[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

It started with a single person painting one public staircase, but when city workers of Istanbul, Turkey covered this brightly-colored street art with dull gray paint, citizen activists picked up brushes in rapid response. Thus escalated an isolated incident into a quiet but powerful city-wide campaign mixing politics, graffiti and beautification.

Aged 64,local  retired engineer Huseyin Cetinel spend reportedly $800 on paint simply to make the steps in his area more attractive – he notes that nature is colorful, and suggests simply that cities can be as well.

As images of his work began to go viral online, many viewers saw it as a call for equal rights – a political statement. When the municipality painted the original stairs over (then initially denied doing so, adding to the confusion), that act was perhaps inevitably interpreted through a polarizing lens as well.

Twitter and Facebook were awash with calls to color other sets of stairs around the hilly city, and a quiet war fought with guerrilla art began … the city whitewashing (or gray-painting) newly-colored staircases as people kept on recoloring them, before finally agreeing to let the steps be painted as the citizens wished.

As interviewed by the New York Times, local financial adviser Nalan Ozgul sees a larger lesson in these events: “There has been some movement in the society, a social uprising together with the Gezi Park protests, and this is just an extension of that spirit. The fact that the government-run municipality first denied having painted over the stairs, then agreed to paint them back in color, shows how desperate and indecisive they are about their policies.”

Alternatively, perhaps this strange story shows the everyday tensions between ordinary people and relentless bureaucracies as much as it says anything  about the activist citizens and imposing governments of a particular time and place, but the effects are certainly colorful no matter how you look at them (Images via Instagram photographer sumrue and Twitter users @durmusbeyin, @demishevich, @verbikerem and @ozgelu)

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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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The cupcake you see here will be sold at the Eat Your Heart Out 2013 pop-up cake shop in London, England, open October 25-27. Food artists will be offering the world's most gruesome and delicious treats. These cupcakes are made by Twisted Fondant, a macabre division of Fantasy Fondant. What makes them so gruesome? The explanation may be a bit disturbing, visually, so if you are up for it, continue reading.


The name of these cupcakes is Mango Fly Larvae Removal cupcakes. Miss Cakehead calls them DIY Maggot Extraction cupcakes. They are served with a glove and a pair of freezers so you can do the deed. Just keep reminding yourself that no matter what it looks like, this is all delicious cake and edible icing.

Gently pull that maggot out. Gently! You don't want it to tear apart!

It's almost out.

What a relief! The maggot is edible. Really.

Don't forget to squeeze out the pus. It's mango-flavored!

The eat Your Heart Out 2013 cake shop food exhbition will be October 25-27th. Macabre Liqueur Chocolates will also be offered at the event.
 Read more at Miss Cakehead's site.

Produced but not written by Joel and Ethan Coen, the new Fargo TV series will tell another blackly comic crime story in the same snowy climes. We don’t know much of what that exact story will entail, but we have at least now found out who both of the key players are and how they’ll loosely be related.

Already cast was Billy Bob Thornton and now, as per Deadline, Martin Freeman is joining as the co-lead:

It centers on Lester Nygaard (Freeman), a small town insurance salesman henpecked by his wife, whose life is changed when a mysterious stranger, Lorne Malvo (Thornton), comes to town.

It does seem like another kidnapping gone wrong story, though perhaps I’ll be surprised. Or maybe it will be another kidnapping gone wrong story and I’ll still be surprised.

Freeman’s career is proving fairly varied but he has shown some specialty with these everyman roles. Getting him nervous is always good value too. He’s a true artist of anxiety.

The new show will run to ten episodes on FX, telling a self contained story. It’s been written by Noah Hawley and Adam Bernstein is the only director yet named, being in charge of the first episode. I guess it’s reasonable to assume that production will start in the snowy part of the year.

Martin Freeman To Star In The Fargo TV Series

Color-coded muses, rotten apples, self-imposed house arrest, and other creative techniques at the intersection of the superstitious and the pragmatic.

