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.

Starting a Model T

The first playground slide

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In the early 20th century Charles Wicksteed owned a company that made drills, saws and gearboxes. In 1921, to celebrate the end of WWI, he took pipes from his factory and used them to build swings in a park in Kettering, England.

A year later he introduced the world's first playground slide to the park. It stood 12 feet tall and featured polished boards that could be slid down.

Wicksteed's playgrounds were a success, and he spun off a company Wicksteed Playscapes to design and build playgrounds. That company is still in business, easily making it the oldest company in the world dedicated to creating playgrounds. In the words of Charles Wicksteed:

I came to the conclusion the great mistake so many private benefactors and public bodies make is this: they lay out a beautiful Park to sit in, and look at, but they do not realise that the people want more than this, they want something doing. And those who cannot play themselves, enjoy looking at those who can. The Play Ground should not be put in a corner behind railings, but in a conspicuous and beautiful part of a Park, free to all, where people can enjoy the play and charming scenery at the same time; where mothers can sit, while they are looking on and caring for their children.

My Play Ground is not confined to boys or girls, or old or young, it is open to all. I have seen a dozen women of forty years of age on the Plank Swing together, and enjoying it as much as the children. I have also seen old ladies of 80 go down the slides. It is a good thing to have plenty of variety and then no one tires.

I used to be told how boys abused everything and what a disgraceful thing it was for two men to swing together on the same swing. So I made up my mind it would be far easier for me, as an engineer, to make the Playthings so strong that they could not be broken, rather than try to reform the users. In this I have succeeded without disturbing the delicate balance, so that the youngest child alone can operate any of the playthings.

Charles Wicksteed

Found via La Boite Verte.

  

We Gotta Get Out of This Place

Get ready for an escapist weekend with Dan Auerbach.

Visualizing dinosaurs

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These pictures, and those after the jump, are old drawings of what paleontologists used to think dinosaurs looked like. They tended to be pictured as being dull colored and very lizard like. Today it is believed that they were much more colorful and active. In fact, fossils are now yielding some information on just what those colors were.

The article How do we know what dinosaurs looked like? discusses the evolution of how dinosaurs were pictured through the years. From that article:

When ancient people were faced with strange bones, they did exactly what we do today, and used the best knowledge available to reconstruct the creatures that left them behind. Sometimes this resulted in poor conclusions. The first name assigned in print to any dinosaur remains was the ignominious title of Scrotum humanum – a label given by British physician Richard Brookes to the broken end of a femur in 1763, believing it to be the fossilised testicles of a Biblical giant.

We now know that the leg bone belonged to a Megalosaurus – correctly described as an extinct reptile by William Buckland in 1824. You can’t entirely blame Brookes for his conclusions, as dinosaurs would not be described as a group until 1842. That was when Richard Owen, head of what is now the Natural History Museum, revealed to the world a new class of strange, extinct creatures he called dinosaurs, meaning ‘fearfully great reptiles’. He imagined Iguanodon, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus to be reptiles with legs sprawled out to the sides, with scaly grey or green skin: something like modern lizards or crocodiles.

In 1854 artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created life-sized sculptures of these animals as directed by Owen, and you can still see these on display in Crystal Palace Park in south London. Visit them and you will see they look very different to how we depict dinosaurs today.

Over time, we have come to completely revise our understanding of the appearance of dinosaurs, and much of this began with the description of another American dromaeosaur called Deinonychus in the 1960s. John Ostrom at Yale University made the revolutionary suggestion that this species was a bird-like, fast, warm-blooded pack hunter, and so began the ‘dinosaur renaissance’ of the 1960s and 70s. Ostrom championed the idea that birds were dinosaurs, and was spectacularly vindicated when Sinosauropteryx, the first known feathered dinosaur, was found in China in 1996.

The ugly side of ice cream

Above is a video of a restored 1944 Dairy Queen ice cream making machine. The behind the scenes machinery of making ice cream is certainly grittier than a brightly lit and colorful ice cream parlor.
 

Wish You Were Here

Get ready for a wistful weekend with Cody Jinks.

  

He gave us lollies

Nyuju 'Stumpy' Brown was an aboriginal artist from northern Australia. She grew up living in a hunter/gatherer lifestyle and didn't encounter white people until she was a teen. From the video:

"The first time I saw an airplane was down near the stock route. It landed near us. We thought the white people might kill us. We were frightened of the white people so we hid in a wattle tree."

Below are some of her paintings.

