She Drives Me Crazy

Get ready for a beserk weekend with BeKy.

Appalachian molasses stir-off

Old movie posters about dope fiends

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Recently U.S. States hither and yon are legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational use. These are posters of exploitation flicks during the prohibition years of the drug. Under the guise of a dire warning they were stuffed full of wild parties, fallen women and much debauchery brought on by the use of the whacky tobacky.

There are more of these posters and a history of marijuana's prohibition at the post Anti-Reefer Film Posters and Why Marijuana is Outlawed.

Walking in Katmandu

A couple walk through Katmandu headed to Durbar Square. As they mention, there is a lot of beeping by the vehicles. Also, the subtitles they added were a nice touch.

Deception and reality

Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra 

Manjusri, a bodhisattva should regard all living beings as a wise man
Regards the reflection of the moon in water,
As magicians regard men created by magic.
As being like a face in a mirror,
like the water of a mirage;
like the sound of an echo;
like a mass of clouds in the sky;
like the appearance and disappearance of a bubble of water;
like the core of a plantain tree;
like a flash of lightning;
like the appearance of matter in an immaterial realm;
like a sprout from a rotten seed;
like tortoise-hair coat;
like the fun of games for one who wishes to die...

Deep Down Low

Get ready for a hallucinogenic weekend with Valentino Khan.

Japanese Noodle Warriors

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This post pretty much exists for no other purpose than for me to use that title for it. Anyway, these are the work of the Japanese artist Taishi Arimura. From the Spoon and Tamago post where I found these images:

Arimura sculpts the food samples into the bodies of warriors. He then meticulously carves up the Styrofoam packaging of popular instant noodles – in this case, Nissin’s Cup Noodle and Donbei – to create the armor, which he adheres to the noodles. The final touch is either a fork or chopsticks as weapon and the warriors look like they’re ready for battle.

 

A rubber band refrigerator

In above video Ben Krasnow builds a refrigerator using rubber bands as the cooling element. Of course it doesn't provide a lot of cooling, but a thermal imagining camera shows that it does slightly lower the temperature of the chamber. Ben explains the physics behind it all.

Ben's YouTube channel, Applied Science, is well worth a visit. he has a lot of fascinating projects, including a DIY scanning electron microscope, that are all pretty amazing.

When are they bringing these babies back?

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In this new age of neo-Puritanism with many, many sins to punish -- misidentifying one of the 1200 genders, illegal plastic straw possession, microaggressions out the wazoo and so forth -- social media mobs and twitter raging certainly have there places. Still, they lack a certain immediacy in their shaming.

Consider the advantages that old-timey pillories provided. Not only the public humiliation, but the opportunity to mock sinners to their faces, and even to chuck rotten fruit at them, add nice personal touches for SJWs.

Course if pillories do come back in style then sooner or later, and probably sooner, I'll end up in one. Ah well, in the words of Parsons from 1984, "Of course I'm guilty! You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?" I guess I'll just have to face my punishment from my betters.

At any rate, enjoy these few pictures of pillories as you ponder what awaits you.

Touring the South Pole station

Above is a video of a woman giving a tour of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. My previous knowledge of Antarctic stations came from repeated viewings of John Carpenter's The Thing so suffice it be said I was surprised by how large and, well... how institutional it looked.

I also wondered how much effort it took to build the place. Below are two videos, which are long in run time, showing the early efforts to plant the station and then the work to build the newer station we toured above. All in all, a pretty amazing engineering feat considering the environment it was done in.

Missionary Man

Get ready for a watchful weekend with Hatune MikuV3 and Megurine Luka.

 

Aviation Week magazine covers

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Here, and after the jump are a number of covers of Aviation Week which, depending on the date, is  also known as Aviation and Aviation Weekly and Space Technology. They are from the Internet Archives Aviation Week section where you can view more covers as well as browse the magazines interiors as well.

Casting an equestrian statue

This video uses animated etchings from the period to show the 15 year process of designing, casting and installing a monumental statue of Louis XV of France. Altogether it used 30 tons of brass. It was destroyed during the French Revolution.

Via The History Blog.

  

Friday

Get ready for a reimagined weekend with Matt Mulholland covering the Rebecca Black classic.
 

Sparrow Mart

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Sparrow Mart is an art installation created by Lucy Sparrow and housed in L.A.'s Standard Hotel. It is a replica of a 1980's American style supermarket. The replica goods and products are made of felt and can be purchased. It will be open until the end of August 2018, so if you're in the L.A. area and want to see it you still have time.

From the Colossal article Lucy Sparrow’s ’80s Style Supermarket Offers 31,000 Handmade Felt Items:

The retro shop has all the familiar selections of American comforts, including a videotape rental section with ’80s classics like Footloose, Dirty Dancing, and Short Circuit. She also has fresh hand-sewn seafood on ice, sushi, fruits and vegetables, a variety of meat cuts and other animal products, popular snacks, canned goods, cereals, candies, sodas, liquor and cleaning products. Each item is meticulously cloned from felt, a material that evokes childhood and play. The fact that the store offers 27 different types of sushi (each produced in 300 pieces), plus chopsticks, wasabi, pickled ginger, and even soy sauce packed inside iconic plastic fish containers, says a great deal about the amount of detail and determination that went into creating this overwhelming installation. Working alone until very recently, the artist ended up hiring four full-time assistants in her studio and outsourcing fifteen professionals to complete this immersive project.

The naked ones in the forest

Above is a short documentary about the isolated Mascho Piro tribe in Peru's Amazon jungle region.

The Mascho Piro are hunter gathers who are increasingly coming in contact with the outside world. The villagers they are encountering, and sometimes attacking with deadly force, are Christians. Some of the villagers are also descendants of the Mascho Piro. Regardless of blood ties, they consider the Mascho Piro as brethren who are living a sad life in the jungle and should be brought into the folds of civilization.

Acting as a buffer between the two are the Protection Agents. They're concerned about the effects of contact on the Mascho Piro, particularly exposure to disease and the realization that, were the Mascho Piro absorbed into civilization, they would end up on the bottom rung of society -- the "poorest of the poor" -- as they struggle to adjust.

It is a complex and tragic situation. In their desire for machetes and iron pots the Mascho Piro have no idea what they are walking into. That said, in these situations I always wonder about the logic of keeping such groups of people artificially isolated. What purpose does it really serve? Aren't they already the "poorest of the poor" with short life spans and high infant mortality among the negatives? How much of this desire to isolate is more for the vanity of the anthropologists then the benefit of the Mascho Piro and, more importantly, their descendants? I don't know.

For a related post see He gave us lollies.

Avoiding insult

If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War. ― George Washington

Ain't No Grave

Get ready for a revived weekend with Jamie Wilson.

  

The new Neo

Neoneocon has a new site, and a new name -- Neo. I've updated the link to her site. I've also added ScrappleFace to the 'Blogs of Interest' section.

I imagine I am also going to have to update this site eventually. The background tiles and graphics are hosted at the templating company's website, and I expect they'll pull the plug on them eventually.