Famous authors are notorious for their daily routines — sometimes outrageous, usually obsessive, invariably peculiar. In Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors (public library) — the more dimensional and thoroughly researched counterpart to Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals — Brooklyn-based writer Celia Blue Johnson takes us on a guided tour of great writers’ unusual techniques, prompts, and customs of committing thought to paper, from their ambitious daily word quotas to their superstitions to their inventive procrastination and multitasking methods.

As curious as these habits are, however, Johnson reminds us that public intellectuals often engineer their own myths, which means the quirky behaviors recorded in history’s annals should be taken with a grain of Salinger salt. She offers a necessary disclaimer, enveloped in a thoughtful meta-disclaimer:

One must always keep in mind that these writers and the people around them may have, at some point, embellished the facts. Quirks are great fodder for gossip and can morph into gross exaggeration when passed from one person to the next. There’s also no way to escape the self-mythologizing particularly when dealing with some of the greatest storytellers that ever lived. Yet even when authors stretch the truth, they reveal something about themselves, when it is the desire to project a certain image or the need to shy away from one.

Mode and medium of writing seem to be a recurring theme of personal idiosyncrasy. Wallace Stevens composed his poetry on slips of paper while walking — an activity he, like Maira Kalman, saw as a creative stimulant — then handed them to his secretary to type up. Edgar Allan Poe, champion of marginalia, wrote his final drafts on separate pieces of paper attached into a running scroll with sealing wax. Jack Kerouac was especially partial to scrolling: In 1951, planning the book for years and amassing ample notes in his journals, he wrote On The Road in one feverish burst, letting it pour onto pages taped together into one enormously long strip of paper — a format he thought lent itself particularly well to his project, since it allowed him to maintain his rapid pace without pausing to reload the typewriter at the end of each page. When he was done, he marched into his editor Robert Giroux’s office and proudly spun out the scroll across the floor. The result, however, was equal parts comical and tragic:

To [Kerouac's] dismay, Giroux focused on the unusual packaging. He asked, “But Jack, how can you make corrections on a manuscript like that?” Giroux recalled saying, “Jack, you know you have to cut this up. It has to be edited.” Kerouac left the office in a rage. It took several years for Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, to finally find a home for the book, at the Viking Press.

James Joyce wrote lying on his stomach in bed, with a large blue pencil, clad in a white coat, and composed most of Finnegans Wake with crayon pieces on cardboard. But this was a matter more of pragmatism than of superstition or vain idiosyncrasy: Of the many outrageously misguided myths the celebrated author of Ulysses and wordsmith of little-known children’s books, one was actually right: he was nearly blind. His childhood myopia developed into severe eye problems by his twenties. To make matters worse, he developed rheumatic fever when he was twenty-five, which resulted in a painful eye condition called iritis. By 1930, he had undergone twenty-five eye surgeries, none of which improved his sight. The large crayons thus helped him see what he was writing, and the white coat helped reflect more light onto the page at night. (As someone partial to black bedding, not for aesthetic reasons but because I believe it provides a deeper dark at night, I can certainly relate to Joyce’s seemingly arbitrary but actually physics-driven attire choice.)

Virginia Woolf was equally opinionated about the right way to write as she was about the right way to read. In her twenties, she spent two and a half hours every morning writing, on a three-and-half-foot tall desk with an angled top that allowed her to look at her work both up-close and from afar. But according to her nephew and irreverent collaborator, Quentin Bell, Woolf’s prescient version of today’s trendy standing desk was less a practical matter than a symptom of her sibling rivalry with her sister, the Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell — the same sibling rivalry that would later inspire a charming picture-book: Vanessa painted standing, and Virginia didn’t want to be outdone by her sister. Johnson cites Quentin, who was known for his wry family humor:

This led Virginia to feel that her own pursuit might appear less arduous than that of her sister unless she set matters on a footing of equality.

Woolf remained incredibly resourceful — an inventor of sorts, even. After she switched from standing to sitting, she created a contraption of which she was very proud: She used a piece of thin plywood as a writing board, to which she attached a tray for pens and ink so she wouldn’t have to get up and disrupt her flow of inspiration should she run out of materials. Driven by a similar fear of depletion of materials, John Steinbeck, who liked to write his drafts in pencil, always kept exactly twelve perfectly sharpened pencils on his desk. He used them so heavily that his editor had to send him round pencils to alleviate the calluses Steinbeck had developed on his hands from the traditional hexagonal ones.