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Dereliction of Duty

The Bad Shepherd by Jan Brueghel the Younger

There is a point at which the law becomes immoral and unethical. That point is reached when it becomes a cloak for the cowardice that dares not stand up against blatant violations of justice. -- Kurt Huber

 

Bullet With Butterfly Wings

Get ready for a self-centered and cranky weekend with Frida Snell.

  

I want to see this movie

Above is a review of Night Wars. It appears to be a cinematic tour de force of the first order. Particularly impressive are the scenes where, while sleeping with loaded guns, the protagonists return to Vietnam in their dreams to participate in fire fights.

If you just want to see the sleep fights, and they are a sight to behold, you can go to time stamps 6:00 and 9:12.

Walking in Yangon

Time for yet another random walking around video. This one is through the streets of Yangon, Myanmar.

While there is no such thing as a connoisseur of walking videos, I've watched enough of them to begin to spot differences in them. In this one I particularly like his camera work. While usually the camera in these things just point ahead, he tends to focus on points of interest, sometimes even turning as he passes them. A nice touch.  

You Can Never Go Home Again

Get ready for a oddball fusion weekend with Gangstagrass.

Happy 4th of july

A FALSE ALARM ON THE FOURTH

Uncle Sam - It's all right! There's no fighting! The noise you hear is just my family celebrating!

The illustration is from 1902. It is hard to read, but the kids in the picture are labeled: Philippines, Hawaii, North, Porto Rico, South, Mass., Texas, New York and Alaska, with the black boy bearing no label. The concerned looking lady in the white robes is Peace.

Enjoy the 4th all.  
 

Drawings of jellyfish

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Ernst Haeckel was a 19th century German biologist. After the untimely death of his young wife he became fascinated by jellyfish (medusae). Their ethereal and fragile beauty touched a chord in his sorrow. 

These samples of his illustrations are from Public Domain Review. There are more after the jump.

 

Everybody Anyone

Get ready for a melancholy weekend with Itsuroh Shimoda.

  

Making rubber bands

If you're going to be blazing away with rubber band guns, then you're going to need rubber bands. Looks like a nasty place to work.
 

Another way for a kid to shoot his eye out

When I was a kid we made rubber band guns using clothes pins. I imagine I would have craved one of these had they been around.

Of course, since the word gun is in the name rubber band gun, you can imagine how some folks might view their sale. In fact, in 2010 some nitwit in New Zealand bought one in a New Zealand shopping mall and then waved it around and joked about robbing a McDonalds with it. He ended up arrested, and perhaps the trial judge at his sentencing got a bit a carried away as well. From the Queensland Times:   

A judge has called for rubber band guns to be banned after a man wielded one of the weapons at customers at an Ipswich shopping centre ...

“I find it inconceivable that items of this nature are on sale in Queensland,” Judge Koppenol said.

“Quite apart from the damage that a fired rubber band could do to the eye of a victim this weapon would give the distinct appearance, in my opinion, from a distance of being an actual gun.

“I cannot see any benefit and a significant detriment from the continuation of the sale of items of this nature.”

 

When The Hurt Is Over

Get ready for a weekend of self-flagellation with Mighty Sam McClain.

  

Leaders on toilet paper

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I've been remiss in my coverage of the latest affairs of Turkmenistan. For example, I completely skipped over Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow's (the former dentist and current president for life of Turkmenistan)  decree banning black cars and instructing his citizens to repaint their cars white or silver. Oh, and then there's the giant statue of him riding a horse which replaced the twirling statue of the previous leader, the beloved Turkmenbashi. You can see the giant horse monument below.

With that introduction to the post, you may wonder why I started it with a picture of Presidents Trump and Obama on toilet paper.

Well, it all started in the city of Dashoguz when several children were detained and tried for the crime of defacing pictures of Berdimuhamedow. Their hooliganistic acts included drawing goatees and mustaches on his pictures, as well as trampling them underfoot. Matters got even worse when it was discovered that local residents had taken to using newspaper with his picture on it as toilet paper. Oh, the horror!

From the article Turkmenistan Police Inspect Toilets for Use of President’s Newspaper Photos as Toilet Paper:

While inspecting another Dashoguz school for similar defiling of the president’s photos, police found bits of newspaper – some of which had Berdymukhammedov’s face on them – used as toilet paper in the school toilet. The director was fired, and an ample investigation into this practice began. It has reportedly led to the dismissal of several civil servants.

Apart from police officers inspecting both public and household toilets for incriminating evidence of defiling president Berdymukhammedov’s portrait, staff at landfills all over western Turkmenistan were instructed to be on the lookout for soiled pictures of the country’s supreme leader.

