Fantastic Voyage

I like how for one of the posters for Fantastic Voyage, they simply filled it with a naked Raquel Welch.

Nice Pipes

I had a brain explosion when I saw this ass (LOL, that was an actual typo) ad over on this blog. I remember it vividly in some car or custom van magazine I had as a kid. I was torn between the titles "Nice Pipes" and "Nice Balloons".

Come For the Beets, Stay For the Animal Husbandry!

Fans of The Office will appreciate that Schrute Farms has actually garnered many rave reviews on TripAdvisor.com. That's hilarious.

Gravity Sucks

Here's a poster (NSFW) for a movie I musta missed in the theaters. Dig the caption. Really? The most exciting? Did the guy who made the movie live in an old folks home or something, and to him those are actually perky, pert breasts? I'm not sure if it's a porno or a documentary or maybe even a Freaks rip–off.

That's Art? That's Art!

I don't read newspapers, so I check out comics online every once in a while. Close to Home is like a dumb person's Far Side, but every so often he does one that's good. It must be a Jackson Pollock exhibit.

PEP Pills!

It's true, but they never agree.

Corvette Winter

Sorry, that's the cleverest title I could come up with.

In the '70s, 'Vettes were prime targets for outrageous customization. It was easy to add on to the already swoopy fiberglas bodies. Nothing shows that better than the one in Corvette Summer with Mark Hamill. Turns out that it's also easy to not get that whole thing at all and create something that should not live.

Pentax Kamikazee

When watching this old Japanese Pentax ad, what caught my eye was the weird little airplane that shows up near the end. It's one of those Dinkel GX suicide planes that the Germans made. Here's the info I found about them:

When the Reichsministry of Sportive and Jolly Activities issued its edict banning unauthorized use of fireworks in April 1945, it triggered creation of one of Nazidom's last violent flying death throes: the potentially vicious Dinkel "Little Fireworks Weapon.' The Dinkel was merely a metal tube, its fat nether end hollowed out and stuffed with every skyrocket, cherry bomb, Roman candle and other explosive that could be culled from warehouses, private homes and factories. The pilot hung on for dear life as someone lit the wick protruding from the stern. The craft wiggled and shot ahead on skids, rising into the air if the pilot was quick-witted enough to so direct its erratic course, Few Dinkels saw active service, but in the last great sentimental gesture of the Hitler era, Reiehsmarshal Hermann Goering had four such craft assembled, ordered them fueled with fireworks, and then, as his Führer watched, had the Dinkels fly overhead skywriting a multicolored swastika in the night sky. Alas, the swastika proved a skywriter's Götterdämmerung when all four planes collided at the axis. The Führer was nonetheless said to be delighted at the show. A repeat gala featuring 60 GX's was scheduled for the next August, but was canceled by the unexpected turn of events that May.

I modeled this in X–Plane a couple years ago. It flew very nicely.

Doctor Whoa

I never liked Doctor Who, because I couldn't stand looking at the curly–haired, floppy–faced actor who played him when I was youngish. But the theme song always entranced me—it's so spooky. I always assumed it was performed on an early synth. Nope. Each note was recorded from a plucked string or tone generator onto a hunk of tape, then the hunks were painstakingly spliced together to form the bass line, melody, and everything else. Whoa. That's dedication to music. Read about it over at everybody's favorite source of probably–truthful information.

Russian Rover

I had no idea the Ruskies landed rovers on the moon. They've located where one of them should be, and auctioned it off. Next step, going to get it.

Stewardesses

Hmm, maybe flying wouldn't be so bad after all.

Telefunken U–47

Lookit all the Telefunken U–47s used to record this album! Frank Zappa would be proud. It's actually a scan of the back of a real–to–reel box cover. (Link to album rip.) That period of sound, recordings, and home hi–fi was really interesting. Leaps and bounds were being made in sound recording and reproduction techniques compared to preceding the decades. Hi–fi geeks would sit in their den, listening either through their headphones or their speakers, pipe in mouth and Rob Roy in hand. The recording engineers and producers liked to explain how the recordings were made, but I've never see anything as detailed as this one.