Some habits, of course, were far less pragmatic, harking instead to creative superstition. Truman Capote wouldn’t begin or end a piece of work on a Friday, would change hotel rooms if the room phone number involved the number 13, and never left more than three cigarette butts in his ashtray, tucking the extra ones into his coat pocket.

Many authors measured the quality of their output by uncompromisingly quantitative metrics like daily word quotas. Jack London wrote 1,000 words a day every single day of his career and William Golding once declared at a party that he wrote 3,000 words daily, a number Norman Mailer and Arthur Conan Doyle shared. Raymond Chandler, a man of strong opinions on the craft of writing, didn’t subscribe to a specific daily quota, but was known to write up to 5,000 words a day at his most productive. Anthony Trollope, who began his day promptly at 5:30 A.M. every morning, disciplined himself to write 250 words every 15 minutes, pacing himself with a watch. Stephen King does whatever it takes to reach his daily quota of 2,000 adverbless words and Thomas Wolfe keeps his at 1,800, not letting himself stop until he has reached it.

A minority, however, measured quantity as inversely proportional to quality. James Joyce proudly considered the completion of two perfect sentences a full day of work and Dorothy Parker, an obsessive reviser, even skewed to the negative, once lamented, “I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

Even more curious were the resourceful methods authors used to compel themselves to execute their daily quotas. In the fall of 1830, Victor Hugo set out to write The Hunchback of Notre Dame against the seemingly impossible deadline of February 1831. He bought an entire bottle of ink in preparation and practically put himself under house arrest for months, using a most peculiar anti-escape technique:

Hugo locked away his clothes to avoid any temptation of going outside and was left with nothing to wear except a large gray shawl. He had purchased the knitted outfit, which reached right down to his toes, just for the occasion. It served as his uniform for many months.

He finished the book weeks before deadline, using up the whole bottle of ink to write it. He even considered titling it What Came Out of a Bottle of Ink, but eventually settled for the less abstract and insidery title.

We already know how much famous authors loved their pets, but for many their non-human companions were essential to the creative process. Edgar Allan Poe considered his darling tabby named Catterina his literary guardian who “purred as if in complacent approval of the world proceeding under [her] supervision.” Flannery O’Connor developed an early affection for domestic poultry, from her childhood chicken (which, curiously enough, could walk backwards and once ended up in a newsreel clip) to her growing collection of pheasants, ducks, turkeys, and quail. Most famously, however, twenty-something O’Connor mail-ordered six peacocks, a peahen, and four peachicks, which later populated her fiction. But by far the most bizarre pet-related habit comes from Colette, who enlisted her dog in a questionable procrastination mechanism:

Colette would study the fur of her French bulldog, Souci, with a discerning eye. Then she’d pluck a flea from Souci’s back and would continue the hunt until she was ready to write.

But arguably the strangest habit of all comes from Friedrich Schiller, relayed by his friend Goethe:

[Goethe] had dropped by Schiller’s home and, after finding that his friend was out, decided to wait for him to return. Rather than wasting a few spare moments, the productive poet sat down at Schiller’s desk to jot down a few notes. Then a peculiar stench prompted Goethe to pause. Somehow, an oppressive odor had infiltrated the room.

Goethe followed the odor to its origin, which was actually right by where he sat. It was emanating from a drawer in Schiller’s desk. Goethe leaned down, opened the drawer, and found a pile of rotten apples. The smell was so overpowering that he became light-headed. He walked to the window and breathed in a few good doses of fresh air. Goethe was naturally curious about the trove of trash, though Schiller’s wife, Charlotte, could only offer the strange truth: Schiller had deliberately let the apples spoil. The aroma, somehow, inspired him, and according to his spouse, he “could not live or work without it.”

