We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
As always, may our self-proclaimed betters choke on those words. Happy 4th of July my fellow citizens. Enjoy the BBQs, festivities and fireworks.
The 4th of July brings BBQ grilling to mind. The above video is a review of a robot that cleans the grate of a BBQ grill. The brushes that keep falling off adds a bit of humor to it all. Even on sale these Grillbots cost $90 to $100. Seems like a mighty steep price to do away with your gill brush, but to each his own. You can follow the link if you have a hankering to buy one.
Speaking about robots, I wonder whatever became of The Robotolizer?
You can download PDFs of the catalogs from the Yokohama library site. Run the URL though Google Translate Web to be able to find the links to the PDFs.
As an aside my wife, son and I watched a Tokyo fireworks display from our hotel room a few years back. I have no idea what the occasion for the fireworks was, but it was a very impressive show.
Monna Innominata [I dream of you, to wake] - Christina Rossetti
I dream of you, to wake: would that I might
Dream of you and not wake but slumber on;
Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone,
As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight.
In happy dreams I hold you full in night.
I blush again who waking look so wan;
Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone,
In happy dreams your smile makes day of night.
Thus only in a dream we are at one,
Thus only in a dream we give and take
The faith that maketh rich who take or give;
If thus to sleep is sweeter than to wake,
To die were surely sweeter than to live,
Though there be nothing new beneath the sun.
This is a nicely done video showing the underbelly of Lagos, Nigeria. It has snippets from a variety of people showing a small slice of their lives. It is produced by Al Jazeera if that matters to you.
[T]he temple was built by Tamil Hindus native to southeastern India, and it first appeared in recorded history in the 600s AD. In the 1300s, the sacred structure was ransacked and destroyed by the Muslim general Malik Kafur in a successful attempt to spread Islam to Madurai. It wasn’t until nearly 250 years later, in 1559, that the structure was rebuilt by the first Nayak king of Madurai.
The Meenakshi Amman Temple remains standing today, the tallest tower reaching 170 feet high.
It is amazing how intricate and colorful the statues and decorations are. Actually, a lot of buildings in antiquity were similarly colorful, their pigments have just been lost over time due to neglect.
These pictures, and those after the jump, are gather from here and there on the web. Enjoy.
Regular readers will know that I frequently act like a monkey when a shiny object is dangled in front of my eyes. That is, I tend to get fixated and head off on tangents from time to time. So, it should be no surprise that after watching and reviewing the Russian TV show Vyzhit Posle, there would be more Russian TV in my future.
Above is an opening scene from the Russian TV series Sparta (available on Netflix). In the foreground is Barkovsky, a new student who is observing his fellow students as they eat lunch in a cafeteria. In the background we see Irina Shorina, a rather frumpily dressed Russian super model, errr… I mean student, who is carrying her tray. Just then a young fellow jumps up, walks over to her, says something snotty and then tears her blouse open.
Wait -- this is high school?
Anyway, he points at her flat chest and makes jokes about it and all the male students, being red blooded Russian boys who wouldn't get caught dead trying to date a flat chested Russian super model, all guffaw in laughter. The girls are also all laughing, strangely unperturbed by a guy ripping open a girl's blouse in the middle of the crowded cafeteria.
Meanwhile Barkovsky seems unamused by it all as he pours salt into his hand, walks up to the bodice tearing hooligan, tosses the salt in his face and then knocks the cad over as he pulls his pants down and then ends it all by throwing a plate full of food into the bounder's face. A scuffle ensues, but it is soon broken up by the Russian lunch lady who runs in and scolds the lot of them. Entertainingly, she completely ignores the Russian super model student with the torn open blouse. Ah, a day in the life of a Russian lunch lady.
The cafeteria scene was a flashback, the show now moves to the present where the bulk of the story takes place. It starts with a young woman teacher apparently committing suicide by jumping out of a 3rd story window at the school.
Enter our hero, Igor Andreevich Kryuko (pictured above), who is a rather odd Russian version of a down on his luck, hard-boiled detective. He also has a suicide in his past -- his wife caught him kanoodling a blonde in his car, went home and promptly jumped to her death. Ironic, aint it? Oh yea, the blonde is now his boss in the precinct they work at.