“There is a special janitor at each landfill site whose job is to inspect garbage, to look for soiled newspaper photos, to establish the house or flat of the newspaper subscriber and to report it to the police,” Fergana.ru reports.

Sooo... we may not have giant golden statues and streets full of white cars, but at least we can wipe our butts with novelty toilet paper without fear of getting arrested. That is, so far we can, but these days ya' never know (OK -- link to an old story, but whatever).

 Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow

Ads for alcohol

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Here is a small collection of old beer, wine and liquor ads. I love the delighted expression on the guy's face in the ad above. The pure malt tonic below was an advertising strategy of the early 20th century. Sometimes, as well as advising the tonics to mothers, it was also suggested to let the little ankle-biters have a nip as well. You can read about that at Just What the Doctor Ordered.

There are a few more ads after the jump. Enjoy.

Trouble Every Day

Get ready for a riotous weekend with Son of Orange County.

  

Navigating a sprint boat

More sprint boat racing. This video shows shots from several angles on a sprint boat. Included are good views of the navigator giving hand signals to the driver to steer him through the course.
 
You might notice the boat is from New Zealand. That's where the sport originated. It first spread to Australia and then to the States.
 

Sprint boat racing and bikinis

We may no longer  have the bikini portion of the Miss America pageant, but at least we still have sprint boat racing!

Er... not that the two topics are remotely related, but I needed an excuse to link to bikini pictures, so there is that. At any rate, enjoy the racing and the bikinis.
 

Kate McCannon

Get ready for a bedswerver weekend with Colter Wall.

 

Comey the fall-guy?

I haven't posted much politics lately. Other sites certainly do a better job of dissecting the apparent sleazy antics of the CIA, FBI, DOJ and the Obama administration. What triggered this post was the leaked news that the IG draft report found that James Comey was insubordinate in his handling of Clinton's email server. From Business Insider:

The Department of Justice's inspector general has concluded that James Comey defied authority at times during his time leading of the FBI, ABC News reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with a draft report on the matter.

The report, when finished and officially released, will cap Inspector General Michael Horowitz's inquiry into the FBI's handling of its investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. The report is said to focus on senior FBI leadership at the time, like Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, rather than on Clinton.

One source told ABC News the draft report about Comey described his conduct as "insubordinate." Another source reportedly agreed with that characterization but could not confirm that the exact term had been used.

Needless to say the leak is spin. It neatly places the blame on Comey while insulating his superiors and of course Obama. I suspect the actual report will be more complex than that.

That said, if true one wonders what Comey thinks of being setup as the fall-guy?

Making bricks in Myanmar

When I post these type of YouTube videos -- walking in a city, manufacturing processes, etc. -- I look for a particular type of video: one not too long or short, with decent camera work and natural sounds without music as the soundtrack. It means I often have to watch a lot of videos to find one that works for me.

While going through brick factory videos, mixed in with the usual promotional videos, there were a number of clips that focused on the exploitation of child labor in the brick factories. The featured dirty and tired looking kids describing truly horrific working conditions.

This video starts with shots of a couple of young children hauling baskets of clay out of a pit. However, the longer you watch the less it seems they are exploited little urchins. Along with several adults, only two of them are hauling the clay. The adults are smiling and seem amused by it, as if they kids are just showing off for the camera. Furthermore, in the background there are a couple of other kids sitting on the edge of the pit just watching.

I got the impression that the brick factory was probably a family operation and the kids were just there with their families. Perhaps closer to an 19th century farming family than a Dickensian sweat shop. Then again, who knows? A video can be edited to tell a story from most any slant.

Gimme Shelter

Get ready for a sanguinary weekend with Paolo Nutini.

Chaos and Order

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"There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.

If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish."

- Chuck Palahniuk

In Remembrance

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As you enjoy this Memorial Day be sure to spend some time remembering those it honors and the 'last full measure of devotion' they paid to our country and freedoms.

You Are My Sunshine

Get ready for a jilted weekend with the Leftover Cuties.

15,000 Dominoes

Well, who am I to criticize another person's pastime? Built by Heveh5 who has many more domino projects at her YouTube page.

Dan Cherry's Tools

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Dan Cherry is a collector of old tools. He arranges items from his collection and photographs them. He uses color, material, type of tools and texture to create his compositions.

I thought I might have posted his work already, but I couldn't find it if I did. At any rate, these are from La Boite Verte's Des Outils Anciens Meticuleusement Arranges. As well as after the jump, there are more examples there and at Dan's Instagram page. Enjoy.

Self Esteem

Get ready for a diffident weekend with Eric John Kaiser.