(A semi-scientific hypothesis of an aside here: If left to rot long enough, decomposing biomass, such as apples, produces methane gas. Though methane is not toxic, it can displace oxygen in a closed space — like, say, an obsessive writer’s small den — and could eventually pose asphyxiation risk if the displacement runs rampant. In small doses, however, it can cause light-headedness — that pleasant near-tipsy feeling of slight dizziness one gets when in the grip of creative inspiration. It is possible, then, that the rotting apples were more than an odd olfactory stimulus for Schiller and actually had a biological effect on his mental state.)

Most authors, of course, didn’t let their food rot for inspiration, but they were no less particular about their preferred edibles for fueling the muse. Agatha Christie munched on apples in the bathtub while pondering murder plots, Flannery O’Connor crunched vanilla wafers, and Vladimir Nabokov fueled his “prefatory glow” with molasses.

Then there was the color-coding of the muses: In addition to his surprising gastronome streak, Alexandre Dumas was also an aesthete: For decades, he penned all of his fiction on a particular shade of blue paper, his poetry on yellow, and his articles on pink; on one occasion, while traveling in Europe, he ran out of his precious blue paper and was forced to write on a cream-colored pad, which he was convinced made his fiction suffer. Charles Dickens was partial to blue ink, but not for superstitious reasons — because it dried faster than other colors, it allowed him to pen his fiction and letters without the drudgery of blotting. Virginia Woolf used different-colored inks in her pens — greens, blues, and purples. Purple was her favorite, reserved for letters (including her love letters to Vita Sackville-West, diary entries, and manuscript drafts. Lewis Carroll also preferred purple ink (and shared with Woolf a penchant for standing desks), but for much more pragmatic reasons: During his years teaching mathematics at Oxford, teachers were expected to use purple ink to correct students’ work — a habit that carried over to Carroll’s fiction.

Many authors were notorious multitaskers: Alexandre Dumas dedicated every spare moment to his craft, writing between errands and meals, and Gertrude Stein wrote during errands as her wife, Alice B. Toklas, drove the duo around in their famed Model T Ford, Aunt Pauline (named after Stein’s real aunt, because the car, like Pauline herself, “always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most of the time if she was properly flattered”). Johnson tells us:

In the privacy of an automobile, she could let her mind wander and jot down a few lines, no matter where she was. Stein was especially productive during errands. She’d sit in the car while her partner, Alice B. Toklas, dashed into a store. While she waited, Stein would pull out a pencil and a scrap of paper. She was particularly inspired by the traffic on busy Parisian streets. Automobiles stopped and started with a rhythm that thrummed right into her poetry and prose.

Stein, like Vladimir Nabokov, even liked to write in a parked car, which served as a perfectly contained bubble of stillness ideal for writing. But other authors’ relationships with transportation and the muse were decidedly less safe — Eudora Welty jotted down ideas during the long drives to her mother’s nursing home and Sir Walter Scott composed poetry on horseback.

Moving vehicles and motion, in fact, have a long history of stirring up inspiration. (I get the vast majority of my own ideas while riding my bike around the city or working out on the elliptical at the gym.) Joseph Heller arrived at some of his greatest ideas while riding the bus and even famously stated that the closing line of Catch-22 came to him on a bus. When he was sixteen, Woody Allen channeled his budding comedic genius on his daily crowded subway rides to the New York ad agency that had offered him an after-school job. Most impressive of all, however, was that he managed to write his ideas down without the luxury of a seat, standing and wobbling alongside irate commuters. Johnson cites Allen’s recollection:

Straphanging, I’d take out a pencil and by the time I’d gotten out I’d have written forty or fifty jokes … fifty jokes a day for years.

But lest we hastily surmise that writing in a white coat would make us a Joyce or drowning pages in purple ink a Woolf, Johnson prefaces her exploration with another important, beautifully phrased disclaimer:

That power to mesmerize has an intangible, almost magical quality, one I wouldn’t dare to try to meddle with by attempting to define it. It was never my goal as I wrote this book to discover what made literary geniuses tick. The nuances of any mind are impossible to pinpoint.