To complete his character, Igor lives on a house boat, has heart problems, eats a lot of tomatoes, bends paperclips into little figurines and is about the most unobservant detective to ever walk the Earth.
While everybody else concludes the teacher's death is a suicide he decides that a crime was committed so he launches a murder investigation. Hilariously from that point on he spends all -- and I mean all -- of his time lurking around the high school looking for clues. Good thing there are apparently no other crimes in this city.
As he bumbles around conducting his inept investigation we discover that, with the exception of the lunch lady from the above video, virtually all the teachers, staff and students of the school are degenerates in some way, shape or form. We have a parade of liars, petty criminals, sluts, pedophiles and neo-Nazis along with beatings, peepholes in the boy's lockers room, teachers getting roofied, students getting squashed by trucks, Russian mafia goobers, abandoned children, students filmed doing strip teases and more!
Yeeesh, even Mario Cart has better graphics than this clunker
The 'more' being S'Parta, the video game this TV show is named after. The game is presented with the same sort of moral panic Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto generated at one time. The game allows you do whatever you want to, so if the kids play it they are bound to all turn into homicidal maniacs. A corporation, presumably an Eeeeevil corporation, has bribed the school with free computers to install S'Parta in its computer lab. Naturally, all the kids started playing it non-stop and they're turning into homicidal maniacs and worse as a result.
What's funny is the game as shown is a wheezing bore with nothing to do in it and, as you can see from the screen cap above, it has amazingly crappy graphics for this day and age. If I paid $60 on Steam for this monstrosity I would be pretty livid, but the kids all seem to love it.
If I say much more I will be getting too deep into spoiler territory, so I'll leave it at that. Also, the show only had one season so I won't be revisiting it like I did with Vyzhit Posle. Would I recommend it? Well, the filming is gorgeous, but the characters are somewhat flat -- it depends on how curious you are to see what a modern Russian police show looks like.
Finally, in light of the flat chested super model student in the video that started this post, I'll end it with Leningrad's song Tits. It features infidelity, discusses the benefits of breast augmentation surgery, has wise advice from Vladimir Putin, mixes in mention of the Magnitsky Act and reenacts Da Vinci's Last Supper. Be sure to turn on captions if you view it. It is probably NSFW.
A detailed look at the making of aluminum cans for drinks. The logic of the design choices are explained well, and the manufacturing process is clearly illustrated. An interesting look at a mundane topic.
This is a time lapse of a cargo ship traveling from the Red Sea to Hong Kong. Many years ago I sailed much the same waters, but I was on a warship and I remember the trip as being from east to west.
We had left Hong Kong and were in the Gulf of Tonkin when the Yom Kippur War started. The carrier group I was with pulled out and sailed through the Straits of Malacca and headed first to the Gulf of Oman off the Straits of Hormuz, and eventually south to the Gulf of Aden where my ship, and another destroyer, ran a blockade of the Bab el-Mendab Straits into the Red Sea.
It was hotter than hell and the sky was yellow with wind-blown sand. The Indian Ocean was beautiful.
Flattery in courtship is the highest insolence, for whilst it pretends to bestow on you more than you deserve, it is watching an opportunity to take from you what you really have. - Sarah Fielding
These covers, and those after the jump, are from the Internet Archive's collection: Scientific American (1845-1909). As well as the covers, the collection allows you to browse the internal pages of the magazines.
I first posted this video in 2013. It is a ferocious storming of a beach by RC amphibious landing craft carrying RC tanks. It seems appropriate, in an odd sort of a way, to run it again on this 75th anniversary of the D-day landings.
This is a video of a walk through La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is an amazing place full of elaborate above ground vaults and mausoleums. The architecture of them is breath taking, nary a modern looking monstrosity among them. Many well known Argentinians, including Eva Peron, are buried there and it is still in use by notable families.
When cameras don't exist in the courtroom, either because they've yet to be invented or they are not permitted, the courtroom sketch artist is the only one to record the trial's scenes. Sometimes the sketch is less an immediate record, and more a recreation of trials long completed. These, and those after the jump, are a few examples of courtroom sketches. They run the gamut from the old-timey witch trials to more current litigation.
For whatever reason machinery always fascinates me. The above video is a detailed animation of the mechanics of loading, firing and ejecting a shell in an AR-15.