Stereo was a wild, insane way to listen to music, and many engineers made full use of it. Not so much as a way to reproduce the actual sound one might hear standing in front of the band, but more as a special effect. There were lots of albums sold where instruments would switch from being fully in the left channel to being fully in the right and then back, usually packed with "ping pong" in the album title. Listeners—up until then being used to mono—would go "wowwee!" Lots of bands were recorded this way, including The Beatles. Even Van Halen's first album panned the guitar completely into the left channel with only some reverb and some solos in the right. Lose a channel in your stereo and you've lost Eddie, or Ringo's drums.

Tron Legacy

I honestly don't remember seeing Tron when it was first released. I do remember feeding token after token into the Tron video game machines at the mall. I did finally watch it at some point and thought it was a little too Disney, like there should be knights and wizards or something dumb like that. A more recent viewing a few years ago put it in a slightly different, more favorable light—probably just the effect of me being at a totally different place in life. I certainly wouldn't call it one of the best sci&ndash-fi movies ever made, but it does have the credit of taking sci–fi to a different level with its f/x and stuff. It's definitely something I'd watch if it's on TV on a Sunday afternoon after a gig.

So now a new movie is being hyped to the geeks of old, Tron Legacy, still starring Jeff Bridges (trapped in the digital realm for 25 years). I'm actually kind stoked to see this one. The selling point for me is that Olivia Wilde is also in it. Hubba hubba. Here's a shitty looking pirated trailer if you want to watch. It's hard to tell what's going on because it's so dark and low–res.

America's Kids; They're a Bunch of Babies

Report: American Schools Trail Behind World In Aptitude Of Child Soldiers

Google Bird Poop View

Yuck.

Polaroid Guts

Here's a cool film made in 1972 about the Polaroid XS–70 camera. What's cool is it shows and describes how the thing works. It's truly an engineering marvel, as well as a chemical marvel to have the photos come out that good simply by squishing the chemicals from one place to another. If you hadn't heard, they finally stopped production of Polaroid film last year. The factory was sold, I think by someone who might still produce it in limited batches. The warm and fuzzy look of a Polaroid photo is surpassed only by the intense colors of Kodachrome.

Vintage Toon Porn

This is funny and weird. It's cartoon porn from 1924. NSFW, perhaps, although it's safe for YouTube, so I guess it's not really porn then.

That Was Weird

This morning iTunes kept giving me an error about not being able to save the library because it couldn't find the file. I'd been downloading lots of free music lately. Then I noticed my drive had 3M free. Three meg! Sure, the music files I get are mostly encoded at 320k and contain hi–res scans of the album cover, but I couldn't believe I'd filled up my 1T boot drive. I launched Grand Perspective to see what was eating up all the space. Half the space was taken up by a Retrospect backup. WTF? I'd started a new media set yesterday, still trying to figure out which is the best way to run Retrospect these days, and when I got to the step where you add a member to the set, thought I was choosing the source. So I set the member to be on the root of my boot drive instead of in my backup folder on the external. Oops. So I deleted that set, made a new one, and started the new backup all over again.

I partially blame Restrospect for being confusing and not being verbal enough in its various sheets that slide down during the creation of a media set.

Switched-On Gershwin

Holy fucking shit. My brother had this album that I listened to constantly. Somebody finally ripped a nice sounding copy to mp3. It's all piano and Moogs. It contains the spookiest version of Summertime you'll ever hear.

A couple weeks ago Dad asked if I thought I could sell Bob's records up here. My answer was "SELL?!??" There's a bunch of stuff that I know ain't on CD that I haven't heard in eons. I'll rip a bunch of it. My nephew Ryan is coming up to visit over Spring break and I'll have him bring them up. Finding this one saves me the trouble of having to rip this album.

Shut Up Little Man

I just found something that has been around for more than a decade, kinda underground, but in some areas very much above ground. It's called Shut Up Little Man. It's the recordings of two drunk men, Raymond and Peter, through the very thin wall of a shitty San Francisco apartment building. They hate each other and fight constantly. All sorts of words describe the recordings; funny, depressing, poignant, disturbing, hilarious, etc. There were 7 volumes on CD (everything is available at the iTunes Store) and a best–of that you can download here. It became a stage play (or maybe two), a comic book, almost a movie (many times), and even a song by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo (recorded by The Wipeouters, a surf music project by the spud boys).

All the stuff on the official site is really quite interesting to read because the phenomenon got so big and weird (the letter from Mark Mothersbaugh, the meeting with Johnny Depp at the table, etc). Go spend the rest of the day reading it and listening to them rant and bicker.

Do it or don't, little man.