[…]

You could adopt one of these practices or, more ambitiously, combine several of them, and chances are you still wouldn’t invoke genius. These tales don’t hold a secret formula for writing a great novel. Rather, the authors in the book prove that the path to great literature is paved with one’s own eccentricities rather than someone else’s.

Odd Type Writers is both fascinating in its particular oddities and oddly assuring in its general testament to the grounding power of personal habit and the coexistence of creativity and quirk. Complement it with some more practical help from famous authors in their collected wisdom on writing.

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The Roots, Jimmy Fallon, and the Sesame Street gang sing a rousing rendition of "Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?"

(YouTube link)

Improv Everywhere gave passersby a chance to conduct a symphony orchestra.

For our latest mission, we put a Carnegie Hall orchestra in the middle of New York City and placed an empty podium in front of the musicians with a sign that read, “Conduct Us.” Random New Yorkers who accepted the challenge were given the opportunity to conduct this world-class orchestra. The orchestra responded to the conductors, altering their tempo and performance accordingly. This project was a collaboration with Carnegie Hall and Ensemble ACJW.

A good time was had by all. For more on this caper, see the blog post about it. Link  -via Tastefully Offensive

Percussive Maintenance from Duncan Robson on Vimeo.

Magic. Or Duncan Robson is just a really good editor. Any supercut that starts with Doctor Who and ends with Fred Astaire is fine by me.

(via: Laughing Squid)

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If you want simple, beautiful, compact storage, look no further than the combination of a few pieces of IKEA furniture. The folks over at IKEA Hackers discovered that LINNMON table tops, combined with EXPEDIT storage grid modules, can create a simple rolling library.

You just need to pick up your LINNMON (x2) and EXPEDIT (x3) at IKEA and add a few other things (casters, wood strips, etc.) to put this project together. For the most part you just need to build the furniture as IKEA intended and add a few things. When you're done, you get this awesome little storage module that holds a lot and looks great.

A Library on Wheels | IKEA Hackers

by Alex Balk

To honor what would have been Philip Edward Hartman's 65th birthday, let's watch one of his greatest performances that is currently available for embedding. (I would have put up this one were such a thing possible.) Once a year or so, given the churn and turnover of the Internet, a site will post Hartman's audition reel for "Saturday Night Live" as if they were the first ones to discover it; if you want to get an early start on its 2014 appearance, today's a good day for it.

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The post Remembering Phil Hartman appeared first on The Awl.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has given us some of the finest musical numbers of all time, including his odes to Predator, Batman and Robin, and more. But this heartfelt proclamation of how Hunger Games ripped off his beloved classic Running Man may be his greatest work yet, and is titled "Fuck You, The Hunger Games."

Read more...

He's sort of like Plastic Man in that he can mold and shape his beard into anything. This isn't photoshopped. Incredibeard really did make his beard into a ramen bowl. You can see more photos of his heroic work at the link. Warning: clean-shaven men will leave his site feeling ashamed and inadequate.

Link -via Foodiggity

If you’ve yet to hear Ylvis’s “The Fox,” go watch, then come back. Otherwise, enjoy while I slowly back away.

(via Jason Inman)

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Felienne describes how she, Daan van Berkel and some other friends went away for a weekend to hack a Turing machine out of Excel formulas. Lacking an infinitely long tape, they had to kludge around a bit, but the outcome is both cool and instructional (here's the machine itself). The Turing Machine is Alan Turing's "hypothetical device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape," which formed the basis for modern, general-purpose computers.

Then, lets have a look at the machine itself. Since we are only using formulas, we cannot continuously change the tape. Therefore, we use one row in the spreadsheet to represent one state of the tape. Each following line represents the state of the tape after one transition. As Willem van de Ende poetically put it: “No state was harmed in the making of this Turing Machine”

This means the top most line of the spreadsheet (shown in yellow in the following screen shot) represents this initial state of the machine. C2 shows the row where we reach the halting state and D2 counts the number of 1′s from there. As the first line contains three 1′s, this machine indeed seems to be calculating the successor.