These days we prefer to terrorize ourselves with Ebola, Marburg virus, zombie outbreaks and other pandemics (and don't even get me started on EMP and asteroid collisions), but back in the good old days we mainly worried about A and H bombs.
It seems -- and this is not to minimize the dangers of bacteria and virii -- like we are allowing such fears to side-track us from preparations for nuclear war. So, as a public service, I bring you the above educational video to prepare you for the mushroom clouds in your future.
As a bonus, below is a video of an old air raid siren being fired up. Fairly creepy sounding all in all. Well, with that I'm off on a test run of my 'below a workbench' fallout shelter. Laugh if you must, but I won't be the one turning into a radiation mutant because I was unprepared. Then again, the mutants do get the pretty girls in the end, don't they?
Yesterday was Memorial Day, where we remember those who sacrificed all in combat. There were happier times as well. These are a small sampling of WWII brides and grooms from Vintage Everday's Wartime Marriage: Lovely Photos of WWII Soldiers With Their Brides. Many more photos can be found at the link.
Jaymukh, the father of the Village Food Factory YouTuber, makes a batch of potato chips. After frying them, he seasons them with chile powder and salt. Then they package them and they hand them out for the villagers to enjoy. At the link are many other videos of Jaymukh cooking various dishes.
Like the other addictive food videos ... the videos on Village Food Factory have their own formula for viral appeal, built on Jaymukh’s quiet, matter-of-fact way of preparing large quantities of food with the scantest equipment. Jaymukh hacks down shrubs with a machete to make space for himself to cook, and lugs huge branches from nearby trees to build his fires. He makes homemade coconut oil by methodically cracking open a hundred coconuts, and scrambles hundreds of eggs in a kiddie-pool-size pot. In the channel’s most popular video, he drops two hundred pieces of chicken into a deep vat of oil for a K.F.C.-style preparation.
Our eyes show us what is in front of us
But they don’t show us what is there
The sun gives us our light
Yet it brings with it the shadows
Our hearts are meant to love
But hate lingers here
Opposites with the same home
You cannot hate without having loved
Yes, this world
It is a beating, living heart
Filled with love, Full of hate
It is broken and scarred
Yet it is fresh and beautiful
Hate cannot take over this heart
But love cannot win
Life in itself is just one contradiction after the next
This is a 1942 series of photos of George Camblair being inducted into the army and undergoing training. I tried to find out what happened to him, but had no luck in my search. I did quite like the touch that he got the pretty girl in the end. I wonder if he used the ol' "I don't want to die a virgin" line on her?
Gypsy pegs are another name this English fellow uses for clothes pins. He's showing how to DIY make them in the video. I dunno, for as cheap as a package of them are this seems like an awful labor intensive way to save a buck or two. I suppose there is some satisfaction to it all, if only in drinking the beers needed to use the cans for metal strips in their manufacture.
The fellow's name is Harry Rogers, and his YouTube channel is full of all sorts of other odd and interesting DIY projects.
I've noticed that frequently Oriental artwork is not bound by the golden proportion. Rather, the division is one side full of detail and the other a void. Our human reality balanced against something else altogether. These oil paintings, and the text below, is from the website of the Japanese artist Arisa Kumagai.
Leisure Class
I grew up in the red light district.
My family ran a business selling glitzy Italian clothes to mafia, and to the ladies working in the brothel located just behind our fancy shop.
Surrounded by decadent luxury, I was literally pounded in to acquire the taste of leisurely class.
Defined by T. Veblen, people from this class spent until they drop on themselves to attain social dignity.
I was born in 1991,so the history of socio-economic decline synchronized with mine.
I grew to believe that vanity was the only salvation.
In the absence of God, I saw beauty in excessive decoration.
There was swirl of desire, poor and rich. The more prosperous meant more ornamental.
There was gush of beasty energy, life and death. The more vibrant meant more embellishing.
But I found in that whirl a gleam, a residue or a kind of mutant, in the form of a human body.
Now my religion is to worship the surplus, something magnificent and yet something non-functional, like art.
But I also know from my up bringing that there’s always an end to the glory; that it all sinks into the dark, death-like void.
A simple video showing a family making a Mongolian breakfast. I'm not sure about the milk tea (not a big milk drinker), but it looks interesting. I wouldn't mind trying it.
