed to the point of parody. Bouffons amuse themselves by reproducing the life of man in their own way, through games and pranks.’
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December 7, 2010
Area code 321 is the area code serving Brevard County, Florida and home to the Kennedy Space Center. It has been in use since November 1, 1999, and was assigned to the area after a successful petition drive due to the Space Coast’s impact on the county (if pronounced properly – ‘three, two, one’– the code resembles the countdown which launches the many spacecraft from Cape Canaveral).
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