Now, how do we get from one state to the other? For this we need to do some administration. In column A, we save the column position of the head. In column B, we save the current state. With that we can calculate the value of one square on the tape, by looking at the state and the previous value on the tape, with the formula below:

Excel Turing Machine (via Hacker News)

[Video Link, thanks Tara McGinley!]

Technically it’s Peter Dinklage and Lena Headey who went on Sesame Street, not their Game of Thrones counterparts. If only it were Nikolaj Coster-Waldau so I could make a tasteless joke about tossing seven year olds out of buildings. Le sigh. Anyway, above you can see Headey teaching Murray Monster how to relax (no, it doesn’t involve wine), and behind the cut is a clip from tomorrow’s episode of Dinklage as Simon of “Simon Says” fame. And he sings. Dangit, Peter Dinklage. Stop being so perfect, for once!

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A 61-year-man in Texas went to a hospital complaining of dizziness. He was very drunk, but insisted he hadn't had a drink that day. His wife said he would become drunk at odd times. Hospital staff assumed he was lying about drinking, but gastroenterologist Dr. Justin McCarthy and Panola College dean of nursing Barbara Cordell wanted to get to the bottom of the case. They isolated the patient and monitored his blood-alcohol level for 24 hours, and found his alcohol level spontaneously went up after eating!

Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer's yeast in his gut.

That's right, folks. According to Cordell and McCarthy, the man's intestinal tract was acting like his own internal brewery.

The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy the case of "auto-brewery syndrome" a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.  

The condition is quite rare, as brewer's yeast is usually not a problem for a healthy digestive system. Link -via Arbroath

by Alex Balk

"'This morning as Simon McCoy was preparing to introduce this story, instead of picking up his tablet to hold as he went to air, he mistakenly picked up a ream of paper that was sitting next to it,' said a spokeswoman for BBC News. 'In the rush of live news, he didn’t have an opportunity to swap the items, so simply went with it.' Mr McCoy has previously been seen on screen briefly resting his head on his desk when the camera cut to him."

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The post Newsman Displays Vintage iPad appeared first on The Awl.

This week Victor took me to a shop to find a lamp for the bedroom but they were all too expensive.  Like, they had an $8,000 crystal chandelier in the shape of a leaping, life-sized, cavorting pony.  True story.  I wanted to take a picture but Victor thought it would be too weird for me to say, “Hey, can I take a picture of your shiny pony?” so instead I stayed quiet until about 10 seconds later when I saw an enormous bear’s head on the wall and I screamed ,”HOLY SHIT THERE’S A BEAR” and then I think probably Victor realized that he just can’t take me out in public in general.

Several clerks (and shoppers) looked up in a rather annoyed way, which is sort of rude because 1) if there really was a bear in the shop they would probably be grateful for my warning and 2) THERE REALLY WAS A BEAR IN THE STORE.  Victor pointed out that it was just the head of a bear, but I countered that the head was technically the most dangerous part of the bear and then he argued that bear paws are just as painful, but I pointed out that no part of the bear is deadly if his head has come off, and then we just agreed to disagree because we were attracting more attention.

Then a salesman came over and I was all, “HOW MUCH IS IT FOR THE BEAR?” but I was trying not to sound too eager because even though the head was dusty and mostly shoved behind a vent it was still pretty bad-ass and I didn’t want to let them know that I was too interested because that’s how they get you. The saleman looked confused for a second and then laughed awkwardly, and then said “Oh.  You’re serious” and was like, “I am deadly serious, sir” and he said he’d ask his manager.

The manager came over to make sure that I wasn’t just fucking with him and I said, “Before we go any further, I just want to point out that this bear is literally 75% off.  I mean, unless you have the body of the headless bear in the back, in which case I might be interested in purchasing it too” and then he wandered off in a bit of a daze.  Victor shook his head and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, but in his defense it’s possible it was because he was looking at the pony chandelier because that shit was fucking dazzling.  Then the salesman came back saying, “We would be so…so thrilled to let you have it for $75″ and I shouted “SOLD!” and then I was a little offended on Beartrums behalf because why were they so happy to get rid of him?  Clearly I was saving him from people who did not appreciate him and probably didn’t even realize his name was Beartrum.  This was a damn rescue.  Plus, when they climbed up on the ladder to get him down I realized that Beartrum’s head was three times the size of a normal bears and the whole thing was made of fiberglass and fake fur so no one even had to die to make him, unless it was a lot of stuffed animals from a scarlet fever ward, which would explain why they were in such a hurry to get rid of him.   Then they really quickly wrapped him up because I think they just wanted us to leave.  This is exactly why I often get really good service and also why I recommend not taking your medication during days when you have to buy a car or a bedroom set.