As an aside, below is a recipe for milk tea, although I think it is more of the Chinese 'bubble' tea variety than what the family in the video were using.
3/4 cup brewed tea (such as black, green, chai, or jasmine)
Bela Lugosi is famous for his portrayal of the vampire in Dracula. Aside from that film, his Hungarian accent and eventual morphine addiction greatly limited his roles. He was type cast to play only in horror films, and the quality of his roles greatly diminished over time. Still, he is an icon.
These posters, and those after the break, are from his various films. they are from 100 Years of Movie Posters. There are more of his posters at that site. Enjoy.
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. - Charles Darwin
Above a fellow tours Kishinev, the capital city of Moldavia. Apparently Moldavia is the least visited country in Europe, and after his tour I can see why. It is a pretty run-down and depressing looking place.
Below he takes a Moldovan road trip to a dot on the map in the countryside called Ratus. On the trip he listens to Moldavan pop music on the radio, rides in an old Lada as well as a horse drawn cart and muses at an abandoned Soviet bus stop. Ratus ends up being a sleepy little village, but the Moldovans met along the way are friendly and much more cheerful seeming than those in Kishinev.
Finally, inspired by the pop music on the radio I bring you a video of Moldova's Dan Balan's Chica Boom in which a stylish pop star, I assume he's Dan Balan, sings 'chica boom' over and over while a young lady undulates around and sings her lyrics in English while pouring water over herself and so-forth. Uh... it may be slightly NSFW.
Have a joyous May Day comrades as we boldly march forward stomping the hoarders, wreckers, Kulaks and other assorted running dogs of Capitalism under our feet on our way to the Workers Paradise. Also, be sure to enjoy -- if the bread lines aren't too long -- your traditional May Day feast of onions, borscht and wodka.
You can never control who you fall in love with, even when you're in the most sad, confused time of your life. You don't fall in love with people because they're fun. It just happens. - Kirsten Dunst
I'm sure that many of my regular readers will be heartbroken to hear that this is my final post on the Russian TV show Vyzhit Posle (The Day After on Amazon Prime). This post covers the third season, the show was not renewed for a fourth. If you're interested my Season One post is Vyzhit Posle, while Season Two is Can true love survive zombification? I'll try to avoid spoilers, but some will sneak in, so be forewarned if you think you might watch it.
Above is a scene of a Moscow woman who had been beaten and robbed in a village and stumbled upon a group of bumpkins for help. Word had leaked out what had happened in Moscow, but the government -- since they were partly to blame for the whackadoodle 'Create a Master Race' plan that so terribly went awry -- covered up what really happened. The result is all the Moscow residents are feared as possible zombie virus carriers, so that's the level of hostility Moscow refugees can expect.
That works nice as a plot device because it ties our outbreak survivors to the hot zombie babes as all being outcasts, and therefore all being worthy of our sympathy. Still, Season Three frequently goes off the rails.
Zombie stories are handicapped from the beginning by having a completely preposterous premise. They can only work when they're not too ridiculous on the edges that surround the central absurdity of the story. Unfortunately, or depending on how you look at it fortunately, Season Three of Vyzhit Posle is freighted with a lot of ridiculousness around the edges.
The new characters are all pretty silly. Above is Kristina, the best of the new lot, although admittedly I may be allowing skimpy costumes and cheesecake poses to cloud my judgement a bit. At any rate, she is a Russian version of the manic pixie dream girl. She hooks up with Skat, the hacker in the bunker from the beginning who's main purpose had been, until he met Kristina, to be a fount of expository dialog.
It looks like they were building him up for a bigger role in Season Four, but in the mean time he has sex with Kristina, listens to her babble about having a no-strings-attached relationship and watches her cutely faint from time to time. One's suspicions as to where her story is headed are borne out when she lights up with joy upon discovering that the hot zombie babes can self-repair themselves. Yup, she is a manic pixie dream girl with an incurable disease. I must say, her attempts at getting herself infected are pretty entertaining.
Above is Valera, the skin head with a heart of gold who in Season One had fallen crazy-mad-in-love with the beautiful, soon to be zombified Aijan (aka Valera's One True Love #1). In the screen cap he's in a partial state of undress and playing tonsil hockey with Nika (aka Valera's One True Love #3). In the background, circled in red, is Katya (aka Valera's One True Love #2). Hey, I told you that this show had a lot of silly soap opera stuff going on and it's only gonna get worse.
