Category: quick thought

The Death "Sentance"

While catching up on the world this morning, I encountered the following:

Bring Back the DEATH SENTANCE for PEODOPHILES!

I don’t know who these PEODOPHILES are, but I’d like to bring back the English sentence for everyone.

Sen Tance actually sounds like the name of the hero from a terrible bit of ’80s cyberpunk.

Death SenTance (1984) – Chapter 2: Edge Runner

“The weight of the RAM was making Sen’s arm tired, so he set it down and flipped the switch to engage his five-colour monitor. The door-handle turned. Tance spun quickly as a woman covered in nothing but surgically implanted titanium spikes, and nipples, entered the room.”

Eternal Content

Nosferatu stillI’m not presenting this as a serious concern – more as an idle question – but, I was wondering:

You’ve heard of the idea that once a file enters the winding tubes of the internet, it can never truly be erased? Well, will we ever reach a point where we’ve produced so much content; content which no longer disappears when libraries burn, or pages rip, or film degrades; that we’ll simply have no need to produce more?

If youtube readily provides five-thousand flavours, spanning a hundred years, of undead movies, why create yet another vampire flick?

March Of The Tin Can Man

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5MYYvsKNhI]

Just a quick clip of the little robot I built with the Eights – mostly as a test to see how difficult it is to get video from my phone to the internet.

Also, how is it feasible that my iPhone can supposedly generate HD video, and yet most security footage still looks like it was recorded on a hand cranked, black & white, Super-8 camera?

Ethiopian Caterpillar

It was an annual event, when I was a child, to receive Sears’ Christmas catalogue and immediately begin dog-earring the glossy pages as a non-subtle method for suggesting gifts. Often there’d be some especially beloved item which would haunt me till the big day –

[vimeo 16128282]

This is no Laser Tag set, or sparking robot (with life-like walking action!), this is a mechanical device created in 1820 – still, it has me in that same grip. Unfortunately, according to the Hodinkee.com, I shouldn’t be expecting it under the tree this year.

The Ethiopian Caterpillar is a bejeweled automaton from the year 1820. Attributed to Henri Maillardet, only six automaton caterpillars are known to exist and the other five are in prestigious collections in Europe, include one in the Patek Philippe museum and another two in the Sandoz collection[…]

The pre-sale estimate for this piece is $350,000-$450,000.

While it’s the historical aspect of the automation that interests me, I suppose there are other factors involved in its cost; here’s part of the blurb from the Sotheby’s Catalogue:

the body realistically designed to represent a caterpillar comprising eleven jointed ring segments, framed by seed pearls, and decorated with translucent red enamel over an engine-turned ground, studded overall with gold-set rubies, turquoise, emeralds, and diamonds

Image from the Sotheby's catalogue

Inspiration

There are a few touchstones I have for each character in Flash Pulp, some bit of audio or visual candy that helps get me in the proper mood – few of them, however, have quite the same connection as Blackhall and the soundtrack to the film Ravenous.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDl4OhRN3bQ]

Childhood Spider Songs (And Santa Too)

Yukon Cornelius

Like many, I have a long-time fascination with the music from the 1960s Spider-man cartoon.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tmMn6wFmt8]

While on the prowl for a source at which I might obtain the swinging soundtrack for my own personal use, I came across this post from WFMU’s Beware Of the Blog.

While it does answer some of my questions, it also brought some interesting details to my attention:

Toronto had a large pool of actors in the nineteen fifties that were nourished by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, one of only two major players in Canadian television, and the only major player in Canadian radio drama. This pool came in very handy when voice acting needed to be employed by American producers looking to cut costs. Rankin-Bass was the first American outfit to exploit the Canadian acting community, at a time when its soon-to-be-prolific animation outfit was still nothing in America. The now legendary 1964 stop motion animation special Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer employed an enmormous stable of Canadian voice actors that all went on to provide voices on Spider-man (What? You didn’t know Burl Ives played Doc Oc!?). Hemrie the Misfit Elf was done by Paul Soles, the future Spider-man and Peter Parker himself. Billie Richards, Rudolph, often played Paperboys or other anonymous children in the show. Paul Kligman who played both Donner the Reindeer and the Reindeer Coach in the classic holiday special became the cantankerous J. Jonah Jameson.

X-mas Spidey
Interesting, but unmentioned in the WFMU post, is that one of the co-writers of the famous Spider-man theme song was actually Paul Francis Webster, Best Song Academy Award winner for Best Original Song, and sixteen-time nominee.

That is to say, one of the fellows involved in writing the Spider-man theme also wrote:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0XClu_oqkE]

(Try and cover that, the Ramones!)