Victor drug the giant box of bear to the car while muttering that I was unstable, and I agreed with him, but I don’t think you have to be crazy to realize that paying 2 bucks per pound of bad-ass bear is a goddamn bargain.  I tried to go online to find a similar bear head to prove that I’d made a fantastic buy, but when I searched “Big Bear Head” it gave me a San Diego craigslist ad entitled “Big Bear needs some quick head now” and then I just decided to never go on the internet again.

I got Beartrum Higglebottom home (“Beartrum” was just a given and I think “Higglebottom” is nice because it sort of implies that his non-existent bottom had once been wiggly and positive) and I decided to take some of those fancy unwrapping picture sets like you see on sophisticated techy blogs, but when I downloaded the first one I noticed that Ferris Mewler was doing something weird in the back.

And so then I was like “Enhance….Enhance….Enhance” until finally it was big enough that I could see that Ferris was hiding his head in his genitals.  Or something.  I’m not sure.  All I know is that he’s way more flexible than I am and he seems to be showing off.  Victor says he’s probably just hiding his head in shame so that other neighborhood cats won’t recognize him on my blog and make fun of him.  I can’t but help to think that this is not going to help his case:

Then I opened the box a little more and you could see Beartrum’s enormous smile, as if he was saying, “YOU ARE MY VERY BEST FRIEND EVER AND NOTHING WILL EVER TEAR US APART.”

Then I asked Victor to walk around holding Beartrum up at various places in my office so that I could figure out the best place to hang him, but I was actually just taking pictures of Victor wearing a bear and then he heard me giggling and was all “WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING?  ARE YOU RECORDING THIS?”

Then he put Beartrum down and walked away muttering under his breath.  I figured I needed to even the score for the sake of my marriage so I yelled at Victor to come to the front yard and when he got there I was wearing Beartrum’s face and singing “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” in a deep, creepy, slow-motion voice on the yard.

That’s when Hailey’s school bus pulled up and I waved at her, and the bus driver seemed sort of disturbed, but probably only because I looked so realistic that she wasn’t sure if it was safe to leave Hailey there with me.  Victor agreed, but not for actual bear-related reasons.  Hailey, however, thought Beartrum was totally bad-ass, and that’s when I decided that from now on I’d only hang out with eight-year-olds, because they still understand the whimsical joy of silliness, and they’re too young to call the authorities on you.

Victor, on the other hand, demanded that I get in the house and stop waving at our neighbors because “WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO THINK?” and I immediately dismissed him, but then I thought, “Oh my God, they probably think we’re furries.”  Then I started to explain what a furry was to Victor and he was like, “STOP TALKING ALREADY” because apparently education is not important to him.

Then Victor told me to put Beartrum away, but I told him I needed a few days to figure out where he fit best.

Victor:  NO.  Just…no.

me:  But he looks so happy.  And it’s the guest bedroom so it’s hardly ever used and when we have family spend the night they’ll have company.  I tucked him in like a burrito baby.  LOOK HOW HAPPY HE LOOKS.

Victor:  Try again.

I attempted another option:

me:  Rowr-rowr-rowr.

Victor:  What?

me:  OHMYGOD, LOOK  OUT THE WINDOW!

Victor:  WHAT IN THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?

me:  He likes to wander at night.  I think he might have narcolepsy.

I briefly considered poking his head through the hedges just to freak people out, but Victor said I couldn’t because I might cause an accident because people weren’t prepared for that much awesomeness.  (He didn’t say that last part out loud, but I’m pretty sure it was implied.)