Anyway, to make a long story short, after Valera thought he had killed zombie Aijan at the end of Season One he fell in love with Katya, a spunky newspaper reporter who snuck into Moscow's quarantine zone to try to get the truth. Needless to say when zombie Aijan showed up again the ensuing love triangle proved to be problematic. However, it all came to an end when the Eeeevil Dr Lobodo locked Valera and zombie Aijan in a cage, conducted unholy experiments on her and ended up brutally torturing poor Aijan, who at that time only wanted to tear Katya's face off and then snuggle with her sweetie Valera.
By Season Three Katya graduated from print journalist to the host of 'Black Day', which is the State ran TV channel's top-rated zombie show. In that capacity she ended up interviewing Dr Lobodo. That's a bit surprising because she and Lobodo had shot each other at the end of Season Two, but she's under a government contract so she lets bygones be bygones and puts a positive spin on him and paints him as a hero. Due to the whole 'torturing zombie Aijan' business Katya's craven behavior infuriates Valera. So he dumps her and runs to the arms of Nika before going back to the quarantine zone to settle a score with Lobodo. BTW, did I mention that Nika is engaged to Andrey, the Russian special forces guy? I wonder if that is going to complicate things?
Speaking about Dr Lobodo, that's him above with Inge, the naughty vixen who runs the Eeeeevil lab. Due to a rare semi-successful experiment at the lab they're about to have some celebratory bondage game fun. Lobodo has fallen head over heels in love with her, but she just uses sex to manipulate him in her nefarious schemes. In the above scene she is more or less taunting Lobodo after he asked her if she really loves him. It strikes me, especially if you're chained to a bed, that might be a bad approach to take with an Eeeeevil co-conspirator who may, or may not, have a syringe full of zombie flu in his back pocket.
BTW, the resolution of the Valera/Lobodo confrontation is quite the plot twist.
Above we have Nadya (far left), the former yum-yum girl turned alpha zombie queen. She has snuck out of Moscow in search of a refuge in the woods where she can stop slaughtering people left and right and instead live an idyllic and peaceful life. She has hooked up with a couple other hot zombie babes in search of the same. In the screen cap they are shown dancing around, waving torches in the air and wearing tree branches as tiaras. Way to keep a low profile ladies.
Unfortunately for them their seclusion doesn't last long. Soon enough they are found out. No, not by their late night pagan frolics, instead it through the sheer stupidity of Mitya, Nadya's boyfriend. In fact his idiocy so infuriates Nadya that she breaks up with him. Surprisingly she doesn't tear him limb from limb, instead she just storms off in a rage.
Earlier I mentioned silly new characters. Easily the silliest was Rapida (right) shown above confronting Nadya. She's the sort of 'tough' character you find in a bad video game. She wears goofy leather armor in is supposedly a fearsome zombie hunter. However, from what we see of her she is inept in everything she does. For example, in the confrontation above, Nadya starts the scene bound and gagged in the trunk of a car. Rapida begins by pointing her gun at pregnant Nadya's belly and sneering about the abortion she is about to perform with a bullet. True to Rapida's usual blundering, around 20 seconds later her partners are slaughtered by Nadya and Rapida ends up zombified. Quite the zombie huntress.
Finally, after much mayhem, soap-opera hijinks and amusing closed captioning Nadya gives birth to her little monster... errr… I mean darling little baby zombie girl. Above is Mitya, the proud father of the bundle of joy, holding the little tyke. One of my great regrets in the show being canceled is missing out on how, or if, he survives the toddler's terrible twos.
With all my joking in this post about the show, it is actually quite good. As I said in Part II, this is one of the best and most unique takes on the zombie genre I've seen in a long time. It is also much smarter than my review probably makes it seem. For example, the fate of Aijan hangs over, echoes through and informs a lot of the soap opera stuff in Season Three. Dr Lobodo's "I didn't understand" applies to more than just himself.
Finally I spent a long time trying to find a good video of the hot zombie babe's movement. It is very striking, almost birdlike with their arms thrown back and a weird twitch in their shoulders. Below is the best video I could find. There is a lot of action, but sprinkled throughout it are shots of the hot zombie babes in all their glory.