In the end, I left Beartrum on the floor of my office until I find the perfect spot.  The cats fucking love him.

The good news though is that I think I’ve finally found my new profile pic.

I just found out about this documentary of my favorite band, The Clash, which was produced by Google. Above: it's Topper, Paul, and Mick!

In this exclusive documentary featuring never-before-seen footage of the late, great Joe Strummer, all four members of “the only band that matters” walk us through the making of each of their classic albums. Newly re-mastered versions of those albums are available below, along with a new hits collection based on the set list from one of Joe’s favorite gigs. Plus, four contemporary bands inspired by the Clash’s legacy offer their own takes on the band’s songs. If you already love the Clash, watch and listen and we guarantee you’ll hear something new. If you don’t, you’ll hear why you should.

Google produces a five part documentary on the Clash featuring the remaining band members talking through their classic albums and never-before-seen footage of Joe Strummer (Via The World's Best Ever)

"I will make a film showing myself staring at the camera for thirty minutes," says my deadpan friend Jeremy Bornstein. "Possibly more." The pitch video is hilarious. So is the FAQ, which includes questions like "Will there be blinking?," to which Jeremy replies, "I am considering adding 'no blinking' as a stretch goal."

Talking Heads Memo

Saves the Daily Kos

Notorious BIG Government

Mashablemore

Mates of Slate

Jarvis Gawker

ArtsBeat Happening

Townhall & Oates

Apples in Stereogum

Hot Hot Air

Grateful Deadspin

PoliticocoRosie

The Huffington Postal Service

Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits is a dark fantasy classic. But nobody would fund his movie about time-traveling robbers, and George Harrison had to mortgage his office to get the film made. That's just one of the secrets of Time Bandits in this exclusive excerpt from the book Very Naughty Boys: The Amazing Story of HandMade Films.

Read more...

Itsy Bitsy is a free 78-page Kindle story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Swedish horror writer of Let the Right One In. I have not read it yet, but from the description below it sounds like a paparazzo gets punished, so I am looking forward to reading it. A young celebrity lives on my street and the paparazzi tear up and down it like maniacs. One day they are going to kill a pedestrian.

Destined to become a modern classic, the short story Itsy Bitsy is guaranteed to make you think twice before you take a picture of someone in a bikini. In this creepy shocker, horror author superstar John Ajvide Lindqvist gives new meaning to punishing the paparazzi.

Itsy Bitsy

Dr. Richard Feynman's lectures on physics have been iconic standards of physics education for the past five decades. Videos of the series were put online at Microsoft Research a few years ago, but now the entirety of Volume 1 is available over simple HTML (mirror). In a letter to members of the Feynman Lectures Forum, editor Mike Gottlieb said, "It was an idea conceived many years ago, when through FL website correspondence I became aware of the many eager young minds who could benefit from reading FLP, who want to read it, but for economic or other reasons have no access to it, while at the same time I was becoming aware of the growing popularity of horrid scanned copies of old editions of FLP circulating on file-sharing and torrent websites. A free high-quality online edition was my proposed solution to both problems. All concerned agreed on the potential pedagogical benefits, but also had to be convinced that book sales would not be harmed. The conversion from LaTeX to HTML was expensive: we raised considerable funds, but ran out before finishing Volumes II and III, so we are only posting Volume I initially. (I am working on finishing Volumes II and III myself, as time permits, and will start posting chapters in the not-too-distant future, if all goes as planned.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Greg Nutt created this JJ Abrams-style trailer for Galaxy Quest, remixing the original. It's an interesting and entertaining exercise in form, and makes me wonder if you couldn't apply the treatment to practically any footage -- Local Hero? The Outsiders? A Day at the Races?

Galaxy Quest Alternate Trailer (Thanks, Earl!)

Minnesota's favorite indie rock minimalists Low covers "Stay" by Rihanna. Yes, Rihanna. Proceeds of the sale of the single via iTunes go to Chicago's Rock for Kids. Low's most recent LP is the lovely The Invisible Way, available on Sub Pop Records.